Costa Rica (From Day 2)

It’s always strange to arrive an a foreign place in the dark, you wake up and everything is new, new sights, new sounds…

Yesterday, the first day here at La Montaña, I woke up early and spent some time alone with God just outside my door. Then I had breakfast with Joe Pent and some of the other staff at the dinning area. We sat outside drinking coffee and getting to know each other a little better as we talked through the rest of the week. We also talked philosophy of running camp, working with the churches, working with different cultures.

I met Esteban and Otto, the sound and video guys. I’ve been working mostly with Esteban teaching him how to use the cameras, and how to use Final Cut Express. He’s been using iMovie for the last year, and he seems to learn quickly. He speaks broken English, but we get along just fine. He makes fun of how lazy I am with my Spanish. He knows that I can understand much of what is said in Spanish, but he says that I’m lazy with speaking it myself. He’s probably right.

The camp that they are running this weekend is pretty much just a guest group. It has all the challenges of running a guest group that we have up at Hume. It’s interesting seeing the staff having to rearrange the schedule, and get slightly frustrated at things not running efficiently. And, here I am making a weekend video for a guest group. I don’t know very many things more difficult, but then I’m trying to teach four guys who don’t speak much English how to shoot video for a totally different kind of camp that they run fully themselves in a different season. Plus, we still have to get this video done. So, I’ve been shooting about half the time trying as best I can to explain how I am shooting and why. The other half of the time, I put the camera in their hands and give them instructions or specific shots to try. I’ve showed two of the guys the basics of editing. They are taking turns going through the footage and gathering all the good clips onto one timeline. Tonight we’ll actually edit the whole video. Hopefully I can have them do as much as possible of the work. It will be slower, but I know that they’ll learn by doing. Otherwise, if we run too short on time, I’ll just have them watch what I do so that they have an example.

Unfortunately I don’t have great material to work with. The guest group has mostly been doing teaching times and seminars. It’s a group of young adults being hosted by the Full Gospel Men’s Group. There are lots of spontaneous testimonial times. The meetings always end up going longer than planned. The La Montaña staff was supposed to run Team Building exercises (The call them riddles) for most of the morning, but the meeting was two and half hour late, so they rushed through them right before lunch in less than an hour. I wasn’t able to even get to all of them before it was over. It rained most of the afternoon, but we filmed their High Ropes Course, (Cuerdas Altas) and then some swimming, roe swing, and diving up at the lake. The ropes course is beautifully set deep in the rain forest. It was like walking into another world, or maybe just like taking the path at the wild animal park that starts just bellow the Orangutan enclosure and ends over by the elephants.

Right now, while one of the guys is working on editing the video, I’m watching Esteban teach somebody else what I taught him yesterday about the camera. There’s something especially exciting about that. It means he understands it on a deep enough level to be able to explain it in his own words, in his own language, in a way that somebody who doesn’t already know video can understand. It’s only been one day, and already I’m confident that they will continue to learn and grow in their use of these cameras and their video production in general.

On Monday, we’ll be going down to San Jose to their main office (just like Hume’s Fresno office) where I’ll be teaching video seminars all day to several volunteers that they hope will be involved at different times in their video productions at camp over the next year. In the morning I’ll be covering general philosophy and concepts in regards to making videos for camp, and in the afternoon I’ll focus on specific skills with hands-on exercises.