Diogo helping build his house

Greetings!  This week has gotten off to a great start with an energetic team from Jupiter First Church (Florida).  The team arrived in San Jose on Sunday afternoon and after our 5+ hour bus ride, we arrived on the Bribri reservation.

This week we have chosen four different sites within the Watsi community: doing Kids Club, building a house, building a porch, and repairing a community center.  Though many this week are feeling the struggle of communicating in a foreign language, so far the teams have accomplished a great deal and seem to be having a lot of fun.

The house that we are working on this week is being built for a woman named Karen and her family.  Since Karen is currently studying English in school the group is doing a great job conversing, partly in Spanish and partly in English, in order to get to know each other.  It has been wonderful to watch the relationship grow between the team and Karen’s family.  Karen’s four-year-old son, now being more comfortable with the team, brings smiles to everyone’s faces as he runs and chases them around their home.

Karen has been very hospitable and has offered many refreshments to the team, including a native sweet and sour fruit called the guanabana.  The team has been appreciative of her gratefulness and is noting the love and hard work that emanates from each member of her family.  The bond that has been forming within this group of people is just one of the many ways in which we can see God working in our lives this week.

Team Costa Rica

June 8, 2010

To learn more about Costa Rica mission trips, visit www.experiencemission.org.

Rural Mission Trip: Just checking in from Costa Rica. The summer has been a challenging one but it’s been amazing to see how God continues to work in ways that we did not see possible. This last week we travelled up to Alto Coen; which to give ya’ll an idea of the kind of trip it is, just to get to the location where you are staying you take an hour boat ride in a banana boat, an hour bus ride, and then a 5 hour hike up roughly 1500 feet on a muddy, rugged terrain. It is an amazing experience but you definitely get a workout. Anyways, throughout the week Ali and I had the privilege of getting to know the people, specifically the women and children while the men worked on the bridge, which was our main focus for traveling up to Alto Coen- to assist in the building of a suspension bridge that would connect two sides of a village. It was a stretching experience as I battled not being able to fully communicate with women and children however it was amazing to see how God worked through my weakness to still do His work. As I sat under a tree constructed structure with a leaf roof, I found myself exchanging my English language with their BriBri language. While the time was spent learning small phrases such as How are you?, What is your name? Where are you from? And how to count to ten, the bond that formed seemed to go deeper then the simplistic phrase exchanges. It was an exchange of lives, a sharing of each others’ hearts and the joining of lives for a moment.
Team Costa Rica

*To learn more about the mission trips that Experience Mission is sending out, visit www.experiencemission.org.