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Letter to my home church: The Amesville-New England Parish

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27 of April, 2024 Dear friends, It has been a busy year already in our work with the Green UBL team, and specifically with the community gardens. You may remember that we are working with two spaces, the first, called Rocoto Garden, was the pilot project started by Elena, a UBL student from Peru, in 2018. We are re-designing and enlarging slightly that garden with the help of a student from the National Costa Rican university (UCR), Raquel, who studies architecture. The UBL has developed a relationship with an Urban Organic Agriculture program at the UCR. Students in the program provide approximately 300 hours of community service with the gardening program. The other garden, Sunflowers garden is doing well, full of flowers and beautiful tomato vines, as well as herbs, mustard greens, purple cabbage, green peppers, and medicinal plants. The community members that are part of Sunflowers have planned three major activities in the past month. Today, we held our first workshop of the ye
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Finding our feet--looking back at our first year in Costa Rica

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  Keila and Annika flying a kite from the 3rd story balcony of our Costa Rican house. This year has not been easy for us, even with all of our privileges of a safe home, secure food and loving family members. But there have been moments of pure joy. This year  has been such a hard year for so many people, it boggles my mind, weighs down my spirit and bruises my soul. Even now with the hope that the vaccines seem to bring, there is the news of the new virus variant that is even more contagious. Each person and family's story is unique. I have been privileged to hear some of those stories, from family and friends in Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, in the United States, in Haiti and in the Dominican Republic, as well as from mission colleagues scattered across the globe. I have also listened to public radio from the US via internet--story after story from the pandemic and from the protests, resistance and reactions to the terrible murders of black people by police officers. You can review
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Birthdays, Maps and Gardens

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San José, Costa Rica Dear friends and family, Keila "at school" in June, right before their 3-week vacation. June 2020 This past Friday, July 10 th , Keila and Annika finished their second week of the mid-year, three-week school vacation. Not summer vacation; first because the school year here in Costa Rica goes from February through November and second because we are in the middle of a very wet and cold rainy season. But Friday was a special day anyway because it was Annika's 9th birthday. She got to choose breakfast (pancakes) and dinner (pizza) and her cake (lemon). Jenny and I worked together to arrange two Zoom meetings, one with family and another with classmates from the school Annika and Keila attend virtually, because of COVID. It was hard to get Annika’s 2 nd -grade classmates’ attention. Finally, Jenny said, in English, “On the count of three we’re going to sing Happy Birthday.” She counted, we sang and, unexpectedly, the kids joined in. La
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