Most of the streets in and around the city of San Jose, Costa Rica, do not have names.  The main streets do, but it’s hard to know exactly what the name is because it isn’t posted on many signs.  For the most part, this doesn’t pose any problems.  The streets don’t need names because most people don’t get their mail at their houses (they have post office boxes).  To get to someone’s house or a business one simply has to know where certain landmarks are and which direction is north, east, south, or west.  Addresses are something like:  the neighborhood surrounding Forest Park, fifty meters south and 100 meters east.  I’ve already blogged about that last week. 

Today, Todd had an appointment to get an x-ray taken of his teeth (he has brackets to straighten the top and the local orthodontist told us he needs to have two teeth pulled because they are crowding his bottom teeth).  As she wrote the prescription for the x-ray, she showed us the address and simple map (just a couple of streets with arrows saying things like “this street goes toward the next town”) and told us the place that takes the x-rays isn’t far from the park where we live.  That was good news, we thought.  The appointment was at 8.30 this morning, so last night I spent hours trying to find the key landmark in the address (Radio Reloj).  I could find webpages referring to the landmark, but no specific directions.  Finally we found the address of a local grocery story that was almost identical to the place we needed (the only difference was the number of meters from the landmark).  It wasn’t where we expected, but, hey, this is a new place.  We don’t know everything…

Come to find out, we really didn’t know everything.  We headed out east from the house (walking into the sun) and then cut a few blocks north to cut east again.  We didn’t see the landmark but quickly found the grocery store.  Not far now, I thought.  “Keep your eyes open for the business,” I told Todd.  We walked.  And looked.  And walked some more.  Finally we turned around to see where we missed it. 

The problem was we didn’t miss it.  I finally asked a businessman waiting for a taxi if he knew where the landmark was.  My Spanish was not strong this morning, but in his answer I heard bits of “the next town” and “by a cemetery” and “I think.”

“Gracias,” I said as we started walking west and then south.  We asked a couple more people and got pretty much the same answer.  Finally, one man knew of the landmark.  “It is on the other side of town,” he said.  “Take a bus.” 

We took a taxi, and he dropped us off at the front door of the business we needed (on the other side of town somewhat close to the cemetery).  I still haven’t seen the landmark.

Work completed, we walked home.  It didn’t take long this time.   Only about 15 minutes. 

I like to see where things are in relationship to one another, so when I could I pulled up our community on Google Earth, found our house and then traced our journey.  We walked more than three and a half miles (not counting the taxi ride, of course). 

What’s really sad is this:  if we had only gone south after we left the house this morning, the office was only a quarter mile from our front door…

(The picture is one of the views from our window upstairs.  It is looking south… Oh, there’s the place Todd got the x-rays…)

Just a brief note to let you know we have not forgotten you.  We have moved into our new house, but we don’t have internet yet.  We’ve signed a contract, and it will be connected next week…sometime.  At the moment we are at another student’s house borrowing their computer.  We’ll write more when we are connected. 

Very briefly…we are doing fine…fighting occasional culture shock and homesickness…practicing Spanish…making mistakes in the langauge and being a source of joy for the local people…enjoying life.

Thanks for your prayers…

We’ll write more later…I promise.

Hoy (today) was Aylis’ compleaños (birthday). She is now doce (12) years old and we were teasing her that she’d have to wait a few more years before she’s a teenager in a Latin American country.  She asked us why and we told her it was because in Spanish there are no teens. Eleven through fifteen are their own words and then sixteen  through nineteen (I guess the closest we get to adding teen to the word) are ten and six, ten and seven, and so on.

We started the day by going to a Spanish speaking church. When the pastor asked (in Spanish) if anyone was visiting for the first time, I hoped he wouldn’t notice us, but he did… I had to stand up and say where we were from and our nombres (names), all in español.  After that we went to a Brasilian pizza place for lunch (that was Aylis’ choice for her birthday lunch).  It was excellent!

Costa Rican pastries are different than what we are used to, but she still wanted a cake (for Todd’s birthday we got torte from the bakery up the street). We’d been told a local Tico restaraunt called Fresas (strawberries) made the best cakes. They looked good, so we bought her half of a melocotòn (peach) and cream cake. Not much cake with a lot of real cream. It was rich, but not sweet. After eating a five cheese pizza and the cake, we had no appetite for dinner.

Aylis says it was a good day. Perhaps the best gift came in the phone call we just received: our house is ready! Tomorrow evening we move out of the missionary center where we’ve been staying and into our own space! That’s is a gift to all of us!

Be blessed.

