Meeting Emergency & Long Term Needs in Costa Rica

Operation Blessing’s outreach center in Costa Rica assists the poor and hurting every day. Meet Vivian and Migdalia; two lives OBI partners have helped.

Job Training
Poverty affects 18% of Costa Rica’s population. Single mothers and battered women are among a growing segment of Costa Ricans struggling to survive. Left alone with children to feed and care for, these often uneducated women have difficulty finding jobs. Viviana was one of those left in such a situation.

Viviana found herself raising her three-month-old baby alone. The young mother didn’t have any marketable job skills until she came to one of Operation Blessing’s free career training centers. In just three weeks, she learned how to do manicures and pedicures, passed her certification exams and was offered a job working in a beauty salon. Excited about this opportunity, Viviana said, “I am so happy to see the fruits of this course in such a short period of time.”

Operation Blessing also offers students career training in hair dressing, sewing, the culinary arts and clothing design in locations like San Jose, Cartago and Guásimo. Each center has all of the tools necessary to properly train the nearly 200 women who attend the free classes. New groups of students enroll every two weeks.

Disaster Relief
Migdalia and her husband were not at home with their six daughters when flooding destroyed their house last January. The parents frantically made their way back to Sixaola through the torrential rain. After two days of weary travel, they found their children safe but wet on the second story of Migdalia’s sister’s house.

Her daughter Vicky remembers the hours she spent in shoulder-high water. With tears in her eyes she said, “I thought I was going to die.”

Migdalia and her family were among the 8,500 flood survivors in the Atlantic Zone. Although relieved their children were alive, the couple mourned over the loss of their home. Everything had been destroyed, even their jobs. The struggling family had been working on a banana plantation for years, but the plantation was damaged and couldn’t hire them back. Migdalia didn’t know how she would feed her children.

But Operation Blessing Costa Rica intervened and delivered emergency food packages to the families in Sixaola. Migdalia was grateful to be able to feed the family and new toys from OBI helped her girls take their minds off of the disaster.

Thank you for caring for the poor & hurting in Costa Rica!