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!

What´s Normal?

This is something that I’ve been wondering about for a while now but my curiosity has been intensified with my time abroad in cultures different from my own. I remember I started thinking about it when I came home for Christmas during my first year of college in New York and home didn’t feel quite like it used to when I lived there day-to-day for the previous eighteen years. I had only been gone for two months or so, but already I had adjusted to a different life. Or perhaps I was somewhere in between my old life and my new one at school. Either way, home just didn’t feel like home anymore. I think the vast majority of Americans move at least once or twice by the time they go to college, but I had never even moved houses my entire life, let alone cities or states. I think never having had that experience of a drastic change is what made the question of what it is to be normal so conscious in my mind.

It’s weird. You leave your home for the first time and you expect time to stand still while you’re gone and for everything to be exactly as you left it, but things don’t work that way. Granted, things don’t change very quickly in Roanoke and things basically stay the same, but I think I’m speaking more to the attachment you feel to a place. Also, I think that the attachment you have to a place relies heavily on the relationships you’ve developed there. I think it’s only natural that as you move from place to place, or go from high school to college, that your current friendships begin to take precedence over your former ones and relationships tend to fade over time if you don’t keep up with them (I’m not talking about life-long friends – I mean acquaintances, people you were kind’ve friends with in high school, etc.). If you don’t believe me, simply think back over the years of your life, or the periods rather (middle school, high school, college, after college), and tell me if you’ve maintained all those friendships over all those years. It’s impossible. People come and go; there’s nothing wrong with it, that’s just the way it is. No matter how bad you want to, you can never go back to the way things were before. Our childhood homes, or at least the way we recall them, are long gone. And you can never go back to high school, although I have no idea why anyone would want to!

I’ve been blessed to have had a handful of friendships endure from elementary school and middle school to today, but I feel as though that’s the exception to the rule. We all still call Roanoke home since we haven’t technically made the transition to another permanent location, but we’re hardly ever there and never all at the same time. Between college, study abroad, grad school, and working overseas, my friends and I hardly live in Roanoke anymore, but where do we live? What’s normal for us? What’s normal for anyone? What length of time is necessary for a way of life to feel normal to someone? Will I ever feel normal in a foreign country, no matter how long I stay? How long will it take me to readjust to the States? Or will I ever? I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one, but I’d like to explore it for a little while, at least until my head starts to hurt haha.

I think it’s interesting to point out that, in my opinion, it’s much easier for an expatriate to feel at home in the United States where the population is very diverse than it is for a white American like me to integrate into a homogenous country. I stick out like a sore thumb almost everywhere I travel: Africa, Asia and now Latin America. Even if I learn the language, adapt to the culture, make friends, start a family or whatever the case may be, everyone would still know that I was different. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be accepted in those places, but no one would ever believe I was from there. But what people from homogenous cultures often don’t realize is that the United States is so diverse in virtually every aspect of life that you really can’t tell if someone is a citizen or not just based on how they look. I’m not sure if my argument is that I’ll never be able to feel at home in a foreign country or simply that it would take a lot more time than it would in any random town in America. I really like it here in Costa Rica; my Spanish is coming along; I’m starting to make some friends; but I’ll always be the gringo in town haha. I guess it’s not such a bad thing.

I think that I’ll be able to get used to life in the States when I return; I think the difference will be in the way I see things. I don’t think I’ll ever again be able to subscribe to the fast-paced work, work, work lifestyle that so many Americans have. I can’t claim to be completely comfortable with the pace of life down here because it’s excruciatingly slow, but I’m slow-paced by nature and I think this pace suits me better. I also think that I’ll be more people-oriented when I return. It’s engrained into us from an early age that time is money and people rarely spend as much time as they should with their family or friends or neighbors just sitting and talking because it seems like a waste of time when you could be making money. At first it bothered me when I wanted a quick answer to a question from someone and then an hour later after drinking coffee and shooting the breeze I still didn’t have my answer. But it’s nice the way people take an interest in each other here. I’m not gonna go overboard and say that I’ll be a vegetarian by the time I get back, but my family here definitely eats a lot less meat than what I’m used to, and I’ve begun to realize that the amount we eat back home is so unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I love meat and there’s zero chance that I’ll refuse to eat it, but I won’t take it for granted so much. Maybe I’ll decide to eat it less often or in smaller portions or something.

Back to the original topic… maybe there is no such thing as normal. Or maybe each person has their own ‘normal’ and I just haven’t yet found mine. Certainly it’s not normal to be a Peace Corps Volunteer or to live abroad. I guess I’ll just have to settle for being different for now. Perhaps there’s something to be said for it.