(By the way, because we are going into the house, we don’t know when we will be getting internet service. If we don’t write for a few days, that’s the reason…)

Aylis just proudly informed me she has 456 stamps in her collection and would welcome any additions if anyone feels so moved…

Saturdays and Wednesdays are garbage day on the street where we are staying.  The schedule of exactly when they pick it up is a little loose, but it needs to be on the sidewalk out front early in the morning.  I put it out by about 5.30 and then sat down to read a bit.  About an hour later I heard some rustling outside and, thinking it was one of the stray dogs in the neighborhood, peeked out the window to make sure they weren’t making a huge mess.

It wasn’t a dog.  It was a homeless man.  (He wasn’t, by the way, the only person going through our garbage this morning.  There were others.)  Being an outsider here, I watched to see what he was doing.  He felt the outside of the bag first to see if there was anything inside worth making the effort for.  Sensing something, he carefully opened the top of the bag and dug through.  Finding a half-drunk bottle of PowerAde a visiting mission team had left, he unscrewed the lid and quenched his thirst.   A few moments later, the chicken bones from the chicken stock we made last night made their way into the bag over his shoulder.  What else he found, I don’t know.  He was thirsty.  He was hungry.  And I did not give him anything to eat or drink.  Not really, anyway.  One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.

When he was finished digging through our garbage, he carefully closed it up and moved on.  If I hadn’t been watching, I wouldn’t have known he’d been there.

Please don’t get the impression this is all there is to Costa Rica.  There is a lot more.  Some good.  Some bad.  This is just what hit me today.

Be blessed.

Before we got here, we were told this is the rainy season. They are right (why wouldn’t they be, they live here). It has rained every day since we’ve arrived. It usually begins to fall after noon or one in the afternoon, and then is scattered the rest of the day and into the night.

This afternoon, we were invited to an authentic Tico (Costa Rican) lunch at the home of another student family. It was, of course, arroz con pollo (chicken and rice) and was ¡Muy Rico! (very delicious). The cook was Rosalinda, their house help who speaks no English and is a great help for them in many ways…including practice speaking Spanish. They are leaving for Ecuador in August and we might be able to work something out for us to hire her when they leave. Because we are Americans and are perceived to be able to afford to employ someone, we are looked upon as selfish if we don’t. Full time house help (40 hours a week to clean, cook, watch after the kids, etc.) costs less than $400 a month, and provides a steady job for a local person. And, as I said before, she helps us learn our español (Spanish).

The family has invited us to go with them to the feria (Saturday market) tomorrow morning and to church with them on Sunday. We are told the feria is a great look into authentic Tico culture.

We hope to be able to move into our new house on Monday. We’ve walked by it a number of times going to the park and hither and yon and other places in between. There are very few streets with names here, so we have to know the landmarks. (Fortunately, the park in front of the house is a minor landmark.) Because there are no street names (and mail is delivered to the post office) directions to homes are from those landmarks. For example, a place might be as simple as San Francisco de Dos Rios, across the street from Pancho Flores or more complex like San Francisco de Dos Rios, Park of the Woods, 100 meters south, 150 meters east, blue building with white gate and a sign that says Fred’s Place or something like it.

It’s actually kind of nice, if you know where the landmark is and if you know at what point of the landmark the directions begin (we spent 30 minutes this morning looking for an address from the park across the street from our house. Silly us, we didn’t know from which corner of the park the directions begin!)

We will upload some more pictures when we get our laptop working. Somewhere between Atlanta and San Josè, half of the power cable was lost. We are calling and visiting computer stores here with no luck…yet. It’s a big city. We’ll keep trying.

We pray you know where you are. Be blessed.

Today was a big day. To start off it was Todd’s 10th cumpleaños (birthday) and we were all awakened by a noisy flock of green loros (parrots) in the trees outside. They were noisy, but beautiful. Todd was ready for his big day, though, so he didn’t mind the cool wakeup call. He had already received a big present before we left the states, so he wasn’t expecting anything else, but we wanted to do something. He really wanted to see a real live volcano, but the weather was not cooperating on that one, so we decided to do some exploring of our community. (Our bags finally arrived, and they delievered them to our door yesterday afternoon, so we felt free enough–and clean enough–to branch out.)

First, we walked a bit around the neighborhood, bought a memory card for the camera, a soccer ball from a deportes (sports) store, and found another route on foot to the place we had dinner the first day we arrived.

It was still early, and we wanted to take in a movie in the next town over, Cartago (a few kilometers away). It was too far to walk so we hailed a taxi, crowded in, and made our way. Enroute, I sat in front and practiced my Spanish with the driver. He told me all about the tall palm trees that came from Africa (but are found in other places like the Dominican Republic and Jamacia). They are good for all sorts of things like oil and bags and even biodiesel. (I understood all that in Spanish–¡Pura vida!)

