Rest In Peace

We received an email informing us that a friend had passed away in a car accident last week down in Costa Rica. Willy the Clown, and his father-in-law passed away. Willy's mother-in-law is in critical condition. His wife and his 4-year-old daughter are hospitalized. Please pray for this family! Willy partnered with us on more than one occasion at the campground with the homeless shelter ministry as well as with the orphan home ministry. The words in the picture say, "A great friend. A great blessing. You will be remembered always". A flame for evangelical ministry in Costa Rica has been blown out this past week.

The day after....Christmas!

Our next team arrived! They were here at the camp for a week and a half. They came as a children's ministry team with two "handymen husbands". I think that you will see from the pictures below that we strive not to be your "cookie cutter" ministry; always seeking to do things in ministry that will stretch those who God has sent to serve alongside us as well as our family!

The children's ministry team wanted to do something with the orphan home kids, but we have found that having them at the camp and working with them there is much easier on us as far as transporting the team and supplies to and from the orphan home, and we usually have much better behavior from the kids when they are at the camp because they realize that it is a privilege to be down at the camp.

The theme that the team had decided upon using was two-fold; CEF's Wordless Book and it's colors, and an overall theme that "I'm Special to God"!

My job was to take their "ideas" for programming and help them make it into a program that would work best with these kids. Much like VBS programs are run at home, I decided on a rotation of stations after an opening with songs, and the Bible story message. At this station, the ladies are coloring fingernails in the colors of the Wordless Book to reiterate that message.

With every team before you can even begin working on ironing out the team's ministry while they are here; you have to do sorting of the supplies which they bring with them. In an email I was asked what I felt that this group could focus on bringing down. I asked them to concentrate on getting donations to make hygiene kits for the ongoing homeless shelter ministry that we have, and if they felt that they could, small gifts that could be used in gift bags to minister to the Mom's at the orphanage. Here is one of the completed hygiene kits for the homeless shelter.

One of the ministries that is near and dear to my heart is the homeless shelter ministry and in our initial conversations, I asked the team leader if she thought that her group might be interested in preparing a meal at the camp to take with us to a homeless shelter and feed the men there. She was more than sure that the group would want to do that! Having our partnership with Promundo Fundacion means that we call them when we are setting up the logistics for a team with a date of when we would like to serve a homeless shelter. They then call around in their network of homeless shelters and find out which homeless shelter needs a meal on that date (the homeless shelters survive solely on donations and many shelters frequently go without the ability to feed those being housed there) and they call us back and tell us which one to go to and how many we can expect to cook for. When the team commits to doing this, we do the grocery shopping of all the supplies that they will need to carry this out; drink, plastic cups, plates, silverware, napkins, spaghetti, sauce, bread and butter. Here's two of the ladies beginning to prepare the sauce. In addition to serving the men, someone shares a testimony and other teams have done dramas.


Because this team was smaller in number, we asked a friend of ours who also ministers through Promundo Fundacion to come and help us with this group. Roberto and his wife, Patricia are Costa Rican missionaries in their own right. They live on the support of others and the focus of their ministry is children, but they also work with homeless shelters like us. Ken and I have heard Roberto's testimony and he was as a child an orphan. Who better than to lead the games and music with the orphan home children than Roberto & Patricia? Being given up by my biological mother for adoption at 2-1/2 yrs. old I understand that there is a need to have "trust" restored in the minds and hearts of these children. Here, Roberto's activity is building trust within the orphan home, by having the girls do this activity girl-to-girl as well as the boys doing it boy-to-boy. Some of the other activities that we did with the children divided them off by each individual home and we all were witnesses to God moving them toward restoration. By the end of week of VBS, 66 children from the orphan home made first-time commitments to the Lord!

After church one morning, a Costa Rican friend came to me and said, "do you know why I keep asking you if I can buy one of the bunkbeds at the camp from you"? (Of course, we need all the beds at the camp to house teams and rental groups) My reply was "no". She then told me that she had a neighbor who had five children and that they had mattresses, but not all of the children had beds, in fact, two of them had to sleep on their mattresses on the floor. I told her I could not promise her anything, but I knew with the January team that there would be construction workers coming and maybe we could help out in some way. She was happy enough that I would try to help out her neighbor-friends. At the time of this conversation with her, I didn't know that two of the husbands accompanying their wives were handymen on the team! When they got here, I told them the story, and they were more than thrilled to be asked to make them. Other jobs that they did included replacing roofs on the two cabins and the other missionary house. The family that needed the bunkbeds lives in Palomo where the church that was meeting in the camp has moved too. Below is their picture. We invited Pastor Mario to meet us there at their home to pray for them when we surprised them with the bunkbed delivery.

