My Heart for Costa Rica: A Testimony of Transformation and a Vision for Christian Renewal

About the Book

“I write as a man who was given a new life in a small valley in the mountains of Pérez Zeledón, and who now understands that the chance was never meant for him alone.”

At thirty-eight, after the daily work of recovery and a return to the sacraments, the author found himself whole for the first time in his adult life. My Heart for Costa Rica is the record of that transformation.

For the people of Costa Rica

A gift and a warning: a reminder of what Costa Rica still holds — a living Christian culture, coherent families, and a high-trust society — and a constructive proposal for strengthening and sharing those values.

For seekers elsewhere

For those in the North seeking salvation from the collapse of faith, family, and meaning — especially men — and evidence that another way of life is still possible.

The book unfolds in six movements: Inheritance, The Crossing, Immersion, Formation, How a Place Becomes a People, and What Is Being Tested.

From the Book

Passages from My Heart for Costa Rica

It was the core of the happiest days of my life. The candles, the organ, the altar. I stood there and sang unto God. The conductor gave his signals, we performed, and our voices would echo through the cathedral as we completed each piece with precision. The people in the pews would nod and smile approvingly. We would file out in the closing procession as the organist played. The doors would shut at the end of the procession and you could hear the people begin to talk and collect their coats and file out of the church hall. It was all tremendously satisfying.
— Chapter One: The Maple Leaf Forever

There was no single night I became a stranger. It was the night the bus did not wait, and the night the clerk did not hear me, and the night I stood in St. James and could not sing, and the year the old house belonged to someone else. I still had a passport. I still paid tax. We had meant the block, the choir, the table, the city that let a boy ride to Bluffer’s and come home before dark. Then we meant a crowd I did not trust and a crowd that did not trust me, and I was in the middle with three jobs and a pizza on my lap.
— Chapter Four: You Can Never Go Home Again — When I Became a Stranger

I stepped out of the plane still in my clothes from Canada, and the night air of San José hit me like a wall of heat and moisture. It was like jumping off a diving board into a hot tub. Up north those temperatures lasted an hour or two at the hottest part of the day, and I was acclimated to cold November air. I drank it in. My shoulders dropped. Every muscle in my body let go at once. The humid air soothed my throat. I could smell damp earth and flowering trees even there, on the tarmac. I noticed the atmosphere among people right away and felt at home in the relaxed vibe. I could not help but smile. This was somewhere really special.
— Chapter Eight: Arrival

Mountains of Pérez Zeledón beneath low cloud

And still there was a clear lack of money. You could see it on every street: the unfinished construction, the wear, the tin roofs patched with whatever was at hand, a rusty wheel left in a yard, paint peeling off a door that someone still opened each morning. It was poverty. It was not indifference. A woman swept a cracked sidewalk as if the crack were beside the point. A man in a faded shirt repaired a chair in the open air and looked up to say buenos días as if he had all the time in the world. I had learned, in other places, to read scarcity as a kind of hardness in the face. I kept looking for that hardness here and could not find it. The question stayed with me anyway. How had they managed it—to be this kind, with so little?
— Chapter Eight: Arrival

Two horses grazing beside a wooden fence

From the Prologue

Costa Rica stands as a beacon of hope. The Christian vision of family, work, and ordered liberty has the power to form a wholesome life of meaning.

If you are reading from the North or from any place where the lights are dimming, read this as evidence that another way of life is still possible — and that it is worth every sacrifice to protect and to live.

About the Author

Evan Bannister Minaker grew up in Toronto, where music was everything in his early years — a scholarship chorister at St. James Cathedral who learned the discipline of craft from great mentors. Raised in the shadow of his Oma's remarkable story, he carries her cross, made from the melted remains of the churches of Dresden.

He left Canada for Costa Rica and found faith, recovery, and home among the Ticos in the mountains of Pérez Zeledón. This book is written, in his words, “to make my Oma proud.”

My Heart for Costa Rica