Rice, Beans and Spaghetti

On the same plate.At the same time.It’s actually a lot better than it sounds after you get over the initial shock of the blasphemy. The first time I saw it, I was pretty taken aback but now that I’ve had time to think about it, it almost makes sense. I mean rice and beans are a given with every meal here like kimchi was in Korea, so if you want something else it still has to be served with the rice and beans. After a while you realize that food is food and you just learn to eat whatever you’re given. Having said that, I actually really do enjoy the food here and it’s not a problem for me at all. It’s not always very balanced but at least it doesn’t contain all the stuff that processed food has in it. I still contend that a rice-based diet is a great way to lose weight. Don’t ask me why, but it is from my experiences. I’m not going to lose another thirty pounds like I did in Korea simply because I don’t really have that much to lose but I had already lost seven by the end of the first ten weeks. Although, I’m pretty sure I gained it all back while I was at home eating turkey, dressing and mashed potatoes and gravy three meals a day for about a week and of course all the Christmas cookies and candies, haha. I was reading a book about being a Peace Corps Volunteer and it was talking about how men typically lose weight and women gain weight during their service. The theory is that food in developing countries has a lot of carbs and men’s bodies can process carbs a lot quicker than women’s and it turns into energy instead of fat for men. Also, there is a lot less meat in the diet and I guess men typically eat more meat than women back home.

Someday I’ll have to start taking pictures of my meals to show you guys but I feel a little weird about busting out my camera at dinner time. I feel like it might send the wrong impression, like I think the food is really strange or something. Speaking of pictures, I figured out why my pictures take up so much space and thus forever to upload. My camera was set to take pictures that could be printed out at size A3. I’m not sure how big that is, but they were taking up 4MB apiece and each one took several minutes to upload. Now I’ve got it set to e-mail attachment mode or something like that and each one is only 150KB and my memory card can hold about 45,000 more pictures now than it could on the other setting. The only problem is that I can’t go back and change my old pictures to the new setting. I’ll choose a select few of the best of my old pictures to upload and then once I’ve taken a bunch of pictures on the new setting I’ll be able to put as many up as I want and really quickly, too!

I’ve started the long, slow process of working on my CAT (Community Assessment Tool). My plan was to start interviewing my family, since they would be most comfortable with me and most familiar with who I am and why I’m here, and then I was going to introduce myself one Sunday at church. The first part worked out great – I’ve interviewed my host dad, his mom and one of my aunts and I feel like I already know a lot about my community. The other great thing is that they’ve been able to tell me who can answer the questions that they don’t know the answers to. I guess in a small town like San Isidro, it’s well known who is on what committee and who the town leaders are. The second part has not gone as according to plan, unfortunately. Last week there was no service, this past week my friends and I went to the beach to celebrate a birthday, and the following week is a special service for a sweet 15. Yes, 15. Apparently that’s like a coming-of-age thing here for girls. I’m not sure how much significance it carries these days but, from my understanding, in the past it used to signify that a girl was now a woman and she was old enough to marry and have children. I think it’s changing or has already changed in the cities, but here in the country it’s acceptable for girls in their teens to marry men ten, fifteen, or twenty years older. Also, teen pregnancy is really common here which makes sense if a lot of teens are married, but still… I was talking to one of my friends about it (she’s 19) and she said that she’s one of three girls left in her graduating class that hasn’t had a kid yet. Now that could be an exaggeration and I have no idea how many girls were in her class, but that’s still really shocking. Anyway, so the next service at the church is a special one for my cousin who is turning fifteen and the only people who are going are the invited guests to her party. There’s still going to be a lot of people there, but it’s mostly family from out of town which doesn’t help me at all. My new plan is to wait until the first day of school and introduce myself to all the teachers and parents because supposedly there’s some sort of meeting the first morning. I still haven’t gotten up the courage to complete the door-to-door survey portion of the information-gathering process. I’m not sure if it’s because I feel like my Spanish is inadequate or because everyone here thinks I’m a 16-year-old exchange student. San Isidro and surrounding areas have had a lot of foreign exchange students in the past, but they have never had a Peace Corps Volunteer or an equivalent from another program. People tell me I look young for my age, but sixteen?!?

The CAT is a huge pain, but I actually really enjoy talking to people about San Isidro and finding out about the community from a variety of perspectives. We’re supposed to ask questions concerning health, safety, education, water and sanitization, drugs, etc. It’s interesting because some of the questions are written specifically for very, very underdeveloped areas of the world. For instance, there’s an entire section on water with questions like ‘How many wells are there?’ ‘Does anyone here know how to fix the wells?’ ‘If there is no potable water nor wells, how long does it take to get to the nearest water source?’ ‘Do you boil your water before drinking it?’ I’m sure all of these questions are really crucial in other places, but here they have water systems similar to ours back home with an organization that oversees the aqueducts and a guy that lives here that can fix them. They haven’t relied on wells in like fifty years! The first two questions were ‘Is there potable water in the houses here?’ and ‘Do the majority of households have their own bathrooms inside the house?’ The answer was ‘Yes, every last one of them.’ So I said well… I guess I won’t be working with the water and they were like why would you? We have a guy for that.

