After hiking and hitching rides to various parts of the reservation for the past few days, we decided we could rest confident that there is significant need there and that local residents would definitely welcome it.

But in order to do things right, we had to make one more stop: The association of indigenous leaders, which is the first line of government on the reservation.

We had received their permission last year to work on the reservation, but keeping in mind that we’re looking to take on larger projects and most of the association was replaced after a recent election, we decided to start from scratch. I wrote a letter thanking the group for allowing us the opportunity to work there thus far and asking their permission to be able to continue our projects there.

We got up at 5 a.m., packed up (we were headed to San Jose right after the meeting) and hopped on a bus to Suretka, the Bribri village where the association meets. We had heard through the grapevine that they were going to say yes, but nonetheless I decided to hold on to a healthy apprehension about it rather than consider it a done deal.

Turns out that was unneccesary. The new association president has an English-speaking father–we didn’t ask where from–so English was his first language and he was eager to talk with us. Turns out he’s also a Christian. He listened to us for a few minutes and gave us an informal approval before the meeting even started.

We went into the one-room, wood building with empty wood benches and sat in the second row for a while before moving to the front. The members of the association trickled in one at a time.

They made us the first item on the agenda. Our comrade Timoteo Jacson spoke first in Bribri, explaining to them who we are and what we hope to be able to contribute. I then stood and addressed them in Spanish, and they read our letter out loud. They were quiet for a few moments.

Then they told us one at a time that they loved the idea and they would like to work alongside Experience Mission to see how we could collaborate resources to work on larger projects than either of us could afford independently.

When we began to discuss the possibility of the bridge in Soke, the association president said, “God has his time for everything, and I think that for this project, it’s now. We’ve been working for months on getting all the materials we need for that bridge, but until now we haven’t had anybody to build it. And now you show up. We have half the materials in Limon and the other half here, and we’d be happy to deliver whatever you need.”

Couldn’t have gone much better than that. Also, when we return in February, he wants to take us on a two-day hike to a remote, remote village to show us the depth of problems facing families there and the relatively simple projects that could help them.

The bus on the way back down was late. Extremely late. Timoteo flagged down a 4×4 taxi–not a very common site in the area we were sitting–and we walked over to hop in.

It turned out to be this guy Gato (that’s a nickname, of course) who had overcharged us twice, and who we had turned down for a ride a third time because of it. It was a 12-kilometer trip back down to the bus that would take us to San Jose, and we were getting ready to take a hit in the pocketbook.

We dropped Timoteo off at his place, said goodbye and continued down the rocky, unsurfaced road until we got to downtown Bribri.

“How much, Gato?” I asked.

“Two thousand colones,” he said. That’s four dollars. He undercharged us by $12.

“Really? That’s all?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was headed down anyway.”

God is good.

-Steve

We’ve had a few exciting days as John and I traveled back to the potential bridge site in Soke to take precise measurements and then visited the dilapidated homes of impoverished Bribri families we hope to be able to send teams to help next summer.

John frequently does surveying work when putting up buildings stateside, and he said there were two ways we could measure the span: With string and a level or with the proper surveying equipment. We stopped by the hardware store where we’ve been pricing out all our materials (which the owner seems to like, as he gave us both t-shirts and his card), to check whether they might have a cheap version of the tool John needed. They didn’t, but it turned out one employee’s uncle was a topographer, and he lent us his surveying equipment free of charge. It was heavy, WWII-era gear, and John said it did the job well. We took turns carrying the tripod during the hour-long hike up to Soke.

When we got there, the man watching the bridge, Faustino, dropped his cacao-farming activity to help us. He used a machete to hack a 20-foot length of cane and we carried that across the wobbly cable bridge and to the old bridge base on the other side. I moved it wherever John told me to (or, rather, whichever direction he waved his arms) until he told me to mark it and then said it was time to throw a string across as well.

It was a fairly complicated venture, involving much tugging and yanking, and several attempts to throw the string from one side of the river to the other. We finally achieved success after Faustino dove in to catch the string, which we had tied around a stick in order to get it across.

We hung a few strings from the string itself, and John walked around through the mud and in waist-deep water marking it up, then we rolled it up and took off. Faustino said he would be ready for us when we came back.

As we walked off, he shouted, “Just remember that I’m here farming this cacao so you can have hot chocolate in the United States!”

We’ve also spent time with Timoteo Jacson, a local Bribri leader, identifying families in need of assitance. We visited one home where a single mother with two children was left without a roof, and her parents, both elderly, live in a house that appears on the verge of collapse. We also visited a family of four–two of whom are deaf and mute–that lives in a small shack about a hundred yards off the road.

We’ve also been able to spend some time reconnecting with the people we worked with last summer, such as Pastor Gregorio and his wife Esther. Pastor Gregorio said a group of homes had been washed away by the Sixaola River and he said he would be happy to show us where it had happened.

At any rate, things are going very well and God has been keeping us very happy and very busy. We’ll post more later.

-Steve

No trip to Costa Rica would be complete without spending a bunch of time waiting on the sidewalk outside the airport, so John (our construction advisor) and I decided to get that out of the way right away this time. Matt, our engineer, and his wife Katie were delayed by about two hours flying in from Mexico.

At least we hoped it was only two hours. See, we didn’t have their flight number, so we weren’t sure if they were coming in at 12:10 a.m. or on another flight from Mexico at 1:30 a.m. We decided to call somebody in the U.S. who would know. Problem was, we didn’t have a phone card and there wasn’t anywhere around to buy one. I did, however, have a ton of Costa Rica’s enormous coins left over from my last trip. I pulled out a Ziploc bag full of them and started going to town.

