Time Flyin'

I can’t believe it’s already mid-April. And before I know it, we’ll be in May because next week is la semana santa (holy week) and my family is taking me to Perez Zeledon for eight days to visit the extended family. The last two weeks in March, we were in San Jose for in-service training and the first two weeks of April have been short weeks with holidays and special meetings and other things keeping me out of school. Time has been flying…

So Easter is coming up and in Costa Rica they celebrate it for an entire week. Not everyone has the whole week off because the most important days (Friday and Sunday) aren’t until the end, so most people have to work Monday – Wednesday. I went home for Christmas, so I don’t personally know what it was like, but my friends tell me that it was anti-climactic in comparison to Christmas in the States. So I imagine that la semana santa is sort of like their Christmas: the biggest holiday of the year, in other words. And if you think about it, it makes sense that Easter would be more important than Christmas. After all, it wasn’t Jesus’ birth that was most important, nor His death, but His resurrection. But it’s still weird!

I thought I might explain a little more about what I do outside of the schools. I enjoy teaching English and helping the teachers here, but what interests me most are projects in the community. They’re a lot more varied than just teaching English all day and I get to meet a lot of new people and learn new things in the process. I’ve already written about my boys’ soccer team I believe, but right now I’m in the process of forming a girls’ team, also. According to my principal, I needed to issue permission slips because it’s not culturally acceptable for girls to play soccer. I think it’s just a better-safe-than-sorry scenario. The female P.E. teacher in the elementary school is going to help coach the girls’ team with me.

Yesterday I went to a meeting of the Boy Scouts in San Pablo to see what a typical meeting is like and to talk to the leader and the head of the committee that’s in charge of the troop. We went on a short hike to a clearing where we ate some snacks, played some games and sang some songs – it was a lot of fun. I didn’t really get the chance to collect all the information I needed, but I’ve come to realize that sometimes it’s better to just relax and experience something new than to go into it full steam asking a million questions and not really interacting with the person. I learned a lot more from watching and participating in a meeting of the Boy Scouts than I could have in ten interviews about it. Now I just need to find a few people that are interested in leading the scouts in San Isidro if we can get a group formed.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Asociación de Desarrollo (Development Association) to talk about the possibility of building a gym here in San Isidro. They turned in the paperwork for the project a few years ago and after sitting in bureaucracy forever it was finally rejected due to the government’s lack of funds. We’re hoping that some of the grants that I have access to as a Peace Corps Volunteer will help us get it approved this time.

I have a couple other things going on with some teachers in the technical high school in San Pablo. Remember that I wrote about how the high school teachers in San Isidro have to teach all kinds of other classes other than their specialty because the school isn’t big enough to have its own counselors, etc. Well, in the big technical high school, there is one teacher that teaches the proyecto social class to the entire school. She has 800 students from all parts of the region. I’m working with this teacher to figure out a way for the students that come from places outside of San Pablo to do their projects in whatever village they come from. And specifically the ones from San Isidro, for obvious reasons. The kids in the 10^th grade have to do a special community project for forty hours, so maybe I can put them to good use doing a recycling project or something, who knows?

There’s another teacher in San Pablo that I’m talking with to try to get a website created that would allow teachers from all over Costa Rica to share resources and ideas they have for their classes. He’s an informática teacher, which means he teaches computer classes. At first, we were talking about having the kids make the website as their end of the year project, but this guy actually makes websites for a living and he was telling me that he could make it better and faster; in a week’s time he said. It’s cool because it coincides with a project that some other TEFL volunteers are doing, which is to put together a book of resources that Peace Corps volunteers and their co-teachers have come up with. They want to put this book together and send it to all the other TEFL volunteers and the teachers they work with to have a hard copy as a resource for years to come. What I want to do is digitize it and put it on the Internet for others to use and to possibly add to it. The website would be for teachers of all subjects, although I think it would be used primarily by English teachers due to the (hopefully!) high level of content of English resources.

After holy week, I’m supposed to start teaching classes in the technical high school for kids that come from areas where there aren’t English teachers in the elementary schools. These kids go through six grades in their elementary schools with no English whatsoever and then they’re thrown into classes with kids who have had English and they just clam up because they’re scared to make mistakes. It will be good practice for when I start my community classes in May because I think a lot of my students will have little or no prior knowledge of the language.

So it seems like I’m busy, and I am, but sometimes I wonder what I’m actually getting accomplished, if anything at all. I do a lot of talking but I haven’t done a lot of doing. It would be great if all of these projects came together and fell into place but maybe I should pick one or two and focus on them until they’re complete. The good thing is that sustainability of projects is emphasized a lot in the Peace Corps, meaning that I’m not supposed to do all this stuff on my own. It’s better for me and the community if I find people to take charge of my projects because it empowers them to do it on their own in the future when I’m not around anymore. And it keeps me from going crazy trying to be in charge of a million things at once!