When I think over the past two years, so many memories flood my thoughts. I think of moving into our partially furnished apartment and being overwhelmed by our semi-automatic washing machine and by the need to quickly buy all sorts of household supplies that we were not expecting to buy. The image of me clutching onto Timmy in the backseat of a taxi as we sped through the unfamiliar streets of San José flashes through my mind. I now laugh at the memory of Dan pushing Timmy's stroller laden with much needed kitchen supplies (complete with a casserole dish strapped into the seat and a lamp sticking out of the basket) across a crazy 3 lane highway roundabout. I was running beside him with Timmy in a sling, my hands full of bags of silverware, pots and pans, and muffin tins. We were the crazy gringos (actually, we probably still are the crazy gringos...).
in front of our San José apartment, where we lived during language school (2008)
I remember sitting in a classroom at our language school, studying Spanish with my tutor while pushing sleeping Timmy's stroller back and forth with my foot. I remember continuing to push the stroller back and forth in the covered walkway of our school, waiting for Dan's class to finish and listening to the rain pelting against the metal roof. I remember Dan and I taking turns studying each evening while the other played with our boy. I remember graduating from language school and wondering if we knew enough Spanish to do the work that was ahead of us.
with Jonesí, our grammar teacher, at graduation in December 2008
The emotions I had as we moved into our empty, unfinished house in Atenas are still so vivid to me. While we waited for our kitchen cabinets to be installed and a laundry room to be added on the back porch, we drove all over this part of Costa Rica in search for furniture. It took longer than we expected, which we eventually were thankful for when our still empty house flooded. And, how happy I was when we finally moved our clothes out of plastic bins and into a real, live dresser - a whole year after moving to Costa Rica!
exploring our new backyard in Atenas in mid-2009
I think of meeting our first group of interns, our first intern orientation, our first time getting all the host families together. Now we are about to say good-bye to our third group of interns, and we feel like we have a well-established intern program ready for the next group arriving in August. I was so nervous the first time Dan went on a project trip; now he has returned to Haiti a second time, and has done a third project in Costa Rica. He recently finished all his pending projects and has been preparing for his upcoming project trip to Honduras in September.
a recent photo of Dan at his desk in the EMI office
I clearly remember Dan telling me one week after we had been visiting various churches here in Atenas that he felt strongly that God wanted us at the little Baptist church we had visited first. How thankful I am now for that conviction of his! We now feel so at home in our church here and we are so blessed by the relationships that we have there.
worshipping with our church family at a baptism service in March of this year
I have had (and still experience at times) days of intense loneliness and discouragement; we also are blessed with days of great fellowship with the Lord and with people here. There have been so many times that I prayed to God with unsettled questions of "Why?" and "What if?" and was answered with His calm, gentle answers of assurance and peace. Of course, I could ramble on and on about more and more memories. As I said in the last post, the past two years have been hard, but good and right, and we wouldn't trade them for anything. It has been an adventure and a journey, and there is still so much learning and growing to do. After all, we've only been here for two years!
