Costa Rica - Day 3

We started the day with fellowship as we fueled up for the day. To start our bus ride to the Santa Marta  Methodist Church, Kristin had a fun trivia game and Jeremy/Lewis lead the devotionals. Drew and Coleman racked up serious trivia points.

The church is building a parsonage and a classroom. The sun was out and blazing as we arrived. We put on layers and layers of sunscreen, bug spray and more sunscreen. Work gloves, hats, sun glasses helped protect us as well!

We partnered up with the South Carolina group to do the following jobs: painting, installing a roof on the parsonage, stacking cement slabs to create walls for the classroom, prepping for electrical work, landscaping, and chiseling cement around the walls of the parsonage to create a smoother edge and level surface for the tile work.

Both groups worked to be the church for this congregation in Costa Rica but also to each other. “Have you had water recently?” “Did you put on sunscreen recently?” “Do you need to get out of the sun?” Was heard more times than I could count.

We had an eclectic playlist to help entertain us as we worked. Thanks Bethany! The group worked hard today but we also took the time to be present with each other. To learn about plans for after graduation, to get to know Caroline the student who has been staying at the center, and what all the fuss is about fortnight. To appreciate how much better the bananas are here or enjoy the kindness of a stranger who converted dollars to colones so a few could enjoy ice cream.

We enjoyed a simple but tasty lunch. Then had to quickly unload cement mix bags and large tiles before the rain started. We got smarter with the cement and started handing the bags through the windows.  And thankfully finished in the nick of time before it poured!!!

The rain dropped the temperature and the clouds blocked the hot hot sun. But we were creative to still get work done: wires could still be prepped, painted was moved inside and many continued stacking the cement slabs for the walls in the rain.

Beverly/Emily(South Carolina group), Annabelle, Kristen, and Anderson had an efficient system to clean the metal before the painting, shift the clean metal to be painted and then allowed to dry. Thin coats were key! And all took breaks from the fumes frequently.

Had a little excitement before dinner when we lost power for hours. But Franny, Lugito and Louisa kept working to get us an amazing dinner of a chicken gravy, rice, salad, fruit and tortilla chips. Between the battery flood lights and flashlights on phones/portable fans flashlights, no one miss a beat.

The day ended with ring light devotionals lead by Kristen, epic 12 person Uno game, many of the young people belting out Umbrella at the tops of their lungs! The biggest disappointment was that the blue tooth speaker was out of juice for the epic 12 person Uno game. And maybe all the draw twos Ava was gifted and she could rarely play an actual card.

We used cold showers to clean of the sweat and grime. And birds, bugs, frogs and many other creatures sang us to sleep. Eventually a few hours after bedtime, the power came back on. And we quickly plugged in that blue tooth speaker to be prepared for tomorrow!