Shame, let down, sadness....

These are things I feel after waiting so long to update the blog. But, in the words of of my favorite Jane Austin book/movie 'Do not worry Lizzy, this too shall pass, and probably more quickly then it ought...' Its from Pride and Prejudice - I highly recommend you at least watch the six hour A&E special version if not even read the book too.

We recently sent out a prayer letter to everyone – if you did not receive it please do let me know. I’m also posting one on the blog here and will be sending one out via email today….

So much has happened since the last time I blogged! Roughly two months ago I had the opportunity to go for an over night retreat with my 7th, 8th and 9th graders. During that retreat there were several team building events – if you have ever been to a low ropes course, you have probably done something similar to what we did that weekend. However, they also had a military style obstacle course where you had to swim through mud water, walk up muddy slopes, climb rope ladders, run through tires, crawl underneath barbed wire (okay – it was just rope – but I was imagining that it was barbed wire), and other such activities. I’ve never had the opportunity to do that and it was quite a bit of fun.

To be honest, I often don’t feel *that* much older than my kids, especially the 8th and 10th graders, but one picture in particular really sealed the deal for me realizing the cold hard truth. I AM that much older then my students. If you look at the picture here, you can see that I both tower over my students (hard to do given that I am only 5’8’’) and I am also generally much more ‘thick’ then they are. In general, I’m just old. Christy has felt a bit old lately because Elizabeth has started telling her ‘Mom, your hands are rough because you are OLD!’ I’m not sure where she learned this (I certainly did not tell her to say this – even I have limits) but I guess all you can do is laugh because the kids don’t know any different

Roughly a month ago I had the chance to attend a camp with the 10th and 11th graders which was fun as well. We went to an area called Savegre which was absolutely beautiful. This camp was situated in a mountain valley right along the Savegre river so in every direction around us were mountain peaks. Also surprising to many, it was VERY cold in the evening time. I was wearing long sleves, to t-shirts, a long sleeve t-shirt, a fleece jacket and a rain jacket over it, but was still shivering during our evening meetings. There was a high ropes course there; however, it had rained so much recently that we were only able to use a smaller section of course including a ‘leap of faith’, a ‘rapture’ – where you get pulled up in the air by your team mates, and something called a hammock where you basically jump off a 40 foot balcony and swing like a monkey for a couple minutes. During this weekend, we had the president of the board of directors come and speak to the children and on the side we also did a brief study on the Biblical character Daniel.

One thing that was interesting was the ‘serenades’ at night. I guess this is more or less Costa Rican tradition. The first night everyone ‘goes to bed’ at 10pm (realize, no one is ACTUALLY going to sleep) and the girls prepare for their serenade. It starts at 11:30pm. For this year, the girls had black lights strung up everywhere and had hold up posers in bright colors that had the words to the songs that they were singing. The girls holding up the posters wore black so you could hardly see them and four girls in the front playing instruments wore white. Overall, pretty cute. The next night we ‘went to bed’ at 10:30pm – but then the guys had to get ready to serenade the girls. The must have pulled the pedals off of about 500 roses because they put rose pedals all over the floor. They also had formed some PVC in the shape of a heart, put alcohol in it, and set it on fire. When I saw this getting set up, I asked Matt ‘…this is going to melt the PVC – what are they doing….?’ (I was also thinking, why are you allowing this). Sure enough, about 10 minutes into the serenade, poisonous black smoke was billowing from this now melted blob on the ground. Matt and I were able to put it out while the boys continued ‘signing’ – if that’s what you could call it – to the girls. Overall, an experience to see, and a neat look into the culture.

More recently, Christy and I were able to spend two weeks in Miami and help Latin America Mission out with an orientation for folks interested in becoming missionaries. It was a hard time in La Palabra de Vida because Matt taught all of my classes (thanks Matt!), but a great time for us because we got to basically just act as a taxi service for the folks in orientation, answer questions, and just basically just be friends to them for 10 days. The orientation included presentations on the history of LAM, the nuts and bolts of Latin America Mission, advice on support raising and also a whole bunch of team building activities. This last thing was something new to the orientation from when Christy and I went through it in 2007, and something I think is a huge improvement to the program. It was truly a blessing for Christy and I also to be able to hear the story of every one of the candidates and why they felt called to missions work.

We just entered into the ‘spring’ break of La Palabra de Vida which means that I have the ability to rest for the next couple weeks. Before I started teaching, I thought this was a crazy amount of vacation, but now that I know how much is involved with both prepping and execution of the school work, and also emotionally with the lives of the students, I am really looking forward to the couple week break. My folks are coming into town which means the kids will have endless book reading times and outside bicycle riding times – which will be great.

I hope everyone is doing well, and I’ll try to use this break as a catapult to blogging a bit more in the future...