Week 4 Update

It has been a month already! We feel like we are just starting to get settled into life down here in Costa Rica (I have a feeling we’ll be saying that for awhile). Thank you all so much for the prayers, phone calls and emails - it has made this first month much easier to bear.

We had the pleasure of attending church at Iglesia Christiana Alajuelita with Miguel and Karina. This church is our church home away from home. It was wonderful to talk to many of our old friends and to see how God has been blessing the church and the community through this church. It truly is amazing to see how much our church has changed over the past year. We had just a few minutes to talk to Miguel and find out how he has been growing new leaders and programs within the church. Hopefully, in the very near future we will be able to sit down with him and Karina for dinner or coffee and get a more complete picture.

We started our Spanish classes this week. One of our friends down here in Costa is a language teacher. She has agreed to tutor us and another missionary family. Its hard to describe how bad we are at speaking Spanish, but I think you can imagine how hard we laughed that night.

Yesterday, we went to the Verbena feeding center. I held a little boy, Amelio, who was maybe two years old. The food was incredibly hot when they brought it out. However, poor little Amelio was so hungry that he didn’t want to wait for it to cool off. As soon as he took the first bite his entire little body shuddered. So then we both started blowing on it as fast as possible so he could eat it sooner.

We also experienced our first water outage. Dan’s still not exactly sure why the water was out for most of the day. However, it came back on hours later. Thankfully, the people who had lived here before us, left us several 6 liter jugs of water. When the water came back on it was very cloudy. With my stomach issues, we had to use bottled water to prevent any possible infections. After 48 hours, the water was finally back to normal. We’re so thankful for clean water!

As you know, Elizabeth is not doing well. We’re headed back to the orphanage tomorrow so I will give you an update then. The last we heard is that she’s not doing well and they’re not sure if she’s going to make it or not. However, we know God is the ultimate healer and he’s going to take care of her!

I survived another week of school! My class size is now up to 18. Its amazing to me how different the system is here. Earlier this week the school realized they had maxed out their special education slots. In other words, the resource teachers don’t have any time left to help new students. Therefore, the administrators tell the parents that the child can enroll but the family will have to hire a private tutor to come in the school to help the child. So 2 of my students now have private tutors that come in during normal school hours to pull them out for extra assistance. Tuesday night is Open House. All of the parents in my class will come in to hear all about our school year. Say a prayer that everything goes smoothly!