The idea is that by the end of the process, I’ll know what my community needs, what they want, and how that fits into what I can provide with my skill set and also what the Peace Corps would like for me to do. The Peace Corps has a lot of initiatives with HIV/AIDS awareness, women’s rights, teen pregnancy, etc. to name a few. If I walked into my new community without asking anyone anything and started a whole program on HIV/AIDS, only to realize weeks or months later that the problem is almost non-existent here, that would be a huge waste of time and effort. One thing that I’ve found is that the people here are well aware of the lack of recreational activities here for the children. I think it would be a really great idea to start a gym or build a playground to give the kids here something to do with their free time instead of just watching TV. And I think it would receive a lot of support from the people here, which is really important if I want my projects to continue well beyond my time here.

This past weekend, my friends from the Los Santos region and a couple others went to the beach at Manuel Antonio on the Pacific side to celebrate the birthday of one of us. We actually live really close to it if you look on the map, but the way the roads and the bus routes work, you have to backtrack to San Jose and then take a convoluted route past all the other beach towns to get to it. I think by car it’s only a couple hours but by bus it’s more like seven or eight. It was a really beautiful beach and there was also a national park with monkeys! Definitely worth the time in the bus. We left early Friday morning (I got up at 3:50 to catch the first bus out of my site) so we could get there in time to hit the beach for a couple hours before the sun went down. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but if I haven’t, the sun goes down here around 5 or 5:30 every day. The beach was really pretty and the waves were strong but not too strong; it was perfect. I didn’t even get a sunburn haha! For dinner, we found a really good Mexican place. It was so good that we ended up going back there for dinner Saturday night, also! Both nights I got two enchiladas and traded one for half of someone else’s burrito. The restaurant has their own hot sauce and it was so good that my friend, Angela, decided to buy a bottle. I thought about it, but of course I have two bottles of Marie here with me. On Saturday, we went to the national park. It was a beautiful walk through the forest and eventually you end up at a beach that’s more suited to Costa Ricans because it’s enclosed and there’s really no waves to speak of. Most ticos don’t know how to swim or the ones that do don’t know very well, so waves scare them and they’re always warning you about rip tides. My host dad even told me how to swim out of a maelstrom if I got trapped in one! At the beach, people were feeding the monkeys chips and other snacks so they could take up-close pictures. I got a short video of this one small monkey hanging upside down off of a low-hanging branch so he could grab chips out of people’s hands. On one end of the beach, this lady had hung her bags up in the branches of one of the trees on the edge of the forest. I still don’t know if the monkeys planned it this way, or if it was just coincidental, but two of them kind’ve led everyone away from the tree with the bag by running around and looking cute and whatnot. Then one of them sprinted over to the tree and started rooting around in the bags before anyone could make it back over there and stop him and he ended up with a bag of chips! He took it up into the tree and before long there was a huge commotion and you could see a bunch of leaves falling down and you could hear monkeys screaming at each other. Eventually all the chips fell down onto the rocks below and the monkeys had to gather them with their hands and their mouths and scurry back up the trees on two legs.

On the way out of the park, armed with the information that monkeys like chips, one of my friends started feeding one of the monkeys. At first, it was just one cute little monkey and we were having fun taking pictures with him. Then, one by one every twenty or thirty seconds, more and more monkeys arrived on the scene. And they weren’t content to hang upside down from the trees and wait; they started running after us on the ground. Before long there were several on the ground and we started seeing more in the trees, a lot more. So we decided to get out of there – fast! Afterwards, we did a bit of shopping, hit the beach one last time, ate Mexican again and went home early Sunday morning. We spent a little bit of time at the Peace Corps office in San Jose because we needed to put our deposits down for a rafting trip coming up in two weekends. It’s the Saturday before Super Bowl Sunday, so we’ll be staying the night in San Jose after rafting and watching the game with everyone before we all head our separate ways again. But not to worry, we’ll all be seeing each other again at the end of March for ten days in San Jose for our in-service training :) 

Feria del Café

This past weekend was the long-awaited coffee fair in Frailes. It didn’t disappoint. There were tons of activities, lots of merchandise, food and snacks, a coffee-picking competition, fireworks shows,a circus act, concerts, and even helicopter tours! It’s by far the biggest event of the year in Frailes and the surrounding areas. I’m really glad I went and that I stayed the night Saturday with my training host family so I could be there for the entire two days. I got to see most of my tico friends from Frailes and several of my Peace Corps friends as well. Unfortunately, many of the Volunteers from my training group live several hours away and couldn’t make it up for the fair.

