Happy Easter and God bless you all! It’s been a while since we’ve written, and our family has many updates to share, but we first wanted to tell you about a special project we are working on.
Through a friend of ours, we were very blessed to meet a beautiful single smiling mother of six named Sarai, who, by all appearances, you’d never guess in a million years what she’s been through. A few years ago Sarai was covertly transferred hours away from a coastal city in Costa Rica to a small city near our mission post to protect her from her violent husband. Her husband was then sentenced to fifty years in prison on accounts of domestic violence. They had been married for 15 years and had six kids together. Sarai lost everything and had to start over. Luckily, her life was re-located near an uncle of hers who happened to live by the popular tourist town of La Fortuna, and she was able to find a job.
Sadly, even though Sarai found what many would consider a prestigious job as a high-end chef at a FIVE-star hotel, she is only making 1200 colones per hour, which is equivalent to about $2.00 an hour. With the cost of living in said tourist town, being paid this much is barely enough for her to live on if she lived alone. As it stands, she needs to pay bills and feed her family of eight, who all live in a small one-bedroom apartment, with a total of three beds for all of them to share, and no outside space for them to play save a skinny sidewalk leading to the street. Can you imagine? Eight people, including your mother, sharing three beds?
Sara has a dream. She’s dreamed it enough to have found and priced all the bare minimum materials needed to start her own business: baking cakes and other decorated sweets to sell. Sara proudly showed us pictures of her creations on her phone that showcased exquisitely prepared cakes and other baked goods she’s made for the luxury hotel she works at. She would already start selling her baked goods on the side – in addition to working sometimes 14 hours a day – to make ends meet, but her landlord wouldn’t let her connect an oven due to the electricity bill it would incur.
Now we have the same dream as Sara; not only to eventually help her start her own business, but to first get her family in a house that fits them, and to get her out of survival mode so she can sustain feeding her family on her own.
God has brought our two families together. I know we are meant to ask for help on behalf of this family. We sometimes struggle greatly with the inequality of the circumstances of life. But instead of dwelling on this, I’m remembering that God loves to use us all when we agree to be used by him, which is, in fact why we are here, Praise God! The Lord hears the cries of the poor.
“The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles.”
-Psalm 34:17
If you would like to contribute to helping Sarai and her family, please donate on the link below and type in “Sarai’s Family” in the notes. Thank you for partnering with us on mission! Have a very blessed Easter Season.
Schmitz Family Missions 