My friends at the Association for Development through Education in Costa Rica, with whom I lived and worked for a couple of months in early 2010, are planning a conference for January that will certainly be one unlike any other conference you've ever been to. In partnership with a Costa Rican seminary, a mission organization and a community health group, they'll be exploring the "zero down" development model ADE is using, and considering its wider implications for various sectors in different places. Here's the blurb:

A bilingual conference looking at answers to the tough questions of the interaction between faith, missions, money, and development. No one is coming with all the answers, but as we come together, learn from each other, and look specifically at the "zero down" model we hope to take steps forward to further understand these difficult relationships.

Here's the conference promo video (also available in Spanish):

If you're interested in reading more about my experiences with ADE, here are a few posts from that time:

• I wrote about teaching English via Cha Cha Slide here;
• I gave a Palm Sunday sermon about Jesus, friend of chorizeros, described here; and
• I gave a video tour of the community and house where I lived here.

Please do learn more about ADE and their Zero Down development conference.

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.

ADE’s education center isn’t too far from here; a ten or twenty minute walk depending on which direction you’re going. To get there you walk a few minutes along the main road, then down a pretty steep driveway of red volcanic rock, across a river in the rainforest that will take your breath away, and eventually to a small clearing in the valley. The original owner of the place brought in the building supplies by ox cart. That is where I’ll be sleeping.

The past couple of days have been a chance to relax a bit, so all I’ve been able to do is meet the priest, attend Ash Wednesday mass, eat a potato-filled 'enchilada' from the local panadería, meet the students from our school, participate in a couple of ADE team meetings, attend a meeting with the town council, go to an evening service at the local evangelical church, and translate the remaining parts of the ADE website into Spanish.

Once the skies clear a bit I'll get out there with a camera, and as the days progress I trust I'll have taller tales to tell.

I was wrapping up grad school, on the job hunt, and being very introspective about who I am and what I want out of life and what God might want out of my life and how all of that might possibly fit together (people like us keep Moleskine in business, I’m convinced). This period of soul searching and re-evaluation came at the end of what was perhaps the most eventful year of my life - some parts good, some parts bad - and at age 27 I realized that while I didn’t have any money and there were certainly no jobs, the possibilities were in a strange sense limitless.

And this is where the scattered thing comes in. Because while in a certain sense ‘social justice’ serves as an umbrella for everything I’m passionate about, it definitely leaves a lot of specifics unaddressed. But I took a look at my life and realized that while I am fascinated with Maasai rituals and would love to sit around in hookah lounges in Istanbul or eat copious amounts of naan and curry in Kolkatta while watching cricket, I already have a natural connection to Latin America and perhaps I shouldn’t overlook the significance of that.

So now I write in the closing days of my internship here in DC, having just booked a flight to Costa Rica. I’ll be joining some friends in San Rafael de Vara Blanca, a small town near the epicenter of an earthquake that hit almost exactly a year before the one in Haiti. Tomás and his family moved back to San Rafael last fall and have started a nonprofit called the Association for Development through Education (ADE).

During my two months there we’ll be trying to figure out whether this might be a good long-term possibility for me, but in the meantime I’ll be pitching in however I can as ADE gets off the ground and begins welcoming students. I plan to travel a bit and do some writing for publication, Lord willing, and I hope to brush up on my Spanish enough to be considered just about bilingual.

To those ends, I have revamped this blog so as to better document my adventures. If you’re the praying type, I’d appreciate prayers for wisdom as I try to figure out whether Costa Rica is the place where God would have me serve as his instrument of shalom for the next year or two or three.

I've come to the conclusion through all of this that times of introspection have their place, but at a certain point they become, frankly, quite a drag. I want to be able to stop spending so much time analyzing my life and to begin actually living it again, and I'm hoping that one way or another, these two months will be an important step in that direction.