Planet of the apes

it's a young man's world

Getting to our hotel in Santa Theresa was a 300m
hike up a steep incline. Not a good choice.

Everywhere we look it's backpackers, adventure seekers, vagabond surfers from the US, Europe, and Australia. The trade-off with enjoying the beauty of this area is that one has to deal with the roads here -- among the worst in Costa Rica. The modes of transport are exclusively ATVs and 4x4 SUVs. Average age looks to be about early 20s. It may be a young person's paradise, but suffice to say, it's not the easiest place for a woman almost 7 months pregnant and two small children. We are in the small surfing town of Santa Theresa on the Nicoya Peninsula.

Taking a trip like this is about voluntary displacement. We expect there will be the unexpected. But I grossly underestimated how limiting it would be with Eliza's condition and the age of our children. I'm too used to galavanting freely by myself to the outermost territories of our grantmaking world. Traveling with a young family has given me a whole new awareness of how much I naively assume perfect health, extreme mobility, and some degree of ruggedness. Obviously, these are not to be taken for granted (even for a young man, for that matter).

We finally concluded that the house in San Jose very likely has bed bugs (the signs are telltale), leaving us without a reliable home base. As a consequence, we have decided to come home early. We arrive next weekend, cutting this adventure short by two weeks.

So now we focus on making the most of the remaining days we have here.

Speed boat ride to Nicoya Peninsula. Terrible idea. :(

Kids enjoying the balcony in Montezuma

They've been troopers

Competing with Eliza for the biggest belly

A bug's life... oh, and reptiles

Happier days @La Paz Waterfall

Before we left, Kristi (First Fruit Board member) asked me to assign percentages to the three main objectives of this trip. At the time, I told her it was 60% about quality family time, 20% about enhancing Spanish language skills, and 20% about getting ministry learning opportunities. I'm so glad she asked that question because it has helped guide me in making some important decisions along the way.

La cucaracha

For starters, we have decided to limit our time in San Jose. Malia and Eden have gotten multiple mosquito bites for 11 consecutive nights in the house where we are staying. We tried everything short of buying mosquito nets (which are hard to come by these days in San Jose). That coupled with the daily headlines in the local paper about a troubling spike in dengue fever cases (transmitted by mosquitos) around the Central Valley, and we decided we had had enough. It also didn't help matters that the house has a cockroach problem. The final straw was Eliza's late-night encounter with an unidentified yellow reptile on the kitchen counter. I know we sound like first-world prima donnas to some of you, and maybe beggars can't be choosers (since we're staying in the house for very little cost to us), but it was definitely time to stretch our travel budget a little and get out of Dodge.

Treehouse at Roblealto

The biggest downsides to this so far are twofold: 1) most of the NGOs/ministries we were planning to visit are in the San Jose area; 2) most of the tourist areas are swarming with and catered to gringos (we could easily get by without speaking Spanish). Just before we left San Jose, we had a wonderful visit with two extraordinary ministries associated with Latin American Mission (LAM), a 90-year-old Christian organization operating in this region. LAM has an impressive legacy of spawning some enduring institutions in this country -- from one of the nation's top-ranked hospital (Clinica Biblica) to some of the region's best-known seminaries (ESEPA and ProMETA) to widely-heard Christian broadcasting stations (Radio Faro de Caribe). We visited two such institutions -- Roblealto and Colegio Monterrey.

Granja Roblealto

Founded in 1932, Roblealto's mission is to care for the children of Costa Rica who are in critical situations, at social risk, and who need specialized care. Roblealto works with 1,000 kids per year, getting referrals from all over the country by the government child welfare department. It aims to reintegrate families by providing two core services. The first is a "halfway house" where foster parents care for up to 10 children for a period of 3 months to 2 years. These heroic foster parents are recruited from local churches. The second program is, as our host, Steve Mean, put it, "daycare on steroids." The multiple daycare centers provide all-day enrichment to the children, including health, nutrition, education, spiritual support and psychological treatment.

A one-day-old chick for sale

One of the most remarkable aspects of Roblealto is how it's operating costs are locally self-sustainable. Granja Roblealto raises and sells one-day-old chicks to egg breeders and poultry farmers. It generates $10 million in revenues, $1 million in profits and contributes $440,000 directly to Roblealto's social programs. Impressive!