John’s conversation lasted about two minutes. During that time, I’m fairly sure I pumped in about forty or fifty Costa Rican coins. We made it with a few seconds left. At least my backpack was lighter.

Anyway, we got Matt and Katie and crashed at the Casa Ridgway (a nice little hostel run by Quakers) before grabbing their rental car the next morning (they planned on continuing a tour of Latin America after helping us out) and heading to Talamanca.

It was pouring rain there, pounding on the tin roofs until you thought they would cave in, and then pounding harder.

We connected with Sebastian, a good comrade and a reliable riverboat pilot, and went up to Coroma the next morning, where a team built a bridge in July, in order to check up on things and show our new engineer our previous project. The bridge looked fantastic, but the community was extremely saddened about the recent death of a young man named Wilber, the community leader in charge of the bridge construction.

The next day (today), Sebastian went with us up to Soke, where we hope to assist the community in building a much-more needed bridge.

The span of river the Bribri have to cross at Soke looks more impressive every time you see it, and especially now, since heavy rains for the past few days have driven the water levels up. Matt and John were both somewhat stunned.

A previous bridge hung from 1996 until 2004, when it collapsed as seven families crossed. We went across the river in a small, shaky boat to look at the support on the other side. As we crossed, an 8-year-old boy walked on a three-cable bridge held together by vines some 30 feet above us. It was from that makeshift bridge that a 9-year-old girl fell to her death while walking to school last spring.

That bridge looked shaky and I had seen it before, but I didn’t realize how shaky until I elected to cross it going back. It wasn’t so bad at first, but out in the middle, with all three cables wobbling independently and the vines–the only things controlling the sway–spread 15 feet apart, I had to grip pretty darn hard just to stay on and I was wobbling all over the place. The 8-year-old boy who had crossed before, named Luis, sat on the shore on the opposite side laughing at me and cheering me on.

He’s our main customer. We want him to stay alive.

-Steve

A family of seven Somali Bantu refugees had just arrived in Fort Wayne, Ind., and without an interpreter on hand, volunteer Terry Taylor was doing her best to communicate with hand gestures. She took them to a three-bedroom apartment the relief organization Catholic Charities had secured for the family, but when she came back to check on them a week later, she found two of the bedrooms empty.

“I realized that they didn’t think those bedrooms were theirs,” Taylor said. “They were all huddling in one room and sleeping together - a family of seven.”

Taylor, who now works full-time for Catholic Charities, said that was just one of countless instances of dramatic culture shock she has seen since she began working with the refugees.

“They time warped 200 years into the future when they got off the plane,” she said. The problems begin at the most basic levels, Taylor said, such as, “Not recognizing at least 90 percent of the food they see at the grocery store. They’re used to getting rice and oil and sugar and a couple other things.”

Now Fort Wayne, already short volunteers to handle the thousands of African and Southeast Asian refugees living there, is preparing for an unprecedented influx of refugees from Thailand: Hundreds of members of the Karen indigenous group who fled their homeland of Burma, in order to avoid death at the hands of the military junta in power there, are headed to Indiana.

The government there has for decades waged a merciless campaign of subjugation against the indigenous Karen tribe, who were once among the best-educated and highest-paid members of Burmese society. After Great Britain granted Burma independence in 1948, the junta took power and the greatly resented Karen people’s prosperity ended abruptly, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a 120-nation consortium that assists refugees and monitors global migration trends.

Facing torture, death or at best a life of forced labor, the Karen fled into isolated villages in the country’s jungle-covered mountains. After decades of living in the largely self-sufficient villages and warding off the Burmese army, some 150,000 Karen fled into Thailand some 20 years ago, where they were placed in refugee camps. There they have remained, prohibited from entering the rest of Thailand to pursue a better life. Another 650,000 Karen remain displaced within Burma, according to the IOM.

Both the United States and Canada have accepted thousands of Karen refugees, and Taylor said organizations like hers have been overwhelmed. More than 450 Karen have been relocated to Fort Wayne between July and September, and another 600-800 are expected in 2008, she said.

“Catholic Charities normally resettles 150 to 200 refugees total in one calendar year, so this has been amazing,” she said.

After brief, often baffling orientation sessions during which they cover dozens of legal details regarding their residency in the U.S., the refugees are cut loose. They are given food stamps and a few hundred dollars per month with which to subsist, and because they arrive financially illiterate, the money often goes quickly.

Their financial struggle does not end there, Taylor said. Those who open checking accounts frequently overdraw them, incurring fees and leading them to believe the bank has stolen their money. Many people are so afraid of the banks, she said, that after three years in the U.S. they’re still paying their bills with money orders. Also, the refugees are left with the financial burden of repaying the government for their flight to the U.S.

Taylor said any sort of cultural orientation activity is helpful for refugees of any nationality, from helping them learn English - which can be a lengthy process since many of them arrive illiterate in even their native language, she said - to helping them learn to drive or understand a checkbook.

Additionally, because from their perspective simple tasks such as purchasing paint or cleaning supplies can seem daunting, many of the families’ homes and apartments are in need of basic repairs, and working on those projects would present the opportunity to teach the refugees how to handle such tasks themselves.

Experience Mission is offering summer 2008 mission trips to Fort Wayne to work with the refugees. Learn more at www.experiencemission.org or by calling the EM Office at (360) 554-8060.