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Building Community in Costa Rica:
 Trip Report - 2008
Trip Report - 2007
WMP sent a team of 13 on a trip to Palmares, Costa Rica to help in the construction of a community center. The team consisted of 8 adults and 5 teenagers, aged 14 – 19. All of the adults had previously served on missions teams in Costa Rica, but it was a first-time experience for the young people. The team was led by Anita Lee, a member of the board of directors of WMP.
 
The construction in Palmares is expected to be a five-year project. Our team worked on the foundation. Several weeks earlier, a team from Alabama dug trenches on three sides for the foundation, but because of a shortage of money and manpower, they had not been filled with concrete. Because of excessive rain this year, they were filled with mud and water.
Part of the team tied rebar while the rest dug the mud from the trenches. On our second day, we began to mix cement and dump wheel barrow loads of the mixture into the trenches. Large rebar frames were placed in the trenches. Smaller rebar frames were set upright at intervals and tied to the larger frames and stabilized with metal bars used as guy wires.
Trip Report - 2004
In the summer of 2004, a 16-person team of World Missions Possible volunteers traveled to Costa Rica to help with the construction of a community facility in the town of Alajeula, a city just outside of San Jose. League City United Methodist Church (Texas), with the help of a $1,600 grant from World Missions Possible, sent the mission volunteers to work on this project. The facility serves as a center to educate and train people to become leaders in their churches and communities in Costa Rica. It also serves as a retreat center for congregations throughout Costa Rica and as a staging center for mission teams working in the country. The construction project is a multi-use facility that will include dormitory space, a conference center and a new kitchen.
 
The team’s work involved digging large, deep six-foot holes for the "footings" to support the load-bearing columns of the new structure. Since the area is in an earthquake zone, this was a critical consideration in the foundation work. CR foundation shows an outline of the building (perimeter of holes/dirt piles). The covered work area in CR footing is where the reinforcement bar is hand-bent into various shapes, which will then be wired together and placed in the holes to reinforce the concrete footings and columns. The team also helped repair and refurbish some of the existing structures.
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