Meanwhile in Costa Rica
27/07/16 05:40
With the news headlines full of politics and my head full of family business, I haven’t been paying as much attention to the news from Costa Rica lately. Monday was a big national holiday in that country. The celebration of the Annexation of Guanacaste is big deal with parades, traditional dances, and other events. Each year the country’s northwestern province goes to great lengths to show of its history and traditions. Children dress up in traditional clothing, dancers perform, vendors sell special treats like rosquillas, which are savory cookies and chicheme, which is a fermented corn drink. The president of the country visits Nicoya, a prominent town in the region. The festival is officially known as Partido de Nicoya. Costa Rica’s colors are red, white and blue and there are plenty of banners and buntings sporting the colors.
While most businesses in Costa Rica use the holiday as a time to display their national pride, you won’t notice much of that in advertisements for beer and other alcoholic advertisements. The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, Sala IV, recently ruled that the culture, values and history of the country cannot be associated with liquor for advertising purposes. National symbols and traditional Tico music cannot be used in any form of advertising for alcohol. The justices also made changes in the make up of the commission that controls advertising for alcoholic beverages, limiting the participation of representatives of advertising companies. The festival on Monday was a sort of test run for the big national celebration of Costa Rica Independence day which takes place in September.
Meanwhile, the actual day of the celebration, Monday, also saw a huge display of the power of Costa Rica’s natural environment with an eruption of Turrialba Volcano. The volcano sent a column of ash, rock and steam 3,000 meters (nearly 10,000 feet) high. The volcano is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) East of San José, the nation’s capital and most populous city. San José has seen quite a bit of volcanic ash this year. Turrialba has been erupting sporadically since the fall of 2014.
Chances are that the volcanic eruption isn’t that big of a news item in Costa Rica. It offers the occasion for some dramatic photographs for those who happen to be in the right place, but the country has many active volcanoes and the people have learned to live with the volcanoes and frequent earthquakes related to the activity of those volcanoes.
I keep my eyes on the small Central American country because we have many friends there. Our church has been involved in an active sister church relationship with a congregation there since 1988. Volunteers from our church have made visits to that congregation every year. Some years we have traveled with groups, other years just a couple of people head for Costa Rica for Vacation Bible School. Two couples have provided the main conduit for this on-going relationship through their generous dedication and faithfulness to both congregations.
Costa Rica is an amazing place to visit with two ocean coasts (the Pacific and the Caribbean), lush rainforests, active volcanoes, high plains desert, and incredible biodiversity crammed into an area about half the size of the state of South Dakota. Nearly 5 million people live in Costa Rica, with about a third of the population in the immediate vicinity of San José. When you visit the city, it is difficult to tell where the actual city limits lie because all around the official boundaries of the city are densely populated urban communities. Perhaps these communities are technically suburban, but they are as densely populated and have all of the problems associated with the large city. The population of San José exploded after the Second World War and continues to grow. Costa Rica, like Switzerland, is officially neutral. It has no standing army and offers a standard of living for its citizens that is higher than neighboring countries. In the 1970’s and 1980’s when there was incredible violence and conflict in neighboring Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, a flood of immigrants from those countries, primarily single women with children, flooded into Costa Rica to escape violence and pursue a better life for their children.
Our sister church was founded in a squatter’s community on the edge of San José. People lived in shacks made of whatever materials were available for many years. These days simple concrete block houses have been built with the support of the government to replace the shacks and shanties. The legacy of broken families and the lack of adult male role models continues to have its impact on the community, however.
Maintaining our relationship with our sisters and brothers in Costa Rica who are living out their Christian faith in their setting has been critical to our congregation’s understanding of our role in the world. We are not the only church. We are not alone in our commitment to service. We have partners around the globe. Our recognition that the church in Costa Rica is deeply connected with the church in South Dakota helps us to understand the size and scope of the church. We’ve learned, sometimes by our mistakes, that faith and mission are not commodities that we export, but rather ways of continuing connections with people of faith and mission who live in other places.
Central American countries continue to produce a large number of immigrants, many of which would like to come to the United States. In fact Costa Rica has a specific program of temporary sheltering of asylum seekers while they wait for official processing to migrate legally into the United States. Our countries are linked in many ways and there are people in Costa Rica who will one day be our neighbors here. In fact, they and all of the people of the region are already our neighbors. And loving neighbors is one of the invitations of the gospel.
