11/7/10
I’ve been in Costa Rica for over a month so remembering everything that’s happened in the last 5ish weeks is going to be impossible, but this is seriously the first chance I’ve gotten to write and I’ll try my best.
I remember my parents driving me to D.C. and staying the night with me before my orientation at the Holiday Inn Georgetown. I was excited to be going on another adventure but I was also nervous about meeting so many new people. I knew that I would be spending a lot of time with them over the next 3 months and I was worried that I wouldn’t like them or vice versa. I got to spend some time with Andy as he lives really close to that area of D.C. It was like the night before my trip to Korea all over again! The following morning, before my family left, I switched rooms and met my roommate for the night, Taylor. He’s a really cool guy from Tennessee so I was definitely relieved to have already met someone I got along with well.
The orientation day we had is a huge blur for me at this point. I remember meeting a lot of people and doing a lot of activities, filling out a lot of paperwork and just trying to absorb as much information as I could. I remember the very, very first thing we did as a group was introduce ourselves and say one fun fact we had learned about Costa Rica during our research. I felt like everyone was really nervous so I decided to go first and break the ice by telling everyone that prostitution is legal in Costa Rica (which may or may not be true; it’s still unclear)! The guys in my group thought it was hilarious but the girls just thought I was weird haha. Beyond that, I don’t remember a whole lot. We did some skits, drew some posters about or fears/concerns and our aspirations, learned some of the Peace Corps’ policies, etc. Afterwards, we got some “walk-around” money for dinner and whatever else we wanted to do in Georgetown. It’s an expensive part of town so we got like $75 or something crazy. We also got reimbursed for our travels to D.C. so I had a lot more money to take with me to Costa Rica than I was expecting. I went to a Greek restaurant with a dozen or so other people and they were all cool too, so I wasn’t really worried at all about the trip any more after that; although, I started to feel old, haha. I’m actually under the average age for the group, but that’s only because there are a couple people over fifty that bump it up. I’m definitely over the median.
The makeup of our group is interesting. Tico 21 (Costa Ricans refer to themselves as ticosand we’re the 21st group) is comprised of two different programs: TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and CED (Community Economic Development, I think!). TEFL is almost all girls and CED is almost all guys, but combined it’s fairly even. I think they told us at our orientation that we come from almost half of the states in America. Surprisingly, Virginia is the third most represented state, I’m pretty sure, behind California and Texas. There’s me, a girl from Harrisonburg, a guy that went to JMU from Richmond and a girl from central Virginia. There are 45 of us in all, so four from Virginia isn’t bad at all. North Carolina has a few also and, actually, one of the girls from there lived and worked in Luray in the same restaurant that Katie used to work at. Small world. There are quite a bit of people in our group that already speak Spanish fluently or close to it. In fact, one of the girls in our group speaks Spanish better than English! A lot of them grew up in Spanish-speaking homes and others lived abroad in Spanish-speaking countries. One of the things we talk about all the time is how there’s really no substitute for living somewhere and being completely immersed if you’re really trying to learn a language. A lot of us took a lot of Spanish in school and a few people were Spanish majors in college, but the people who actually lived abroad are the ones that can speak the most now.
After orientation, we flew into Costa Rica and were immediately bussed up to a retreat outside of the capital, San Jose. We were in an area called Tres Rios, three rivers, and my host family later explained that rich and famous people live there. We spent the next four days getting to know each other, learning more about our training and eventual service, trying new foods and drinks and just relaxing. It never dawned on me until just now, because four days out of five weeks seems negligible, but because of the way our training is set up, a lot of the friendships I’ve made since being here are almost exclusively from those four days. I’m jumping ahead of myself a bit now, but we were put into training communities based upon our program and our Spanish level. I’m in the TEFL intermediate-low group with four (now five; we just got a new girl from Peace Corps/Tonga) other people and the only time I see the others is when we have training all together two days a week. And for the most part, our training is based upon our program, so what I’m saying is that I basically never get to see the guys from the CED program and the friendships that I have with those guys were formed over an extremely short and busy period of four days. Wow! Really crazy to think about. The retreat was further proof that this is where I’m supposed to be and these are the people I’m supposed to be with and this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I remember in my initial interview with the leaders of my program, I told them that I had never felt such a sense of purpose in my life. I know there will be hard times to come and that feeling will be tested, but I really feel like I can make a difference here and I will be made different in the process, also.
