Costa Rica - A Typical Day

While in Costa Rica no two days ever looked exactly alike, but we did have a main focus that we worked towards each day that we were there. While this was an evangelistic trip (which any missions trip should be, in my opinion), our focus was also on discipleship and building relationships. We didn’t want to lead people to Christ only to leave them completely alone at the end of the week.

My team's church

There were six North Americans on my team that served one neighborhood in Aserri (a city in Costa Rica). Erika was 13, so we oftentimes sent her out with one of the adults. Each team member would get paired with one translator and at least one national. A national was usually someone from the home church that we were working with, and the translators were volunteers that had come from a city two hours away. A lot of the translators that we used on this trip were sleeping on cots in a church or inside on small bedroom in someone’s house. They gave up a week of their time and a lot of comfort in order to take part in this ministry.

Erika and some of our translators

Each day we’d head out in our little sub-teams and go door to door asking people if we could talk to them. And let me tell you, Costa Rican people are nothing like Americans. Most of them would come out and listen to you, and most of them were very open when you asked them questions. I usually started out by asking them if I could talk to them (then pausing for the translator to translate), then telling them who I was, where I was from, and why I came (with pauses for the translator). Then I usually liked to ask them if they knew where they would go if they died tonight. It usually started the ball rolling pretty well, and then I could ask if I could share more with them. We were all equipped with eCubes, which work incredibly well when you’re dealing with two different languages since visuals are wonderful. 
We would eat lunch and dinner with our whole team (North Americans, translators and nationals) in this one lady's house. She had volunteered to host us (during the day) and cook our food for us for the entire week.

The orange house is the one we got dropped off and picked up from everyday, and where we had lunch and dinner.

Earlier in the week it was usually the North American doing most of the talking, but as the week progressed we tried to get the national or the translator to share instead, and we just watched. The goal being that the nationals would be prepared to do this on their own when we left. There were quite a few nationals who told us that they’d never seen evangelism done this way, and that they’d never known that they could witness to people so easily in their neighborhood. The level of excitement that I saw in some of them was one of the most amazing parts of the whole trip for me.

Off we go

As the week moved forward we also would go back to houses that we’d already been to in order to talk to people who had been saved. If they weren’t coming to the daily cell groups (Bible studies) we were having we’d invite them again, or just try to talk with them for a bit.
As for the cell groups, we had those every night. Eventually we had two of them, one up on top of the hill (the one that I was mainly at) and one down in the neighborhood below the hill. I worked with the children’s ministry every night and I grew quite attached to those kids. I do have some stories to share about some of them, but I’m going to save those for another post.

We worked with the children in the street outside of the house where the cell group was being held

Watching people come to the cell groups and how excited they were about them was such a blessing to all of us. And watching the nationals connect with the new believers and come along side them gave our North American team a lot of comfort in knowing that things are going to carry on long after our one week there.

Me with the children from up on the hill