Feb 23-March 1, 2008; First week at the CRM

We met up with our home mission team from Charleston, SC at the airport on Saturday, Feb 23, so as to ride up to the Central Rural Metodista with them. This is a team led by Rockville Church on Wadmalaw Island, just outside Charleston. Brooke started going on mission trips with them to the Central Rural Metodista in 2005, and Brett started in 2006. The team has participants that represent several different churches every year. Trinity UMC, our home church, was connected with them via Steve Semler. Steve is another missionary at the Central Rural Metodista whose home church is Trinity, and he got the call to become a missionary in Costa Rica through his relationship with Micah LaRoche with the Rockville group. Steve was a fisherman before he became a missionary, and worked on Micah’s dock at Cherry Point Seafood on Wadmalaw. You can check out more information about Steve by visiting the Central Rural Metodista website.

Our first week at the camp, we participated in the Rockville team’s mission trip as ordinary short term missionaries would. The group always starts out the week by going to church on Sunday at one of the local churches. This year we went to Santa Rosa, where the cam,p with the help of teams from the US, is in the process of building a parsonage for the pastor, Giovanny, and his family. Later in the day on Sunday, we took a soak at the Hot Springs just up the road from the camp, where you can relax and get a good body pruning for a group rate of $5 per person.

The projects we participated in throughout the week were construction projects in Santa Rosa and a new cabin at the camp, painting in El Mirador ( precario close to the camp), and at a school in a village nearby called San Rafael. We later had vacation bible schools for the students at the school in San Rafael and at a school in Linda Vista. Since the national religion of Costa Rica is Catholic, schools have no problems hosting bible studies during the school day.

The week the Charleston crew was here, I (Brooke) got news that my Uncle Tom, also known as Uncle Moo, had passed away. I wanted to go home to be with my family and mourn and reminisce. But we had just gotten here, and I somehow knew that I was to stay here. The support from my husband and the Charleston crew was just what I needed, so I knew God had planned it that way, that when he died, I’d be surrounded by my family in Christ. My cousin Katie sent me the eulogy my Uncle Puc wrote for Moo. He ended the eulogy with the Robert Frost poem that ends, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the road less traveled, and that made all the difference.” I had just read that poem a few weeks before we came to Costa Rica, and it gave me the hope and encouragement I needed to come with my husband and leave my family, friends, job and security back home. Brett and I visited Moo a few weeks before we came to Costa Rica, and Moo gave us the encouragement we needed to come here as well. He was in full support of following a dream, a Calling from God, to live life to its fullest, and not just according to what seems safe. Moo was one of the people in my life that God used to speak to me. He not only was my uncle, but also my Godfather, a title which I seldom acknowledged growing up. But looking back, and remembering all the times I spent with him over the years, God was always speaking through him to me, showing his unconditional love.