Canadian jingoism and fruit

(Written on Saturday, posted on Monday)
Nothing too exciting in the last couple of weeks, hence the lack of updates. But I’ve finally stayed in Boruca for the weekend because I have various things to do… create the first tests of the year (done), make some new posters (not done, and likely staying that way considering the shop was closed yesterday and today), and laundry (in the process of being done, in true 24-year old style: wait all week until I’m on my last piece of clothing, then do it all at once). The washing machine takes a while to fill up, so I’m tied to the house for the time being. Not that I’d leave; it’s 90 something degrees outside, and I’m currently sweating in the shade of my room.
Classes have been going pretty well, and the third through sixth graders all have their first test this week. To give you an idea of what I teach on a day-to-day basis, the third graders’ test is ‘what is your name/how are you (with 7 emotions)/what day is today/tomorrow/yesterday’. They’ve got it down pretty good, except when they have to say the days of the week in order without the help of me singing our Days of the Week song. The sixth graders are a smart bunch, so they have all of the above questions plus year, month, classroom objects, weekly schedule questions (‘I have math on Fridays’), and describing the emotions of other people (he/she/it/we/they). This is the first time they’ve had English class two years in a row, so they’re doing pretty well.
I’ve also introduced a daily slang word for the 4th through 6th graders in a section of their notebooks I call “Talk Like a Gringo.” Gringo is a general word for an American. In some places, it’s more derisive, but in Costa Rica it’s the same as calling someone is Irish or Italian. (And don’t believe what you hear: the word didn’t come from Mexican soldiers yelling “Green, go!” at American troops during the Mexican-American War – army uniforms were still blue at this point, so the true origin of the word is a mystery. OK, I’ll stop being a history nerd now.) In any event, so far they’ve learned “What’s up?,” ‘cool,’ and ‘wicked’ in the Bostonian sense, of course. ‘What’s up’ and ‘wicked’ were pretty easy to demonstrate, but ‘cool’ took some work. After getting suggestions of cool people like Madonna and Michael Jackson, we eventually settled on ubiquitous reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee to be our beacon of coolness. I happen to hate Daddy Yankee and his one beat that he uses in every song with the passion of a thousand bad telenovelas, but at least they got it. My fourth grade class and I were practicing how to describe a group of people on Thursday when a random group of Canadian high schoolers walked by our window. I asked them if they could describe the group using ‘Talk Like a Gringo’ words, and to my delight they all said, “They are wicked cool!” Success. After school, my director gave me some stickers and bookmarks that the Canadians left for me. Awesome, I thought… until I saw that the stickers were all Canadian flags and the bookmarks had the Canadian national anthem printed on them. Some of the kids saw me getting them, so word is out that Tichar has stickers. Next week, it shall be my shameful duty to hand out Canadian propaganda to a group of malleable young minds. Will you let them grow up singing the “O, Canada” as they walk home from school or naming curling (or, worse yet, hockey) as their favorite non-soccer sport? No? In the spirit of good ol’ fashioned American imperialism, I beg you to send down all the patriotic nick-nacks you have. From a plastic flag to stealing the medals Grandpa won for storming Normandy, this is a cause worth fighting for.

