INTEGRATING FAITH, SERVICE, SCHOLARSHIP
LASP NEWS
LASP’s mission is to cultivate a Christ-centered community of critical thinking learner-scholars from multiple disciplines, that seeks to expand global awareness and integrate Kingdom values via experiential learning in the Latin American context, challenging students to respectfully engage our host cultures and strive for academic excellence.
A Biannual Newsletter Twenty Five Years At LASP LASP Director, Anthony Chamberlain reflects on his 25th anniversary in Costa Rica. P. 1-2
Fall 2015 Current
Alumni Updates
A few updates from our current semester
Read about what LASP alumni are doing, where they are in the world, and what they are passionate about.
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Perspectives
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Looking Back
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same? Twenty Five Years At LASP by Antonio Chamberlain The More Things Change, the more they Stay the Same, is an expression I’ve been contemplating for many years. Perhaps it seems silly. But having just completed 25 years at LASP, this dicho keeps recurring as a potentially meaningful frame of reference for reflecting over the then . . . and now. When Ruthanne and I arrived at LASP in 1990, Costa Rica’s population was just over 3 million. Today there are more than 5 million (and we brought 3 Tico children into the world, so we are in part responsible). Then there were 280,000 cars on Costa Rican roads. Twenty five years later, we creep along with 1,350,000 other registered cars. Twenty-five years ago it took me 10 minutes to drive to work, the same distance that now often takes me 40 minutes. The trickle of tourists coming to Costa Rica then has increased to an annual flood of more than one million visitors today. During the same time period, however, the poverty rate has remained virtually unchanged . . . folks who do not have their basic needs met still hovers at about 25%. Just a few weeks ago LASP’s program assistant led the newly arrived Fall 2015 semester participants in an orientation week devotional by placing a water bottle in the center of the classroom and asking Antonio, Ruthanne, and Ben them to report what they saw. Their responses varied widely depending, of course, on where they David, December, 1993 were seated relative to the bottle. My reminiscing found me perusing the old issues of LASP’s Central America Currents (later renamed, Latin American Currents). Among them I found an article I had written 25 years earlier entitled “The Power of Changing Perspectives” . . . eerily similar to the 2015 orientation reflection. Mine was a consideration of the different emphases of North and Latin American approaches to Easter. It concluded: “Christ was constantly imploring his followers to examine common things from a new perspective. He is using Central America and Central Americans to do just that today in the LASP.” P. 1