The four days were really fun. I remember playing sports in our free time during the day and just hanging out or using the Internet to check sports scores at night. The food was really good, but it’s still really good at my host family’s house, too. For breakfast, we either eat gallo pinto (rice and beans with cilantro, awesome) with an egg and quesoblanco (white cheese that squeaks when you chew it; if you can get past the texture, I think it tastes really good) or we eat sandwiches. I prefer the more typical gallo pinto breakfast, but the sandwiches are pretty decent, too. Lunch and dinner are kind’ve hard to distinguish between. I haven’t really noticed a difference. We usually eat rice and beans, chicken, andplatanos (fried bananas; I was positive I would hate them and I kind’ve did at first because I don’t like sweet stuff usually, but they’ve grown on me and I can’t imagine eating rice and beans without them, almost like having a Korean meal without kimchi!). We also eat soups with chicken or meat and a lot of vegetables. They have potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower here, but the other vegetables are different from what we have. It’s funny though, because most of the ones we don’t have are really similar to potatoes in my opinion so it’s almost like they just have a lot more variety of potato, but I know they’re not really. Basically, the food here is great and I’m pretty sure I’m gaining back the weight I lost in Korea haha. The only food I didn’t like so far were the lunches my host mom packed for me to go to my training site before I told her that I didn’t mind cold beans and rice!
This is going to take forever if I describe everything that happened in detail, so I’ll just expand on the most important things that happened during our retreat. We had our LPI (language proficiency interview) test to determine which level we were and what community we would be going to. I did not do well at all during my interview but somehow I got intermediate-low. Not that I doubted the teachers in the first place, but having been in my group for a month I know they put all of us in the right place because all of our levels are similar. It’s nice not having anyone really below or above you, so we’re all learning together at the same pace and we all have the same struggles. We need to get to intermediate-intermediate to be sworn in as Volunteers, although they did say that for the TEFL program they would also accept intermediate-low. We’re going to re-take the test later this week, as it’s the midpoint in our training and I’ll be able to see how much I’ve learned and what level I’ve already attained. I would like to be IM at the midpoint and intermediate-high by the end. Another thing that happened during the retreat was a couple guys and I watched a Costa Rican soccer game with the security guard. His favorite team, Saprissa, was playing and he convinced us all to become Saprissistas (fans of Saprissa). Little did I know that Saprissa is far and away the favorite team for most ticos and their rival, La Liga, has the second biggest fan base. Now I’m always getting into arguments with the Ligistas! The next to last day of the retreat, we were sent on a mission to buy and use phone cards and then find our way to an important location in Cartago using our Spanish and ask questions about the place. Our group got the museum in Cartago and we met an artist who was working on a huge mural inside the museum. She explained that she is the first woman in Costa Rica to be allowed to paint a mural (I think, there was no translator so I just picked up bits and pieces of what she said) and that the mural is a history of Costa Rica from the time of its discovery until now. It was nice to get out of the retreat center for a few hours and have our first taste of real Costa Rican culture. At the end of the retreat, we had a barbecue with music and dancing and during the meal there was a minor earthquake! I didn’t even realize what it was at first haha. Luckily, there haven’t been any quakes since then.
Towards the end of the retreat, we were given pamphlets telling us which community we were going to and who our family was. Right now, I’m in the community of Frailes about 25 miles south of San Jose. After another month or so, I’ll be done with training and will be leaving for another community, most likely much farther away from the center of the country. I really like it here; I kind’ve wish I could stay, but I would also enjoy seeing other parts of the country, too. Frailes is a town of about 5,000 people and although it feels small, it is the second biggest of all the training communities. There isn’t much here, but we do have some resources that aren’t available in other places. We have two Internet cafes, a police station, two grocery stores, three sodas (hole-in-the-wall restaurants), a library, two pool halls and much more! It doesn’t sound like much, but like I said, other places don’t have hardly anything. A couple of the other communities that I’ve seen are just houses and farms on the side of the road with a pulperia (general store) and an elementary school. A lot of kids from all around have to come to Frailes for high school. The other thing our pamphlet told us is the address of your host family’s house, but Costa Rica doesn’t really do addresses. Basically, they take a point of reference that anyone who knows the area would know well, like the Catholic Church, and then they tell you how many meters and in what direction to walk. My address was 300 meters southwest of the Catholic Church. Thankfully, my family was there waiting for me at the bus stop to take me home or else I probably would have never found their house!
