La Posada de Belén

About La Posada de Belén

La Posada, as it is called in shorthand, is located in El Coyol de Alajuela, a working class neighborhood about a 20 minute drive from San Jose in Costa Rica’s central valley. It is a campus of about 20 acres, with an entrance along an overcrowded two-lane surface road that serves giant warehouses and the ubiquitous maquiladoras that dot the landscape surrounding Costa Rica’s 2^nd largest city. While there is a fence along the front of the property, it’s not to keep people in, as is the case in most of Costa Rica’s shelters for homeless adolescents. The campus is otherwise open, and the entrance is shared with the rustic parking lot of the “Delicias de La Posada” coffee shop and bakery run by the students, serving the truck drivers and local employees. Traffic is a slow, endless line of oversize trucks on Costa Rica’s famously bad roads.

Inside the gates, as it were, the campus of La Posada looks more like a typical Costa Rican public school. Wide sidewalk promenades roofed in ubiquitous corrugated metal roofing connect low slung concrete buildings while they protect people from the blazing tropical sun or the relentless monsoon rains. It’s not a “pretty” school, per se, but it is buzzing with life, decorated in the gaudy, cheerful colors that mold-resistant paint comes in, bulletin boards filled with cutouts of little silhouettes of the girls and their babies. Teachers and staff decorate the halls and classroom walls with hopeful messages. In one of the dormitories, a bulletin board covered in shiny, dark blue paper with pink crepe bunting, a moon and stars, and the passage:

“Que nadie te menosprecie por ser joven.

Al contrario, que tu palabra, tu conducta,

tu amor, tu fe, y tus buenas acciones te

conviertan en modelo para los cristianos.”

1 Timoteo 4:12

“Let no one demean you for being young.

To the contrary, may your word, your conduct,

your love, your faith, and your good acts

make you a model for Christians.”

1 Timothy 4:12

On another bulletin board, lovingly decorated in blue paper with a meticulously cut bright yellow border, depicting a tree branch with birds flying over green grass and flowers, with the caption:

“Joven: No te avergüences de lo que eres. Dios te escogió para ser luz.”

“Youth: Never be ashamed for who you are. God chose you to be a light”

The bulletin boards are covered in the thick clear plastic sheeting that educators in the tropics cover everything from school books to seat covers with to protect them from the humidity that eats everything here in short order. And it’s the clear plastic covering that gets to you, not the Bible passages or platitudes. This place is resilience, and that’s what it seems to do: It helps young mothers, little girls with babies, really, to believe in themselves, to persevere, to overcome, and above all, to love their children.

The dormitories are large rooms, shared by four girls and their children. Asphalt tiled floors, the kind you’d see in a school or hospital in the States in the 1960’s, are polished to a high shine. Each girl has her own bed, next to her child’s crib, or child’s bed, and each girl has a large, bright yellow locker made of steel and expanded metal lath, like an institutional chifforobe, where all of her earthy belongings could be kept behind a sturdy padlock. Hello Kitty stickers, bible passages, baby and boyfriend pictures taped to the cage-like doors.

The four girls to a room seems odd to the casual observer. They’re big, bright rooms, with plenty of room for everyone, but one of the school psychologists explains why there are four girls to a room: This is a trauma-informed milieu. Many, most, of the girls who are here, have lived through trauma that most would find unimaginable, and many come from backgrounds where they themselves have experienced sustained unstable, abusive, or violent homes. “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” they’re called, and to hear any one girl’s story here is to bear witness to a life of adversity. It is not uncommon for a young mother in this set of circumstances, to harm her own child. If that is happening, and you have only two girls in a room, the other girl may not see it or not feel safe enough to speak up. If you have three girls in a room, two will often conspire to keep a secret. But if you have four girls in a room, they “protect each other’s children” the psychologist explains to us. By the time they had the resources to build new dormitories, they knew this, and since the school has been organized this way, they have been able to prevent the abuse of infants while still maintaining their commitment to building mother-child bonds.

La Posada is not a pretty place, until you scratch the surface and see that it is a place blessed with a beautiful spirit. In this country, for teenage mothers, dropping out of school is a fait acompli. Most will have to work anyway, and even if they have childcare, the chores of motherhood exacerbate in poverty, and the basic tasks of shelter, food and clothing make school a dreamlike wish. To highlight how sophisticated this seemingly simple place is: When you enroll at La Posada, on each school day, you only need drop your child’s clothes off at the laundry. At the end of the school day, they will have been washed, dried, folded and set in a pick up locker for you, so that after school, you can dedicate your time playing with your child, then when they are in bed, you can study. Everyone participates in chores, and you can see that for some of the girls, this is the safest home they have ever had. In this environment, symptoms of pride break out everywhere, good grades are taped to the lockers, pictures are taken, certificates of achievement are celebrated, and slowly but surely, for the resilient ones, personal safety and autonomy are nascent in their lives, and as a consequence, in the lives of their children.

Amazonian parrots are native to Costa Rica. About 8 inches tall, bright green, some with a yellow spot on their heads, others with a red spot. Parrots are the noisiest of social birds, and to witness a flock of parrots is to hear a joyful cacophony. At the best of times, La Posada is happy like a flock of parrots. This isn’t your Irish grandmother’s Catholic orphanage. The girls her are encouraged to be courageous, vulnerable and authentic. There is a relentless permission to be vulnerable, to seek help, to weep, to let go. And a relentless expectation to persist, to endure and to achieve. All of the young women who call La Posada home have faced some significant trauma in their lives, and all are under the legal guardianship of the PANI. This makes it easy to think of La Posada as a shelter or to be mis-regarded as an orphanage, and it would be accurate to say that all but a tiny fraction of the girls are survivors of extraordinary abuse or neglect. But for us, and for the people who have dedicated their lives and careers to La Posada, it is a school, it is home, and it is a place of safety from continued re-traumatization. You won’t meet victims, you will meet incredibly strong, resilient, insightful and powerful young women who have all made decisions to take the harder road of working to better their own lives while creating a better world for their children. You should intend to meet them in that light.

For service learning and study abroad students, volunteers or missionaries, La Posada de Belen is a humanitarian destination that will allow you to share your personal and professional gifts, and a place that will change you.

To donate to La Posada de Belén, click here.