Most of the fair took place on the soccer field, although the coffee-picking competition was in a finca and the helicopter took off from a different location. Along the perimeter of the field were stands with all kinds of snacks and merchandise pertaining to coffee and other traditional Costa Rican stuff. There were coffee cookies, coffee brownies, coffee candies, coffee pizza and, of course, just regular coffee. The coffee pizza didn’t really taste like coffee; it was just bad. There were also necklaces, bracelets, earrings and crosses made out of coffee beans. Everything seemed reasonably priced and there were several things I saw that I considered buying, but I’m sticking to my plan to buy the bulk of souvenirs towards the end of my service. That way, I’ll know even better than I do now what’s out there, what I want, how much I can get it for, what’s authentic and traditional, etc.

It was cool to walk around the fair with my friend, Tyler, from the business program of the Peace Corps because a lot of the people selling merchandise there are going to be working with him since he lives in Frailes. So he was explaining to me how they make everything by hand and how it’s environmentally friendly and whatnot. They all seemed talented and creative, not to mention ambitious, so I imagine he’ll be able to do some great things with them and help them expand their businesses over the next couple of years. One thing they would like to do is start websites and expand their market beyond the Frailes coffee fair once a year and wherever else they sell the rest of the time – probably in markets in San Jose. I’ll share any links I get from Tyler so you guys can start buying stuff made from the world’s best coffee!

The coffee-picking competition was kind’ve anticlimactic. I guess I shouldn’t have been expecting too much since all you’re doing is just watching other people do a menial job but I thought it would be really exciting. I thought it would be an hour or two of intense picking, but as it turns out, the competition in Frailes is the finale of a series of competitions in other places and they only pick for fifteen minutes in each location. I got there right when it was supposed to start, but for whatever reason we had to wait an hour for it to begin; like everything else here, things just run on a different schedule than what I’m used to. Apparently, not only do you have to pick fast, but you have to pick the high quality beans. If you end up with a lot of greens or leaves and twigs in your basket, you get disqualified or have points deducted or something. They announced the winners of the competition at the end of the fair. There were three places for each sex: 3^rd place received $100, 2^nd place $200 and 1^st place $300. Pretty decent considering that it would take even the best coffee pickers about two weeks to make $300. And slow people like me couldn’t make that much during the entire season, haha!

One of the sponsors of the fair was Stihl and they had a competition to see who could cut the thinnest slice off of a log using one of their chainsaws. It was called ‘la galleta más delgada,’ which means ‘the thinnest cracker!’ A lot of guys tried to cut it too thin and were disqualified when their slice broke off halfway down the log. Tyler’s host dad was one of the participants and he opted to go last because he thought the chainsaw would do better after it had warmed up a bit. I knew Papillo was pretty handy because he constructed his own house, but I didn’t think he would cut the thinnest cracker, but sure enough he did! It was really quite impressive; it couldn’t have been more than a centimeter or two thick.

I was stupid and didn’t check my camera battery before I left so I wasn’t able to take many pictures. But there’s always next year and it should be even bigger and better!

Back in the CR!

I’ve been back in Costa Rica for almost a week now and although I really enjoyed seeing friends and family back home, I’m definitely glad to be back. It was a little weird to fly back and forth like that. I’ve been to other countries and lived abroad before, but I’d never visited home in the middle of one of my trips and then returned to wherever I was. By the time I had readjusted to the States, it was time to return to Costa Rica.

While I was home, I tried as best I could to keep up my Spanish but I was definitely rusty and unconfident when I first got back. I think I’m back to where I was, but I was a little overwhelmed the first couple of days. There was just a lot going on. I spent the night in my training community and visited as many people as I could before I had to leave the following afternoon and then I was off to my new site, San Isidro. So I had to pack all my stuff and say goodbye to a lot of people and then start over in a new place. A couple days later the other volunteers in my region and I had a meeting with the regional English assessor to talk about what our plan was for the rest of the month and a half we had left until school starts. The other volunteers had met a bunch of people in their sites and held meetings and were about to start teaching classes in their communities and all this other stuff… I just felt lost. I hadn’t even unpacked yet haha. After the meeting, one of my friends gave me some paperwork that was due in less than a week. We’re also supposed to be collecting information in a variety of ways and writing a 40-50 page diagnostic on our community. In Spanish, mind you. It was just a lot to handle in a short period of time, but I’m better now so it’s all good. I still haven’t really started on any of the things that I’m supposed to have done by the time school starts, but I’ve taken a few days to relax and get my bearings before I get going and I feel a lot better about everything now.

