Hola from Costa Rica!

Hello again! I am writing to you now from Heredia, Costa Rica, a town of 350,000 people about 20 minutes from the capital city of San Jose.

In Heredia I will be working on staff at the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) base where I brought a team to over last spring break. Each week of the summer, we have a team of high school students that come down from the U.S. to serve down here in Costa Rica.

I arrived on Friday, June 22 and was greeted at the airport by my friend Shannon (from IWU) and a YWAM staff member, Ryan. It was great to see some familiar faces. When we made it back to the base, it was very exciting to see another old friend from the spring, Alvaro, as well as lots of new faces from the team that is currently serving here. There are 18 students and 5 adults here right now from Washington. Their main task from the week is building a house and I get to help! Yesterday I went with them to the site and they had already laid the foundation and built most of the structure for the house and were working on the roof. I got to use a nailgun, it was pretty exciting. In the afternoon, I went with a group of 8 students to a poor barrio (neighborhood) where a local church was putting on a kids program and we got to play with them as well as hand out food to the kids and their families.

Yesterday night we took the team to play indoor soccer and it was really fun. I think this is the first time I've played soccer since I was on my high school team, so that was amusing. They are really into soccer down here though, so I'm sure I'll get many more opportunities to brush up on my skills.

Today (Sunday) we went to church in downtown Heredia, and then took the team to see the house they had built during a trip down here two years ago. After that we had lunch at the local mall, where I saw Ronald McDonald taking dessert orders at McDonald's in the food court - it was awesome. Tonight we are going to a local youth group, so that should be a fun experience as well.

Below is a picture of the main building at the YWAM base. You can see more pictures of the base on their website at:

http://www.ywamheredia.com/pages/Base%20Tour

It's so great to be back here! I'm going to try to write little updates as often as I can, so keep checking in! Dios le bendiga (God bless you!)