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.

Malia's note to Eden to mark our adoption becoming official

We are official!

Can you believe it's been almost two years since Eden became part of our

family? Today we finally got our day in court to finalize our adoption in

the state of CA. As the judge was reading the oath, we were trying not to

be distracted by the girls fidgeting around on our laps. Meanwhile, the

court recorder was so moved that she was crying as she typed. One almost

forgets how big of a deal this is. I guess it's a good sign that it feels

uneventful to us -- like Eden has always been a part of us.

Best line by the judge: "You do realize that she will one day be a

teenager. And you still need to take responsibility for her then too."

My response: "She already acts like a teenager sometimes." God sure gave

me two sassy ones. :)

Ladybug and Monkey

Needless to say, the girls had a blast trick or treating. Malia has been this ladybug for the last 3 Halloweens now. Auntie Cathy made it for her and it still fits!




The girls with their neighborhood friends



It has been hard to motivate Eden to communicate with us, so I was surprised to see how quickly she picked up on saying "trick or treat"! The rewards were too huge to pass up I guess :)

Fall...and New Challenges

Paul just came back from spending a couple of weeks in Africa for work, so we spent his day off at the pumpkin patch with the girls. I think Eden wasn't quite sure about it :)








When Eden first came home, she was pretty good about sticking right by us so we relaxed a bit on allowing other people to play with her, hold her, etc. We've learned it's called "trauma attachment", where the child may stick to you like glue because they are afraid of all the big changes that have happened and feel insecure about what will happen next. So it turns out that as she's adjusted and gotten used to her new home and surroundings, she is also now getting very comfortable with other people very quickly. A little too quickly. Any new adult she meets is a potential caregiver to her and she will readily follow them around since they're more likely than mommy to offer her sweets and let her have her way with toys and other kids.

It's way more complex than I just described and I know it may be hard for someone who hasn't had the experience of trying to bond and connect with an adopted child to understand. I don't expect everyone to understand it, but we're just asking for the support of our friends and family in stepping back from loving on Eden and allow us the time to form a solid attachment. We will fill people in as we spend time with you, but basically we ask that you not touch/hold her, offer her food or toys, and if she comes to you for any of these things to redirect her to one of us.

We have appreciated the love all of you have shown her, sincerely. Thank you for supporting us in this way.

New Friends

The girls met Millie and her mom this weekend in Palo Alto (Eden and Millie are from the same orphanage/city). Super-encouraging time for Eliza!