Hola amigos! 

Today is day 4 of this fabulous trip. We are having a fantastic time here and our days are continuing to get better! Today we enjoyed a day of spending time with the children and families of the area during "Club de Ninos" (kids club) and a concert.

After the usual morning festivities of getting ready and breakfast, we headed to the local park to prepare for the day.  While one group stayed at the park to set up for kids club, while a few other groups walked around the area inviting children to kids club and families to the concert. At 10:15, we started the kids club off with some worship. It was super fun to see the kids dance and sing to Jesus! For me and a few others it was cool to know some of the songs in English and already know the motions and be able to dance easier with the kids! Then they learned the story of Jonah and the whale and did a whale craft. After that we had the opportunity to each spend time with an individual kid while they got their faces painted and got balloon animals made for them. This was such a great opportunity for us all to get to know the kids. We then handed out hot dogs to people at the kids club and people near the park.

After a yummy lunch of hot dogs, we set up for our next activity, the concert. Tapon, a popular Costa Rican rapper put on the concert for the community. Tapon is also a youth pastor and brought the youth from their Vineyard Church (Vina Palmares) to help us out for the day. Before the concert started, we set up all the equipment and went out in groups to invite more people to the concert. The concert began at 3 and was full of positive energy. Although the music was all in Spanish, we all still had a great time dancing to the music and spending time with the Ticos. My good friend Lexy had quite the experience getting pulled on to dance floor by an older tico. During the concert, Tapon shared bits of his testimony, about how he came to Christ and his past life that brought him to where he is. He then shared some affirmative words with the community especially directed towards the children. It's extremely heart warming to see someone speaking such awesome things into these kids lives.

After the concert was over, we packed everything up and got to spend more time with the students from Vina Palmares and the Vida 220 leaders.  We then headed back to base for dinner and debrief time.

Today was an exhausting day, but well worth it! Even through the exhaustion, we all still have so much joy. Right now I'm listening to everyone playing games and just having a good time in each others company. It brings me so much to joy to hear this after an exhausting day! God has been so good to us these past few days and I know He will continue to use us in incredible ways to show His love the rest of this week!

                                                Katie Gisi