This past week, even though it’s been hectic, has been really fun. Like I said before, I got to see a bunch of people in Frailes before I left which was really nice because it would have been a much more difficult and uncomfortable transition to go straight from home to my new site without seeing anyone I knew. I spent my first full day in San Isidro picking coffee with my host family, which I thought was fun and interesting but I can see how it wouldn’t be much fun to do every day. At first, I was picking the coffee bean by bean because I was worried about accidentally picking the green ones if I just tried shucking the entire string of them all at once. The red ones are ripe and the yellow ones are OK to pick, also, but you’re not supposed to pick the green ones because they’re not ready yet. The black ones are dried up reds and those you can pick, too. What makes it a little easier is that the green ones are still really hard and they stay on the branch a lot better than the others. So as long as you don’t pull too hard, you can get all the reds, yellows and blacks in one fell swoop without getting any of the greens. The other thing I had to get used to was the fact that it’s OK if you end up with a bunch of leaves in your basket because you can just pick them out at the end and it’s a lot faster that way than avoiding them the whole time while you’re picking. Anyway, I definitely picked the least out of everyone, including my twelve year old sister, but they all said that I picked a lot for my first time. I didn’t let them pay me for what I picked, but if I had, I would have made $7 for about 7 hours of work. That sounds pretty bad, but obviously the other workers pick a lot more and make a lot more than that. And considering that half the world is below the poverty line which is $2 per day, I think Costa Rican coffee pickers are doing just fine. It’s not exactly what I want to do with my life, but it beats a lot of other things in a lot of other places.

Before we had our meeting, the regional assessor took us to a coffee co-op for a tour of the facilities. Coffee is a huge part of the culture here, so it’s important that we have a good understanding of the process. The more we know about coffee, the more we can relate to the nationals and thus the more willing they will be to work with us and befriend us. I had already experienced the first few parts, which is picking the coffee, measuring who picked what by emptying your sacks into boxes called cajuelas, dumping the boxes into a big truck and then taking it up to one of the receivers. At the receiver, the coffee slides out of a chute in the back of the truck into a bigger box that equals ten cajuelas. Two of those boxes equal a fanega. Someone has to keep shoveling the coffee towards the chute and once the box is full the worker at the receiver closes the chute and pushes a button so the bottom of the box opens up and the coffee falls into a huge pile and sits there until another truck comes to take it to one of the coffee co-ops. The guy at the receiver keeps track of how many times you fill up the box and then you get a receipt. At the co-op the coffee goes through a number of other steps to prepare it for roasting. There’s a machine that separates the part of the coffee bean that they want from the parts they don’t and from there the two piles go off in different directions. None of it is wasted, however, because they found ways to make good use of the entire bean. They figured out that they can make ethanol gas with the liquid part of the bean and the husk can be used as fertilizer. The actual bean continues on to be dried in the sun which takes about a week. And if it rains, everyone has to run outside and gather up the coffee as fast as they can. I’m not sure why they don’t just bring out a tarp or construct greenhouses or little pavilions made of clear plastic or something like that, but I guess they know what works best. After the beans are all dry, they put them inside for a few days to recuperate and they have to control the humidity in the room to ensure that the beans are as good as they can possibly be. Don’t ask me why they need to recuperate or how sitting in a huge pile in a building helps but it’s a step in the process so… haha. Then they’re ready to be roasted. They roast the majority of the beans to a medium roast because it’s the most popular but they also do light and dark. There are also four flavors of coffee in Costa Rica and the flavor depends on the altitude in which they were grown if I remember correctly. They are chocolate, vanilla, floral and the other I don’t remember. All in all, it was interesting to see the process from start to finish and I must say that even though I almost never drank coffee back home I’m getting to the point to where I drink at least two cups every single day here!

This past weekend there were fiestas de verano (summer parties) in my site. It’s not really supposed to be summer down here because we’re in the northern hemisphere but they call the dry season summer and the rainy season winter. These summer parties are a lot like county fairs or carnivals except with dances at night. There are a lot of farm animals (cows, sheep, goats, hogs, etc.) and a lot of carnival games and food. They start the dances around 8 and at first it’s kind’ve traditional and a lot of older couples dance for an hour or so but after they leave they play more modern music and the dance has more of a club atmosphere. The first night, on Saturday, none of my friends from Frailes were able to come, so I ended up dancing some with my host sister and her friends and a little with my brother and his friends. We didn’t leave until around midnight which is super late here because we normally go to bed around eight or nine so we can get up at five and be in the fields by six, but these parties only happen once a year so everybody stays up for them. Yesterday, a few of my friends came up for the fiesta and we hung out for a little while until the tope came. A tope is a group of horses that rides from a good distance to its destination at one of these fiestas. Then they have a horse show before they sit down for dinner. After dinner, there is live music and dancing.We decided to leave after the tope and drive over to a bigger city and see what was going on at their party. There was a lot more stuff to do and there was an outdoor concert, as well. It was a cover band playing the most popular songs from Latin America, none of which I knew, but it was still fun.

