The gospel can’t be shared if there isn’t a place for the community to gather.
A Central American mission had a community center, but water to the mountain jungle village was unreliable in the best of times. Over the summer, six students and two professors from the College of Engineering and Technology’s Engineers Gone Global club at Grand Canyon University headed to the indigenous community of Shiroles, Talamanca, Costa Rica, to share the gospel and build a water tower for the Yàmipa project.
Yàmipa, in the indigenous language of Bribri, means "family," and was founded by Luis and Susan Selles. Luis grew up in Shiroles and is Bribri, and he and Susan started Yàmipa to focus on community development with a biblical worldview.
“It was kind of a backwards engineering project,” said Brynnor Poplin, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering. “Luis, the guy that we were going down and helping, and his brother had built different water towers in the region before. So he had bought all of the supplies for the water tower, and then we helped him design the water tower with the supplies that they had bought.”
Poplin, Addison Samarin, Luke Brenden and the rest of the GCU group spent seven days in the village populated by indigenous people. Located 112 miles from Costa Rica’s capital city, San Jose, Yàmipa is snuggled into a tropical jungle valley wrapped by the Cordillera de Talamanca mountain range. With the unpaved rural roads and steep terrain, it’s a four- to six-hour drive from the capital to the village on the Caribbean side of the isthmus.
Yàmipa is so small that the team stayed at another nearby village, Esperanza, where they interacted with and learned about the people in extreme rural Costa Rica.
“We were helping,” said Samarin, a mechanical engineering senior. “There were a couple of different areas that we were in. So we were staying at a mission center called Esperanza and got to hang out with the community. (We were) just like seeing what their life is like and living there in a kind of village.”
Poplin and Samarin said that the language barrier was the biggest challenge.
“There were a good number of people there who could speak pretty well, both English and Spanish, so that helped," said Samarin. "(It was a challenge) when you're trying to communicate with people from the community who helped us with the water tower. One of the main guys who helped us spoke pretty much no English.”
Poplin felt the same way.
“There was definitely a language barrier,” he said. “But, we picked up on it a little bit, a couple of us better than others, but we were able to communicate. Google Translate was helpful for sure. It's amazing that there's such good cell service in rural areas and other countries. In Phoenix, there are a lot of blank spots.”
There was one other challenge Samarin faced during the week.
“(It’s) one that's less important, but there are really big bugs in Costa Rica,” she said. “So it was definitely a little shocking.”
There was more to this mission than just building a water tower for the community center.
“(We were…) more so like working to help people who are working on spreading the gospel,” Samarin said. “We helped them in their mission. The water tower project made it easier for Yàmipa to have people doing mission work for better things.”
She said that it was a challenge to figure out how Engineers Gone Global – the club uses engineering for global well-being – could do their part to spread the gospel because of the language barrier.
“We definitely had intentional conversations when we're hanging out with people and stuff,” she said. “The biggest thing was, how can we make it easier for the people who are there (spreading the gospel) and going to be continuing to do that?”
Poplin found the work a greater connection to his faith.
“The whole goal of us going down there was to help Luis and his mission,” he said. “His goal is to reach the community and spread the gospel. That is ultimately the main reason we went down there.”
He paused and thought some more.
“But I would say my faith personally was more trusting in the Lord,” he added. “It was just cool to see everyone just working together and accomplishing the mission. It was an awesome trip with a bunch of awesome people.”
“They're sort of seeding the future,” added Samarin.
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