Our connection with San Rafael was our classmate and friend Tomás, who had lived in the community as a kid. He has since returned with his wife, kids and a small but dedicated team to start the Association for Development through Education to help rebuild the community -- starting with education -- and to prepare community members to be able to respond to future disasters both near and far. Coming out of my experience living between volcanoes in the jungle of Costa Rica with the ADE team, I wrote a piece that was just published in Flourish Magazine. Please read it, add your comments, and pass it on.

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Yesterday, Palm Sunday, turned out to be that day.

In preparation, I read and re-read and re-re-read the biblical account of Jesus' triumphal entry, but nothing was really coming together for me, and in the end I landed on Isaiah 53, which is fitting for Holy Week, albeit more of a Good Friday passage.

The theme of the chapter, as you may know, is the woundedness of Christ as foretold by the prophet Isaiah. It's a brutal passage, really, full of words like suffering, pain, pierced, crushed, wounded, oppressed, afflicted, a lamb to the slaughter, and cut off from the land of the living. But it's also a wonderful passage, especially because in it is the tremendously good news that by his wounds we are healed.

I spoke in the sermon about our brokenness, our woundedness, our sin. It's pretty obvious we're in need of healing, if you take the time to stop and think about it. When we do our own thing, when we play by our own rules - when we wander off like sheep, as Isaiah puts it - things get pretty screwed up really quickly. And there's generally quite a lot of collateral damage.

Not to get all sociologically insightful on you, but as people who have been nurtured in a society that highly esteems personal liberty and individual rights, I think we often make the costly error of reading the Bible as if it were addressed primarily to isolated individuals having their 'quiet times' with God. But taking a step back, remember that the Old Testament books were addressed to the people Israel, and the epistles of the New Testament (at the very least) were addressed to churches.

With all of that in mind, when Isaiah writes that "by his wounds we are healed" it follows that he actually does mean we. There's a communal element there, which is really good news because of that collateral damage I mentioned earlier, which we have all undoubtedly experienced. Our woundedness has everything to do with the fact that we interact with people who, like us, are broken and sinful.

So the question I posed to the church, and the question I pose to you, is this: what will we do with our wounds and the wounds we have inflicted - knowingly or not - on others? Will we hide them, pretending that we're mostly healthy people, that we're not wounded and that we do not wound others? We might try for a while, but we won't succeed for long.

The tremendously good news, then, is that Jesus - by whose wounds we are healed - didn't come for those who had their act together. He came for the notorious sinners, the ones who seem to fail at hiding their brokenness, the ones who were just waiting for someone to offer them a new and better way of life, to offer them healing.

In the gospels, many of these notorious sinners turned out to be tax collectors, those who abused their positions of power to achieve great monetary gain with no apparent concern for their dismal social standing in street corner public opinion polls. Here in Costa Rica there's a great word for just this sort of thing. The word is chorizo, defined formally as a "willful action or act of corruption to gain public funds." One who engages in chorizo, then, is a chorizero.

So in my sermon I talked about the tax-collector-turned-disciple Matthew, a chorizero if there ever was one. Jesus called Matthew to follow, and next thing you know, they're eating dinner at Matthew's place, along with a whole motley crew of chorizeros and other scoundrels. The Pharisees, professionals at hiding their own woundedness, took issue with Jesus' apparent lack of discretion. To which Jesus responded that he had not come for those who had it all together, but for those in desperate need of healing. So that's either really good news or really bad news, depending on whether we're honest about our wounds.

But even if we're honest about our wounds and we accept the healing Jesus offers, the pain tends to linger for a while, and we're often left with scars, in some cases permanently. These spiritual and relational scars, like all the miscellaneous physical scars we carry around on our bodies from years of wear and tear, give us opportunities to tell the stories. Not just stories of being wounded and of wounding others, but of being healed, and even of being used by God as instruments of healing in the lives of others.

And on that note I closed the sermon, reminding the church and myself that God does not bless us and heal us just for our own sakes. He blesses us and heals us so that we in turn may bless others, so that we might be instruments of shalom - undoing, by his grace, a bit of the collateral damage all around us.

I remember watching Hotel Rwanda last winter for the third or fourth time, and I was struck by the power of words when used to dehumanize people who are different. Before decent law-abiding Hutus could begin systematically hacking Tutsis to pieces in broad daylight, the Tutsis had to be made to seem sub-human. You had radio personalities calling Tutsis ‘tall trees’ and ‘cockroaches’ rather than referring to them as people. When you hear this repeated often enough, and circumstances become desperate enough, it suddenly somehow becomes no problem to ‘cut down the tall trees’ and to ‘crush the cockroaches’.

I share that because I worry about the way we in the United States sometimes talk about Mexicans and Central Americans, and the way Costa Ricans talk about Nicaraguans. People in Rwanda never thought they were capable of what they did in 1994, but before they knew it 800,000 people had been slaughtered. I’m not saying the same thing is going to happen in the southwest U.S. or here in Costa Rica, and I certainly hope humanity has learned its lesson, but there’s something tragic about dehumanization in and of itself, long before it leads to genocide.

Ironically, in the memoir written by the real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, he makes the point that it was the power of words that saved the lives of those 1268 people he harbored. Words can be powerful tools for good. Words can, in a sense, serve to humanize.

On Sunday I’m taking an early bus to Managua, where I’ll be staying for a few days, visiting different development projects and ministries for a writing project. My hope for this trip, when it’s all said and done, is that the words I put down on paper, in a magazine maybe, would be words that honor the dignity of those I meet. Words that serve as little instruments of peace, reweaving in some small way a bit of the shalom that God intends for the people made in his image.

In the weeks before I arrived, ADE staff completed a census of everyone in San Rafael, gathering key data about all sorts of things. One of the most striking findings was that 98% of the population had only a sixth grade education or less. This in a middle-income country in an increasingly globalized - and educated - world.

This finding confirmed the importance of one of ADE's main projects: opening a secondary school in which students from the community have the opportunity to receive a world-class education that fits into the broader goal of local capacity building. Take this week as a snapshot of what that might look like.

On Monday ADE students and staff headed over to the local elementary school to weatherize their classrooms. After the earthquake damaged their building and rendered it useless, they moved into temporary wooden structures meant for emergency housing. More than a year later permanent solutions have remained frustratingly elusive, and when it rains, water comes in through the doors and windows.

So, using a donated sheet of clear plastic and pieces of scrap wood from a neighbor, we weatherized the classrooms with these simple ingredients in such a way that when it's sunny, they can be rolled back to let in fresh air. Today, despite driving diagonal rain, the classrooms stayed dry.

On Tuesday, we set out in our 12-passenger van along the road through the earthquake-affected area, stopping along the way with digital photo and video cameras, which students used to document reconstruction efforts.

This was an opportunity for students to learn more about what is happening in their community and to ask questions they may have never been invited to ask before, such as: Will bags filled with dirt really work to hold a road in place if/when another earthquake comes? Would I want to live in the valley below that sort of structure? Did this construction company ask anyone who lives here before making their decisions?

These are just preliminary questions; the beginning of a new way of thinking in which everyone - even a seventh grader - is a key community stakeholder.

All of this is in keeping with the belief that any sort of healthy and sustainable development (or redevelopment, in this case) must involve local capacity building, and that few endeavors build capacity quite like an innovative and interactive education - whether within or without the classroom, using pens, pencils, books, hammers, nails, cameras, and killer dance moves.