Dang, work in Costa Rica has been crazy. I think they were expecting a boy's team here, because we're doing man labor for sure.
Today was our first day of ministry, and Bethany and I started the day doing Insanity. We have been doing Insanity consistently since last month, and we had planned to move on to complete month two in Costa Rica. Since we had morning devos at 6 am, this meant we woke up at 4:30 to start the workout in the dark of the morning. The workout was good, but the mosquitoes were KILLER. Please God protect me from malaria and dengue fever. The mosquitoes are everywhere, all the time, and if I were to get malaria at any point on my World Race, it would be this month.
After Insanity, I had God time & we had breakfast. After breakfast started one of my hardest work days on the Race. Tony told us that today was going to be easy, and we were given a choice of digging or picking up sticks. Both Amie and I chose to dig, and our task was to make fertilizer with some dirt from the mountain, dirt from the garden, and rice granules. Amie and I went to the mountain to get three large bags worth of dirt. The "mountain" is actually a rainforest in our backyard. No big deal, we literally live IN the rainforest. There are monkeys that we can see from our kitchen (three species, including howler monkeys), trees everywhere, birds chirping, and George of the Jungle-worthy vines. It's awesome. Digging the soil from the rainforest wasn't very easy though, because you couldn't get a good shovel-load with all of the vines and roots around. We eventually managed to get three bags worth.
Meanwhile, Stef & Bethany were clearing brush everywhere, where they found an extremely poisonous snake (like, dead in 20 minutes poisonous). The boys killed it, and (of course) gutted it, and they found a half-eaten rat inside (they said it looked pregnant when they found it). It was sick, but awesome.
Amie & I moved to get the soil from the garden, and it was much easier. Once we were done with that, we ended up loading Tony's Jeep with a TON of wood (long strips for tables and their legs), and some scrap wood we had separated. We took a break for coffee after we had unloaded all of them, and shortly after we finished Tony asked if we could come with to get what we thought were costumes from the sanctuary.
We drove to the sanctuary, which is further away on their property, and hiked up the mountain (all mud) to get to a cleared area of land in the rainforest with the posts for the foundation set and wood clamped near it. Tony told us the "costumes" were right past the wood, meaning in the uncleared forest and down another hill. We found about 25-30 tree trunks cut into logs. Heavy tree trunks. We needed to carry them up the uncleared hill. After that, we had to carry them all the way back down into the car. As we were carrying our first load, it started to pour. This was a problem because Tony had to drive UP a muddy hill to get back on the road. We hustled back, literally jumped into the car with the wood in it, and drove. We didn't make it up the hill. So we left the car, and walked back in the rain muddy, soaked, and exhausted.
We all showered, and me & Stef crashed in bed. Turns out both of us had been sick all day. She threw up multiple times that night, and I was feeling dizzy/lightheaded all day w/ a headache, and when I went to lay down, Bethany noticed my whole body was burning up. I felt fine enough to eat dinner, and the soup we had confirmed I had a fever, because it broke while I was at the dinner table. I felt perfectly fine after that, and have felt fine since. Stef started feeling better the next day too. It was a crazy intense first day though!
