Burnt to a Crisp

Three weekends ago, all of the volunteers from the Central Valley region went to Turrialba to raft the Pacuare River for our regional VAC meeting. I don’t remember what VAC stands for but it’s a committee of volunteers for volunteers. They put together a lot of trips and activities for us all to come together and get to know each other better.This trip cost about $60 per person and it included the rafting, transportation and lunch made by our guides. They dragged one of the rafts onto the land and flipped it over so they could use it as a table and they prepared lunch right there on the river for us. We had tuna tacos if I remember correctly; it doesn’t sound too appetizing but trust me, after a couple hours of rowing, you’ll eat anything. It was actually really good and everything was really fresh because they cut up all the tomatoes and avocados and everything on the raft-table. And for dessert we had Chikys! Chiky is a brand of cookies; they’re rectangles with one side being chocolate and the other just cookie.

 The Pacuare River is one of the world’s top 5 rivers to raft and it was awesome! It has mostly class 3 and class 4 rapids and there’s a long slow part where you can jump out of the raft and just float for a good while. Also, we stopped and went ashore for about a half hour to a nearby waterfall. The water landed on a huge stone step that we were able to swim to and sit on; it was pretty cool.The water hit you hard enough that it kind’ve hurt! It was a fun trip and a great experience and I would definitely recommend rafting the Pacuare to anyone that comes to Costa Rica. It’s affordable and worth every penny: we rafted for a couple hours or so before lunch and another hour after. It had been a while since I had gone rafting and I haven’t gone many times, but I’m pretty sure this was the longest of the trips I had been on previously and easily the most fun.
  

I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks with a second-degree burn on my back.The same cousin that I took with me to the mountains wanted to go to the creek and build a dam so we could have a little pool to swim in. It seemed like a good idea at the time and we definitely had a lot of fun doing it, but ten days of pain makes me think otherwise now. I put sunscreen on at the start of the day and reapplied to my face and neck halfway through but I never reapplied it to my back. I have a theory that my host sister didn’t put nearly as much on my back as I needed, but it’s my fault for having my shirt off for that long and sleeping for an hour or so on a rock wasn’t very smart either!

The dam we built wasn’t as good as the ones I used to build with Heath and Andy but it served its purpose. With my friends in Roanoke, we were always really careful to build our dams with rocks that fit each other like a puzzle so not so much water got through. It’s easy to just throw a bunch of rocks in a pile but if they don’t fit together just so, the water will rush between them. Grass clippings and leaves are great for filling all the tiny holes that you’ll inevitably have among the rocks. I was hoping to build a sweet dam like in the old days, but my cousin preferred to just throw a bunch of rocks in a pile. Even so, we managed to get the water up past our waist at the deepest part.

The aftermath was devastating though. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t burned at all in any other part of my body – not my face, not my neck, not my shoulders – nowhere except for my back. And burned it was. The first day it was just really red, almost purple, but it didn’t hurt. From the second day until a day or two ago it hurt a lot and I had tons of little blisters and a few big ones. One was about as big as my fist and was completely full of water. It almost looked like one of those bags that goldfish come in sometimes. It’s almost fully healed now, but it’s still red and feels warmer than usual and I have several scabs down my spine where I got burned the worst. I guess when I laid out on the rock, the skin around my spine was exposed a lot more than when I’m standing and maybe it’s more delicate because of that. At least the pain is gone; now it just itches like crazy haha!

Presentations

I think I’ve mentioned before that our counterpart here in Los Santos, the regional assessor of English,Manolo, is a very powerful man and that he was instrumental in bringing the TEFL program not only to this region but to Costa Rica itself. Needless to say, we all feel very lucky to have him because he’s set up so many meetings for us and he provides us with the support we need to do our jobs well. We’ve already met most of the teachers we’ll be working with and visited most of our schools. However, sometimes it can be a bad thing for your boss to be so active and interested in your project because sometimes you might have to present yourself in front of seventy principals – in Spanish. And that was just one of our meetings this past week and a half.

