Heading Off to Lima

It's been a month and a day since our arrival in Costa Rica. Saturday at 4:00 pm, Tom Bastian (the big boss man) Micah Florea (a structural engineer) and his wife Beth, Emily and I will be taking off from Costa Rica to head to Peru. Our project is a church in a very poor, urban area of Lima, which has nearly 1500 members and very little space to put them, let alone continue expanding as they have been. The plan is to design a several story building for them to build on the plot of land their existing church occupies, meaning they will have to demo that building for the new one. Most of EMI's projects have plenty of space and don't exceed two stories, making this project unique, and a bit more of a challenge to the structural engineer, who I will be assisting. While there, we will be staying with host families from the church. I will likely be doing some translating for the team members in the same house as me, plus while we're at the project site.

While we'll be living with host families in a spanish speaking country, this week will be quite different than Costa Rica. Instead of little Atenas, snuggled into the hills, we'll be in a poor part of a huge city, so safety will be a bigger concern. Along with the five of us, a team of six volunteer engineers and architects will meet us in Lima. The whole week will be a marathon of designing, drafting, communicating with the church leaders, and heading back to the drawing board. After the week is done, the team members will take what we´ve finished so far back home with them and continue to work on it for the next few months.

I'm not too sure what my part of the team will be, but I'm going with an open mind to wherever I can serve.
Please pray for:

• Good communication and relationships with the church
• Energy throughout the week to get as much work done as we can
• A good understanding of local building practices, so our design can be followed well.
• Safety and health in travel and while we are there.

Thanks for your prayers and encouragement.

In Christ,
Jim Flinchum

February EMI Update Letter

Dear friends and family,

It’s been four weeks since my EMI internship started, and life has certainly been eventful. I’m just beginning to settle into some semblance of a routine, but we shall see just how routine this turns out to be.

I spent my first week with EMI at a retreat center with all of the incoming interns at a retreat center in Colorado Springs, near EMI’s headquarters. We spent several hours each day flying through the abridged versions of the biblical basis for missions, EMI’s mission to share the gospel with the spiritually and physically poor, and how to design in third world countries where building codes are suggestions at best. We built friendships, shared our testimonies, and discussed our strengths and roles as a team late into the night. And since we were in beautiful Colorado Springs, we unwound a bit with some hiking and rock climbing. The unity in the group was practically instantaneous, despite having come from all acro

ss the country, from different denominational backgrounds, and being made up of both engineers and architects (eternal rivals under ordinary circumstances). And then, having just made friends with about twenty other interns, we had to say goodbye as we headed to our respective offices. Thankfully, the internet is a wonderful tool to stay connected and see what all the other offices are up to, and EMI staff have told us that the connectedness between the interns does wonders for bringing the offices together. My fellow interns are Amos, a civil engineer (who also went to Cal Poly, though I never actually met him there), Emily, a civil engineer from Texas A&M, Michael, an architect from North Carolina State, and Ben(not pictured), an architectural engineer from Colorado, who is returning after interning here last fall.

We spent our first week in Costa Rica going through more orientation. We learned how to find our way around the town center, took some crash courses in Tico culture, got to know the staff, and studied the Bible some more. After our first day at the office, we got dropped off with our host families, which was intimidating for Amos, Michael, and Emily, who spoke next to no Spanish. They managed to survive with very little Spanish for the first week as we went through orientation (though the host families were so concerned and hospitable that one could hardly call it surviving), and just finished language school on Friday. I’ve been very grateful for how deeply imbedded my own Spanish ability is from growing up speaking it. Despite being out of practice, it’s all coming back pretty quickly, which has made me the translator not just for the other interns, but occasionally for some of the newer staff.

Please pray for:

• Amos, Michael, and the rest of the team that just left for Guatemala
• EMI staff that just returned from an overwhelming experience in Haiti
• My upcoming project trip to design a church/pastoral training complex in Peru

In Christ,

Jim Flinchum