Besides school, the thing that’s been taking up most of my time is fruit. Finding fruit, eating fruit, asking for fruit, thinking of new ways to get fruit, looking like an idiot while attempting to hit fruit off trees with a ten foot branch – if it has to do with fruit, I’ve done it. Not only is fruit healthy food, it’s free food. Considering that I try to live on $2 a week when in Boruca (no, really, $2… I’ve gone over only once), free food is the key to getting from lunch at 11am to dinner at 7pm without starving. My first fruit source was an orange tree behind my host grandmother’s house. The tree was technically in the neighbor’s yard, but the branch hangs over into her yard. Not that it matters, because neither of them use it, but I still felt bad. This is the tree that requires the huge branch and a good amount of work to get a single piece. After deciding that I looked stupid/criminal while doing it, I figured it was better to have children standing next to me so it looked like I was getting them fruit instead. Nashaly (my host sister) or my students were happy to oblige, and since they never wanted fruit anyways, it worked out pretty well. Considering the time it took and the fact that it was only possible to get one or two oranges a day, though, I needed to come up with other ways. Among them:
1. Combining learning with fruit-finding - My first graders are learning colors, so I set up a team scavenger hunt where they had to find an object of each color they were learning. One of them, of course, was ‘orange,’ and there just so happens to be an orange tree near our school. So as I watched proudly from my classroom, 14 six year olds hurled sticks at the tree in a desperate attempt to be crowned English Champion for the day. Result: seven oranges.
2. Translate for fruit - One day during class, three girls from the colegio (high school) knocked on my door. One of them is applying to a leadership program in the US and needed help with the application and essay, both of which needed to be done in English. I headed over to one of their houses a couple of nights later, and the two of them that were already there showed me around as we waited for the one who actually had the application. It turns out that they have orange, apple, mango, and avocado trees in their backyard, and that their backyard extends indefinitely outward because there’s nothing but mountains behind them. Upon seeing my delight at the amount of fruit, they said I could take whatever I wanted. As we sat there waiting, I ended up eating about 10 apples (they’re smaller and softer here, and a lot more addictive), two small mangos, and shoved as many oranges into my cargo shorts that I could fit. The third girl didn’t end up coming, so we had to reschedule for two nights later. Result: One essay written, lots more fruit.
3. Drop obvious hints on students – My sixth graders love to hang around my classroom and practice their English/teach me Spanish. One of the questions they knew from last year was ‘What is your favorite food,” which, as you can probably guess, I immediately jumped on. “My favorite food is… oranges. No… apples. No… avocado.” First, I learned that avocado starts growing here around May, at which point you will stop hearing from me because I’ll be eating it 24 hours a day. The next day, though, a sixth grader named Francisco stopped by my class before lunch and handed me a bag of about 20 apples. Result: Francisco gets a 100 in my class, I get 20 more apples, and many more likely to come from the students that saw my reaction.

700 words on fruit… nice. The only other big news I can think of is that today I opened a refrigerator for the first time since arriving in Costa Rica. I didn’t even think about it until now. Well, that about does it. My clothes are clean, and Dooby the puppy looks like he wants some hammock time with me.

Diablitos video

Hostel Pangea, San Jose -
I'm in the city for the weekend to hang out with some volunteers that I haven't seen since Un Techo Para Mi Pais over a month ago. This place has a lightning quick internet connection, so I was finally able to upload the video of the Diablitos to YouTube.
So, what in god's name is going on in the video? Well, it's a demonstration of a three-day festival held in late December/early January each year. Borucans are indigenous people, meaning that they were in Costa Rica before the Spanairds started settling/taking over in the 1500's. The guys dressed up as Diablitos ('little devils") represent the Borucans, and the man dressed up in the bull suit represents the Spanairds. Essentially, they yell at each other and fight, with the Borucans eventually coming out on top.
This all took place on the street right next to my backyard. I was lucky enough to get a good seat for the performance, so there's no heads in the way. I did, however, almost get rammed by the bull a few times as he went after any Diablitos that came near my spot. You might also hear a few short explosions. Borucan boys love their fireworks, and set off M-80ish ones at all hours of the night... usually in the centro in front of my house. Here, they were just throwing them at the feet of the performers, trying to mess them up.
That's all I have for now. Now that I know that this place can handle uploads, I'll try to get some videos of my classes/students up as well. (Like, say, my first graders singing "Hello Teacher" for the 300th time and still loving it.)
Once again, thanks for the e-mails and messages. Talk to you all soon.

All the best,
Dan

Cataratas y Diablitos

This past Friday was the first entirely free day I’ve spent in Boruca since my first few days here about a month ago. I don’t teach on Fridays, but every weekend I’ve either left early Friday morning or been too sick to function. I had no particular plans, but it ended up being a blog-worthy day, mostly for the pictures. (Only a few Awkward Dan Moments…. Sorry.)

