July Camp

The July camping season started this last week.  Ok, let me back up and explain a couple of things. 

Costa Rican schools start in February.  They run through December, with a break in July (about 2 weeks) and then a longer break in December and January.   So, our big camp season is in January with 4 weeks of camp and then we have 2 weeks in July. 

This meant the long hours we've had before, Noah going in at 5:30 am and not coming home until almost 11 pm.  I will say this, while the camp week was longer at Barakel, we see a lot less of Noah here because we don't live at camp.

But it was a good week.  Noah was able to spend a lot of time with the service kids, the 16 year olds who scrub dishes and toliets, to encourage them, as well as the counselors and other support staff.

As you think of us, pray with us for

• the counselors, as they share the Gospel with the campers
• For the the campers, counselors, and staff to hear the Heart of the Gospel and respond to it (well all need constant reminder of the Gospel)
• For unity amongst the staff
• For our big boys who will be day campers Monday and Tuesday.
• For the boys and I as we do another long week without Noah around much
• For Noah, energy, wisdom and grace as he works with everyone.

Thanks all!!

Hodgepodge

It's been a lot of this and that this last week.  Just a bunch of bits and pieces really...

So here you go, in no particular order:

• Today Noah is hiking up a volcano with two of our volunteers.  Yeah, pray for him.  Pray for great conversations with these two guys, that they would be safe, and that he wouldn't be too worn out when he gets home...7 hour hikes are intense, man.

• Today our lawyer meets with the Migration people to get the answer to our petition for residency.  Pray it will be granted!

• Since moving all three boys to different rooms last week, Quinn has slept so.much.better.  Probably should have moved him out of our room 2 months ago. Oh well.  We're thankful for more sleep.

• Although, now that we are sleeping more, my body remembers what it's like and now is asking for more and more.  I am pretty sure I could sleep 12 hours straight for the next week and a half.  Yeah, not going to happen, but a girl can dream, right?

• We need to paint all the bedrooms.  When I asked our landlady if she had paint we could use, her son brought primer over.  You think that will still work for a finished wall look?  I haven't the foggiest...

• After scouring the yard for limóns, and squeezing the ones we found, I look at the juice and realized there were worms swimming in it.  Yeah, that went down the drain...sigh.

• Seems as if we are transitioning to rainy season weather.

• I was explaining to my tutor yesterday about the house I grew up in, and he was amazed at the amount of land my parents own, 10 acres.  He also said no one here would live on that much land by themselves, it would be too dangerous.  And that explains a lot about why people think we are nuts to want to live in the campo (country.)

• Mango Hedgehogs are the boys new favorite way to eat a mango

Galletas de Navidad

So Wednesday we hosted our first group of volutneers here at our house.  The camp season is coming up and there are some new voluteers who don't really know each other.  They wanted to spend some time together before camp started and we offered our house up for the fun. 

We thought it would be a good idea to have an activity for them, becuase they had only spend about 36 hours with each other.  Sometimes it's good to have your hands busy when working on making friends.  So, being that it's Christmas time, decorating Christmas cookies seemed like a good idea.  Most Ticos don't bake, so Christmas cookies aren't a thing here and they were all excited to try their hand at this North American tradition.

It was fun to watch them figure it all out.  First, they spread the frosting on the cookies like you would butter on bread.  And when they finished decorating, they asked if we needed to cook the cookies again.  Nope, just eat 'em friends!  They thought the Michigan and moose cookies were the funniest. 

After the cookie making, there was some tree climbing for oranges and just general talking and laughing.  And I'll say this, when working with people who love camp, your kids have some great play buddies!  Our kids were loved on, and thoroughly played with!  The volunteers were fighting over who got to hold Quinn.

Supper was taquitos and salsa, fruit and chips.  I was thankful how everyone pitched in and helped clean up.  We were able to spend some time talking with the group, getting to know them, them getting to know us better.

Pray for this group, and the rest of the volunteers as they are preparing for camp in just a few weeks.  Pray that God would use this preparation time to grow them and He would soften the hearts of the campers that are coming.

Camping

Way back in February, Noah and I decided that one of the things we wanted to do with the boys this summer was camp.  And we figured that it made sense to do that while we were up north after our time at Barakel.  We found Mill Creek Campground in Mackinaw City, and because we knew we would have a 7 week old with us, we opted for renting a cabin instead of tenting it.  Some day we will, but this didn't seem to be the summer for that.

The cabin was really just a cube with beds in it.  It did have a dorm fridge and a microwave, but no bathroom or running water.  We still cooked over the fire and had to walk to the bathhouse, so that's something, right?

The boys really enjoyed it.  They made somores, got filthy playing, and even got to have a hayless hay ride. Regarding the somores, Elliot looked at me at one point with his hands covered in warm marshmallow and said, "I don't want this attached to me anymore."  Ha!

One day we walked around "downtown" Mackinaw City (yes, this is the same place we stayed one April for a fraction of the cost they charge during the summer.  Seriously, from Labor Day to Memorial Day, this place is a ghost town!)  The second morning we went to Fort Michilimackinac, which the boys thought was way cool. 

It was a great 48 hours of just being us.  Noah described camping to the boys as a "time to slow down and take your time doing things and being a family."  Yep.  I wish we could have had about 3 more days of it!

Hello Again. Remember Me?

Well.  It's been a while, hasn't it?  That's what 16 days on the road and getting back 5 weeks before you leave the country will do to a blog.

Let's see.  There is lots to share, our week at Barakel, our time with family in the North, camping and some exciting support stuff.

