Robbed!!!

Hola!! I know, I know. Its been an eternity since we’ve blogged!! We’ve been in transition lately; moving out of the host home and into our own apartment here in San Jose. I’m sitting here writing to you from our “pila room”, a small porch off the back of the apartment that contains the clotheslines and a pila: a small concrete sink used to wash everything from clothes to shoes to dogs. The sounds of the city in the distance are pretty typical of our mornings here: the sigh of cars passing by, the drone of them accelerating and the screeches of them braking, trucks honking, dogs barking, chickens crowing, sirens, car alarms, and the occasional gecko chirping. The sunrises are pretty here when its not concealed behind clouds off the mountains. If you can believe it, I’m actually a little chilly! We moved out of our host home officially last Sunday and into the apartment only about a 10 minute walk from the school! It was quite an emotional event leaving the host home. Our Tico mom cried crocodile tears and didn’t want to release her hugs as we made our way out the door; quite an attachment for only 2 months! In Hollywood movie fashion, she saw us off, waving to us all the way down the street until we rounded the corner, tears and all. We will forever be grateful for our time with Orlando, Flora, Josue, and Orlando Jr. We spent all day Sunday trying to unpack the boxes we’d checked onto the plane about 2 months prior. We hadn’t opened any of them yet, so it was as if Christmas had come early….only we knew what we were getting! It was kind of nice to be surprised by things we’d forgotten we’d packed! I never thought I’d be so excited to see a set of bedsheets or an ice cream scoop!

We went to the outdoor market on Sunday to stock the kitchen with food…something we hadn’t had to think about while we were living with the host family! It was quite an adventure! Sorry, we didn’t take any photos of that trip because we wanted to avoid, as much as possible, looking like gringos or Americans there for the first time! We thought snapping photos and “ooohing and aaaaahing” might get us the “gringo price”. The “gringo price” phenomenon is basically when, because you look like a gringo or an American, they jack the price up substantially…sometimes double! We spent the weekend comparison shopping for each item on our grocery list. At the end of the day, we had a spreadsheet complete with every item we thought we’d EVER need and every place that sold it and a price from each of those places. I think you can probably imagine whose idea the spreadsheet was! ;)

Our neighbors just moved in next door. They’re a couple from Las Vegas who are here to learn Spanish and will be missionaries in Honduras or Nicaragua. Below us, on the first floor, are two Costa Rican families. We’ve met them both and they seem like very sweet, kind-hearted people. Hopefully we can form relationships with them over time.

Alli’s mother and sister came to visit us on Monday and will be here through this coming Monday. Alli’s older sister will also be visiting us next week! It has been quite the blessing to have family come and help us move into our new home. This three week break between school semesters would have been quite long and lonely if it weren’t for them! While we were out visiting another town, our car was broken into and some things were stolen. Alli’s purse was stolen, which included her wallet. Her wallet had debit cards, a check book, her Costa Rican driver’s license, and few other things. However, the ladrones (lah.-drohn-ays), thieves in Spanish, were probably pretty disappointed when they looked through it and found no cash! Our small suitcase was also stolen which had a few more personal items in it. Alli’s mother and sister had a bag that was also taken. We were able to call and have all the cards cancelled and the banks are in the process of issuing us new ones. They hadn’t charged anything at the time we cancelled them. Our clothes we’d packed for the day were all taken, so we spent the next day in smelly, sweaty clothes until we could find somewhere to wash them. All in all, it was quite an interesting few days!! All this has served as a reminder that we are in enemy territory and that things will be done at all costs to rob us of our joy and hope. However, the Lord has used this experience to reinforce the fact that our joy and hope should not be placed in the things of this world. After all, they are just that….things. All the things of this world will pass away, but the word of the Lord stands forever!

James says:

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

1 Peter says:

In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

PRAYER REQUESTS:

1. Please pray for our break between semesters. Pray that we’d find rest and thought we’d be refreshed and have renewed energy to tackle the new lessons in September.
2. Pray that our new home would feel like just that…a home.
3. Pray for opportunities to minister where we are. Pray that the Lord would bring along opportunities to share his love with others, even if its missionaries in transition.
4. Pray for time with family as they are here.
5. Pray for EMI’s ministry.

Hopefully it won’t be so long till we write again!!

For our King,

Josh & Alli

A break....

Hey guys! Alli and I have finally finished up our intensive course. Our last day was August 7th. We both made straight A's! We had a little graduation ceremony that Friday also! We feel as though our Spanish has tripled or quadrupled in the short 2 months that we've been studying. Our teachers were excellent! Oscar, my grammar teacher, really understood how to teach an english speaker how to arrange spanish grammar. There are so many more verb tenses in Spanish than there are in English and it sometimes seems like a calculus equation to put together the correct conjugations: conjugate it in the first-person singular form, take off the ending, add this ending, but only if its used in this form following this certain rule. WAY more complicated than I ever thought it could have been!!! But, we're looking forward to a few weeks of break so that our brains can hopefully recover and who knows, maybe we'll begin to remember how to speak English!! Believe it or not, studying spanish vocabulary and grammar so much has extremely negative effects on your ability to speak and write English well! We'll begin the new "regular" semester on August 31st. Pray for us!!

There've been a lot of developments in last few weeks since we've finished up the first semester of language school. We recently learned that our apartment here in San Jose will be ready for moving in a day or two earlier than we were originally told! So, we'll be moving out of the host home and into the apartment this coming Sunday! WOOHOO!!! We're so excited to have our own space where we can relax and feel "at home".

On the housing note, we also recently learned that there was a family, the Dormans, that was coming into Costa Rica in September, who've worked with EMI some in the past. They are coming to Atenas to lead and develop "Hogar de Vida", an orphanage. However, they will not have a place to live at the orphanage officially until January of 2010. So, we are going to be able to offer them our place to live temporarily for those 5 months or so until their place comes available! That's right! We've been blessed to have already found a place to live in Atenas once we finish up language school in December!! We actually had to put in a deposit today to hold it until the Dormans can get here in September. They'll pay rent on the place until January when we return from the States after the holidays. So, this helps us to know that we already have our perminent housing handled and we can relax and enjoy the holidays with family and not have to worry about where we're going to live when we return! What a blessing!!!

We spent this past weekend in Atenas with friends and the office staff. We were helping Micah & Beth build a "rancho" behind their apartment. A rancho in Costa Rica is a lot like what you and I would call a "pavilion". He'd cut down a few trees behind the apartment that had died and were in need of being removed. He then milled those trees into lumber to be used for the rancho. He plans on building a brick pizza oven underneath the rancho! We spent Saturday standing all the posts and Sunday preparing all the beams and rafters to be put into place. Alli and Beth scrubbed and cleaned a bunch of the used roof tiles Micah found that had been removed from an old house. I attached a few photos below.

Micah and I standing the posts (trees that had been debarked)

Alli and Beth hard at work! Looks like she got ALL the dirt from the tiles on herself!

Making progress....

As I mentioned earlier, we were able to find a permanent place to live once we return from the States after the holidays. We decided to stay in Atenas after Sunday to look around for places to live. We'd originally planned to leave and head back to San Jose on Sunday, but decided to take this time off from school to home search. So, we spent Monday and Tuesday looking and we were able to actually look at about 12 places! Atenas being such a small town, we decided that the one place we found that we thought we could live in was probably as good as it was going to get. So, we pulled the trigger!

Pray for us as we prepare to begin another semester of language school!