I´m writing from an internet cafe in Bribri, a small town in Talamanca Costa Rica. This part of Costa Rica is an indigenous reserve. We´ve been on outreach for about 2 weeks now. For the first 4 days we were in Shuabb which is a little community in the jungle. To get there you walk from Bambu (a town where the only phones are payphones and cell phones) down to the river. You pay a guy in a dugout canoe to take you across the river. Then you walk up the muddy hill to the road. If you´re lucky, you´ve talked to the guy with the tractor and he´s there to take you to Shuabb. Otherwise, you walk 4 kilometers to the village. We walked once and took the tractor once.
In Shuabb there is an elementary school with 19 students, 1 full time teacher and a teacher who comes once a week to teach Bribri, the indigenous language. There´s a small church and a lot of jungle. People´s houses are pretty spread out, some along the ¨main¨ road (only traffic I ever saw were the tractor guy and one motorcycle. I´m pretty sure you can´t get a car in there), some farther back on trails in the jungle.
While we were in Shuabb we spent the mornings helping with church projects- cleaning, repairing, and putting protective sealant on wood beams. We also started helping a guy in the community build a house, but had to stop since his beams weren´t cut yet. The afternoons we hid from the rain, rested, and planned for the evening. Each evening we were there we had an activity we invited the community to. The first night we had a movie night and showed The End of the Spear. The next night we had a children´s program and played games, did our favorite drama, and sang songs. We even got the adults to participate in some of the games. The last night we geared our program towards adults and had Katie share her testimony and broke into groups of men and women to share. However, Rossela and I took the kids out and played games and sang songs and told the story of David and Goliath by the light of 2 flashlights, so I don´t know exactly how it went.
The evenings with the community were really fun. We had about 20 people each night, a lot of families came back each night. It´s a very warm, welcoming culture, but the people in general are pretty shy. We couldn´t get the kids to anwer any questions during our children´s night activity! I think the Bribri culture in general is more punctual than Latin culture, which surprised me. People started showing up to our activities 15 minutes early and I think everyone was there by the start time. People kept bringing us gifts of food. Pejiballes (palm fruit) are pretty tasty. We also got a lot of mamones, which are like lychees. Bananas grow all over the place and we had 4 bunches by the time we left (bunches meaning the whole giant thing that growns on the tree). We had fresh oranges and lemons too.
Today we left Margarita, another small community, but not as indigenous or jungly as Shuabb. We spent 6 days there, working with the local church. We helped with several church services, did programs in 2 local elementary schools, helped with some work projects at a school and the church and hung out with the local kids and youth. The highlight of our time there for me was hiking with the youth from the church to a beautiful waterfall deep in the jungle. We had lunch there and went swimming in the pool at the bottom.
We´re spending the next couple of days in Volio, helping at a Mennonite church. On Monday we´ll head back to San Jose for a few days and I´ll post photos then!
Thank you for your prayers and giving!
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