Christian Surfers In Costa Rica

This is a look at El Rancho Biblico, a missionary project that is designed to help the children who live in a small shanty town at the edges of Playa Jaco.  The shanty town is found on the banks of a dried up river on the south end of town.

When walking around town as a change from walking the beach we had walked down this road up to this point, where the road ends and the river bed begins.  We thought that beyond this point we wouldn’t find anything of interest, so we always turned back to follow a different road.  Well, today we learned differently.

This is April, a young woman who lives just a few doors down from our villa.  She belongs to a group called Christian Surfers, a missionary group that in inter-denominational.  April has been in Jaco for nine months and will likely be here for another year and a bit as part of the small missionary team that works year round here.  After a number of chats together, we decided to go with her to check out her work.  She took us to the river bed and then drove down the river bed through a straggly shanty town where families had built all kinds of homes on the banks of the river.  They were squatters and as such, they had rights to build where they wished on government land until that land was needed.   The guy with April is the mission’s minister.

Almost as soon as we arrived, we volunteered to work on backfilling a retaining wall.  As you can see, one little guy soon became interested in working alongside of Maureen.   The area we worked on was to be later covered with a cement slab so that another area would be ready for use by the mission in their after school program as well as the work with the community’s mothers.

Of course I wasn’t allowed just to take pictures of the work and so did my fair share as well.  It wasn’t long before some others came to join in the work, a group of missionaries down for six days of helping out from Alabama, U.S.A.

The group were all dressed in matching red teeshirts.  It was good to see so many people who wanted to do something useful for others.

Here is a look at the housing on one side of the river bed.  The amount of people living on this short stretch of river bank was actually quite surprising.

This community has over sixty little children and it is the children that the mission focuses on.  They have created and after school program that helps with homework; as well, the mission helps sponsor kids going to school by paying for school uniforms and for school books.  Sad to say, not all of the kids go to school.

Before the planned activity of crafts that would be appropriate for the kids, the missionaries planned on giving out free teeshirts to match those worn by the missionaries from Alabama.  When the kids found out, they came running from their homes like these two little guys.

This little girl is proudly wearing her new teeshirt and waiting for the group to settle down and get on with doing crafts.

Another little girl sits on one of the tables set out for doing crafts not really aware of what is going on.  The activity around the giving away of teeshirts lasts quite some time and soon some of the kids are crying while others are running around and laughing.  With all of the kids now having a new teeshirt, the missionaries then give out free teeshirts to a number of the adults.  I have to admit that the idea of free teeshirts has worked to create a festival atmosphere in this tiny community.

There is no doubt in my mind that the teeshirts are going to be well worn.  These people are poor beyond any measure we would want to make back in Canada and the U.S.A.

Since it was going to be quite a while before they actually got around to doing crafts, we decided to head back home for our lunch, making plans to return a few more times to do what we could to make a small difference.  This last photo shows the tiny community from the road entrance.   Thanks to April for showing us a hidden face of Jaco.