Our first meeting was in a pizza place in Santa Maria with the regional assessors of the other subjects and the supervisor of the assessors. We had two hours to tell them all about the Peace Corps, the TEFL program, why we decided to be volunteers and what we want to do in our sites. In typical tico fashion, the meeting started a half hour late but we still ended a half hour early. Everyone knows that it always takes way less time than you think it will to say something you’ve written for a presentation, but as it turns out, it’s a lot worse in a foreign language! I think it took me an hour to write what took me only five minutes to say. I shouldn’t have been as nervous as I was, because everyone here understands how hard it is to learn English, so they’re really gracious about our level of Spanish. But I couldn’t help but be nervous introducing myself in Spanish to the region’s highest level of educators.

Also present at our first meeting were the three county administrators. Each one of us got to meet the man or woman that is in charge of all the schools in our respective county. That’s the cool part about the meetings: after you’ve introduced yourselves and gotten the hard part over with, you get to meet all these powerful people that can help you later on. Everyone seemed like they were excited to have us there and were thinking of ways they could work with us. In my presentation I told them that I like playing soccer, so one of the assessors was telling me that the teachers have a league and I could join his team!

The second meeting we had was the one with all the principals. In the pizza place, the meeting was just for us, but in this one we were just a small part of a much bigger meeting about all kinds of school-related stuff. We met in a big gymnasium at a school in between two of the major towns here for a few hours. I probably could have understood what was going on if I had wanted to, but the four of us had just gotten back from a rafting trip and I was too exhausted to care. The superintendent had some things to say as well as the circuit supervisors and some other people. I have no idea what they were talking about but I can’t imagine I missed anything exciting! For some reason, I wasn’t so nervous to talk in Spanish in front of the principals. I don’t know if I was just too tired to be worried or what it was. Right before our part of the meeting, Manolo sang a couple songs, so I opened with a joke about how if it didn’t embarrass him to sing like that then I could at least say a few words in Spanish!

The third meeting was with some of the English teachers that we would be working with over the next two years. This was by far the most fun because we could talk in English and play games with our new friends. Of course, we said a few things about the Peace Corps, but our main goal was to just meet the teachers and have fun with them. I think we ended up playing Mafia for the last hour of the meeting! I met almost all of my teachers and they’re all really cool and I’m looking forward to working with them. I can definitely see myself hanging out with some of them after school or on weekends if they have time. The problem is that the single ones go home to other parts of the country to be with their families on weekends and the others are married with children. Also, their schedules just don’t really allow them to do a whole lot during the week. They work from 7:00 – 4:00 almost non-stop and without planning periods – ridiculous. Anyway, it was a huge relief to meet my coworkers and for them to be cool.

Día de las Montañas

A couple days ago, on the first, my cousin and I went hiking in the mountains that surround San Isidro. I tried to get more people to come with me by telling them that the first of February is a special day in the States: “El Día de las Montañas.” Nobody believed me, and rightly so. Dario and I packed a lunch and started at seven so we wouldn’t be out in the sun during the hottest part of the day. We had planned on going to the highest mountain to take pictures and come back but once we were up there, we decided we might as well visit as many other peaks as we could and we ended up staying out almost the entire day. Amazingly, I didn’t get a sunburn because the Peace Corps gave me this really thick SPF 60 sunscreen; you only need one coat of that stuff for the entire day, even at the beach. We started at his house on the edge of town and walked back into the center where a road splits off and goes up in the mountains. It was asphalt for a couple hundred meters and then it was dirt and rock the rest of the way. The hardest part of the entire day was the initial ascent; after that we just followed the ridgeline from peak to peak.

We came across a random soccer field way up in the mountains that they use for church retreats and family reunions and stuff. It was really nice, but it definitely seemed out of place and I still can’t imagine the people here hiking up there. I’ve never seen anyone walking around for the fun of it and everyone thinks I’m weird for walking, jogging and hiking. About the only form of exercise that people engage in here is soccer. A little higher up the mountain, we found some bee farms or whatever you call them. Not far from there we also saw a bunch of bees living inside of dead trees. My cousin was afraid of them at first, but I explained to him that they won’t mess with you as long as you don’t mess with them. Eventually, we had to leave the dirt roads to get to the top of the first mountain and we didn’t use another road until we came back down at the end of the day.

