Hasta la Vista to Pura Vida

It’s time to head home. Some parting shots:

Timothy’s daughter Rebecca’s missionary dental practice

Dr. Rebekah Stoll in situ

The ultimate in organic fertilizer—the orange blossoms on those trees produce nitrogen—as seen from the road from Grano de Oro to Turrialba, where Felix and I took a bus to San José.

I’ve never seen a computer store with indoor parking before. There’s no on-street parking.

I've also never seen a car where the driver can watch TV while driving. But with San José traffic usually at a standstill, you might as well.

Felix (left) was my escort from Turrialba to San José, where Alan hosted us for the night.

It has been an incredible privilege to be here. While I didn’t get the chance to do as much linguistics with Ruth as I had hoped—the scripting took longer than I ever expected (as it always does, I needed to remember)—I think I saved the Cabécar and Ngöbe teams a lot of time and hassle. Ruth and I will be meeting online for an hour a week to talk linguistics, and David knows whom to call when things go wonky in the software department, so I consider it a trip well worthwhile.

May God be pleased to use this time and work for his eternal glory!

Field Trip

Thursday through Saturday were spent at the desk, mostly with David, but often alone. Unless your idea of fun is tweaking things like this

to produce things like this

you have seen all you need to see of my work on those days.

 Well, I did take a walk yesterday and saw something that reminded me of Papua New Guinea.

Cone-shaped houses used to be common, but as thatch has become hard to come by, roofs are now either black plastic or roofing iron.

Today was a different story. We visited a church about an hour by car and another half hour by foot from the house here. Pictures don’t do the road justice: in some places it fit right in with the foot trails to our village in PNG. And then we had to cross the river.

I had flashbacks of the day in 1992 when it took me 45 minutes to grab a zip line and ride it, but I was able to man up and ride this one.

The church sits by itself along with the pastor’s house. The pastor happens to be Timothy’s brother-in-law. 

This is a matriarchal society, and the matriarch here is Timothy’s wife Eliza’s grandmother, a dear old saint of many years.

The homestead, from left to right: the covered visiting area, the kitchen, and the living areas, probably for the grandmother on the left and for her daughter and her husband the pastor on the right.

I was right at home: pigs, dogs, and chickens roaming freely around the area, people going in and out of church and nursing babies during the service, the smell of wood smoke.

The brethren welcomed me, and in the spirit of 1 Corinthians 14:26, they asked me to say a few words. Timothy’s Cabécar orthography is very easy to follow, so I sounded out a couple of verses as best I could and spoke through Timothy for five minutes or so and got a warm round of applause.

Church song

(Unfortunately, this was the least enthusiastically sung song of the morning, but the other video didn’t come out.)

Tomorrow, it’s back to the desk to begin the home stretch.

Marching Forth

Oh, what’s that I see
By the dawn’s early light?

It’s the flags of the duo of Dr. (Rebekah) and Mr. (Joel) Stoll. Joel is from Switzerland and Rebekah, one of Timothy’s daughters, is, natch, from Costa Rica. Rebekah runs a mission clinic in Grano de Oro, and Joel is the factotum here at Finca de Cueva and also pastors the Spanish church I visited on Sunday afternoon, two doors down from the clinic.

Should it be Mr. and Dr. Stoll, or Dr. and Mr. Stoll?

Yesterday we took them and Dr. Doug and his son Kyle (down for the week from Seattle and BIOLA U, respectively) and others out to the middle of nowhere in Indian country—well, the Indians know where it is, of course—so they can hold three and two fractions days of dental clinics.

Dr. Doug and Kyle.

No mission trip is complete without pictures of treacherous terrain and bad roads, so here you go.

I wonder how far above the water level that footbridge is in rainy season.

The elementary school that is hosting the clinic. “With education and God[’s help?], we can make our dreams come true.”

Since we’ve gotten back I’ve been working on getting David’s draft of Mark ready for field testing. The goal is to have a script he can run on his draft files that spits out a file that can be imported into the family desktop publishing program and printed with no tweaking. That took until this morning. Since then, I’ve been working on a map that will be included in the handouts.

Me writing the script

Me working on the map

My handiwork

I’m not sure what tomorrow will bring, but if it’s tough, Timothy and David will get some relief from hearing me say, “Groovy!” and “I’m happier than a pig in slop!”

Thanks again for your prayers!