Monday, February 27, 2017

Monday, February 27


Let me begin by saying what a great group of students we have with us this year.  Although everything hasn’t gone according to plan, there has been no complaining.  We started with breakfast at 6:00am, and nearly everyone was early or just on time.  That’s tremendous, especially considering that there are 4-6 persons per room, and only one shower/bathroom per room! Breakfast was again (and will be most mornings) “Gallo Pinto”, which is rice and beans as well as scrambled eggs and fruit. The fruit was fresh pineapple and watermelon.

After breakfast, we all headed to the school and unloaded a long flatbed trailer of 20 ft metal tubing and cement.  We all worked as a team, and got it unloaded.  The bags of cement were about 100 lbs each, and there were 30 of them.  After we unloaded those, the truck pulled down below the project on a side road, and the students unloaded about 300 cement blocks from the street below up over a retaining wall to where we will be building the perimeter fence. 

After unloading the block, the students moved the brush that had been cut down to make way for the wall/fence that we are building.  Also during the day, they moved another stack of 500 blocks to a new location to make room for the dump truck to deposit the load of sand we will use tomorrow in the concrete for the footing for the wall/fence.

The students did an AMAZING amount of work for our first day!  There is more to tell, but once again everyone has gone to bed for the night.  And several were probably asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow from a long day of hard work.  I’ll say it again:  This is really a great group of students!

Thanks for your prayers!

-Michael Peel

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Sunday, February 26

It's 10pm here, and everyone has gone to bed for the night (well, except me...).  After a VERY early start this morning, it wasn't hard to convince anyone to go to bed, with a breakfast time tomorrow (Monday) of 6am.  At 7am, we will already be at work on our project site, unloading all the building materials from a truck that is scheduled to be there at 6am.  I pray that it is there on time so we can begin our work here.

We landed in San Jose about 30 minutes early (12:30 local time), and expected to get to Monteverde early as well.  But instead, an airplane from United was unable to leave our arrival gate due to some immigration issue.  So we sat on the tarmac for the 30 minutes, and pulled in to our gate at exactly 1:05pm, which was our regularly scheduled time of arrival.

The students loaded onto several smaller buses to be taken to another large bus offsite from the airport.  After a 3-hour winding trip (with the last 16+ miles on a very bumpy and winding gravel road, we arrived at our hotel.  (with one student losing his lunch from car [bus] sickness -- but all is well now).

We had supper at the restaurant owned by the hotel, which is also next to our project site.  It is a short 5 minute walk from the hotel.  They served salad, bread, and spaghetti with a tomato based vegetable sauce.  After a little social time at the restaurant, we walked back to the hotel and had a meeting and worship.

That's all for tonight.  Hopefully I'll be able to have more to say tomorrow after we begin our projects.   We continue to covet your prayers on our behalf.

--Michael Peel

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Pre-trip intro

Hello and welcome to the C.A. Costa Rica Mission 2017 blog.

As time allows (as well as internet connectivity), this blog will be updated with current information and some pictures so you can see how things are going on our mission trip.  Feel free to share this address with friends and family of participants:
https://costaricamission2017.blogspot.com