I woke up at 7:30, which is comically late here in Boruca… to the point that Yaneth chuckled at me when I stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast. The church bell usually rings around 5:30 every morning, and things get rolling not long after that. You have to make an effort to stay asleep anytime after 6:30. I spent a couple hours doing laundry, which isn’t noteworthy besides the fact that it takes a shorter time to dry things in Boruca’s scorching sun than it does in an average dryer. I strolled down to the escuela to check my e-mail, and I found all of the teachers sitting in a circle of desks, apparently in a meeting that I hadn’t been informed about. I asked one of the cleaning ladies about it, and she assured me that certain people didn’t need to be there – the cleaning staff, the cook, and myself. Puzzled but not upset about missing an hour of unintelligible Spanish, I checked my e-mail in the lab. The windows are always closed to prevent theft and bugs, so it’s always hovering somewhere around 95 degrees. Facing a slow connection and an empty water bottle, I call it quits after a while and head home.

After lunch and some quality nothing-time, I decided to make something of the day and head to the waterfalls to take some long-overdue pictures. Camille, a girl from France who’s living in Boruca for a bit and working on a farm outside of town, lives in a rancho palma on the way (I’ll have to get pictures at some point… it’s like a decked out tree house), so I stopped by to see if she wanted to go. I met her waiting for the bus back to Boruca last week, and we have the natural connection of being two of the four people in Boruca who can speak English.

Pictures to go with words, since just words don´t cut when you probrably have Facebook open in another window (I know I do...):

Some pigs that were feeding next to the first waterfall. Not sure where they came from, but it made for a weird picture.

Shot of the second waterfall and the swimming hole it creates. I spent some time jumping off the little ledge that goes up on the right hand side of the photo (to the right of the last rocks that are dark from being wet). The highest I did was about 7 feet… the swimming hole is only about four feet deep, so I didn’t want to test my luck too much. The last time I was there, though, some kids were jumping from about 15 feet up, as well as from the branches on the tree that hangs over the pool. Seems dangerous, but I’m pretty sure I’ll give into boredom and do it by next weekend. (Don’t tell my insurance company.)

View from the top of the biggest waterfall, taken from the same spot as the last picture except turned around 180 degrees.

At this point, a group of 15 or so students from Rice University in Texas came down to the waterfalls, and I joined up with the tour they were getting from a few girls who live in Boruca. (It helped my ego that I spoke better Spanish than all but one of them.) They were in Boruca for a week helping to build some rancho palmas outside of town, and this was their one day to do “touristy” stuff. They were all really nice, and once again it was good to rest my mind a bit by speaking English.

We headed down a steep hill to the bottom of the big waterfall.

Picture of the big waterfall. To give you an idea of its size, there are two guys standing just to the right of the top of the waterfall – one in a white shirt, one in black – and the waterfall drops for another five or so feet past the bottom of the picture. I will not be jumping off this one.

We continued further down the slope, and the girls brought us to Boruca’s very own bat cave. I was never all that scared of bats to begin with, but I’ve become completely desensitized to them since moving here. One flies into the house every night, so I usually watch the news with one swooping across my face every ten seconds. Quite harmless. Couldn’t get any pictures of the inside of the cave, as the group was afraid that the flash would cause the bats to all fly outside and eat them. So, if you want to see the bat cave, just let me know when you’ll be flying down to Costa Rica to visit me.

As we were leaving, we found out that the guys at the top of the waterfall were part of a film crew that was shooting a documentary on Boruca. I headed home, did some work for school, then spent an hour lounging with our puppy Dooby on the hammock (PS – that dog loves me).

With the family all out of the house, I was reading quietly in my room when I started to hear drums. There’s always some kind of commotion going on outside of my house, but this was the first time I’d heard live drums. After a few seconds, I start to hear high-pitched yelps. I immediately recognized the yelps from a day I’d spent in the town of Rey Curre a month ago: Diablitos! Every year, Boruca (and on a smaller level, Rey Curre) have a festival called Fiesta de los Diablitos (little devils), where guys dress up like spirits (who represent the Borucans), get really drunk on homemade alcohol, and fight a guy dressed in a bull suit (who represents the invading Spaniards from the 1500’s) for three straight days with little to no sleep. Boruca is known for this fiesta, and I was lucky enough to catch the smaller version of it in Rey Curre in early February (Boruca’s is in December).

