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!

Un Techo Para Mi Pais

I’ve been working on this one in bits and pieces over the last week or two. I easily could have added a lot more, but 2,400 words seemed like a good cutoff point in order to keep myself (and you) sane. Having over two weeks with nothing planned after our orientation ended, our WorldTeach group spent a week in the town of Batan building houses with the volunteer organization Un Techo Para Mi Pais ("A Roof For My Country") for 26 poor families in that community. It was definitely one of the more memorable experiences of my life, for both positive and negative reasons.

On the down side, it rained - hard - for all but maybe an hour the entire week. Think of the hardest rain you've ever seen, and then thinking about trying to build houses in it for 10-12 hours a day. Also, throw in the fact that your most technologically advanced tools are a hammer and a length of plastic tube used to make sure everything is level. Then, add on that you're getting three small meals of rice and beans a day, not getting to shower, wash your hands, or sometimes even have access to a toilet... and then at the end of the day sleep on the cold, wet, concrete floor of an elementary school classroom with no windows. Wake up at 5:30 to the sound of more driving rain and start all over again. Needless to say, it was an tough week on the body, and if I were to make a list of the ten most unsanitary things I've done in my life (which I'm liable to do - I love lists), I'm pretty sure all ten would have occurred in Batan.

Walking in the rain w/gigante beam. 25 minutes or so to the house, a solid 40 with the beam.

What I looked at for more hours than I can count. The process: Dig, fill with rocks, fill with mud, stick pole in and smash down, measure, take pole out if not exact, and either add more rocks/mud or dig it out with your hands.

Lack of comfort aside, though, it was a week that I'm glad I experienced. Hearing about poverty and seeing it first hand are two completely different things, and I'm pretty sure that the fact that the families we were helping out had to live through worse conditions every day was one of the few things that kept me getting out of bed (or, rather, off of floor) and putting on the same wet clothes every morning.
The first family we worked with was actually an extended family living in three small huts on the same plot of land. The main one belonged to the grandmother and grandfather, and was made of a hodgepodge of wood and rusted tin. The other huts belonged to their children, their spouses, and the grandchildren. These were worse: each was a single-room structure for the whole family and all of their possessions, the walls and ceilings were garbage-bag material propped up by tree branches, there was one mattress for the entire family, and the floors were simply mud. There was no running water (only what could be pulled up from the ground), and the toilet was a box with a hole in it. We had three separate groups of about seven volunteers building this family three new houses over the first three or so days of the week.
The second family lived on the other side of town, but faced similar conditions. Their house was slightly larger, but it was still essentially one large room with blankets separating the different sections. From my count, there were at least seven people living here: mother, father, four children aged 3-18 (or thereabouts), and the infant son of the 18 year old girl. Their yard was almost entirely flooded out from the rain, and they told us (after we had made the mistake of washing ourselves off in it) that the water was probably contaminated with whatever had gone into their toilet, which once again was a hole in the ground.

The huts at the first site we worked on.

The homes we built weren’t anything amazing. They were probably about 15 feet long and 8 feet wide, a door, two windows, a tin roof to keep the rain out, and (something we often take for granted) a floor. In the US, this is more like a large tool shed, but this was a huge step up for these families, and provided them with an opportunity to make their lives just a little bit better.

A few of the countless moments, some good, some bad:

- As we enter the seventh hour of work in the pouring rain of the first day, I start to question the worth of my (or any) college degree. Working with the Costa Rican and Nicaraguan college students of our group has proved difficult due to language issues, and the four college-educated Americans and one medical school student from New Zealand are currently digging rocks out of the dirt road that leads to our family's huts using shovels and long metal poles. Taking directions on how to dig holes and precisely level the foundation columns in Spanish was way over my head, so I relegated myself to rock-digging duty, as we needed baseball sized rocks to steady the pillars we placed into the field of mud we were building on. Twenty years of education, some of which I'll be paying off well into my thirties, and I'm trying to figure out the fastest way to pry a rock out of a dirt road with a shovel. As we improve at our craft - I'm soon able to unearth rocks with a quick flick of the wrists - we start to make light of the situation, calling each other "rock stars," singing any song that has the word 'rock' in it (a variation of The Police's "Roxanne" - appropriately reworded and renamed to "Rocksanne" - was a favorite), and making any pun about rocks that we could think of. The rain doesn't seem as hard, and we feel validated by our menial yet necessary work. You know the old saying about having to work your way from the ground up? Literal application here.

