Esperanza

Day 4: January 12, 2010

God is so great! Our girls afternoon was awesome!  I was so excited for the opportunity to share God's perspective of them as beautiful women, and our hostess accepted Christ I learned later this evening.  There's so much more I want to share with these women about who they were created to be and how their creator loves them.  I just love them! During our time with the ladies today we painted fingernails to go along with our beauty motif.  It was hard, because we went around the neighborhood inviting the teenage girls to come and all the little girls started joining us too and we had to turn them away because we had decided this was just for the older girls.  But, after we had finished our session the little girls came back and Shawn decided to start painting some of their fingernails, I jumped in on that idea and sat out on the curb painting little fingernails until I was forced to get into the van for dinner, but I truly could have sat there all day and painted their little nails.  It was funny because Shawn picked out this yellow color, and some of the girls didn't like the yellow but I had grabbed about four different colors and three of which were various shades of pink...suddenly I had a whole group of little girls surrounding me asking me if I could paint over the yellow with pink...sorry Shawn...I don't think yellow was the best color choice...but these girls were precious!  It was difficult to try to tell them not to touch anything while their nails were wet...all I really knew how to say was cuidado! (which means, careful!) But still I had a couple little girls come running back to me asking me to fix their messed up nail polish within about two minutes.  It was still fun though.

The Ladies from this afternoon, plus little Mariella snuck in there!

God has also blessed me with plenty of little Costa Rican kisses today.  From little ones sitting in my lap, to howler monkeys and singing parrots entertaining me at dinner, to little Alondra falling asleep in my arms at this evening's events...my soul has been kissed by all of God's little blessings.  Tonight I was also given a Spanish name by one of the little girls.  She asked me what my name was in Spanish, and I told her there was no Spanish equivalent for my name, but that she could give me a Spanish name.  She smiled and thought for a moment...after a little time had passed and I was sure she'd forgotten, she tapped me on the shoulder and said "Esperanza!"  And so, ladies and gents...I have been dubbed Esperanza en Espanol.  Esperanza means "hope" in Spanish, I love it, and it's definitely on the list of kisses to my soul from the day.

Anyway, aside from this, I didn't have much of an opportunity to record a whole lot in my journal unfortunately....today was a busier day since we had three activities planned that took up most of the day with little down time.  Here are some pictures from the day though...

Alondra!

Parrot behind the coke machine at dinner!

Mariella and Me

Ciao!

~Esperanza