Speaking of meeting my host family, it was really awkward at first because my Spanish was so bad and I was so nervous that I could barely say, “Hola.” I remember greeting my new mom with the kiss on the cheek thing they do here that I was still not completely comfortable with and then putting my luggage into a taxi. I think I did an OK job packing for this trip and I definitely didn’t bring as much stuff as I could have, but I still got the sense that the amount I had brought with me was more than what they were expecting. The family I’m staying with isn’t poor by any stretch, but they just have less stuff. And it makes you think… do I really need twenty T-shirts or could I do laundry more often and get by with five or ten? It’s an interesting topic right now because we don’t have water due to the landslides we’ve been having. But I’ll get to that later. My dad, Carlos, is really chill. He works at one of the sodas, so I can go anytime I want and get free food. I try not to take advantage of it too often though because I feel like I stick out enough as it is and I don’t want to be treated differently just because I’m a gringo. But I think it’s culturally acceptable in Costa Rica for family to hook each other up with stuff from where they work. My mom, Mayela, stays at home most of the day except for random trips to the store or to visit friends and family. She’s an awesome cook and she is from here originally and she had something like 15 brothers and sisters so there’s always more family to meet. She told me that she has over a hundred cousins, but they count any relative as a cousin here practically. I have three brothers: Ignacio, 29, Lizandro, 20, and Brandon, 15. Ignacio works construction and he has two kids of his own that live with their mother; Nayeli, 7, and Scarleth, 5. Lizandro owns one of the pool halls in town. It’s free to go in and play pool but he has arcade games and he sells snacks. Brandon is still in high school so I see him the most out of anyone in my family. At the beginning, my Spanish wasn’t very good and I didn’t have a whole lot of time before or after training each day to hang out with my family, so I didn’t have a chance to really bond with them. I felt comfortable and they did their best to include me, but we just didn’t have the time with each other necessary to really form that relationship. But now I really feel close with them and we have inside jokes and games we play and whatnot. The difference is that my Spanish is a little better, but the main thing is that I’ve had a ton of free time with them the past few days because we’re in “Standfast” right now because of the national emergency (Standfast means we’re not allowed to leave our community but we can continue our normal routine). Costa Rica is mostly mountains, steep mountains, and when it rains a whole lot and the earth is completely saturated the ground gets really heavy and it slides. They call them derrumbes in Spanish. Some derrumbes don’t really affect anyone because they happen on slopes so steep that nobody lives there and the land isn’t cultivated so it just drops down to the river in the valley and it’s no big deal. But this time a huge derrumbe landed right on the road to San Jose four days ago and they still haven’t completely cleaned it up, so we haven’t had any classes since our Spanish class on Wednesday. And we had just come back from our visit with current Peace Corps volunteers, so we haven’t had some of our classes in a week and a half. Thankfully, everyone in our group is OK, but a few dozen Costa Ricans died in various parts of the country. The worst that happened in Frailes was that our power got knocked out for a day and we didn’t have water for four days or so (we just got water as I was writing this!). And some of our roads got washed away. The roads in Costa Rica are really bad and heavy rains and landslides keep messing them up. One of my companeros (mates, it’s funny how you get used to saying something in another language and you can’t think of the English version right off; that hasn’t happened to me too often yet, but we had a session with current volunteers telling us about the different clubs and stuff within Peace Corps/Costa Rica and they often couldn’t think of what they were trying to say in English)… One of my companeros here in Frailes had two derrumbes near his house, one on either side, so he was sandwiched in for a few hours before they cleared away the dirt! We actually had a couple small landslides at my house that fell into our driveway. It wasn’t dangerous at all, just more of a pain that we had to cut down the trees that fell across our drive and get the dirt out of the way.
