Okay, I realize I’ve been doing a terrible job keeping all of you up to speed. While there have been vaguely consistent Instagram posts, those don’t capture the details of the journey I am on. It’s a highlight reel if anything. This post ended up being a bit more exhaustive and verbose than I would have liked, but it frames my transition from Panama to Costa Rica quite well. Stay tuned my next post about Preaching in Panama is on deck.
Goodbye Panama.
My last post was entitled “Honeymooning in Panama” and in hindsight that captures the flavor of month one quite well. Our quality of life was high, we enjoyed amazing food, kind and lifegiving hosts, a cool climate up in the mountains. We finished the concrete work, the majority of the painting, and installed all the windows and doors for the indigenous workers housing on the farm. Isolation on a mountain road brought our team closer together, sharing testimonies, giving each other positive and constructive feedback each night. Our communication at month 1.5 remains stellar. It was a tough goodbye to our host family, but ultimately month one was an incredibly lifegiving time that set an incredible tone for the rest of the race.
Getting to Costa Rica.
I am one of three people in our squad (that’s the group of 32) that organizes inter-country travel. Panama-Costa Rica was my first go-around as a logistics lead. Usually we assemble as a squad and bus from one country to the next before dispersing for ministry. However, in September we are spending the month together as a squad–first for a retreat then for ministry. My team traveled a day early to pick up an administrator to facilitate this retreat which meant we could depart directly from our ministry site instead of assembling at the same rally point in Panama as everyone else. We also enjoyed a hostel stay, and a quick glimpse of San Jose, Costa Rica.
We left early in the morning from our hosts in Panama. We had pre-certified our passports the day before, so we had no delays (no one actually checked our passports?) so the family’s Costa Rican taxi friend shuttled us from the border to Sabalito. Mike and I had bought the tickets a week before, and the bus to San Jose arrived at 6:30am as promised. Some 7 hours later we arrived, snagged two taxis to our hostel, and crashed for the evening. Most of us anyways, I spent several hours buying bus tickets from Costa Rica to Nicaragua so that our team could have proof-of-exit to facilitate their border crossing the next morning (this is a style of traveling known as World-Race-style).
The next morning we checked out, took two Ubers (yes it’s a thing in major cities here too) to our bus terminal bound for Jaco later in the day. Squad-lead Rachael and I left the other six behind for a quick jaunt to the airport and back to retrieve our admin. We boarded our last bus and arrived 2.5 hour later to reunite with the rest of our squad for our retreat.
It’s a lot of information, but if you only get one takeaway: there were a lot of details, somehow it went off without a hitch. This time around. Other World Race squads have encountered nearly every kind of delay, miscommunication, and trial that you could imagine. Anything that goes wrong quickly dominoes through your entire itinerary and you must be ready to adjust mid-river.
Hello Costa Rica.
We arrived. We shared stories, adjusted to the humidity, and enjoyed the beach nearby. Our first few days in Jaco were a retreat designed for recuperation and intentional retrospection on the past month, and our goals going into all-squad-month ahead. Logistics also helps with this event–we had booked the hostel, actively managed food budgets, and acted as a go-between for our 30+ person group and hostel management. Thankfully we are a wonderful group to host, Room2Board was an incredible hostel and we all emerged from debrief refocused and re-energized for the most part.
My heart entering month two was quite full. It remains so, but I think it is safe to say I have exited the honeymoon stage. Life is good, but the rubber has hit the road. At times I’ll be sorely homesick, irritated with a squad-mate, overwhelmed with the details I manage as a member of the logistics team. It’s not perfect. Emotions swing on quite a large pendulum here, just as we go from serving impoverished communities to enjoying the beach on our time off. There is a sharp contrast between the spiritual high of being in a Christ-driven community midway through a rocking worship session, to the bitterness, frustration bred from a suddenly skeptical mindset, a low-impact day at ministry, or even the incessant mosquitoes. Life isn’t perfect.
Yet, life is good. I knew that resetting expectations entering month two would be essential. This environment is simply so different it isn’t comparable. I’ve gone from a trusting, intimate culture in the mountains to a beachfront scene known for prostitution, drinking, gambling. This is the Las Vegas of Costa Rica, home of bachelor parties, cloaked in darkness. Twenty years ago there wasn’t a church here.
This month, we are working at the core of the Christian community here: Ocean’s Edge. The town is only 3000 at this point of the offseason, so the impact this one ministry has the chance to bring is incredible. They helped start the earliest churches, and do their best to support the family-oriented business of Jaco. This month has seen me working for a storytelling-business-directory, seeking out local businesses to take photos, hear their stories, and ask how we can support and pray for them. Providing free marketing for these businesses that don’t have the first idea of how to go about it has been an eye-opening experience. We’ve met businesses that give 30% of their time back to their community, that provide free medical/dental services, new entrepreneurs laying out their vision for their business to be a stepping stone for themselves and the community.
Quite the crazy experience. Wrapping up Panama, the entire process of getting here, acclimating to a new, more relational ministry. You pretty much just got a full month’s worth of updates so congrats for making it this far. I’ll do my best to post more consistently in the future so it doesn’t feel like flashback to schoolwork.
Prayers: Continued grace in communication, cohesion for my squad. My heart has continued to be lifted up as I engage with my faith more deliberately in the Bible, in “Theology of the Body” by JPII, in “Why We’re Catholic” by Trent Horn. I’ve recently been pushing myself to engage with the grounding for my faith as intensely as say, politics (daily for me). It’s an active area of growth, any prayers and even book suggestions are well appreciated.
