Monday, April 18, 2011

Beautiful Costa Rica

It's been a crazy week. Good, but crazy. I arrived in Jaco, Costa Rica on Saturday last week really not knowing what our first week here would look like. I knew I was going to be helping the team out with a morning workshop and there was talk of our trafficking team consulting with a local ministry in the afternoons. But other than that....

Our morning workshop ended up being well attended with about thirty people from YWAM and the local church attending. Turns out, half of those people were under the impression that the workshop would be addressing prostitution and human trafficking... which was not entirely true. The workshop itself is geared towards people who work with children at risk but the principles could be applied broadly to any population at risk.

So when the afternoon rolled around, instead of meeting with three people from the local ministry like we had anticipated, Matt, Theresa and I scrambled to put together a workshop on the topic of women in prostitution and human trafficking for fifteen people. Talk about having to do some quick thinking!!

And it went on like that for the whole week. We averaged about 13 people for our afternoon meetings and covered the topics of sexual assault, demand, organizational leadership, street level observations and did some serious praying. The group was diverse; some people have worked with prostitutes for a year and others are just starting out. It was challenging to make sure we didn't leave someone out during the training but not bore others.

Our time here in Jaco has definitely been a success for us. We had no idea we would get such a great turnout. Woohoo!

Now I gotta go figure out what this week is going to look like....

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