The tops of the mountains here are great places to take pictures from because they’ve cut down all the trees to provide grazing land for the cows. We visited several peaks and had different views from each one, but in every direction you look there’s always many more mountains one after the other. We must be right in the middle of a range here in San Isidro. I got a ton of great pictures of my town and the surrounding areas. From the northeast mountain, you can see another one of the villages I’m supposed to work in at some point in these two years: Llano Bonito. I think that translates to ‘Pretty Plain’ but it’s a joke here because it’s neither pretty nor flat. It’s basically strung out along a ridge and the people here say that even the soccer field isn’t level, haha. From another you can see this huge facility owned by the electric company that’s run by the government. And from the last one, the southeast one, you can see almost the entire Los Santos region, or at least all the parts that I’ve ever been to or heard anything about. The only major town I couldn’t see was Santa Maria because there’s a mountain in between it and San Marcos that blocks the view. So I couldn’t see where Bryson and Sarah live, but I could see Copey, almost at the top of the mountain at the far side of the valley where Angela and Rebecca live, San Lorenzo, where Kelsey lives, San Marcos, the biggest town in Los Santos, San Pablo, the closest big town to me, and a handful of other smaller villages.

It’s really cool to be able to see where you live from high up like that. I could see all the parts of town that I’m familiar with and now I know of other parts that I still need to visit. All the major buildings are really noticeable from up there: the church, the soccer field, the salon comunal, the salon pastoral, the two-story house (there’s seriously only one here haha), the cemetery, etc. The salon comunal is a public building that the community uses for dances, concerts, parties and other gatherings. The salon pastoral is owned by the church and is used for similar church-related activities. The two-story house in town is actually my uncle’s house and we live right next door, so it was easy to find where I live from up there!

I was surprised that we didn’t see any snakes, but we did see a very small frog, lots of grasshoppers, butterflies, some lizards, cows, bees, hummingbirds, and a pack of what looked to me like raccoons or something very similar. Their tails were up in the air though… My cousin said that they’re called ‘ardillas’ in Spanish, but that means squirrels so I still don’t know what we saw and I didn’t get a picture either. There was this one part where the face of the mountain was completely covered in a really thick grass and there must have been several hundred birds flying back and forth. I’m assuming they were eating the insects that live up there, but it was National Geographic type stuff with that many of them zooming back and forth feasting on their prey. All we needed was a guide with a British accent to make it complete! It did seem more like terrain you would find in England though. Not that I’ve ever been, but it was like rocky highlands with grass up to your knees.

Towards the end of the day, we came across a herd of cows blocking our way to the next peak. They saw us from a mile away and just stared at us the entire time we carefully made our way around them further up the side of the hill. I would have never thought about it in a million years, but my cousin had to take his shirt off to go around them because he was wearing red! He also advised me to go above them instead of below because if they decided to chase us, they would never catch us going uphill, but downhill is another story… Later that day, I realized that I hadn’t been stared at like that since I came back from Korea!

On the way back down, we kind’ve got lost. We knew the direction we needed to go (down), but the roads weave in and out of coffee farms and sometimes end abruptly. We followed a road for a good while and out of nowhere we turned a corner and there was nothing but coffee in front of us and on all sides. Instead of backtracking uphill, we figured as long as we kept descending we would get to where we wanted to go. Eventually we hit a creek and followed it down until we found another road. From there it was fairly easy to find our way back to town, but those roads in the coffee mountains are seriously like a maze.

All in all, it was a really fun day and I’m already planning my next adventure. I want to walk from San Isidro to Frailes. My brother knows the way and he said it’s like eight or nine hours, which is about the same amount of time we spent the other day. And who knows, maybe there will be a Día de las Montañas Parte Dos!