Today I haven’t really done much of anything except write this post and I finally got around to downloading my pictures onto my laptop. By the time I publish this, I should have some pictures up on Picasa and the link will be on the right. Enjoy!

P.S. It´s going to take me a while to get a substantial number of pictures up... the upload time is really slow

Home for Christmas

Peace Corps Volunteers aren't supposed to leave their sites during training, the first three months of their service or the last three months. However, I was allowed to come home to see my grandma before she passed away on the 23rd. She had a rare and aggressive form of cancer called sarcoma. We had no idea anything was wrong before I left and then all of a sudden she was in the hospital and her health deteriorated so rapidly that I just barely made it back in time to say goodbye. We'll miss you gramma.

Right before I left to come home, we had our graduation from training. It's called the swearing-in ceremony and we had to take an oath at the ambassador's residence. The oath goes something like this:

"I, (your name), do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, domestic or foreign, that I take this obligation freely. And without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. And that I will well and faithfully discharge my duties in the Peace Corps, so help me God."

Two of our fellow Volunteers, one from each program, went up and gave a short speech thanking our host families for everything they've done for us. Then we all went up one by one to get our certificate saying we completed our training and to get our picture taken with the ambassador. Afterwards we had some time to take pictures with all our friends and family before we all went our separate ways to our sites. When I go back in January, I'll be close to five or six other Volunteers and the rest I'll just have to wait until our In-Service Training in March to see them.

It's surreal to be home right now, especially during the holiday season and having come home so quickly and unexpectedly. I remember coming home from Korea and it felt so weird, but we had been looking forward to it for so long... this time I got an email telling me to come home and the next thing I knew I was on a plane and back in my own home, albeit with no bed but that's another story haha. It's definitely been comforting to see friends and family during this time. As always, my thoughts are jumbled and I can never stay on one topic, but I just wanted to mention that it's really cold here. And there's snow. We had the coldest day in 15 years in Costa Rica and it still didn't get down to freezing. It was probably in the 40s or something. Usually you see old women bundled up like there's a blizzard outside when the temperature is in the 60s early in the morning, so 40 is pretty darn chilly for them. It's nice to see snow again. I missed last year's 'Snowmageddon,' unfortunately. My tico friends want me to bring some back with me, but I think pictures will have to do :)

Aside from the cold, another thing I've noticed is that we don't eat rice at every meal, or at any actually (I haven't had a single grain of rice since I left CR... and I'm OK with that haha), and we use forks here. Actually, I lied. I had a ton of rice with my Chinese the other day. The first time I got change since coming back, I thought for sure they had dumped a bunch of pennies in my hand because they felt so tiny. The coins in CR are so huge that even quarters seem really small and light in comparison.

In my spare time here, I've been memorizing the national anthem of Costa Rica, talking with my tico friends to keep up my Spanish, watching a ton of American football and eating as much food as possible. Today I created a new Facebook account since it bothers everyone so much down there that I don't have one. It's all in Spanish, but feel free to add me anyway. I'll write to you in English, I promise! It's actually under my real name this time, imagine that.

San Isidro de Leon Cortes!

This past week, we went back to the training facility in Tres Rios to meet our counterparts for a two-day workshop before going on our site visits for five days. It was an awesome experience and I and everyone else in the Los Santos region feels really blessed to be where we are and for whom we get to work with. Our main counterpart is the regional assessor of English and he brought with him a few other teachers and principals from our communities. My other counterpart is the principal at my high school and I can already tell that we’re going to be good friends; he’s really cool and laid back.