As it turns out, some Borucans were putting on a demonstration of the festival for the documentary film crew that was in town. It was on the street, literally ten feet up the path from my backyard. I was one of the first people out, but pretty soon half the town had poured out of their houses and made their way to the fighting. Pictures were tough because of the weird lighting that the film crew used, but I managed to get a few good shots (and stole some from Nick, another American living in Boruca for a couple of months), as well as a video that I’ll try to post at some point. The demonstration went on for about a half hour, and then I went back inside to end my day with some dinner and Family Guy en espanol.

That`s all for now. I`m in Palmar Norte for a day to get some stuff done, and I`m heading back to my amazing hotel to lounge for a while- pool, tropical plants, but most importantly... cable TV with the World Baseball Classic in English! At $15 bucks a night, I can`t complain. Hasta luego.

Normalcy (Kinda)

The lack of updates lately is partly due to the fact that I’m settling into normalcy here, making it seem like there’s nothing interesting to write about. “Normal” here, though, has taken some getting used to, but at this point I’m a bit surprised at my lack of culture shock.

It’s now the third week of school, and my schedule is finally fixed, allowing me to see my first and fifth graders for the first time. The third week is also the unofficial “official” start of school, meaning that introductory classes are over and most all of the students are now showing up regularly. It’s been weird having new kids show up three weeks into school, but the absence policy here (aka, nothing…) puts the onus on the students to catch up themselves, rather than the teacher having to create make-up work for them. I just got an official list of my students yesterday, so I’ve started my threats of notas malas if my students don’t attend class.

The classes themselves are going pretty well. I’ll admit that it’s been an adjustment teaching the younger ones (first and second grade), as they barely know Spanish let alone English. I’m not used to repetition to the point of insanity… for example, in a first grade class last week we spent 25 minutes working on the pronunciation of the line “I am fine, thank you” in a song called “Hello, Teacher.” Despite the frustration, it’s been nice to have the same kids sign the song to me as I walk home for lunch every day. The older kids are a blast, especially my 4^th and 6^th graders. (I don’t know the 5^th grades well enough yet.) We spent last Friday writing pen pal letters to my former students in Cohasset, and some of them were going after novios/novias (boyfriends/girlfriends) pretty shamelessly. (Grades and ages are pretty fluid here… the way it works is that a student will be held back if they get below a 65 in any subject, so a student would be held back if they got a 100 in every other subject but got a 64 in English. Parents have no say. The result is things like 13 year olds in 4^th grade, even when they’re bright kids.) I also decided to introduce them to some American music during the letter-writing, and since most of them like music they can dance to but can’t understand the lyrics (read: vulgarities), I decided that Girl Talk was an ideal choice. It was a big hit, and some of the kids could even pick out some of the rap songs in the mix.

Despite my initial concerns of not being able to speak enough Spanish to get by, I find now that I’m speaking too much Spanish in class, since English-only is ideally the best way to teach. The older kids have been really helpful, and usually hover over me in between classes to talk and help me with my Spanish. And when I say “hover over,” I mean it… my desk usually looks like a football huddle, with kids fighting for the attention of “Tichar.” I’ve been lucky enough to have a girl named Kelly visiting Boruca for a few weeks, since she’s trained in ESL teaching and is fluent in Spanish. She’s sat in on a number of my classes and helped me notice and correct flaws. Marcos, the Special Education teacher, has also been a big help, as he’s in the process of creating a guide to help future English teachers in Boruca with their transition.

So, that’s what going on with my “normal” days. Kind of boring, but considering I was expecting language barriers, insane kids, and small fires, boring isn’t too bad. Oh, wait… there’s always small fires burning outside of my classroom, since that’s how they get rid of the trash. I don’t think fires on the playground would go over too well in a U.S elementary school…

Some short bits:

1. Yesterday morning, a second grader walked up to my window as I was drawing some pictures for class. He casually handed me a six-inch retractable razor and told me it was a gift. It probably shows that I’m adjusting to the culture when I simply said “Gracias” and went back to coloring.