So in addition to checking out the headlines from the convention and noting history being made in our own country, I’ll continue to pay attention to the lives of our neighbors with special attention to the people of Costa Rica.
While most businesses in Costa Rica use the holiday as a time to display their national pride, you won’t notice much of that in advertisements for beer and other alcoholic advertisements. The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, Sala IV, recently ruled that the culture, values and history of the country cannot be associated with liquor for advertising purposes. National symbols and traditional Tico music cannot be used in any form of advertising for alcohol. The justices also made changes in the make up of the commission that controls advertising for alcoholic beverages, limiting the participation of representatives of advertising companies. The festival on Monday was a sort of test run for the big national celebration of Costa Rica Independence day which takes place in September.
Meanwhile, the actual day of the celebration, Monday, also saw a huge display of the power of Costa Rica’s natural environment with an eruption of Turrialba Volcano. The volcano sent a column of ash, rock and steam 3,000 meters (nearly 10,000 feet) high. The volcano is about 50 kilometers (30 miles) East of San José, the nation’s capital and most populous city. San José has seen quite a bit of volcanic ash this year. Turrialba has been erupting sporadically since the fall of 2014.
Chances are that the volcanic eruption isn’t that big of a news item in Costa Rica. It offers the occasion for some dramatic photographs for those who happen to be in the right place, but the country has many active volcanoes and the people have learned to live with the volcanoes and frequent earthquakes related to the activity of those volcanoes.
I keep my eyes on the small Central American country because we have many friends there. Our church has been involved in an active sister church relationship with a congregation there since 1988. Volunteers from our church have made visits to that congregation every year. Some years we have traveled with groups, other years just a couple of people head for Costa Rica for Vacation Bible School. Two couples have provided the main conduit for this on-going relationship through their generous dedication and faithfulness to both congregations.
Costa Rica is an amazing place to visit with two ocean coasts (the Pacific and the Caribbean), lush rainforests, active volcanoes, high plains desert, and incredible biodiversity crammed into an area about half the size of the state of South Dakota. Nearly 5 million people live in Costa Rica, with about a third of the population in the immediate vicinity of San José. When you visit the city, it is difficult to tell where the actual city limits lie because all around the official boundaries of the city are densely populated urban communities. Perhaps these communities are technically suburban, but they are as densely populated and have all of the problems associated with the large city. The population of San José exploded after the Second World War and continues to grow. Costa Rica, like Switzerland, is officially neutral. It has no standing army and offers a standard of living for its citizens that is higher than neighboring countries. In the 1970’s and 1980’s when there was incredible violence and conflict in neighboring Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, a flood of immigrants from those countries, primarily single women with children, flooded into Costa Rica to escape violence and pursue a better life for their children.
Our sister church was founded in a squatter’s community on the edge of San José. People lived in shacks made of whatever materials were available for many years. These days simple concrete block houses have been built with the support of the government to replace the shacks and shanties. The legacy of broken families and the lack of adult male role models continues to have its impact on the community, however.
Maintaining our relationship with our sisters and brothers in Costa Rica who are living out their Christian faith in their setting has been critical to our congregation’s understanding of our role in the world. We are not the only church. We are not alone in our commitment to service. We have partners around the globe. Our recognition that the church in Costa Rica is deeply connected with the church in South Dakota helps us to understand the size and scope of the church. We’ve learned, sometimes by our mistakes, that faith and mission are not commodities that we export, but rather ways of continuing connections with people of faith and mission who live in other places.
Central American countries continue to produce a large number of immigrants, many of which would like to come to the United States. In fact Costa Rica has a specific program of temporary sheltering of asylum seekers while they wait for official processing to migrate legally into the United States. Our countries are linked in many ways and there are people in Costa Rica who will one day be our neighbors here. In fact, they and all of the people of the region are already our neighbors. And loving neighbors is one of the invitations of the gospel.
So in addition to checking out the headlines from the convention and noting history being made in our own country, I’ll continue to pay attention to the lives of our neighbors with special attention to the people of Costa Rica.