Yeah, that'd be me moving a house BY MYSELF.

- Of the approximately 120 people that signed up for the week, I’m pretty sure that I was the least prepared. We received a list of items that we needed to bring, and for the most part they ranged from the expensive (a hammer and sleeping bag) to the inane (a single can of tuna). Instead of, you know, heeding the advice of the people who run these trips for a living, I decide to set my trip budget at about $6 and hope for the best. Besides the clothes that I brought along, I end up securing an inexpensive hammer and tape measure, both of low quality but packaged together for savings. I also obtain a pillow when I take the liberty of taking one out on long-term loan from the hostel I stayed at the night before, rationalized by the fact that they did not have the mechanical bull they had promised in my travel guide. I decide that expensive items like a sleeping bag and work gloves are not worth the investment, and that if my survival comes down to a single can of tuna, I’m sure that the US Embassy would already be on its way to pick me up. I do, however, buy a tube of pizza-flavored Pringles… because they’re friggin’ amazing.
In any event, upon arriving I find out that I’m the only one of the 120 who didn’t bring anything to sleep in. No worries, though. I decide that I can resort to begging as the stupid American, or at the very least sleep under a towel until someone takes pity on me. In a country with fully socialized health care, I figure that there’s no way they let me go blanketless.
I turn out to be 100% right. I ask one of the leaders of the trip (who speaks good but not perfect English) about acquiring some sleeping materials, and she assures me that “there are many nice people who will want to sleep with you.” Assuming that something got lost in translation, I head back to my room, and within five minutes someone shows up to offer me a blanket. Later on that night, some kind soul drops by to lend me their extra air mattress. How anyone managed to have an ‘extra’ air mattress is beyond me, but unfortunately I had fallen asleep about five minutes prior and did not receive their offer face-to-face. My friend and fellow volunteer, Jimi, takes it on my behalf and lightly taps my back in an “attempt” to wake me up. I do, ask him what the tap was for, and he flat out ignores me. Thinking I was mistaken, I fall back asleep. I awake the next morning to the sound of Jimi snoring, entrenched in a deep sleep on an air mattress that had magically appeared during the night.

Yup.

- I’m more prepared for the second day than the first. Having ruined my shorts, socks, and only pair of sneakers in the four inches of mud that was more accurately described as slushy brown superglue, I had trekked into town the night before to buy a pair of $7 rubber boots. Oh… and a supply of chocolate cookies called “Chikys” and Pringle knock-offs called “Kryzpos,” which came in a tube so large that it could fit most Civil War era cannonballs.
After lugging our equipment through the driving rain on the 20 minute walk to the building site, the rubber boots were already tearing through my skin and causing blisters on any portion of my lower legs that are not covered by socks. Which, of course, is every portion of my lower legs, because I had decided that morning that putting on socks would be a huge waste of time now that I was equipped with my incredible new waterproof boots. Having nature as my only resource to remedy this problem, I stuff my boots with some large palm leaves that I found growing next to our building site, and they act as the world’s cheapest, most ridiculous looking socks. Ranking myself somewhere between Lewis and Clark on the list of history’s greatest survivalists, my inflated ego and I are prepared for another long day in the rain.
I spent a few minutes pretending to understand instructions on how to level the posts, then sent myself off once again to dig rocks with the other gringos. I work at a furious pace, desperate to prove that my rock digging was just as important as building the actual house. All this determination manages to tire me out in about two hours, and suddenly I was searching for motivation to get through the other eight hours left in our day.
As my pace dwindled, a group of five children approached from down the street. The rain had let up a bit, allowing those sane enough to have stayed inside for the past couple of hours to come out. They were clearly from this same poor neighborhood: none of them were wearing shoes, their clothes were dirty and torn, and most of their attire was ill-fitting, clearly handed down from an older sibling but not yet grown into. The oldest one, who introduced himself as Chris, tried to start up a conversation with me but quickly realized that I couldn’t understand his breakneck pace. After a few mas despacio, por favor’s, he simplified his questions and I let him know what our group was doing, and why the tall, skinny American was stealing rocks from his road. The kids ranged in age from five to twelve, although each looked a good 2-3 years younger than their stated age due to the sad fact that the lack of food in these parts stunts the children’s growth.
Chris started our new, slower conversation by asking me if I was from the United States. I replied that I was. His first guess at my city of residence was Paris, but I had to break the news that I was from the slightly less exciting (but slightly more American) city of Boston. He looked puzzled, I told him it was cerca de New York, mas o menos, and he seemed satisfied. By this time, my fellow Gringa Jen made her way over. Jen had already taught in Costa Rica for a year, so she was able to carry on a more substantial conversation with the kids. She explained her job for the morning, which was carrying the dug up rocks back to the house site in a vegetable sack.
Without being asked, all five kids immediately started picking up the rocks I had dug up and placed them in the bag. They continued to do this, run after run, sometimes hovering over my shovel to fight for the right to pick up the next rock. My pace picked up, half strengthened by their enthusiasm for such a tedious task, the other half out of fear of embarrassment of being the white dude who can barely speak and can’t keep up with a bunch of kids. Before long, we’d stockpiled enough rocks to last the morning. I broke open my stash of Chikys to share with our helpers for a job well done, feeling selfish that I ever intended to eat all of them in a neighborhood where food isn’t a given. They happily took the treats, then scampered off as the rain picked back up, assuring that the rest of our rock-hunting wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

