Our Costa Rica Life : School SnAkeS & Other Stuff

Hello everyone!! Well we started home school last week and it was pretty good! I have had to make a few changes to the kids curriculum because I was way overloading them!I have heard that this is a typical Homeschool newbie mistake. So now that I am back down to reality things are good. We did try and enroll the kids in school down here but that proved to be very challenging. They want so much paperwork its ridiculous! School here is only in spanish but other need greater families have really encouraged us to put them in school here and continue some of their homeschool curriculum also. When we mentioned this to the kids they were so excited. They really want to go to school to learn spanish! I had no idea. I was pretty impressed with their attitude. Kids are so open to change and new things. No wonder Jesus used them as an example! School here runs from February- November. We have stayed on a U.S. schedule for our homeschool program so they have started 1st, 4th, and 6th grade this past week. If they go to school in February they would start those same grades but continue in the U.S. homeschool program on the same schedule. It may be tricky. We are still deciding on that whole situation. Okay enough about that..

We had our first snake sighting and it was in our house! Off of our bedroom is a screened in sitting room and this is where our computer is. The kids were in there watching a movie with the light off. I went in there and turned the light on and there he was just chilling..kind of looked like he was watching the movie. Well because we are "new", we cannot spot a venomous snake VS non venomous snake just by sight so we had to chop him :( So sad. He was a baby about 1 foot long. Afterwards we identified it and it appears to have been a baby Tree Boa. We think it got in through an open door. That will never happen again! I was a little concerned that my kids weren't that scared honestly!

The congregation is doing well. As usual we still have some changes going on. When the CO came around we got 3 new Ministerial Servants! So we now have 4 servants and 2 elders in just the english group. As a whole we have 6 servants and 4 elders.

We found out this week that a couple is coming from France in November! They are, of course, the talk of the hall now. We love when people visit or move here! We just love people here:) We also have a family of 5 coming in December that were here last year. They are moving here permanently. And of course my sweet friends Sara and Kressa will be here soon!!!! Sara for about 4-5 months, and Kressa for 1 month. Can't Wait!!!! We met a sister from Florida ( @ our meeting) today who was here last year. She is here for 1 month helping out a congregation about an hour away. She was so sweet! She is hoping to come back and serve in Uvita again next year if finances permit. I hope so!! It really is awesome to see so many young sisters who are not afraid to come out here and serve. They are so brave. I really admire them. Not to leave the brothers out..we have one servant in our hall who is also younger and has chosen to be here where the need is great. He is currently in the states. I haven't met him yet but he has been in Africa at the International Convention in Zimbabwe for 5 weeks and now saving up to come back in a few months! The things these young people can experience from choosing this life of full time service is amazing. It really does change their whole life. Jehovah opens so many doors for them.

This week and last week we have had no speaker at our Sunday meeting ( In English) so we have only been able to do the Watchtower study. The spanish have this happen often also. There are usually 15-20 people at the English meeting each week. Its hard to get speakers, many halls are stretched pretty thin around here. Like...so thin that if you visit us..your giving a part of some sort... I'm totally serious. :) Because of this the branch is trying something new with some groups, ours is one of those groups. Soon we will start to have our meeting right before spanish on the weekend. Right now Spanish has their meeting on Saturday and we have our meeting on Sunday. So starting soon, we haven't really been told when, we will have our meeting on Saturday at 5:00 and the Spanish talk will start at 6:30 and then we will have a spanish Watchtower study. So its an interesting arraignment. We don't have a back room so that has complicated things. I'm wondering what is going to happen in the future because our Kingdom hall is at full capacity right now. Per our branch diagram on the back board we can legally only hold 9 more people in the building than we have now. There has been talk of putting chairs outside the hall next to the windows! Ummm I dont know about that! But apparently thats what ya do here when ya reach capacity. True story! Seriously..They have done it in the past, years ago before spanish split. Don't even get me started on my problems with that..night time bugs to name one..BIG ones that fly and jump and ..YUCK! I imagine the sisters and kids would have seats inside..I HOPE:)

Yesterday we had a very bad storm! To get to our house you have to cross a small bridge but when it rains really bad the water comes up over and covers the bridge and its impassable. This almost happened yesterday and once last week. Yesterday our house got struck by lightening and it zapped some of our electrical outlets and fried our modem. Costa Rican electrical wiring is sketchy anyway so if any other factor comes into play it just flat won't work. One caught on fire the other day when I turned a fan on..LoL Costa Rica I love you! On top of that Tyler got a flat tire yesterday in service and on Sunday nothing is open. Tomorrow is Costa Rican Independence day so everything is still closed. Of course the jack he needed to remove the spar tire and put it on was missing from the car we bought! Costa Rica! Thats what we say every time..We love you Costa Rica but you do things S..L..O..w..l..y.. Very slowly. So fortunately the house we caretake for has a car we can use so we were saved!!

We have been doing a lot of spanish service since we got here. With the campaign in August we were really pushing to help complete the spanish territory. Last weekend we did some english territory and that was great! We had been given the direction to go ahead and finish our english territory with the campaign tract in this area. We met some very nice people. People here have such interesting stories about how they got here. It's very neat to chit chat about life with them. Almost always they will take the literature. This week we are going to add some more service into our schedule. Now that we are settled into our house and getting school under control we want to add a midweek day for service to our calendars this month. Hopefully next month we will be able to add more service time in. We are pacing ourselves though because learning the language is our priority right now. The more spanish we know the better we can learn from the meetings and the more people we can preach to. We have a simple 1 line presentation right now and then we say have a nice day. Its so hard for me sometimes because I want to do everything just perfectly when I speak spanish (I'm a perfectionist and I really hate it) So a sister took me aside and said, " Just say it Amber! You won't learn until you let go and start speaking incorrectly. That's how you learn". Ugh! She was right. I am so happy she told me that. So sometimes I don't know what I'm saying. It is humbling and sometimes embarrassing but I feel like I'm making progress. Someone told me don't measure your progress by how you did last week measure it by how you did 6 months ago..6 months ago!!! Okay ..that was a hard pill to swallow but its true. Big changes take time and patience. That advice came from a gringo who learned spanish too.. so theres hope for us yet!!!!

Thanks for all the emails and pictures!! We didn't bring a lot of pictures with us:( The next time we go into the city we are going to get them all printed so we can put them around our house and in albums so please keep sending us your pictures. We wish we had brought more because those make our house feel a little bit more like home, so keep em' coming please!!! Until next time, Adios Amigos!

We tried to tell them that that's not what a surf board is for ..