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!
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