Tico Tuesday, May 5th

Tuesday greetings from Costa Rica!
Friday I got the chance to participate in Tierra de Niños (Children's Land), a ministry led by a guy in my church that basically does a field day for kids that teaches them Christian values and presents the Gospel to kids. It's a really sweet setup. I got to co-lead a team with 3 other young people and we came in 2nd place!! (Each team won points throughout the day for winning games, having good behavior, cheering a lot, etc). It was really fun to be with kids-and it reminded me of just how much fun field day can be! I got to participate in a couple games, but I just watched and helped with the rest, even though I wanted to play! I guess I'm still a kid at heart. Can you guess what color our team was? More details will appear on the blog tomorrow http://smithcj1.blogpot.com.
Congratulations on making it here in spite of my brilliant lack of putting the "s" in blogspot in the e-mail! And, somehow my camera hiccuped and the other pictures I wanted to put on here have disappeared into oblivion (insert sympathy song here). I will put up pictures from La Carpio soon though. I promise. ANYWAY, Friday was really fun. This little girl I'm with in the picture is named Rebekah. She's 5 and she was the youngest girl on my team. She has quite a will of her own and didn't want to/was kind of too little to participate in a lot of the games, so I got to keep an extra eye on her for much of the day. She is pretty cute though.
If you look carefully at the picture you can see that her name is painted on the left shoulder of her shirt (other left). One of the first activities of the day is to paint a plain white shirt with your team colors. It was wicked fun! I didn't paint my shirt, but one kid on my team came wearing his plain white shirt already, so I basically got to paint it for him. His name was Bryan and I'd guess he's about 11 or so. I'm guessing you were able to figure out our team was RED! Or rather ¡ROJO! Hence, the shirt was painted red and we all wore pieces of red cloth somehow fixed on us. (The other teams were green, blue, and yellow. Sound like AWANA, anyone?) But, we were also assigned a shape. So we were rhombuses (rhombi?). Actually in English I'd say we were diamonds. But in Spanish our cheer that we made up was "Somos los rombos, somos rombitos, somos los grandes y los chiquitos, como los rombos están con Dios, ¡siempre seremos el ganador!"
The not so exciting translation would be "We are the Diamonds, we are the cute little Diamonds, we are the big ones and the little ones, since the Diamonds are with God, we will always be the winner!"
Back to T-shirt painting. The main symbol used with Tierra de Niños is the handprint. So, all the kids make handprints (with paint) on their shirts. It looks really cool. It was fun helping Bryan peel his hand off his shirt and restore his arm to a normal position after trying to make a handprint on his side/back.
In the middle of the day we did all sorts of fun field day games like an obstacle course, a form of dizzy bat, running around, carrying cups of water to try to fill up the bucket on the other side of the field, kickball, a one on one tug of war over a tire tube, link arms back to back and carry a soccer ball between you and the drop it in a bucket, and of course, FUTBOL. The only thing missing was the water balloon toss. Though I think it's probably better that one was not attempted because it probably would have just been a very wet failure. All the games they did were with the purpose of teaching the values of the day-tolerance and unity. And, I think they did a pretty good job of sreving their purpose.
The last activity of the day that we did was make letters with our team. The person leading the activity called out a letter and we had to creatively form that letter with all our bodies as a team. That was interesting. I think we were supposed to bond more as a team over the course of the day, but it was still pretty much mayhem trying to get everyone in the right spot doing the right thing. It was fun mayhem though. And for the very last letter they had 2 teams make a bit T together and the other 2 teams make a big N (for Tierra de Niños). They had us wave our hands in the air and took pictures. It was sweet. Well, the story just came to an N, so that's all for today!