2. Last Wednesday, I showed up to school to find that no fifth graders had showed up to school. Confused but used to the unexpected, I went home and did laundry. I returned about two hours later for my second period class, and only three first graders showed up. Since none of them knew a word of English, we played alphabet and color BINGO… and be “we played,” I mean “I gave them cards and told them when to put a marker on a square.” They seemed happy enough, and didn’t seem to notice that all of their cards were virtually identical, meaning that they all got BINGOs at the same time for every game. At this point, I found out there were some races going on that caused the older kids to miss school. Even though the races were over at this point, our director had made the decision to cancel the rest of the day and have a “meeting” at a beach. So, at 11am, having taught all of three students that day, I boarded a minibus and headed off to the beach with the other teachers, where we swam, played soccer, and ate whole fried fish - heads, eyes, and all – until 9pm that night.

3. On Wednesday of my first week, I came down with an awful fever. I hate missing work, but I felt bad enough to stay home on Thursday. At this point, my family was saying that I was simply adjusting to the food. Saturday comes, I haven’t eaten in three days, my entire body aches, and I’m sleeping 18 hours a day. At this point, the general consensus is that my body is not, in fact, adjusting to the food… now, I’m dying of Dengue Fever. It just so happens that the phones are out in Boruca, meaning that I can’t get in touch with my English-speaking doctor. I decide to make the 6.5 hour trip into San Jose anyways, and just as I’m leaving Boruca on the last bus out that day, I spot Jeremy and John, two volunteers from down the mountain who had decided to visit me. I yell a quick apology, and their faces drop as they learn that I’m traveling halfway across the country while they’re stuck on top of the mountain with nowhere to go. (I find out later that they hitched a ride back down in the back of a maure truck.)

I eventually get to the hospital, and settle on the Emergency Room with my doctor nowhere to be found. I’m able to communicate pretty well with the doctors I talk with, at least enough to get the directions on where to go to make sure that I’m not dying. After a blood test and spending an hour shivering in the waiting room (definitely got some stares from the Ticos), I find out that I’m probably not next on the Grim Reaper’s list and head off to a hostel for the night. I get the final clearance the next morning, but unfortunately (or not) by this point I had missed the last possible bus for my part of the country… which means that I’d miss Monday as well.

Arriving back at school on Tuesday, I head to the director’s office to profusely apologize for missing two days of school. “Tranquillo, tranquillo,” he says. Turns out that he had been out of town both days and didn’t even know that I was gone.

4. I headed to Dominical this past weekend with Jeremy and John for some downtime. After 30 minutes of getting absolutely thrashed by the waves (Dominical is a famous surfing hub, and the stereotypical long-haired American surfers outnumber the Ticos 3 to 1 – what this means is that I was completely out of my league, having been surfing twice in my life), I managed to stand up on my board for all of 3 seconds. I eventually manage to burn my skin to a nice lobster shade of red, and I retreated to the shaded hammocks to sleep and read for the read of the weekend. After, um, forgetting to read it when it was assigned to me in high school, I ended up loving The Great Gatsby. I did manage to get a few great pictures in Dominical:

Three or four foot iguana hanging out in a tree near the bus stop. Not nearly as mean as they look... they scurried away once I got close.

River that fed into the Pacific. On the first day I wanted to take a little stroll around the area to see if there was anything worth seeing. I made it to the mouth of the river (for those of you who failed geography, that's where the river meets the ocean) and decided that it'd be a good idea to walk across. I made it about halfway before the bottom dropped out from under me, and I was forced to swim the rest of the way while fighting the waves and currents. (Don't ask me why I didn't just turn around...) There wasn't too much on the other side, so I turned back around and swam it again. This picture is basically an excuse for me to brag about the fact that I didn't drown.

I took about 20 sunset photos while in Dominical, but settled on this one. I intend to eventually start a blog called "cornysunsetsincostarica.blogspot.com."

That's it for now. Thanks for all the messages!