So with all the free time I’ve had in the house for almost a week, I’ve been watching movies, playing card games and just talking with them. Sometimes the movies are only in Spanish, but usually they can get English subtitles for me. They enjoy making fun of horror movies like I do so it’s a lot of fun. Naipe is their favorite card game; someone told me that it’s similar to rummy. You start with seven cards and the objective is to get sets of three of a kind or three cards of the same suit in consecutive order. Once a set is played, other players can add to the set and whoever runs out of cards first wins. The only difference between naipe and rummy is the way you draw and discard. I lost terribly the first time I played but once I picked it up I rattled off nine wins in ten games and my brothers claimed I was cheating haha! Quetramposo!
Training with the Peace Corps consists of Spanish classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday, program-related training on Tuesdays and Peace Corps-related training on Thursdays. The Spanish classes are in your communities with a teacher that takes the bus out to your site. Frailes is the farthest one away from San Jose so our class starts the latest! However, we have to get up the earliest to get to our other classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it’s a tradeoff. We go from 9:30 to 4. We started with general vocabulary and a quick review of how to conjugate regular verbs in the present tense and we’ve been steadily working our way towards harder material. For me, having taken so many Spanish classes before, grammar isn’t the issue; I just don’t know that many words. We finished the past tense last week and we just started the future. Apparently, Spanish is spoken a little differently in each individual country, so some of the words that I learned before aren’t used here. But it’s nice when, for example, the future tense in Costa Rica is much simpler than what I had learned in my classes and since forgotten and was dreading trying to learn again. Almost every class, we’re sent out into the community with a question to ask or a topic to talk about with a random person. It was intimidating to do these tasks at first, but I’m really glad that we did them, not necessarily that it really enhanced my language skill, but it showed us that the people here are very warm and receiving of us and don’t mind talking to strangers. Sure, it’s a little awkward at first, and they have to get over their initial surprise that we came right up to them and started talking with them, but after that they would talk to us all day if we let them.
The entire Tico 21 group travels to Tarbaca for the classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Coming from San Jose, one of the major roads going south takes you to Tarbaca and then splits. If you stay right you go up to where the CED communities are and if you go left you’ll pass all the TEFL training communities. So Tarbaca is a great place for us all to meet because it’s right in the middle of all of our towns. Our classes start at 8 a.m. and the bus ride from Frailes takes about an hour, so we have to get up around 5:30 in order to be ready for our 6:30 bus. Our classes don’t finish until 5 and sometimes the bus from San Jose is full and we have to wait until the later one comes at 6:30 p.m. We don’t get home those nights until almost 8 and by that time the only thing we can do is have dinner and get ready for bed (I forgot to mention that people generally sleep from 9-5 here; the economy is still largely agricultural so this schedule takes full advantage of the sunlight). The technical training we have on Tuesdays is for learning how to be an English teacher in Costa Rica. Some of what we learn is general stuff that all teachers need to know, but a lot of it is specific to CR. We learn about how ticos communicate with each other indirectly and how we might step on teacher’s toes if we’re very direct with them. I’m still trying to figure this stuff out, but one example of indirect communication that I’ve encountered so far was when I went on my visit the family asked me what I liked to eat for breakfast back home in the States. I don’t normally eat breakfast back home but I told them corn flakes anyway and they had worried expressions on their faces, which really confused me because I didn’t think what I liked to eat back home should worry them. But the volunteer I was visiting interjected and told them that it didn’t matter what they served me for breakfast. Then he explained to me that they were indirectly asking me what I wanted to have for breakfast the next morning. It’s one of those things that seems really strange and inefficient to outsiders, but it’s just another way of doing things and people from the culture that understand the indirect communication do just fine with it. Another interesting thing about ticos is that they love talking about their families because who you are is more defined by who you’re related to than by what you do with your life or what you’ve accomplished. So if you’re meeting a teacher for the first time and you exchange pleasantries and then get right down to business, they’re not going to be comfortable with you and you’re not going to get anywhere with them. It’s better to just relax and talk with them about their family and community and stuff like that the first time and they’ll be ready to talk about work later. That’s another cultural difference that will be hard to adapt to for me. Not that Americans are unfriendly at work or anything, but work is for work in our culture. And tico time is another difference that I’m going to struggle with. You always hear about how in Latin cultures, time isn’t that big of a deal and people show up late for things, but it doesn’t