**I’m going to go ahead an warn you…this blog may require a comfy chair and a cup of coffee…it's a little lengthy.**
If you didn’t know, I am currently in Costa Rica for 7 weeks, teaching English in a local primary school and living with a sweet Costa Rican family. I love it here, it has been such a life-changing experience.
I wanted to share with y’all a particular experience, one which truly did a work on my heart.
You have to flexible here in Costa Rica. Things may not always go according to plan. In fact, it is sometimes best to avoid making plans altogether and simply throw your hands up and say, “Pura Vida!” Last week was a perfect example of this. Nearly every school cancelled class and all the teachers were sent door-to-door in order to do Costa Rica’s 2ndNational Census. As an English teacher, I had the opportunity to help out. Because I spoke English fluently, the school wanted to put me to use in areas where the residents spoke English.
Each teacher was assigned approximately 45 “casas” to visit, carrying to each of them a multi-paged questionnaire that had to be filled out by the resident(s). Here are some example questions that were included in the census:
“What are your floors made out of? Ceramic tile, concrete or dirt?”
“Would you consider the quality of your walls bad, normal or good?”
“Are you able to read and write?”
“Do you own a car, T.V, radio, computer and/or cell phone?”
“Have you used a cell phone, computer or internet in the past 3 months?”
On Monday I was asked to work with Yhoana, the Kindergarten teacher. Someone had told her there were English speakers in her assigned area of Villarreal (the town I teach in) so I was recruited. There only ended up being one house of “gringos,” a family of missionaries from the States. Nearly every other house we visited were homes of local Costa Ricans.
I probably walked a total of 4 miles during the first day of the census, going door-to-door asking locals the necessary questions. (In Spanish…I learned a lot of new vocabulary that day.) Everyone we came across welcomed us into their home and provided plastic chairs for us to sit down. Nobody seemed to have a problem with sitting down with a few strangers for 45 minutes to answer a booklet of questions. At the end of the day, I was exhausted yet thankful for the experience to meet my neighbors in Costa Rica and catch a glimpse of what their homes are like.
The next few days turned out to be quite a different experience. I ended up helping out Miguel, the English teacher at my school, because he was assigned to Playa Langosta, a ritzy beach area lined with ocean-front mansions and luxurious condos that belonged to mostly American folks. We walked door-to-door (or should I say gate-to-gate, because they all had concrete walls built around the properties) with hopes of completing the census form for each house in a timely manner.
As it turned out, many of the homes were not actually “home” to the owners. Most were winter vacation houses, meaning that the residents (usually only 1 or 2 people) only reside there a few months out of the year. With it being June, the slow season, most houses were vacant. Others who were home asked us to come back later, because they were busy with a phone conversation/preparing for a graduation/meeting/massage. The few residents we did encounter (after pounding on the gate and shouting “Buenas!” and “Hello!” because there usually was no doorbell) usually questioned our motives thoroughly before offering us any information. The rest of the week was spent obtaining census information from these 20-or-so houses.
After the census was over, I felt as though I had visited two different worlds. Only a few kilometers and a cement wall separated the mansions of millionaires from the quaint houses of the locals. It was hard not to compare the two drastically different lifestyles, and much of the experience did not settle well with my soul.
For example…
Recall that we asked each resident if he/she considered the floors, walls and roof to be in bad, normal or good condition. Of all the local homes we visited, all of the residents described them to be in “good” condition, despite the fact they were made of cracked cement, chipped paint and/or a simple sheet of zinc. In contrast, we had a number of Playa Langosta residents describe their floors, walls and roof to be in “normal” condition, and some even pointed out the imperfections. It took everything in me to not mention the “good” floors, walls and roofs we had seen earlier. Even these beautiful mansions seemed to be subpar for the residents that lived in them.
Also, we had to ask each resident if he/she had used a cell phone, a computer and/or the internet in the past 3 months. Those in Playa Langosta seemed shocked by such a seemingly “obvious” question, and some even joked and said, “Do you mean in the last 3 minutes?” As for the folks down in Villarreal, it wasn’t uncommon for them to answer “no” to the use of all three things. For one group, media infiltrates their daily lives to nearly a point of dependence, whereas others find out about the world around them by sharing coffee with the neighbors on the front porch.
Lastly, the value of privacy seemed to perfectly correlate with the price tag of the house. In Villarreal, I felt like a neighbor as they invited us into their homes, pulled us up some chairs and even joked around with us with small talk. Kids ran around in the yard, neighbors walked by and waved, and family members passed through the rooms. It is not unusually to have extended family in the same house, and just about anyone could walk up to the front porch and sit down for an afternoon conversation. In Langosta, cement walls surrounded properties, to the point you couldn’t even see the house(s) unless the gate was open. What really shocked me was that many of the houses didn’t even have doorbells. No doorbells?…who ever heard of such?! I thought to myself, ‘Gosh, a neighbor couldn’t even come over to ask for a cup of sugar.’ It saddened me to know that so many of the American beach-house owners strived so much to detach themselves from the community around them.
What really touched my heart, though, was the fact that I could identify with the Americans more so than the Costa Ricans….and it broke my heart to catch a glimpse of how we can live with so many luxuries (which we sometimes consider sub-par) and be so distant from the world around us. Why do we build up walls around our lives to avoid strangers, visitors and even neighbors? Why do we think that luxury will satisfy our longings for something more? Why do we turn our heads from the face of poverty, pretending not to see it?
I think the Lord is truly teaching me a lesson as He prepares me for what I will encounter on the World Race. He is opening my eyes to the world around me, and inviting me to go beyond the walls that surround a life of lonely luxury, into a world or community, joy, pain, poverty and richness…to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Isn’t that what we all are called to do?
I just finished an amazing book (No doubt the Lord placed it in my suitcase so I would read it during this trip) called “Irresistible Revolution” by Shane Claiborne. One of the quotes that really hit my heart is this:
"I asked participants who claimed to be "strong followers of Jesus" whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question, I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time wit the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor."