But that's all a lot for tonight.  We spent yesterday sorting through the entire trailer and making decisions about what to keep, what to get rid of, and what to take to Costa Rica.  And today was running to doctors appointments, more sorting and more decisions.  I am beat.

So I will leave you with a few photos from the last few weeks and promise I will get caught up soon.

Noah's Got Skills

So I just need to brag on Noah for a minute.  Check out this video of him facilitating a team building activity all in Spanish.  The first part is him explaining the activity, and the second half is the debriefing afterward.  I love this man!

In the Mountains

I am not sure how many of you remember the story of our trip to Costa Rica in 2005.  That was long before this little space existed in Cyberspace.  We had some sort of web page that we tried to update, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was, it's probably still in the bowels of the internet somewhere.

But here's what I am getting to.  When we were here in the summer of 2005, we took a trip up the mountains.  This is not typically where tourists head, but we wanted to pretend that we could do things on our own.  We found a cloud rain forest canopy tour in our Lonely Planet guide book, and a cheap ($14 a night) hotel that had hot water.  And we went.  We hired a taxi to take us up towards the canopy tour, but decided to walk in most of the way. 

It was there in the mountains where God planted this idea of Christian Camping in Latin America.  As we walked we joked, "Ha, wouldn't it be funny if this place was closed? hahahah."  And then we got there.  Yeah, closed.  Completely.  But God used that trip.  It was the next step.  The next piece of the puzzle.

This last weekend, we had the opportunity to head back into the mountains.  We spent a great couple of days at Campamento La Cumbre.  Noah and I looked at each other with wide eyes and mouths open as we drove past the road we walked where God spoke to us.  Yeah, it is like a half hour from La Cumbre!  What in the world!  Only God does stuff like that!

We were invited to observe the weekend by the director, a Costa Rican woman named Silenia, who shares an excitement for sharing Jesus in the context of the amazing outdoors and through the unique aspects of camp.  She was so gracious to spend so much time with us, talking about how she deals with different aspects of camp.  It was so encouraging to hear that so many of the lessons that we learned about Camping while we were in the United States can and do translate to Latin America. 

We not only got to observe what was going on with the campers, but how Silenia works with her volunteers, the conversations behind the scenes, you know, the real camp.  The group that was out for the weekend was a group of very at risk teens from San Jose.  These were kids that were part of a program to show them Jesus and to help them make the right choices in the midst of terrible home lives, drugs, alcohol and all the other junk the world has to 'offer'.  These kids had earned the right to come to camp that weekend and it was such a beautiful thing to watch them get to play.   Just play and be kids.  And learn about Jesus in the midst of the playing.  Silenia mentioned that to them, this is like Disneyland.

We saw Costa Rican college age kids 'give up' a weekend to come and work at camp for nothing.  They come because they love Campamento and they have caught the vision for what God is doing through La Cumbre.  I got excited to watch them work with the campers and realize that this can happen in Honduras too!

I filled up a good two or three pages worth of thoughts, observations, and ideas in my journal.  And did I mention that this whole weekend was in Spanish?  Yeah, there were a few other English speakers with us, but all our conversations with Silenia were in Spanish, Noah facilitated a team building activity in Spanish, I helped run a relay race station in Spanish, and we were able to have conversations with different campers and volunteers in Spanish!  Sure my verbs weren't always right, but I got the point across! 

Is this the look of a happy man or what?  It's so fun to see Noah doing what God made him for, playing with kids in the mountains of Latin America, sharing a very real Gospel with them. 

And so now we are back in the city.  Last night we both sighed a little when we heard the car alarms go off and the bus roar by our house.  But what a refreshing, encouraging weekend it was in the mountains!

Uncollection

• It's been a rough week around here.  Lots of just hard life stuff that happens regardless of where in the world you live.  Parenting has hit a different level of intensity, and trying to figure out your kid needs is always a challenge!

• I sat through 5 hours of grammar instruction today.  Yeah, to say my brain is fried is an understatement.  And when you start to learn that there a words that look the same, but mean completely different tenses you're brain starts to cry, just a little bit.  I feel like the further I get down this rabbit hole, the more lost I am.  There was something almost comforting about only being able to say things in the present tense.  Like, I wasn't responsible to sound like an adult because I didn't know how to speak at a higher level than a two year old.

• I managed to find a notions store and a fabric store much closer to our house.  In fact, I can take the bus there (still haven't figured out the bus route back home.  How lame is that?)  But I manged to get some supplies for a few Christmas projects I need to get started on.

• This weekend Noah and I are headed to a camp up in the mountains for the weekend.  Yeah, you read that right, Noah and I!  The boys are staying here with a dear couple that is on their way to Mexico.  Tony and Beverly have been so fun to be around, such a wealth of wisdom.  Tony has been a pastor for 20 something years and Beverly has spent the past 10 years as the director of a Crisis Pregnancy Center.  We are thrilled they are willing to watch the boys for the weekend and the boys are very excited to have them come.  

• While we at La Cumbre, we will be observing a camp in session.  We are so excited about this!  It's always good to get other perspectives, to watch how other people do your job.  And this is great because it will be the first time we get an inside look at the programing aspect of a Latin American camp.  Oh, and did I mention we get to go on a canopy tour too?  Yeah, super excited about that tambien, errrr, as well.

• Bought our plane tickets to MI for Christmas!  Super excited about that also!!  And if you know of a car that needs to be driven by a loving family for the month of December, would you get us a heads up?  We are still in need of transportation for the month that we are in MI.  Thanks!