Founded in 1956, Colegio Monterrey is a private bilingual Christian school, preschool level to high school. It uses an innovative educational model to teach 900 children and teenagers to faithfully fulfill their duties within their family, society, and God. Amazingly, it costs $5000 per year (many of whom receive scholarships), and yet it continues to have a waiting list of prospective students. It too is operationally self-sustaining. Among it's graduates are mayors, congressmen, magistrates, judges, UN staff who have all been taught to have a Christian perspective in formulating their agendas.

We are still planning to visit with a few other ministries in the days we're back in San Jose. In the meantime, however, we are enjoying the spectacular beauty of this country. Right now we're off on a week's worth of soaking up the central Pacific coast. The kids are loving it, Eliza is feeling much more at ease, and I'm going to sign off now so that I can get up early for some dawn patrol!

@Volcan Poas

Thank God for that glass barrier!

Toucan indigenous to CR

Butterfly garden

My first surf session. Haha!

An iguana at our hotel pool

La Vida en La Ciudad Grande

Today marked the one-week point since arriving in Costa Rica. It's taken that long to get our bearings.

When people think of Costa Rica, they think of pristine beaches, ziplines through rain forests, exotic flora and fauna… Well, our first week has contained none of that. Rather, it's been a fairly typical life in a congested Latin American capital city for a family very inexperienced in such a life. It's what prompted Malia's first words when we arrived at the house to be: "I want to go home" (along with the saddest sullen expression). Now the house is not that bad, mind you (see pic). It's just been an adjustment. It probably wasn't a good idea to call this trip the "40-day vacation" to our kids. I think we set the wrong expectations. Even our Spanish tutor told us, "San Jose es muy feo!" [The city is very ugly.]

We are starting to get more of the hang of it. Eliza's found a decent grocery store (she got a kick out of cooking Shake 'n Bake chicken and mac 'n cheese tonight, even though we probably wouldn't eat that at home). I'm learning to stop sweating bullets while driving an '87 Toyota stick shift sedan (the car we're borrowing) in San Jose traffic. We're getting used to the bug bites and heavy exhaust fumes from buses and cars (trusting that our baby in utero won't grow two heads as a result). The girls have been very creative in entertaining themselves with rocks, sticks and broken glass laying around the street (no, we aren't being absentee parents, just letting them live a little).

Two highlights this week:

1. Visiting a Christian NGO called Casa Viva which has successfully introduced and rolled out a foster care model for at-risk children despite a previously skeptical Costa Rican government. It has been winning over its skeptics — now receiving 35% of its support from the child welfare agency of the government — and is poised to scale up significantly as well as help consult other countries in the model.
2. Visiting a local Nazarene church where my friend, Allan Matamoros, preached about life in the Muslim-majority world leading a Latin American mission called Pueblos Muselmanes Internacional. A very high percentage of his support base is from Costa Rican churches.

One of the decisions we made was not to enroll in the local language institute. Our fear was that we would settle into an expat-dominated community and fail to integrate into Costa Rican life. It's caused me to reflect a little about how easy and tempting it is to develop a sense of cultural superiority when in a foreign country. One travesty about Costa Rica is how much of the best land and most lucrative businesses are owned exclusively by expats. Among Western Christians, there is an unspoken superiority we have that our starting point somehow is more advantaged towards living "good" Christian lives than other cultures. Perhaps it's true in the sense that America and much of Europe's founding was based on Judeo-Christian principles. But in day-to-day existence, the call to discipleship is challenging regardless of the cultural context. I heard the story of how one of the most storied and historic missions, Central American Mission, founded in the 19th century by Scottish missionaries, was recently asked to leave by Costa Rican church leadership, essentially over their unwillingness to relinquish control to nationals. [Although, in fairness, I'm sure my shorthand version of the story I heard is somehow incomplete.]

Regardless of where we are, I'm reminded that we need to be "jealous with [His] jealousy" -- to be passionate to see people living lives of genuine and deep faith within their own cultural context.

Tomorrow we overnight at a volcano called Volcan Poas. It will be good to get out of the city.