The mall was good (”The most beautiful I’ve ever seen,” according to Kia), and we never did watch the movie. By the time it would start, we were worn out and the sky was threatening to rain. The taxi would not take all of us (they wanted the extra fare for a second cab to take us). No, we said, we’ll take the bus.

The buses are adventures in themselves, but after a tour of downtown San Josè, we made a connection and found our way back home (by then the clouds had let loose and a heavy rain was falling).

I cannot tell you how excited I am that we were able to do all that with all four kids on only our third day in country. I was excited by the comments I received on my Spanish. There were some things I could not fully understand, but most things were there. This is going to work, I know it will! The kids even saw it working and are feeling more comfortable trying to talk even though they know they will make mistakes. I think they saw the smiles (and not just smiles of mirth) on the faces of those with whom we were communicating.

Todd said it was a good birthday. Now, we’ll see what we do on domingo (Sunday). That’s Aylis’ birthday…

We got into Costa Rica at about 11:30 yesterday, but only got to see the beauty an hour later…without our bags. They should be coming someday. Well, we went to a resturaunt last night and they had hamburgers but they were very different. They put like an Itallian dressing-type sauce on it, but they were still really good. Costa Rica reminds me a lot of Brazil and Peru kind of mixed. It has Peru’s nieghborhoods, sidewalks, and driving, but Brazil’s lush plants and scenery. I had the best night’s sleep last night. The hostle we’re staying at is the most peaceful place, plus you don’t have to worry about anything. I didn’t even wake up when the sun shone through the thin curtains. This morning Dad and Todd walked up to the bread store, just up the street, and bought some breakfast. I love it here and can’t wait to start school! =]

Just a quick note to tell y’all we made it to Costa Rica!  The flight was good and pretty easy.  Not everything went as planned…  not being allowed to check our bags in early because they would probably get lost somewhere in the belly of the airport… hauling 12 bags plus carryons up nine floors to our room (for which we are truly thankful)… water dripping from a light fixture at 11 PM last night when the people in the room upstairs overflowed their bathtub… sitting in the airplane for an hour while they prepared for takeoff by rebooting the computer system in the plane (sort of like a control-alt-delete to reboot a laptop computer–that’s what they said)… Getting to Fort Lauderdale just in time to board for our connecting flight… But at least, we made it here.  We are happy.  We are tired.  We are going to bed. 

I’ll write more later.  If you are interested, I have posted pictures we took from the plane on our web photo album.  Look for the link under the blogroll at the right side of the screen. 

Oh, yeah, there was something else:  our bags haven’t made it here yet.  They didn’t make the connection in Fort Lauderdale.  None of the bags from those of us who started in Atlanta made it.  Oh, well.  Minor detail of life (as a friend of mine often says).  It’ll all work out.  Good thing we have clothes in our carryon luggage!

We fly out tomorrow!  As we go through the bags and repack to redistribute the weight again (we’re in Atlanta tonight…closer to the equator…I think there’s extra gravitational pull down here making our bags heavier than they were a few miles north of the city) we are about ready to go to bed.  The sun is still shining and a swimming pool is beckoning to us (we went earlier this afternoon), but we need to get our rest.  The shuttle to the airport leaves at 4 AM and we need to get all our bags and ourselves down to the lobby before then. 

Please pray for a safe and uneventful flight.  We leave Atlanta at 7.30 AM and, after a short layover in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, will arrive in San Jose, Costa Rica, around 11.40 local time (currently the same as Mountian Time).  As soon as I have a chance after getting there, I will let you know we have arrived.

Be blessed in all things!

When we began our ministry, we searched for a name to call it and settled on Open Circle Peru or Circulo Abierto para Peru.  That name goes back to when we were applying to The Mission Society to be missionaries.  One night we were annointing one another with oil and praying for one another when one of the leaders of the group began to have visions concerning the candidates going out into the field.  When our turn to be prayed for came, the visions continued.  Later he told us what he saw:  “I saw your family standing in a circle holding hands, but the circle wasn’t closed and you kept on inviting people to come into the circle.  The amazing this is the circle never got full.  There was always room for more.”

Since that time, I have been anxious to get to Peru to start filling the circle.  I was reminded the other day (and I don’t think the person reminding me even realized what he was doing) that I don’t have to wait.  Ever since we accepted God’s call to go where we are sent, God has been filling that circle. 

Tonight a number of our different lives came together to pray for us and to send us off with God’s blessings to Costa Rica and Peru.  The Mission Society wants us to be commissioned within three months of leaving.  We–being who we are, I suppose–chose to host it three days before we leave the country.  It was held at the first church we served as a pastor’s family, Farmville United Methodist Church in Calhoun, GA.  It was neat for us to introduce people who mean so much to us to others who mean so much to us but who we know from another time and place. 

Thank you for being a part of our circle.