After the workshop, we all visited our future sites for five days. I went to San Isidro de Leon Cortes and I already really like it there a lot. It’s really beautiful and relaxing there, ‘super tranquilo.’ My new family is pretty cool, too. I thought I was only going to have one sibling because when the Peace Corps visited their house the other two weren’t there and I suppose they just forgot to ask if there were any other members of the family living there. I have a 20 year-old sister, an 18 year-old brother and a twelve year-old sister. Their names are Viviana, David and Maria Lupe, respectively, and we already have a lot of fun with each other. Something really interesting about my new family is that they have had exchange students in their house in the past, so they’re used to us and they know what to expect and how to deal with us better than other families who have no idea. The thing about having had high school exchange students, though, is that they were kind’ve crazy and they were expecting me to be like that, also. Apparently, the other people they had had before me never woke up before 9 or 10, which sounds pretty normal for a high school student but that’s ridiculous here. People generally wake up at 6 or 7 at the latest, but my family picks coffee for a living, so they wake up every day at 5. So when I woke up at 5 with them, they were astonished and kept asking me if I needed to go back to sleep. They’re also really curious to know why I don’t do drugs because the last exchange student they had moved out of their house to a bigger city so she could buy her weed. And they also insist that weed is legal in the U.S. even though I insist that it isn’t, haha. The other thing is that the exchange students slept around within the community, so everyone is already assuming that I’ll be like that, too… Nothing like high school exchange students to provide misconceptions that I have to live with for two years! Honestly though, I think they realize that I’m older and I’m coming as a volunteer so I’m not going to be doing the same types of things.

The first couple days I was in my new site, I just tried to see as much of it as I could and get a feel for where everything was. For how small it is, there’s quite a bit of stuff, and anything I can’t find in San Isidro I can go to San Pablo for and it’s only ten minutes away. We have a supermarket, a soda (a hole-in-the-wall restaurant), a movie rental store, an Internet café in my neighbors’ house, a restaurant and a soccer field. I’m pretty sure we don’t have a bank, a police station, a fire station or a gym but I can survive without those. I think I mentioned before that my family picks coffee for a living. Well, the first day I was there, my brother and I took their truck up the side of a mountain to where their ‘finca’ (farm or plantation) is and the workers brought all their ‘canastos’ (huge bags) full of coffee to put in the truck. They empty them out into this box and then they share the money based on the number of times they filled up the box. After all the coffee is in the truck, they take it up to one of the collector facilities in town. The truck has a chute on the back of it and they pour the coffee into this big container and they keep track of how many times they fill the container. It was really interesting to see a portion of the process and I’m excited to get to try out picking coffee when I go back in a week. The second day was Sunday so we went to church in the afternoon for a special Christmas service. They had a play which I’m pretty sure was their version of Scrooge and after the service they lit the Christmas tree and Santa appeared on the roof of the church and threw candy down.

Monday and Tuesday, we went to the high school in San Pablo for a workshop that the regional assessor had set up. It was a great opportunity for us to meet the other English teachers from the region that we would be working with and we were even given the chance to present what we have been learning in training. Although we don’t always feel like we’re qualified to be leaders, that’s what Manolo, the assessor, wants us to be and being at the workshop was a huge step in the right direction for us. We’ve already developed good relationships with the teachers that we’ll be working with and they have a sense of what we’ve been learning and what we’re going to be doing to help them.

I had a great time in my future community and I already really like it and can't wait to go back for good! I've already made some great relationships with my new family, my co-workers and a few people around town. I'm definitely excited about the next two years of my life :D

Site Placement Day

A couple days ago we found out where we’re all going for our two years here and I couldn’t be more excited! I’m going to a small community that is close to my training community and I’ll be close to several close friends of mine. I think I’m moving one county over or something like that because I’ll be living in a region called ‘Los Santos’ and I’ve heard a lot about it since I’ve been here. All the names of the villages in Los Santos are San             . San Marcos, San Pablo, San Carlos, San Isidro, San Lorenzo, San Antonio, etc.; they’re all names of saints. The streets here don’t really have names, so they just refer to them as where they take you, and one of them is called ‘A Los Santos.’ I think it’s only an hour away!

The TEFL program got placed in clusters around the country and I really like all the people in my cluster. The CED program got dispersed fairly evenly around the country and I’ll be close to a couple of my friends from that program as well. My program coordinators were telling me that my site is one of the best because the teachers at the schools are really excited to work with me. They wouldn’t send any of us to a place where we weren’t wanted, but I think my community especially is excited to have me there. I think it will be similar to the community I’m in now, which is great because I love it here. I won’t be able to experience living in a different part of Costa Rica, but I will have plenty of opportunities to visit those places. At least I know that I will enjoy the climate and the scenery for two years.

The day we were told where we’re going, we had a party at a really nice club outside of San Jose. We got to play basketball, soccer and tennis and there was a pool and a hot tub, also. For lunch we had Thanksgiving food. Obviously it wasn’t as good as the food my mom makes every year, but it was a nice touch and way better than whatever I ate last year in Korea on Thanksgiving. I don’t recall where Katie and I went, but I imagine we probably wanted to get something as close to home as possible and had to settle for cheeseburgers or maybe pizza, haha.

