We love and miss you
Friends, we are so thankful for your love and support to our little family here. I have been considering lately how small we are in the grand scheme of things, how small our plans and projects are, yet how God loves us and cares for all our needs. He sees each of us exactly where we are and He even has custom-made plans for us. (Ephesians 2:10) So, from our little lives here, please accept a grande "GRACIAS". The other day I woke up and I thought, "This is the life! We are being stretched and we're growing. This is right where we are supposed to be." You are the ones who keep us here. We miss seeing you at church or BSF, school, work or in the neighborhood. We wish we could catch up with so many of you. We miss all the conveniences and familiarity of America. We miss the kids' great school. We miss things we grew up with, like Valentine's Day, barbeque, winter, tex-mex, and having a car. Yet we consider "everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord."
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We love our school
Will and I are involved in several things at our school, Instituto de Lengua Española. Will is the paseo director, which means that he plans short trips to cool places around San José. Especially the new students are so thankful to Will for showing them around this beautiful country and helping them get good deals. We have a fun Tico friend named Ronnie who has a travel agency and therefore, knows everyone in the country. He helps Will get bus drivers and he knows just where to stop for a good meal. Ronnie has been a source of encouragement to us and to dozens of missionary families before us.
I am helping as a liaison between our language school and the on-campus kids' school, and so I have learned a lot about the politics of running a school as well as handling student placement and individual student needs. This experience will come in handy at Diospi Suyana school in the future! I also help facilitate the women's exercise classes twice a week. We have a good time laughing and burning off some stress together, as one video says, "sisters in sweat."
It is a blessing to witness God working in our friends at school and to imagine all that has been accomplished by this little school teaching missionaries for 70 years.
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We love Costa Rica
Here in Costa Rica, they celebrate "Friendship Day" on February 14. The government micromanages the lives of Ticos, probably because it is such a small country. Since they didn't want the citizens' feelings to be hurt by so much talk of love, this day is for remembering your friends. They changed Colombus Day to "The Meeting of the Cultures Day" and then "Cultures Day" because the arrival of the Spanish explorers was not an entirely positive experience.
Costa Ricans are very careful not to offend one another personally either. We have learned several grammatical structures for giving advice in the form of a light suggestion. This does not mean, however, that they don't give advice-- in fact, my grammar teacher said that "I don't have an opinion" is an expression that doesn't exist in Spanish.
Part of the same cultural fabric is that Costa Ricans do not want to offend by their smell. A typical Costa Rican showers every morning (often in cold water) and prepares for the day with perfume or cologne. If they have a job that involves manual labor, they will shower and change before leaving the job site or boarding a public bus. One of my friends even commented that a jogger in the park left a clean, cologne smell in his wake!
As you can imagine, we gringos offend by our smell sometimes, by celebrating love on Valentine's day, and by our misuse of their beautiful language; but I guess we'll never know because they wouldn't want to offend us by reporting it!
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We love our neighbors
The Lord has given us friends right here on our street, which has been recently named Avenida 52. (They haven't had street names here in CR, but a few weeks ago street signs started appearing everywhere.) A Tica woman and her German husband met in the USA, married, and settled here, across the street from where she grew up. We have enjoyed a couple of dinners with them and look forward to our growing friendship.
The Wheatons are a family from Boston who came to language school three years ago and now work in a seminary, training Costa Rican pastors. They have five fine boys who our kids adore. I always enjoy spending time with Jessica at the park or at school functions. A month ago they invited us to help out with a ministry they have to a small orphanage located just around the corner from our houses. We have been visiting with the orphans on Sunday afternoons, taking some to the park, doing crafts with others. Our own kids look forward to seeing their new friends and Will and I are challenged to understand Spanish spoken by kids, which is a distinct dialect!
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