Let me share a few happenings:
As I got off the bus today in Carpio, a school-uniformed girl leaped out of her mother's embrace and flew to me. She flung her arms around my waist, pressed her head into my gallo-pinto-filled stomach, and just as quickly dashed back to hide herself in her mother's arms. I never saw her face. I have no idea who she was.
Two days ago I was watching the news with my family when a story about a protest at the University of Costa Rica came on. I watched as policemen brutally beat enraged professors and students; they kept playing the same clip of a man getting his mouth bloodied until he spat out teeth.
Earlier that morning, I was running late to work and got to the bus stop just as the bus took off. Another woman had done the same and we began small talking. Did I speak Spanish? Yes. Was I a student? No. Was I a Christian? Yes...how did she know? She could "just tell." She began talking about her faith, how she had gone to church until five years ago when her now ex-husband began sleeping with another woman in her congregation. How could God do that? Wasn't she doing the right thing, being in His house? Didn't He know what heartbreak felt like? Before I knew it, this tired woman was crying in front of me -- I had known her for all of two minutes and her bruised spirit was breaking down. I had no words of comfort, no easy answers. I asked if I could pray for her. The two of us held hands and hearts as we clung to the only similarity between us: a God that loves abnormally tall gringas and fragile ticas.
During class today, blue skies hid themselves and we were in the middle of quite possibly the worst rainstorm I have experienced yet. Lightning and thunder struck almost simultaneously and the tin roof made it pointless to try and bellow instructions to my students. As the rain lightened, class ended and I went out the gate with Katherinne, Karen, and her baby Suyen under my umbrella. Katherinne asked me if I had every slipped and fallen because of the rain and I told her that although I was an American (and thus quite the klutz), I had never wiped out due to the weather. Less than two minutes later, as we joked about baby names and long days, I lost my footing and plunged shin-deep into a drainage ditch. That sounds gross enough, but let me kindly remind you this was a drainage ditch in La Carpio -- the stagnant rainwater is an opaque black from motor oil, dust, kilograms of garbage, and I don't want to know what else. As if that wasn't enough, my foot got caught and my knee scraped against the slick street; I was a muddy bloody mess. Katherinne whisked me into her home three blocks away where her mother cleaned my wounds with cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol. While the stinging stopped, I sipped on warm milk and watched a vomit-inducing romance reality show with Katherinne, her five siblings, cousin, mother, and Karen with baby Suyen in tow. At that moment I wondered how I can ever dream of leaving this place.
A woman on the mission team from Kathy's church also has a D90 and she graciously let me borrow a lens of hers for the day. Here are some photos I took:
- Hannah
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