August 16th, 2017: Day 2
Our “Equipo de Esperanza” (Team Hope), as we have begun to call ourselves, started this morning with a prompt wake-up just before 6 am. We fueled up at the AMCA House (our lodging) with a delicious meal (as seems to be the usual around here) and then travelled in El Toaster (our bus) to La Reforma youth prison, where we split into two groups.
Our trusted tall athletes (also known as the men’s and women’s basketball teams) lead 5 youth in some basketball drills, while those of us who are more vertically challenged (the non-basketball players) taught a prison administrator and a guard how to use the Sawyer water filters.
We went through multiple different basketball drills including ball handling, passing as we shuffled up and down the court, full court layups and lightening (also known as knock out). The game of lightening was a nail biter, but D Rose (one of the youth) was able to hold off our very own Luke Dreyer in the final round. The game of 2 vs 2 was also called “no blood, no foul” as well as our 5 on 5 game (Ticos vs Hope basketball). Hope pulled off the victory after an impressive and bold half court shot by crowd pleaser Jack Thompson. The youth then challenged us to a soccer game, which both the tall people and non-basketball players participated. The Costa Ricans won……we’ll just leave it at that.
Our short friends had some fun of their own as well before hopping in to a good ol’ game of soccer. Our very own Hailey Houck and Matt VanDyken proved they listened during our on-campus training and flawlessly explained (translated one of our local Push The Rock staff, Nattie) not only the assembly of the filters, but also the purpose and maintenance. We also heard that sadly there is an illness that some of the youth have been contracting lately which could possibly lead back to contaminated water. After hearing that it was clear that God had elected this ministry of water to this place.
After leaving the prison we headed back to AMCA House for a quick lunch and packing time. We departed at 1:10 pm en route to Coto Brus in a new, air-condition-less bus (goodbye until Saturday, El Toaster), and arrived at the guest house for Fundacion Piedad at 8:30 pm. It was quite the ride, featuring an opportunity to pull over and see a group of about 30 crocodiles lounging on the side of a river together–some were in the river! Definitely a surreal moment, but we felt nice and safe above them on the bridge. Other van festivities included testimony sharing, snacks, more snacks, and a new running joke about I.T. Matt and Audit Cody (sorry, you had to be there). After we arrived and settled in, we were fed another delicious meal. We just had our itinerary prep meeting for tomorrow, and are all now looking forward to a good nights’ sleep! Hasta manana, Coto Brus.
Love: Geers and J