I’ve been here in Costa Rica for about 1 month now and I just wanna let you know what I’ve been up to!
For starters, team and I ( & the boys team) had the opportunity to stay at a church in Heredia for about 12 days around Christmas time. The pastor at the church spoke no English so that was pretty fun to jump right into Spanish. I think we all quickly realized how necessary it is for us to start to actually learn the language lol.
While we were there, we helped out around the church and worked on fixing up the pastors house for him. We mostly pulled weeds and painted. We were also able to visit a nursing home down the road. We took food and just hung out there for a few hours. Some of us played with some children that were there, some of us painted nails, and some of us just got to color and hangout with the women and men that live there. The language barrier was rough but if I’ve learned anything so far, it‘s that a smile goes a long way and even though they couldn’t necessarily understand what we were saying they still laughed and just enjoyed our company.
While we were in Heredia, we also had an amazing ministry host named Pastor Renee. Him and his wife have property up in the mountains where they have started a garden. They plan to bring people from Honduras and teach them gardening skills so they can become more self sufficient & take those skills back home with them. I honestly loved the whole ministry. Pastor Renee was a perfect example of how to love people like Jesus. He was so intentional with all of us and just joked around/ had fun, making gardening a whole lot better. Although we weren’t the ones teaching people how to garden, we were able to help get everything started and it was such a privilege. We got to help move a bunch of wood from one property to another (actually way harder than it sounds, I thought I was conditioning for rugby or something lol). We did a lot of random things, planted seeds, and also moved some dirt around so that’s cool.
When our time in Heredia was up and we moved back to the base in Tres Rios, I was a little sad not gonna lie, but I am so thankful for all of the amazing people I was able to meet within those 12 days. OH, speaking of amazing people, a woman named Theresa from the church that we were staying at opened up her home and took us in for Christmas. We took a ferry to her beach house on Christmas Eve and then spent the day on the beach with her and her family. They were all so welcoming and kind to us. Theresa literally fed us so much and once again, even though there was a language barrier, we were all able to just hangout and celebrate Christmas. We spent the night of Christmas Eve around a bonfire on the beach. We sang worship songs and I just sat back in awe of how freaking cool God is. In the midst of Christmas and feeling a bit sad due to being away from family, we were shown so much love by this random family that God had placed in our lives. We went to a waterfall on Christmas morning so that was pretty cool too.
I don’t know exactly what this next month has in store but I’m really excited to find out and I can’t wait to share more with you! I’ll try to post again at the end of this week 🙂
