A Psalm

I arrived back home in Yakima, Washington last night after a full day of travel. As I neared the end of my internship I thought back to the beginning and what was going on in my heart then. In the weeks leading up to moving to Costa Rica I was terrified and I felt distant from God for no apparent reason. It wasn’t until we were on the plane to Costa Rica that God reassured me. For our final intern bible study we were assigned to write a Psalm. Mine is about this experience.

Of Esther, when she was an

EMI intern in Costa Rica. A Psalm.

My God, will you be with me?

Where I am going, will You lead?

or have I turned to my own path;

wanting my own way?

Even when I purposed to serve You;

when I came to a country not my own,

I doubted Your guiding hand.

Was it really You who lead me here?

Fear engulfed me;

the threat of the unknown.

Would I succeed or disappoint You?

I looked for a sign,

any promise to cling to.

When I was already on my way You told me;

on the journey You spoke,

“You are my daughter.”

I listened, but You said no more.

What was this that I could cling to?

You shield me through the unknown.

My failures change nothing.

My successes change nothing.

I am Yours.

As I walk forward,

I am still your daughter.

El fin

With less than a week left in Costa Rica, we have a lot of work left to finish up our project. Yesterday we sent out a preliminary set of plans to all our volunteers for their review. Today we are trying to get those revisions done and sent out again for their review.

For the last couple weeks I've been desiring to share some of my testimony with my host sister Maria Paula. God convicted me at her age that He alone was to be worshiped, not boys. However, I am generally shy about bringing up those kind of conversation topics and in Spanish I was even more hesitant. I started praying that God would bring an opportunity for me to bring it up. Then I started praying that He would bring it up, because I was scared to. Sunday afternoon Maria Paula and I had to walk to the pulperia to get some corn flour for grandma's tortillas. As she was telling me about the latest boy developments and how she is feeling, I saw an opening for sharing what happened with me and started talking...in Spanish. I told her some of my story and how God told me that He was better than boys. I was in shock that I had actually said something. Praise God for His power to use me despite my uncertainty! She simply replied, "I know." I didn't tell my story the way I usually tell it, but I pray that what I did say was the right thing and that if there is something else He wants me to say that He will pull it out of me like He did this time. :)

Life right now is a chaos of working to finish our project, packing, spending last moments with our host families and fellow interns, and doing purposeful processing of what God has taught us during our six months here. In the midst of all the change and non-routine of this week and the coming month, as I see my family and move back to school, I am reminded that my God is my anchor. He is the constant factor through it all and that is all I need.

At Work cont.

And this is my wonderful office mate Allison Byrd. 

HelloOo!

She is great fun to work with, can tell what mood I'm in (apparently I respond to "Hey, Esther..." with a "hmm." when I'm in a bad mood), and at 10am consistently asks if I want to join her on a trip to the corner store (pulperia-new Spanish word for the day) to buy Oreos and milk. She and Kevin have been working in Revit and Photoshop to create renderings of our different projects. This is a rendering of the Directors' House that Allison architected for our project in Honduras. 

Working to the end

Allison and I have been working hard on redlines for our project. Here you can see Tim redlining our latest set of new sheets. Note the red pen cap.  

Tim is usually pretty focused but I guess we giggled a little too much when we took this picture. 

Tim has been a wonderful supervisor. He is organized and tells us clearly what we need to work on. He does redlines as soon as we have a set of new sheets ready for him so that we can keep the project moving. He is quick to leave his work to answer our questions whenever we say “hey, Tim.” He takes the time to understand our questions and if he doesn’t know the answer gives us clear direction for a course of action. I have really appreciated his words of affirmation, which are not given flippantly nor are they extravagant. A “good job” or “that looks good” from Tim mean a lot and when he thinks that we have done a good job he always lets us know. Speaking of Tim’s organization, if anyone has an event, visitor, or trip announcement Tim always asks “did you put it on the Calendar?” The Calendar is our shared Google calendar. Allison and I have noticed that he always has Google calendar open, typically with his email open on his other monitor. So when I had my camera out the other day and saw this I had to snap a photo.

We are sure at this point that we will not be able to completely finish our project. We had been planning a water system that did not rely on a well, but the ministry recently dug a well and hit water! This is great, but it changes all of the plans for the water and wastewater. Thus, we have not received anything from our water engineer. We would still appreciate prayer that we could get the rest of the project finished. It will be a lot easier on Tim to wrap up only the water section rather than have multiple sections to finish. The structural plans are undergoing a lot of revisions right now. As we create the plans inconsistencies make an appearance as well as methods that can’t be used in latin America. Our office director, Micah, who is a structural engineer, has been helping with our structural design since he has more experience with central American construction than our structural engineer volunteer. Pray for quick communication between them as when as quick, good decisions. Brad and Kevin’s project is now finished. They were blessed with some really high quality volunteers. So they have been recruited to help on our project. Kevin and Allison have been working on renderings of the new buildings for fundraising and Brad and I have teamed up on the structural redlines. Here is Brad studying one of our structural sheets. (He didn’t even know that I took the picture.)