When the beds were complete I called my friend and found out that the day we were delivering them was the little girl's birthday! It's amazing to us how God opens doors for His work to get done!

"It's Finally Friday" & Culture Shock

My kids loved that song on Q*DR when we lived in N.C. We would sing it altogether while waiting in carpool line and crank it up! Buncha' rednecks!

It is Friday, but it has been a productive week here at the camp with getting a lot of spring cleaning done. Yesterday, Ken and I spent six hours cleaning out the two main bodegas (storage rooms) in the Celebration Center. One of them is the tool room for construction, and the other houses our medications and medical supplies in a secured storage locker. The other half of that room is divided off by a wall and doorway and has another large storage area with shelving and stores household items for the cabins and the mission homes, and sports equipment. Yesterday, Ken & I literally pulled everything out of the large storage area and into the Celebration Center, cleaned the shelving and reorganized. The "plan" is to move all of the Children's Ministry supplies out of the cabinets in the office of the white house and into the storage area with the shelving.

Last week, I had been reading a blog on missionary blogs.com (a web site comprised of blogs written by missionaries serving all over the world which our blog is a member of) written by a missionary family located near San Francisco, Costa Rica. Their post literally made me tear up in that I felt helpless to help them as they deal with the issue of culture shock. Culture shock is something that all missionaries know they will at some time have to deal with, but it is not something that you can predict the timing of, nor in what manner it will effect you, therefore, you cannot fully explain it to another missionary and tell them exactly how they will experience it. Culture shock by definition is the trauma you experience when you move into a culture different from your home culture. Simple enough, right? Not really...It is a helpless feeling when you go through it, a feeling of literally hitting a wall. You feel as though you have lost what little "control" you might have in living in a foreign country, where you do not always understand the language, where the culture is new and you are walking on eggshells trying not to intentionally offend anyone, and on a daily basis struggling just to achieve simple tasks. I think that about sums it up! There are five stages to culture shock: the first is the stage of excitement and fascination with the new culture in which you live. The second is the crisis period where you begin to feel disappointed where you are, overwhelmed and easily irritated. The third is the adjustment phase when you begin to accept the culture and you begin to have a more positive attitude toward it. I can laugh now, but it took me a full year to get to this phase! The fourth stage is acceptance and adaptation; you have accepted where you live, and you begin to make connections with the people, and are involving yourself in outside activities. The fifth stage is the re-entry shock. When you go back to your homeland and at first you are in a euphoric state, happy to see everyone and be connected again. There is also a crisis state associated with this phase in which you realize that you are not really "home", things have changed, people are not the same, you in some ways feel disconnected because you have been gone and you feel disenchanted. This happens to us every time we go home. We "thought" we were going home, yet, it feels less and less like "home" is there. It initially feels wonderful to have so much available to us when we go back, yet we often shortly upon our return feel angry or frustrated with how much the States has available to them. (Trust me, you really don't want to know all the details of my melt-down in Food Lion in August just trying to satisfy a craving for some American store-bought cookies. End result: Tears of frustration, no cookies, and the inability to literally make a choice because there was SO MUCH to choose from after standing and staring in the cookie aisle for twenty minutes)! When we leave, it's a confusing feeling.

To make a long story short, as I was reading the blog post by the other missionary, the Lord compelled me to leave a comment inviting them to come and stay at the camp.

Please pray for Matt & Kristy and their four children as they come to the camp tonight and spend the weekend. They are here in Costa Rica staying about a year for language study. They are going to be ministering in another country once they have completed their language studies, and will have to make new adjustments to that culture. The Lord has required them to give up much; they have no vehicle while here in Costa Rica. I could not do that with four kids in the States, let alone another country! Matt & Kristy have "hit the wall"! They are frustrated and tired with language study. We can relate to that! They are desperately trying to adjust to the culture. I'm not sure at times I even totally understand this culture and I've already lived here two and a half years. Pray, that the Lord would flood their souls with peace and understanding as they go through this period of culture shock, and that they would hear His voice this weekend as they seek rest in the campground. Pray that the language would "click" in their minds and that they would progress in it! I know that they will deeply appreciate you praying for them! May the Lord work this weekend for His honor and His glory as we offer them respite care!

Rise and shine tomorrow morning for us is 4 a.m. as we travel to Pavas, a suburb of San Jose to join our ministry partners, Promundo Fundacion - "God Festival", who will be infiltrating this suburb for one day with the Good News of Jesus Christ where 90-plus volunteers will work in children's ministry, hair stylists, cooks, lawyers, medical doctors and nurses, pharmacists, and the evangelism team. We partner with them to reach the poor and oppressed in Costa Rica and be His hands and His feet.