really hit home until you live here and see just how widespread it really is. I always wondered how it worked exactly because some things almost have to be punctual; and a few things are, like the buses, but that’s about it. We went to the high school one day to observe the first class of the day before we had to go to our Spanish class and the teacher showed up fifteen minutes late and then left again to make copies. The class that was supposed to start at 7:30 didn’t really start until 8. Most of the students were there on time, but a couple trickled in well after 8 and it wasn’t a big deal. It was a good class, but the time thing was really surprising to me. I thought that tico time would be limited to social functions but it seems to spill over into just about anything. I don’t think stores have set opening and closing times either. Culture isn’t the only thing we learn about in our TEFL classes. We’re learning a lot of basics for teaching like lesson planning, classroom management and how to provide a good learning environment for the kids. I’m really glad that I have experience with teaching going into this because it helps me understand what I’m learning because I can look back on some of the situations that arose in Korea. I’m beginning to realize that learning and experience go hand in hand and it makes sense to work for a few years before going to grad school because what you’re learning is less theoretical and more practical when you have an experience to apply it to. Not that there’s anything wrong with going straight to grad school, but I think older people might get more out of it. If I had never taught a class before in my life I wouldn’t really understand what I’m learning now in training. Of course, after a few months of teaching I would remember what I learned and start applying it to my classes, but right now I can think back to problem students in Korea or times when the class got out of control. I have situations in mind that what I’m learning applies to directly. The classes are great and the training I’m receiving now is amazing and infinitely better than the training we had (or didn’t have) in Korea, but nothing compares to experience. It sucked not having hardly any training and almost never having a co-teacher and teaching as many classes a day as we had to, but Katie and I learned how to be teachers that year. We learned by doing.
The Peace Corps classes on Thursdays are about culture in general, medical stuff, safety and security and rules and regulations of the Peace Corps. I feel like Thursdays are a little more interesting than Tuesdays because the classes are more varied than just learning how to teach for eight hours. Our culture teacher explains how certain words are use differently in Costa Rica than in any other place and how different groups of people greet each other. Women greet everyone with a kiss on the cheek but two men wouldn’t do that, for instance. The younger guys whistle at each other as they pass while the older men kind’ve grunt. Most of what we learn we could probably pick up eventually on our own, but it’s nice knowing in advance and not making as many mistakes in the process. There are a lot of informal greetings that are not OK to use in formal settings, for example. The medical classes seem like they’re more about awareness of risks than prevention. It would be impossible and extremely expensive to provide us with medicines and vaccines for every possible sickness, but they do a great job telling us what’s out there in CR and how to avoid getting it. Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses are a risk, but only in certain areas of the country; actually the vast majority of the cases are found in a single county that I’ll be sure not to visit! The safety and security classes focus on crime and natural disasters and how to minimize the risks. Not falling asleep on buses, keeping your bag in your lap with your arms around it, carrying only as much money as you need, carrying your wallet in your front left pocket, not walking at night, walking quickly and not drinking in public are all good ways to minimize the risk of being the victim of a crime. Obviously, we have no control over natural disasters, but what we can do is know the Emergency Action Plan really well so we’ll know what to do when one happens. We had just gone over the EAP the week prior to the national emergency, so we all knew what was expected of us at each stage of the plan. They cancelled classes on Thursday and put us in the first stage which is just to remain vigilant, stay in touch with other people and be ready for the next stage. Thursday night, they cancelled classes for Friday and Monday and put us in standfast for the duration of the weekend. Standfast means we have to pack a bag in case we consolidate and we’re not allowed to leave our communities but we can continue to go about our normal schedule unless we hear otherwise. Thankfully we never had to consolidate, but if we had, everyone from Frailes would have met at the Catholic Church and lived there until the emergency was over or until they elevated to the highest stage and evacuated us from the country. Consolidation is different once training is over, because during training each community has its own consolidation point, but during service the country is split up into six regions and each region has a consolidation point that every volunteer from that region has to get to. Our standfast period ended this morning, which means we’re allowed to leave Frailes but all the roads are messed up and they’re still not completely clear so we can’t really go anywhere anyway. But like I said earlier, it’s been a blessing in disguise because I’ve gotten a lot closer with my family and probably learned more Spanish, too!
