While I am in Costa Rica, I have prepared some posts which should, if I have set things up correctly, appear automatically in my absence. I will be back to live posting on July 16.

By the time you read this, if all goes according to plan, we’ll have left our work site Heredia and will be enjoying a time of debrief at a comfortable location.

LEAMIS takes this process seriously. It’s important for several reasons:

• It gives us an opportunity to talk about what was done, how effective it seemed to be, and what changes might be made for future trips.
• It gives us time to process what we’ve seen, gather our thoughts and consider how the experience will affect us. This is especially important for first-time participants who may never have been exposed to this level of poverty before, but it’s important for veteran participants as well.
• It helps us relax and avoid the culture shock which would be caused by going directly from dire poverty into the stress and distraction of airline travel.
• Our debrief location gives us a chance to learn about some other aspect of the country where we are serving — yes, it may be a tourist attraction like a safari park or resort area, but it’s often tied in somehow with the history, culture or environment of the host country. Tourism dollars can be an important revenue source in some of these countries, and while I’d love you to take a mission trip to Kenya it would also create some benefit if you took a pleasure trip there. So if I can tell you how great it was to see lions and elephants and giraffes at Masai Mara National Reserve, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Our debrief for the Costa Rica trip will be at Volcano Lodge, a hotel with a view of the Arenal volcano. Please pray that this, too, will be a productive time, and that we will remember that we are still missionaries, not just tourists.