Pura Vida

The sound of giggles, laughter, singing, screaming filled a small, blue and yellow room. Over the past summer, sixty people from my church, North Point Community Church, and I went down to San Jose, Costa Rica on a mission trip. The summer of 2015 my life was forever changed.

This mission trip was my third mission trip out of the country. The first time I traveled out of the United States for a mission was the summer going into eighth grade, and my dad and I went to Merida, Mexico. The next summer, I went back to Merida, Mexico for a mission trip without my parents. I was extremely nervous to travel without them, but it turned out to be amazing! Before leaving for Costa Rica, I was beyond excited to travel to a different country and experience their culture.

    For our mission trip to Costa Rica, we went to different children centers. Our team of sixty was split into three groups, which determined the center we went to: Finca, Quince de Septiembre or El Manantial. I was with the group to El Manantial.

    While we were at the children's centers, we either played with the kids or painted a classroom. Depending on the day, half the group at El Manantial went to play with kids from all different age groups and the other half went to one of the classrooms to paint, which needed a new coat of paint.

Painting days were awesome! The typical schedule for the painting days would have all of us arrive at eight in the morning, head to the classroom, start painting, lunch at twelve, back to painting, finish around five.  The classroom we were painting wasn’t the grandest classroom we had ever seen. The size of the classroom was about half the size of a normal classroom, but it still held about twenty-seven students in it. We moved all the furniture (tables, desks, bins) out of the room, which wasn’t a lot, and began to sand the walls. All four walls had cracks and bumps in them just from how long the center had been there. After we sanded all the walls down, we had to tape everything off so the paint wouldn’t go onto another paint color or on the floor boards. By the time we finished taping it was lunch time, so we headed down to eat lunch with the other group and had rice and beans. After our stomachs were full of typical Costa Rican food, we headed back up to the classroom to start painting.

Colors of the room were blue, yellow, and green. The walls were in two horizontal strips, so the top half was yellow and the bottom half was blue. The window panes and doors were painted green. The classroom needed a new coat of paint, and that’s what we were there to do. We hit the music and got to work. Our group was in charge of painting the yellow and green, so over the two days we did just that. My team and I had a blast! We were dancing all over the classroom to the music and got the whole room looking great! After the whole room was finished, the man over the whole center came up and told us when the kids see the room they say, “ahh voy a la escuela rica ahora!!” That translates to “yay! I go to a rich kid’s school now,” and when the kids passed the classroom we were painting they jumped up and down with joy about their new classroom.

That joy spread throughout the whole center. Every time you would pass a classroom, all the kids would have a smile on their face,  jumping up and down, because they were so happy to see you. The days when my group and I got to play with the kids were the longest but most humbling days of my life. One of the other girls in my group, Hannah, and I chose to be partners and go into the toddler’s classroom. In that classroom, there were two teachers and about 12 babies/toddlers that ranged in age from eight months to eighteen months. Hannah and I jumped right in and helped with whatever the teachers needed. There was one problem though… none the teachers spoke English, so we used a lot of hand motions and all of the spanish we learned in school. We finally figured out what they were saying, and they just wanted us to play with the kids for awhile.  I absolutely love little kids, so I naturally gravitated toward the eight month old. Who knew an eight month old could have so much joy.

That eight month old’s name was Andres. He never lost that smile on his face. The toddler’s classroom was different from all the other classrooms, because the kids could not do crafts. Since they could not do them, we read little spanish books, played with toys, sang spanish kid songs and took them on walks. Around eleven, we took them to lunch, and we usually had to feed them. The teachers were telling us that they usually have to make them eat more than the kids want, because for some of the kids that’s the only meal they get all day. After they ate lunch, we took all the kids back to the classroom, and got their pallets ready for their nap time. The older toddlers slept on the floor on little pallets, but Andres and two others slept in cribs along the wall. As Hannah and I were laying kids down to sleep and rubbing their backs, I started thinking about what Andrey, the man over the whole center, told me earlier that day. He was telling me that Andres had one of the worst cases; Andres lived in a shack on a side of a mountain with a dirt floor and one room, and his father abandoned his mother and two sisters. I sat there looking at Andres falling asleep thinking he doesn’t deserve being put in that situation, he didn’t do anything to deserve that, why was he put into that bad household, he didn’t get to choose his family. None of those kids in that center deserve to be in extreme poverty. They are little kids. Why them? Why was I so blessed with a four bedroom house with air conditioning and heating and these kids had nothing? Why? I sat there thinking while tears rolled down my face, it isn’t fair for them.

To this day, I don’t have an answer to those questions. I learned a lot from that little eight month old boy, who couldn’t even say hola. He taught me that I should be thankful for everything I have and not to take anything for granted and I am blessed beyond measures. He showed me how genuinely happy people can be even though he was in extreme poverty. Costa Rica’s saying is Pura Vida which means pure life, and all the people down there live by that. Lastly, he sparked a fire in my heart that something needs to be done for kids like that. That there is a need in the world, for people to love others, to serve others and to give. I left part of my heart in Costa Rica and took back a little Pura Vida.