Greetings from beautiful Costa Rica! The past several months have been a whirlwind as we adjusted to life as new parents, packed up and prepared to leave home, moved to a new country, and began language school here in San Francisco de Dos Rios. Amongst the whirlwind, there have been many new joys, unexpected struggles and important lessons. As we look back on the experience so far, we find it hard to believe that we’ve already been in Costa Rica for nearly a month. At the same time, it seems a very long time since we left home!
Our focus right now is to increase our knowledge of Spanish and to learn how to live and thrive in our new home before moving to Atenas (the location of EMI’s Central America office). While we are eager to begin our roles of project leader and intern program coordinators there, we are realizing more and more how necessary this time focused on learning is for us. One of our biggest lessons has been learning to expect to be surprised and to expect things to not necessarily be as we had originally anticipated.
Accepting this has helped us feel at home in the “furnished” apartment that surprisingly didn’t have the pots, pans, utensils, dishes, small appliances, or the automatic washer and dryer that we had understood it would have. It’s helped us to start to accept in stride things like our electricity or water being out at random times throughout the week. It also helped us very quickly change our original language school plans when we arrived at our school on orientation day and realized that we did not feel ready to put little Timmy in the nursery while we are in class. While Dan is attending conversation and grammar classes, Sarah is now studying with a private tutor so that Timothy can be with her. In all of these things, God has graciously carried us through the unexpected.
In addition to our language study, we are beginning to learn how to live here – how to shop for food at the local stores and the market, how to cook with this food, how to find our way around, how to appropriately dress our baby in the rainy season, etc. We have enjoyed exploring and putting our Spanish study into practice. There are many things that we appreciate about this culture and we are eager to become more a part of it as it becomes home to us.
Please pray for us as we learn to expect (and accept!) the unexpected.
