- The MEP (Minesterio de Educacion Publica) meetings at my school were a blast, even if they did end up cancelling most of my classes for two weeks. The point of the meetings were to introduce the various directors and bureaucratic types (who live and work in San Jose, which might as well be a different country) to the culture and lifestyle of indigenous people. What this means is that, for at least a few days, I was not the most touristy-looking person in Boruca. Each day the MEP members were split into groups, and each group got to visit a ‘local’ town to talk to the inhabitants and study the school. The first day, I was told to go with a group to a town called ‘Alto Las Moras,’ which according to our map was 1km away. The map was wrong. Alto Las Moras is actually a 3 mile, 2 hour walk almost straight up the mountain. This two hours could have easily been reduced to about one if the San Jose-ers didn’t stop nearly every 30 seconds to take a picture or argue the edibleness of a number of plants. When we finally arrived, all of Escuela Alto Las Moras was there to greet us – all three students and one teacher. Three boys: one in fifth grade, two in fourth. Their prom is going to be pretty lame. I spent a good amount of time talking to the teacher about their English classes. Since they’re so isolated, she’s had to teach herself English and then do her best to pass along that knowledge to her students. She’s even gone through the effort to create a huge book of lesson plans, material and (most importantly) pronunciations for any future teacher who might take her spot. Pretty impressive.
The view from Alto Las Moras. Boruca is down the mountain in the center of the picture. Remember that it takes an hour to drive up the mountain just to get to Boruca and that should give you an idea of how isolated Alto Las Moras is.
The next day, I was chosen to be the leader of a group that was heading down the mountain to Rey Curre. I’m pretty sure they just did this to make me feel needed, since my sole responsibility as leader was to tell our driver to take a left at the bottom of the mountain. My day in Rey Curre was a full one – a class in Brunka (the native language of Boruca and Curre), visiting various village elders, and lunch at the local swimming hole. While all of my other group members decided to stay professional, I took advantage of the hot day by going swimming with our sixth grade tour guides. The swimming hole had a 13 or so foot ledge that you can jump off of, and as I was about to make the plunge, my colleagues screamed at me to stop. “Hay piedras?” I ask, trying to find out if I was about to jump into rocks. “No, tiene que esperar por una hora despues de comiendo para nadar.” That’s right, in Costa Rica, they’re damn serious about the probably-false-since-I’ve-never-actually-seen-any-evidence-of-it-
being-true rule that you have to wait an hour to swim after eating. I shrug them off, jump in, and come up screaming and gasping for air. They jump up, readying themselves to come in and save me. “Que mentiras,” I say as I change my expression to an “I-gotcha” smile, letting them know that they’ve been had.
-While watching another demonstration of the “Juego de los Diablitos” on the street next to my house, a preschooler who has recently decided that Teacher is his best friend sat down to me and started to talk. After a few minutes of asking me how to say different words in English, sometimes asking the same word two or three times upon forgetting it, he makes the astute observation that my skin is white.
“I know.”
“Why?”
“In my country, there are many people who have white skin.”
He ponders this. After apparently failing to accept my answer as truth, he proceeds to scratch my arm with his fingernail.
“Que buscas?” What are you looking for?
“Su piel café.” Your brown skin.
- I spent the weekend in Dominical – the usual of getting burnt, getting physically abused by the waves while surfing, and eating. This time, though, we had the added activities of watching the MTV Michael Jackson video marathon and looking up random MJ trivia on Wikipedia. Did you know, for example, that Slash played the main guitar riff on ‘Black or White?’ Or that he wrote ‘The Way You Make Me Feel’ because his mother wanted a song “you could shuffle to?” Or that ‘Bad’ was originally called ‘Exceedingly Mischievous’ before his label suggested the lyric change to make things flow better? Yup. Most if not all of those are true.
And, to give you an idea of the standard of news down here, in the coverage immediately following his death, the stations clearly didn’t have enough money to pay for the royalties to all of his most famous videos. So, with time to fill and nothing to fill it with, they proceeded to play a full two minutes of Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Fat,’ a parody of ‘Bad.’ No commentary, no insight, only the line “Jackson was one of the most imitated musicians of all time” under the video. Awkward.
- Yesterday, I had my first mask-carving class with the father of two of my students. All the masks here are hand-carved from balsa wood or (less commonly) cedar. We started one out of balsa - cutting and trimming the trunk of its bark alone took about an hour, so I can only imagine how long the carving will take me. I’m sure I’ll force pictures on you at some point, so stay tuned.
As Fourth of July nears, I figured I'd post this video/song. It's Jose Feliciano's 1968 version of the "Star Spangled Banner," one of the first 'alternative' renditions of the song and my personal favorite version of our national anthem. (Yes, I keep track of these sort of things.) I listen to my mp3 of this song almost every night here in Boruca. Happy Fourth!
I’m heading home this Friday, and should be back in Boston by late Friday night. I’ll be around for two weeks, before make the culture-shocking 36-hour turnaround from Boston to teaching in Boruca again. Thanks, as always, for reading, and hopefully I’ll be able to see most of you when I’m home.
