I am sitting at a small table beside a window in Casa Shalom, home of the Doziers and office for ADE. Outside, rain and fog; lots of it. On a clear day the window offers a vista of lush green rainforest, sprawling down into the valley and up the next volcanic ridge. The slope below me, I’m told, morphs brilliantly into an improvised tennis-golf course. Believe me when I say the trash talking has begun.
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 panaderÃa, 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.
Since you’re reading this, I suppose there’s a good chance you know me. And if you know me, you’d probably be able to point to some pretty specific things I’m passionate about. So it may come to you as a surprise that at a certain moment this past fall I realized I was way too scattered to be of any use.
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.
