Costa Rica Day 2 Friday

hello all!
please remember that i am writing this on a spanish keyboard and i am ommitting capitals for the sake of time.

i am ready to write about day 3 and discovered that day 2 did not make it, so i must rewrite it by memory...so here goes...

well, we were up and át ém´ by 6:30 to get a good breakfast to fortify ourselves for a long, hard days´work. everyone had a good night sleep and were raring to go. the bus picked us up at 7:20 to take us to the work site. what a beautiful day--about 70º, sunny, with a beautiful sse breeze ( i don´t which direction it came from, but that sounds good) charlie and tim-- a missionary that works with jay who is very knowledgable about construction--gave everyone their assignments. we all went about our jobs with gusto! nancy provided a delicous fresh fruit snack mid morning to keep us going until lunch. by 5 o´clock we were all done (in). here´s what was accomplished by our very able and hard working team ( and by the end of the day, we truly seemed to be a team)

kim and karen painted the upstairs apartment living room as well as tim and amanda´s bathroom. if you want to know what colors they used, just look at their clothing and you will know.

kathy and nancy measured all of the windows that need curtains, and the other sewing jobs that are needed and then went to the store to purchase the fabric. tomorrow they will go to another store to purchase matching thread as there was not enough time to do both. some things are done differently down here. the curtains will surely "finish off" the rooms and show off the work that the team has done.

tim and gary cleaned out the storage area in the library--what an undertaking that was! after that, they still had enough energy left to cover all of the book cases in the library with black plastic to protect them from the dry wall dust that will appear in a day or two; and after that they hauled dry wall from the school across the street to the apartment to hang in the closet. both men slept like babies that night.

andy, jordan, and pastor began to build a storage room in the garage area under tim´s apartment. they built it of concrete blocks. due to the earthquake threat here in san jose, every third row of block required rebar to be cemented in horizontally, and the blocks had to have vertical rebar cemented in. as you can imagine, this took quite a lot of time to accomplish. jordan mixed 9 wheelbarrels of cement and mortar to keep the walls together. now we know why they call brick laying ¨back breaking work¨ here in costa rica, a storage room is a bedago. by the end of the day, these 3 men assembled 3 courses of block! i guess you would call them "bociferous badego builders", wouldn´t you?

mark and john were in the upstairs apartment all day building the walls of the closet and later building the walls in the library. they slept well also.
brent and david spent the entire day putting up dry wall, and then taped and spackled it.

charlie wore out a pair of sneakers walking around checking on everyone and busting a few chops to keep everyone smiling. i am not sure if he slept at all.

nancy provided us with a delicious authentic costa rican dinner of pollo y arozo, which to you gringos is chicken and rice, along with an avocado salad with tomatoes, refried negro (black in español) pintos (beans), which many of us thought (or hoped ) was chocolate pudding cake!!! for dessert she baked a lucious pineapple cake. *can you tell how important the food is to us right now????

when we returned to the hotel, we had devotions with pastor. he shared Psalm 104:23 that God´s creation is beautiful, but it is the people that are important. that is why we are here--to help these missionaries and to encourage them. we have all experienced instant bonding with each other and with the missionaries; this of course is due to our love of Jesus. pastor reminded us that if our purpose is to save only one soul, the trip was a success. he told us that he and charlie sat next to a man on the plane ride from dulles to san jose who just so happened to live in irondequoit!! they got talking, and this man wants to come to check out living word out! God is in control, and He is orchestrating this missions trip. He will open doors for us and we must walk through. pastor told us what a great job we all did today (except for wayne and howard--no one really saw them except at lunch and when wayne asked jordie and andy if he could use a short piece of rebar-- [isn't w
ayne an electrician???] [actually wayne was going to work in an electrical box and needed to shut off the electricity. unable to find the corresponding breaker, he decided to cram a piece of rebar into the box to break the circuit. pretty smart, huh? but, it didn't work, but wayne is still alive i am happy to report.] we prayed for sara persutte, darryl-the man on the airplane, and one of the missionaries who is struggling.
some went to play cards and some went to sleep . we are so grateful to all of you that supported us and are supporting us in prayer. we had a terrific first full day on the job and God is so wonderful--He has blessed us more abundantly and beyond what we could hope or imagine.....

until tomorrow...