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Hola, mis amigos en Estados Unidos! Greetings from Costa Rica! We arrived safely after our 12+ hours journey spanning from Sunday at 7pm to Monday at 9:30am. The drive to LAX was easy and without much traffic. We arrived at the airport around 11:45pm. Just FYI for people wanting to travel internation on a flight... arrive 2-3 hours before your flight. They stop boarding 1 hour before. We finished checking-in around 12:25am (our flight was at 1:30am), however our flight was full! Two members of our team had to fly on another flight. Fortunately, we all made it to Costa Rica safely, it just took some of us a little longer than others.
Once we arrived, we were greeted warmly by the staff. They are such a wonderful group of people with a lot of personality. They all have servant's hearts. We quickly discovered there is a seemingly endless supply of coffee. Can life get any better? Yes, it can! The scenery here is beautiful with mountains half hidden by clouds that are covered by green, lush vegetation.
Next, we were off to meet our host families. We quickly traveled to our houses to greet the families that we would be living with for the next two weeks. Many of us are not strong in Spanish, just knowing key words, however, we've still been to connect some with our host families! It was so encouraging to have such friendly families that didn’t mind dealing with the language barrier. It helped to give us a good attitude about our future interactions with others here in our ministry sites.
Our second day was mostly a day of orientation and team-building. We all arrived at the SI building at 8am for a time of devotion, worship through music, and a time to learn about Costa Rica and how to be effective at our ministry sites. We did numerous activities to help us to understand culture differences and how to handle them well. There we learned that everyone will have cultural conflict, but it is how we handle that conflict that will determine our whether we will have meaningful, impactful relationships or broken, distant relationships.
After orientation, we traveled downtown to a park in San Jose and ate Costa Rican snow cones. They were delicious! Dd I mention it was raining at the time? We were the center of attention. Can you imagine a herd of 15+ "gringos" eating snow cones in the rain? We had quite the following. There was also a birthday on our 2nd day! We bought a cake for the birthday girl from a shop downtown and surprised her that night at our group debrief.
We know God will be using us in many ways, not just the community we will be serving, but also in our relationships with each other and SI. Please continue to pray for our team to be faithful to God’s calling. We may plant the seed, we may water the seed, but only God grows it.