El 15 de Setiembre Daycare Center

We continue to get more involved at Roblealto. We spent the beginning of the week furnishing our office in the mountains at the Bible Homes. Mark spent many hours working on the details of Roblealto's new website. He's had a lot of fun learning how to manage a website and making it user-friendly and informative. We were really happy to hear that our bosses love the website and want to get it up and running as soon as possible. The plan is to launch it on the 15th of September, which is Costa Rica's Independence Day! We will send an email with the link so you can check it out once it's up!

Wednesday we met with Pamela, our boss, to discuss the next couple of weeks. She has set up visits for us to all 3 daycares and the Bible Home/school. We will also be talking with all the major department heads to learn as much as we can about the many facets of Roblealto. After each visit/meeting, we are typing up a informational report that will be used by Roblealto staff when giving tours of the various facilities - luckily they are in English. And luckily we have Lizzy who is doing the visits with us and is bilingual! Emily also presented (in Spanish!) the evaluation comments from last week's volunteer group. We had a good initial conversation about some of our ideas for continuing to develop the volunteer experience.

Yesterday, we went on our first visit to one of the daycare centers. It was fun to see this part of Roblealto! We really enjoyed meeting Dona Elba who is the director and has worked there since it opened 38 years ago. She has seen a lot of changes including growing from 30 kids to 140 and, at the same time, watching the neighborhood around them deteriorate. We had the honor of talking to one of the teachers who has been there 15 years. She discussed the difficulty of working in that neighborhood where the children see prostitution, drugs, abuse, and violence on a regular basis. She said to us, "For the students, it's not a movie, it's life." It's hard to imagine what difficult lives the children have, but it was so wonderful to see Roblealto at work. As Dona Elba said, Roblealto is the only good thing in the community. We loved chatting with the children and playing with them a bit on the playground. They are so warm and welcoming - just regular loving kids! This is only because of the changes that God brings about in their lives.

Today we visit another daycare center. Continue to pray for the ministry of Roblealto and the 650 children that they serve. God is certainly at work here!