In the poverty-stricken city of Pavas, Costa Rica, seniors Mykaela Brown, Carter Newlin and Addyson Leathers dedicated a week of their summer to helping underprivileged youth as part of the largest Church at Viera mission trip in their history.

“Pavas is a one square mile city, and it has roughly 66,000 people living in it,” Newlin said. “It’s meant for refugees from Nicaragua who came there. It’s in complete utter poverty, like the worst you’ve seen it on TV, the worst thing you could possibly imagine. People are living in shacks where it’s just sheet metal leaned on to anything. There’s not even concrete anywhere.”

The children of Pavas have access to a safe space: the Hope Center, which is a humanitarian sanctuary and church. Having been to Pavas twice — once on the mission trip in 2017 and once last summer — servant leader DeAnne Sichler said the center only keeps improving.

“The Hope Center now has a new building and a stage for worship,” she said. “They have a whole room with computers now, so they can just do so much more with the facility than they could before. And it’s a huge, beautiful, colorful building in the middle of Pavas, which is very colorless. All of a sudden you’re driving, and you see this gorgeous facility structure that has the word ‘hope’ lit up at night. The center is like a shining a light in that city, trying to give the citizens of that city, especially the children, hope.”

Working with both the Hope Center and Church at Viera, the seniors spent their mornings renovating an elementary school.

“I was on the team painting the bathroom and it was pretty horrible to start,” Newlin said. “There was rust everywhere. One of the toilets was flipped over sideways on the ground. We cleaned the bathroom up and then repainted it and painted a little patterned mural on the wall. The group coming in behind us was gonna put some message of you’re beautiful, or something like that, so [the children] see it in the mirror when they’re looking at themselves.”

In the afternoon, the Church at Viera group visited the children, building connections with them and playing games such as tag, which is called ‘la anda’ in Costa Rica. Newlin said knowing Spanish helped him connect well with the children.

“The way that the Hope Center works is you’re encouraged to have a personal relationship with one or two of the kids, to really get to know them,” Newlin said. “I was sitting down, drawing with chalk and waiting for the kids to go to where I was. This little girl, Eimy, came up and introduced herself to me, and I’ve been studying the Spanish language for the past five years, so I could communicate with the kids pretty flawlessly. I got to go to know this little girl really well, and it was a lot of fun to get to hear her story.”

Newlin said the differences between his life and Eimy’s were shocking at times.

“Because of the the gang activity, death is a very normal thing to the kids that are there, and they’re very used to seeing it and they’re very used to hearing about it,” he said. “Eimy just casually dropped, probably the first day that I met her, as I was asking about her family, ‘oh yeah, my dad was killed’. I was like, ‘wow. That’s the reality of this level of poverty’.”

Brown said the desensitization of gang violence in Pavas was jarring after an experience on the last day of the mission trip.

“We were releasing the kids from the end of the day camp and there was an event outside with a bunch of policemen, and gangs were being arrested in the area,” Brown said. “It was really crazy to see because we were just releasing the kids by themselves to go walk back to their homes and they’re walking right in the middle of this dangerous situation.”

Brown said she got more than just a service trip out of the experience, but a long-term commitment.

“It was hard to understand their language, but it was so cute playing with this girl, Camila,” she said. “Camila would write our names next to each other and chalk with a heart around and that just really impacted me. She loved doing the splits with me; she was very excited that we could both do a split. I also have another girl that I connected with, Kimberly, and that’s why I sponsor her now. Once a month I will give $40 to her and that pays for her food, education, etc.”

Striving to inspire the children of Pavas, the seniors shared their spiritual values along with completing their humanitarian service.

“We taught them Bible verses and would recreate a Bible story by putting on a play,” Brown said. “We also spread [God’s word] through arts and crafts. One [activity] was about how Jesus calmed the storm to show that during a hard time just know that Jesus is there for you and is gonna bring hope in for them to get out of an area.”

Leathers said she recommends the mission trip to any high school senior, which was the age group the trip was aimed at.

“[The mission trip] was something my parents had talked to me about for forever because they’ve been to Pavas before, and they’ve been to Peru multiple times on mission trips,” Leathers said. “I just think it’s such a good opportunity to voluntarily take time out of your summer to go help these kids.”

Newlin said the experience was life-changing, mentioning that he even wrote his college essay about ‘la anda’ and “turned it into a metaphor for the power of love.”

“Instead of just being like, ‘wow, I’m so grateful’ and then moving on, it’s like ‘I have access to all this stuff, how am I going to take this into my life and better other people’s lives?'” he said.

Sichler said the purpose of the trip was to share God’s love and show that His love is boundless.

“When I get the opportunity to get away from my comfort zone, away from the blessings that I have here in America, and I get the opportunity to go somewhere else and just love on God’s people, the spiritual takeaway for me is that the same God we have here is in Costa Rica, and it’s just a reminder that we have, a global God that loves all of His people,” Sichler said. “That’s what I’m trying to teach my my seniors and also teach them about discipleship. Taking them to a place where there’s a language barrier, cultural barrier, a food difference, and still showing them that they can have the same conversation about the same Lord and have that discipleship experience was is the most spiritual impact to me.”