Eastern IDEV Students here again...

ADE and Eastern University in Pennsylvania have established an excellent partnership that links students in Eastern’s master’s program in international development (IDEV for short) with the communities of San Rafael and Vara Blanca in Costa Rica. Much of the reason for this partnership is that Tomás, Frances and Ben (our two newest staff members who came in January) were all students in the program. A group of students from Eastern’s program has come to visit each year for the past three years since the Cinchona earthquake in 2009.

From March 4-12 a group of twenty students and one professor from Eastern’s IDEV program joined ADE in Costa Rica. The group stayed in the ADE Center in San Rafael and each of the visitors also took turns staying for three nights in the homes of families in our community.

**Click here to read more and see pictures**

Rebuilding the Broken Down Places

Many people’s homes were either damaged or destroyed during the Cinchona earthquake in 2009. Some of these people lived in temporary shelters built by the government for months afterward. Some received assistance from the government in the form of materials to repair their houses. Others whose homes were completely destroyed received nothing from the government.

Over the recent weeks, members of ADE, along with members of two local churches, were able to participate in the restoration of two of these homes.

Teresa

Teresa’s home was not destroyed by the earthquake, however, the road nearby was completely obliterated. A wealthy dairy farmer up the road from Teresa’s home began to lose thousands of dollars a day after the earthquake because he could not get his milk out to market due to the destruction of the road. Teresa’s house stood in the way of where the government wanted to rebuild the road. Rather than wait for the lengthy process of the government negotiating the relocation of Teresa’s home and family, the dairy farmer came with trucks and pulled Teresa’s house down. Teresa and her family were then forced to move into a temporary emergency "house."



Andrés

Andrés is the grandfather of one of our high school students. The side wall of Andrés’s house was damaged by the earthquake and he had to move out and rent the house next door. The government agreed to provide supplies for Andrés to repair his home, but the problem is that he is elderly and blind and was not able to do the work by himself. The government then threatened to take the materials back since he was not able to use them. The news about this spread through the community and a decision was made to take action. 

**Click here to read more hear the rest of their stories and how we got to be involved**

School 2011 Starts!

We just started our second year of our school here. Check out this ADE blog post to see what we've been up to and the main things we've been doing recently and even some awesome pictures  :)

ADE Blog

Little Updates

So this stretch of not updating my blog has been longer than ever before. SORRY! The summer was crazy busy and then I was back in the States for most of the fall with my family. Well to be a little better I decided to try something a little new and hopefully more interesting than a somewhat monthly update. I'm going to try to regularly update an album on facebook with a lot of the daily type things that occur in my life here. I just started, but hope to keep up with it better. It should give you a greater glimpse into my daily life here.

Check it out here: Life in the CR is always interesting