Alright, so things have been solidified (a little bit). Here is the first blog devoted to the trip. We will be posting updates during our trip as to our locations and learnings. I'm sure these posts will be very overwhelming to read from a length point of view; maybe we should change the site to 'all across the page' viewing? Please let us know!
Anyways, here is our preliminary schedule...
1) Wednesday July 23 - Land in Costa Rica and have the spoiled experience of someone there holding a "Scatliff" sign to pick us up. Then, we are whisked away to the mountainous region a few hours east of San Jose to Tuis (nearest place on google maps is Canada, Costa Rica ;) but if you punch in Turrialba you get a much better idea. This is the home of Voz Que Clama, a mission organization that serves the physically and mentally handicapped people from the surrounding indigenous reserves. People with handicaps are outcasts from the communities due to mythical reasons why they were born with the condition. Their mothers are often cast out as well and this organization offeres them a refuge. (Un?)fortunately they are in the midst of a building project to increase their capacity.
As some of you may know, Tom has experience working with physically disabled individuals, and he is excited to see how his skills may be put to use in these developing areas.
Along with offering a home, the mission is working to spread the gospel in the indigenous regions (many are inaccessible by roads and it's a 3 hour hike in!), offer education on disabilities, and bring in much needed supplies. Additionally the mission sponsors local families near Tuis with food baskets and agricultural education to aid in the process of becoming more nutritionally and economically stable. There are a bunch of other things but I'll try to keep this short and let you know what we learn when we are there (in 10 days from now!!!) We will be staying with a home-stay family in Tuis for 4 nights. Bare in mind, this family does not speak English. Eek. I guess we will be putting our Spanish lessons to the test
2) We say good bye to Voz Que Clama on Sunday, July 27th, and head south to Panama. After a seamless crossing at the border by bus [ ;p ] we eventually reach my colleagues in Soloy, Panama. This trip may take anywhere from 1 to 3 days. Who knows, really. Central America time does not work on the same clock as North American time. We've learned that one in October!
3) While in Soloy we will be crashing either in the health post or with local family (apparently anyone will put you up - a very relationship based country - for a few dollars :) Anywho, we will eventually find my colleagues, which won't be too hard. I'm sure they will know the second we are in town "Otro blanca personas!!" Soloy is one of our 'bases' for reaching the most remote communities in our studies. Most days we will be taking an excursion to an outlying village for data collection. I guess we will see what kind of shape we are in!
4) After a few days we will be heading to David, Panama to meet up with a second mission organization, Panama for Jesus, that runs a local church, seminary school, and also a feeding program for inner city children. We will be working with them for the remainder of our trip. I'm so excited to have been asked to address with the nutritional considerations of the children and help tweak the menu for their needs. Awesome! We will be staying in a hostel here and working with Tracy and Rafael for a few days with whatever we can.
5) On Wednesday Tom flies from David to San Jose, and then catching his flight back to Canada ;( I head out to San Felix, to catch up with my new roomies for the remainder of August and go back to one of our 'bases' and remote communities. Yeah, I'm gonna be buff (or broken) by the time I get back to Canada.
6) I will remain out there and help in any way I can and gain as much information as I can for my project. The hardest piece of this time will be a lack of internet/phone service because we will be spending most of our time in the boonies. I guess I will have to use smoke signals to communicate with Tom. ;)
7) I do the bus to David, flight to San Jose, flight Toronto, then home trip at the end of August.
8) We are reunited! Sigh. Move into our new apartment. :)
6 comments:
This is going to be quite the experience for you guys, amazing! You'll have to keep a daily journal out there to reflect on what you see and do, and so you don't forget things later. Also, it'll be a good reference for the blogging you'll have to do when you get back!
You land in Costa Rica on the 23rd, when do you leave your apartment? The 22nd?
The 'new' apartment is actually vacant right now; it's just being repainted and spified (sp?) up for us.
So, because our apartment manager is awesome, we will start moving whenever the painters are done. Meaning we will probably have some of our junk over there before we leave next week, and Tom will move the rest when he returns. We are hoping to have all our stuff out of this one by the 10th of August or so, so they have a bit of time to repaint/spiffy it for the next people in September.
You guys are going to be busy this summer!
When do you fly out of Toronto?
Toronto is the connecting flight home.
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