A Joyous Homecoming

Sarah: Hooray, they're back! Friday late afternoon the entire gang showed up at QERC, finally home again. It was great to see everyone (ok, mostly great to see David...) and fun to have life around QERC once again. And as a bonus, I finally got to see Scott! He was David's professor when he was here as a student 5 years ago, and then for the past 2 years when David and I lived in California, it was Scott who was our boss. Scott became a good friend and it has been a blast to see him.

It has been a full house this weekend. In addition to the 13 SNU students, we have 3 LASP students, plus Scott, plus their driver Franklin (who is a stud). We all ate dinner together Friday night and got caught up on their travels thus far. Again, I'm going to have to have David write about the highlights of the past 2 weeks, but of course he has been busy crazy this weekend, helping with the group and getting things taken care of here at home (and spending time with me). We all went hiking on Saturday morning and had beautiful sunny weather. It was fun for me to have Scott as my "Naturalist", since I was a Naturalist in California working underneath him. Plus, it was great to learn more about the valley in which we live.

Today we had a great time of sharing and praying together with those that wanted to get together this morning. I love those times and it is neat to connect with the students on a deeper, spiritual level. This afternoon everyone has been busy doing their reading for the ESC class and frantically doing laundry. We did take some time to go visit Laura, the Canadian who lives in the valley. She has recently opened up a cafe of sorts on her deck on the weekends. Our students have really taken advantage of it and we usually get a fairly large group to go visit with her and eat her baked goods every weekend.

Tonight we'll have some more time of frantic laundry loads and quick re-packing, because tomorrow we leave really early. It will barely be tomorrow when we leave--we need to load the bus by 3 a.m.!! However, it will be completely worth it. I'm really excited that the 4 students who didn't participate with the first 2 weeks of this concentration decided at the beginning of the semester that they wanted to be a part of this week, because it's supposed to be the best. We are going to the Osa Peninsula, out in the middle of nowhere, where it's supposed to be the most wild place in Costa Rica. My goal is to see a jaguar and a poisonous snake...

Ok side note, I was planning on posting pictures as well, but I've been trying to upload them for an incredibly long time now (thanks, dial-up internet), so I'll have to wait until a later time to add pictures.