My good friend O Tyler will be living in Frailes, where I am now, so he is coming here today to see what it’s like, meet his new family and visit our houses. Today is also the confirmation of my little brother, Brandon, at the Catholic Church, so I’ll be headed to that in about an hour. Tyler should arrive right as the mass is ending and then we’ll eat lunch at my house before we start visiting his new family and as many other families as we can get to today. Everybody wants to meet the new gringo so I doubt we’ll make it to everyone’s house.

The past two weekends were a lot of fun. During training, we’re allowed to spend two nights outside of our communities, but they can’t be taken consecutively and they also can’t be taken until after the first month of training. For our first weekend out, the roads all over Costa Rica were really messed up after all the rain and landslides and whatnot, so the only place we could get to safely was San Jose. We found a really nice hostel for $12 and spent Saturday and Sunday shopping and sightseeing in the capital. My favorite part was eating foods I can’t get in Frailes; i.e. pizza and burgers mainly. For our second weekend, we went to a beach on the Caribbean side in the Limon province. We found a hostel there where you can sleep in hammocks for $5 and it’s practically right on the beach. The beach out in front of the hostel was a little rocky but we walked about fifteen minutes to get to a really nice part that was sandy and had good waves. I think sleeping in a hammock is pretty cool but I had trouble simply because it was so hot. It reminded me of the hotel room in Ghana without air conditioning: tossing and turning until it either cooled down or I was just so tired that it didn’t matter anymore how hot it was.

It was really nice to be able to get out of our communities and explore the country a little bit, especially after we weren’t allowed/able to leave for the better part of a week during the national emergency. However, now that we know exactly where we’re going, it’s starting to sink in with us and with our current families that our time together is growing very, very short. Next week, we all visit our future sites for four or five days and by the 18^th of December we’re gone.

Training so far...

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 21^st 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!

Braves Update

I lied. I had to post again about the Braves before I left! Their playoff chances are just too encouraging for me to pass it up. :)  As I mentioned in my last post, the Giants and the Padres have to play each other at the end of the season, which makes things interesting because one of those teams will win the NL West while the other contends with the Braves for the wild card. It would get too complicated for the baseball websites to factor in teams' schedules when determining the magic and/or elimination numbers, but not so for me! Assuming both the Giants and the Padres win their two remaining games before their series against each other, the best possible records for the two teams (remember, both teams have to have better records than the Braves for the Braves to be eliminated) would be 92-70 and 91-71 if the Padres sweep or they take two out of three from the Giants. Obviously, if the Giants sweep or take two out of three, then their record would be much better, 94-68 I think, but the Padres' would only be 89-73. Anyway, worst case scenario is that the Braves have to beat a 91-71 record. Best case scenario is the Padres just lose all their games and the Braves win the wild card without having to strain their pitching staff to win games at the end. MLB.com and ESPN.com have the magic number for the Braves' wild card set at 4, meaning they have to win four more games or the Padres have to lose four games or some combination of the Braves' wins and the Padres' losses equalling four. And that number is correct if you're only concerned about the Braves and the Padres, but it's possible for the Padres to overtake the Giants and push them into the wild card race. Factoring in the schedule, the real number is three. I'm not worried at all about the Braves being able to take care of business and get a win or two or three in their final four games and clinch. Their final series is against the Phillies, which would normally scare me, but they will have locked up the best record in the NL and they'll have nothing to play for. Their best pitchers will be resting for the playoff push.

Looking ahead to the playoffs, I'm not sure how much faith I have in the Braves to go very far. I'm pretty sure they don't allow teams from the same division to play in the first round even though they may have the wild card winner and the team with the best record, so we won't have to play the Phillies right out of the box. I could see us beating either the Reds or the Giants/Padres, but after that I'm betting on the Phillies. They're just too good. They probably spent about as much money as the Yankees did, it's ridiculous. I really don't care about the AL; I think the DH is stupid and takes away from the strategy of the game and I think they just hit a bunch of home runs and don't play small ball. Not to mention the fact that there are two less teams in the AL, what's up with that? This is a completely uneducated guess because I don't follow that league but I'm picking an AL East team to go to the World Series. Either one. I just can't see the Twins sans Morneau getting there or the Rangers. I think their records are better than they should be because both of their divisions are trash. It's incredible to have two .600 win % teams in the same division like the Yankees and Rays. Especially when you consider that the Red Sox and the Blue Jays aren't that bad either. The Sox probably would have won the wild card or even some divisions in the NL. Bottom line: NLCS: Braves vs. Phillies; ALCS: Yankees vs. Rays. An all-east final is in the cards this year. Phillies will win in 6. You heard it here first.