I believe in work, hard work!

The journey that he has sent us on this week has just been incredible!  Sunday morning we went to church and had an amazing service.  The people here have so much joy in their hearts, it makes me wonder what I am missing.  Am I just to ashamed to let it show, or do I not want people to look at me like I'm crazy? This is something that has been working in my heart a lot this trip, because I want to be just as on fire for Christ as this group is. After church, we were hanging around talking to people when some of the youth approached us asked if we would like to join them for youth group that night.  We were so excited that they invited us, because we want to spend more time with them!  We ended up going to a members house and just hanging out for 3 hours.  We sang songs together, played games, and just talked together. It was a great night of community and "shuffling" with everyone. 

We started off Monday by waking up at around 5:00 to make sure we were completely ready to catch the 6:20 bus to Alajuela in order to be at our church by 7.  So we get ready and make our way to the bus stop.  The first bus passes but is full.  The second bus is pretty full, so we let the Costa Ricans around us load up instead, the third bus is not ours.  So we begin wondering what to do. We had seen some other buses go up the mountain and we figured they would be back down shortly. Well, we were wrong.  We finally loaded up a bus at around 7:10 and made it to the church by 7:30.  It was the first day, so they gave us some slack and now we make sure we catch whatever bus comes our way.  

So our first day of work, we load up and the drive begins to look familiar.  When we arrive at the location, we realized we were at the first school we spent time at.(I blogged about it last time) I began to laugh, because this is the school I had already been challenged at with my teaching skills and now I know I'm about to be physically challenged here as well.  To give you a little background on who we were working with, we were paired up with the Alajuela United Methodist Womens group.  We had been warned that we wouldn't be doing much construction, because of all the ladies.  All I can say is I would like to see what they consider hard work!  We were told to dig an entire area of land about 5 inches deeper.  This consisted of pickaxing (sp?) the dirt, shoveling it into a wheel barrel, and then pushing it up a hill to dump it in the back (now repeat for 6 hours!).  Let me tell you, this work was hard.  It was extremely hot outside, and a very tiring task.  However, I could help but look at these women and think about how strong they were.  They were out there working in blue jeans in the heat of the day, without stopping.  I don't think any womens group in America would agree to  dig all day in the summer heat.  They also were a great group to work with because they let us come along side with them to help out this school.  They were fun to talk to and several of them truly invested in us while we were there.  The second day of work consisted of the same thing.  We needed to finish the digging to prepare for the cement to be put down tomorrow.  Whenever the students were on break, they surrounded all of us "Gringos" to watch us work and to spend time in our company which was cool.  We once again had the opportunity to go into the classroom on Tuesday.  We went to the same room I had been working with last time.  I was thrilled to see that the students didn't respond again!  (This meant it wasn't me, they were just a shy bunch!) We sang them songs that had a lot of movements involved and they all just looked at us like we were crazy, but no matter what, we had fun.  After class time, we went back to work and finally everything was finished!

Wednesday we headed to the warehouse to work on the organization there.  I felt bad, because the job a lot of the one week team had done, Meg and I destroyed and had to redo.  We moved boxes from one pallet to a different pallet  all day long.  All in all we did about 5 hours of work and had 4 hours of travel.  

Thursday consisted of the same type work.  We thought we were going have new pallets, but they had not been delivered so we cleaned books and repacked them.  Thursday night we went to a karaoke cafe with Katia and sang the night away. 

Today is Friday and we are spending the day resting and packing for Jaco. We leave tomorrow, and I'm not sure if we will have internet, so I will probably update again next weekend!  

The Journey Begins

Hey everyone! I decided to open up my own blog so I could put some of my personal imput within a blog.  So far, this trip has already been amazing.  We have now officially been in Costa Rica for 12 days, and I truly believe each day has been a blessing.  When we came down, we came with 15 of our friends who were planning on spending one week down here.  It was incredible to get to spend time with them, and get a jump start on our journey.  Most days, we were doing activities that were preparing for our team to finish out.  We spent time at several churches doing Vacation Bible Schools, went to four schools to deliver books, worked construction, and worked in the warehouse.  I am going to write about two distinct events just to give you a glimpse into the work we have been doing.

School # 1: Last Thursday, we had the opportunity to stop by a school on our way up to the rainforest.  Being an education major, I love to spend time at schools, and I was very interested to see how there schools worked here.  When we arrived, we were told the children had prepared a few things for us.  They sang us songs, recited poetry, and the kindergartners even did a dance for us.  It was absolutely precious!  When they were done, we had a chance to sing them some songs in English, and 1 in spanish (which they loved).  After all of this we were split into groups of 3 or 4 and sent to a classroom to begin reading to them.   Here is the real challenge.  I was placed in a 1st grade classroom, which means they spoke very little english.  They knew their numbers and some colors and that was it.  If you know me, I know minimal spanish, so I knew this would be quite the task.  At one point I got very frustrated because I have been trained in how to work with this situation, but as soon as it is in your face, you have no idea what to do.  I quickly ran out of things to say, and the students kept asking me how to say things in english, but I had no idea what they were even saying in spanish.  This was such a humbling experience for me because I went into this trip thinking Im majoring in education I've got this, this wont be hard at all.  Well I couldn;t have been wrong enough. Lastly, when we left, the principal was so gracious for everything we have given them, and it all made since.  We were told we were the first vistiors to even come to that school, and not only that, but we were North Americans, which meant even more to them.  

School # 4: Lady Gladys Private School.  This school was started by a man named John who had moved to Costa Rica to retire.  Just to give you a little back ground on him, he is british.  He grew up with his mother in the country side, where they were very poor.  He didnt have much, but they made the most of what they did have.  He ended up starting a very successful carpet company that inturn made him rather wealthy.  When he decided to move to Costa Rica, he was wondering what he might do.  One day, he was in the airport and he thought I'm going to build a school for poor children, and that he did.  He began the process of looking for an area to help out, and found one of the worst neighborhoods in Costa Rica, unfortunately, there was no land for them to build a school there, so they continued to process until they came across land in San Jose near a very poor community.  John knew this would be the place to go.  He then began building a school, and at some point met Carl Dickerson, the man who is in charge of my trip.  Carl began helping John in any way he could, but especially by donating books.  Johns main vision for this school is to be a place that the children can come and learn english along with every other subject.  However, he hopes that the young children speaking english will help pull other students into the school.  The students pay around $25 dollars a month to go to school there and $2 dollars a day to eat lunch there.  The lunchs are provided by the mothers of the students, which I though was very neat!  The children can begin at the age of 4, but there is an application process.  John has recently put in a computer lab, which is a very big deal.  Most school in Costa Rica do not have that, so this put there school even that much ahead!  One quick story about that day:  When we went with the four year olds to lunch, Meg noticed that one girl was just eating crackers.  Meg asked the teacher if she could give her some of her food, but of course the teacher said no simply because if you give her food once, she will expect food always.  The teacher came and shared some of the little girls story with us saying that her mother was in jail and her father was gone, which left her under the care of he grandmother.  Unfortunately her grandmother was unable to provide for her, which broke our hearts.  However, it is very cool to see that John recognized that and gave this student a spot at the school, so she may have a better life in the future.  All in all, the students at this school had so much joy, it was incredible!  I am so proud of the work John has done and can't wait to go back to this school later on this summer!!  If you would like to check out their website its: http://www.educatingchildren.org/

Ill update again once we start working which begins Monday! 

Love you and miss you all!

Stephanie