Costa Rica - An Introduction
I was honored to be one of eight volunteers chosen by Sony Playstation to visit Costa Rica in partnership with Habitat para la Humanidad, to build houses for a poor community there. The province of Guanacaste is far from everything I’ve ever known about my life and my little California bubble. When you're surrounded by the wealthy neighborhoods of West Los Angeles every day, you tend to take for granted basic necessities like indoor plumbing, affordable groceries, accessible schools, lockable front doors, and windows. Our team spent a week in a small town where many people had none of these things. It was a wake-up call, to say the least.
But while I could simply focus on the depressing aspects of the community we visited, that would ignore and belittle the miracles that are happening there. Costa Rica, like all the world, is a place of great opposites. In the midst of poverty and hopelessness there is joy, laughter and unity. There is beauty as well as ruin, light piercing the darkness. It was here that our small team of strangers became a family, serving other families in need, discovering anew that love is universal and knows no boundaries.
These journal entries are my attempt to put into words and pictures the jumbled up mess that is my heart and mind, now that the trip is over. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to adequately express it in a way that others could understand… but I feel as though I should try. Otherwise, what was the point of the journey? Sony could have just donated the cost of our plane tickets and accommodations straight to Habitat for Humanity and let them use it to hire skilled local workers.
Instead, they chose to send volunteers whose prior construction experience probably involved Minecraft or SimCity…
