"It doesn't work but it's really pretty"

I'm listening to Beirut, A Call to Arms, as I reflect on the past two weeks. This album reminds me of Costa Rica because I listened to it on my flight to San Jose when I was trying to prepare myself for the unknown. How incredible it's been to see communities helped, people changed and myself stretched as we all go about life trying to figure out how to love people.

A team from Ohio was here for 10 days building a home for Joselin, a 17-year-old mom whose four month old is adorable and will now have a dry place to sleep. The guys helped complete one house and built another one from the ground up. Rebecca and I came to Jasmine on the last day to help paint and it was definitely a team effort as we all tried to paint around the banana trees and the barbed wire fence that was right up against the house.

The guys also had the project of cleaning/fixing up a stove for Sandra's family, who cooks outside on an open fire. It was so incredible to see this family get a new stove, and I was amazed by the guys who carried it down the ridiculously steep terrain to get it inside their house. I was standing on the sidelines, not helping at all with my exclamations of fear, as they efficiently carried it down the "path" of like 45 steps. The down side to this story is that Sandra doesn't get enough voltage for the stove to work (she said, "it doesn't work but it's really pretty"). The team hired an electrician to check it out and we're in the process of getting her a gas stove or helping her get a permit to hook up the right cables to the electric one.

Rodney and Cindy's son and his family are here visiting for the week and after that our good friend May will be coming (also known as Best Time Ever 2009). The next team doesn't get here until the middle of March so we have a break where we will organize our English classes, put our files in order for the person who takes our place and get some rest. I added photos to my photo album, so take a look if you want to see more photos from the past two teams.