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Every day this week, we had significant events. If you are our facebook friends, you may have seen our pictures from our trip to the National History Museum of Costa Rica. Even if you don't have facebook, you can check the pictures out here.
Here's one example:
Every week or two, our CALL Spanish classes take us outside the classroom and into the Costa Rican culture. This week, we went to the National History Museum in San José. We met up with Gaby, our teacher, and we took the bus into the city. Half a century ago, there used to be a military fort near the location of the current center of San José. The president at that time declared an end to the national army and converted the fort into the National History Museum. They now have displays focused on the history of the building, the history of Costa Rican democracy, and the history of the indigenous people who lived here long ago.
Earlier in the week, we had the opportunity to have one of our friends from the seminary over to our house. We watched the Chronicals of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with English audio (to give our friend English practice) and Spanish subtitles (to give Liz and I more Spanish practice).
Liz is also getting much more outside-of-class Spanish practice by attending a women's water aerobics class (in Spanish), and talking to several of the seminary office workers about financial topics. My Spanish practice has been through technology-related discussions with my supervisors, Andrés and Esdras. Yesterday, they had me take apart the seminary file server and clean out all the dust and junk that had gathered in it over the years. Hopefully, it was a good enough job to make it last for a while longer. In the mean time, I still am slowly working my way through testing videoconferencing equipment and other computer and technological equipment around the offices.
Last night, however, was a pretty wonderful meeting with the other missionaries working here. We were able to hear about some really amazing things going on with a bridge-building project in another part of Costa Rica, in an indigenous region. There is an indigenous people group in Costa Rica that lives near a very large river. They need to cross the river at all times of the year, but when the banks are high, people die each year trying to cross on their own. The Nazarene church is trying to put together teams to build a bridge for these people across this very dangerous river. They have coordinated engineers, various planners and designers, and several local groups as well. Recently, Steve (one of the Work and Witness coordinators that I mentioned) was trying to figure out how they could reach out to get some heavy equipment for this project and they found out that Costa Rica has a government group that has been trying to figure out how to help their indigenous people. Steve was able to talk to the right people and may be able to coordinate the Nazarene Church's efforts with this government group.
Also, in this same trip, he was trying to locate a place where they could purchase building materials for this project. Steve and another guy (I honestly don't know who the other guy was) were driving, trying to find the right materials when they realized that they had gotten hopelessly lost. They decided to pull over and ask for help. When the stopped, they looked up and discovered that they were directly in front of the property for the main supply house for Bridge Construction Materials. Apparently, this place is where the government would go to buy their construction supplies. Steve and his friend didn't even know that this place existed, but God led them directly to the exact place that could help them get the supplies that they are going to need for this giant project. Praise the Lord, it was an awesome story. I was hoping that he was going to write about it in their family's blog -- http://sickelstory.wordpress.com/ -- but they haven't yet, so I had to tell it to the best of my memory. Short version though, God has been doing amazing things.
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