La Fortuna mission trip and other things

Where has the time gone? It feels like just last week I was thinking how much stuff we had going on in April and now April is over. Today was a relaxing Sunday of churching, baking banana bread with good friends, playing a girls soccer game (I scored a goal!!) and just hanging out. Three weeks today until almost everyone will have left Port and started the long journey back to their home countries.

Yesterday we got back from our mission trip in La Fortuna de Bagaces (building the church in San Bernardo). It was a great trip and the end result was a nice little blue church that still needs windows, a door, and electricity but that will get finished over the next few weeks by people we will hire with the money left over from the trip fund raising. Though we only needed $8,000 we raised over $10,000.

All the extra activities we planned went really well too. There was a talent show in the church one night, in which Alyssa, Sarah and I were going to sing Lord of the Dance. Well we tried to sing and it was going well until Alyssa started laughing and then we all couldn’t help but join in so it turned into a rather embarrassing episode of trying to finish singing while stifling laughter in front of over a hundred people. But the audience got a good laugh if nothing else good came of it. We also had a couple of events planned in the town of San Bernardo, which is a ten-minute drive from La Fortuna. We invited all the people in the town to come to the main field to play games and sing some songs. Well a few people showed up and we had a really good time with them playing Ninja. Erin and I went up to a crowd of local people and talked with them for ten minutes in only Spanish! We were scared to go but once we got there it went well and we found things to say. One of the things I have been learning lately is that when there is a need that needs to be filled, I can’t wait around for other people to fill it because otherwise it won’t get done. I need to be the one to fill it. I need to bold in my faith and constantly be doing things that take me out of my comfort zone (like talking to people in Spanish). I can’t use things like my lack of Spanish or physical weakness or sickness as an excuse to not do things that need to be done. We had similar activities planned for the high school and those went really well too.

The church building was pretty straightforward- just a bunch of premade walls that we had to slide down in between some cement posts that we dug holes for at the beginning. The most dangerous part was climbing up onto the scaffolding with the cement blocks and sliding them down without crushing anyone underneath. We had to mix our own cement by combining rocks and sand and cement and then just adding water and shoveling it all together. It was hard work but so much fun to work together and see things get done. It’s definitely true that many hands make light work. Then we also had to level the ground and lay cement on the floor. Finally we painted. After 5 days of working the church was done (apart from the other things that I mentioned earlier). Luckily the property where we were working was right in front of a papaya farm so every day we could take as many yellow papayas off the trees as we wanted and eat them during our break or take them back to the main church to eat later. I didn’t like papayas when I came to Costa Rica but I have definitely changed my mind about them now.

I stayed with a host family with another girl from our group while we were there and that was a really fun time too. We just slept there and ate our dinners there, the rest of that time we were out and about doing community things. The family was wonderful- they were a really generous family and gave us lots of food and love.

A scary thing happened on Thursday night. We went to some hot springs to hang out for the night and I was taking a break from being in the water when all of a sudden a beetle flew into my ear. It started burrowing down my ear canal and when it got to the end and couldn’t go any further it started using its pincers to get further down into my eardrum. When it realised that it wasn’t going anywhere, after about a minute, it came out again. By that time, I had been screaming at the top of my lungs, flailing around wildly and the whole rest of the group had gathered around me trying to find out what they could do to help. On the way home I recovered and we all laughed about it later J Anyway now it’s getting late and I am going to finish reading the Hunger Games (because it is amazing). Goodnight!