--
Up until the week in Batan, I had been living a relatively sheltered life in Orosi, which is mostly middle class and full of people that are used to Americans. It was while I was delivering walls and floors to the different sites on the back of a pickup truck that it finally hit me that I was in Costa Rica. As we crept along the pothole-filled roads trying to dodge tree branches and keep the hundreds of pounds of wood from falling over and crushing us, one of the leaders of the project, a girl named Luli, talked to me about the impact Un Techo Para Mi Pais has already had, and what its future goals were. They’ve built hundreds of houses in Costa Rica already (and thousands in surrounding Latin American countries), but a ton of work still needs to be done. Luckily, they seem to be gaining popularity, especially with the more educated and well off university students of San Jose. I’m glad I was able to make a contribution, however small, to their cause, even if it meant washing myself in an outdoor sink every night.

Three new houses built for the first family.

Opening ceremony for our first house.

Hasta luego.

Haiku Thursday

Because hours of free time is a great excuse to bring this 'tradition' back...

I.
At 3:12, I wake
Rejoice! The roosters don’t crow!
Oh, wait… nevermind.

II.
J-Kwon on TV
Home isn’t far away, see?
Just five years ahead.

III.
Mosquito netting:
Like a princess bed, except
It stops bat attacks

IV.
Telenovelas -
I just don’t understand them;
All they do is cry.

Primer dia

Feb 16^th – First day of school

Mi casa, 4:30

After a seven month stint out of the classroom and five weeks here in Costa Rica, the first day of school finally arrived this morning. In the US, the first day is a big event for both students and teachers: everyone wants to make a good first impression, so everyone is 100% ready to go. Thinking back to my first day at Cohasset, I had been in my classroom for two days prior to opening in order to get my room/introductory lessons ready, and an hour before the bell on the first day. As is always the case in the US, all of my students were present on the first day, and we jumped right into things. I had been told time and time again to expect the complete opposite of the US experience, and that’s pretty much what I got.

I got up relatively early, leaving time to shower, eat, and walk my 50 second commute to school. Oscar and I left together, and arrived at 6:50, ten minutes before the “start” of school. At 6:57, I realized that I had forgotten my dictionary at the house, and I was there and back by 6:59. As 7 came and went with no indication of anything starting, I walked over to my classroom to see how the cleaning/wall-putting-up was coming along. Good news: I had a wall. Bad news: desks in total disarray, and I’m pretty sure that some men were carrying sacks of potatoes out of my room. I immediately wrote off any chance of the room being ready for the day.

Once my director, Mario, gave up on trying to fix our speaker system for the opening ceremonies, we did a quick pledge of allegiance and national anthem, followed by what I soon find out is teacher introductions. I made sure to line up as far away from Mario as possible, just in case he decided it would be funny if he handed me the microphone. Always thinking.

After that, all the kids went off with their classroom teacher. And by “all,” I mean “the ones who remembered today was the first day and decided to show up.” Of the 190 or so kids that are supposed to be in my school, I’d say no more than 35 showed up. I ask Mario what I can do, and he said that I was free until a meeting at 10.

With my classroom being cleaned, I decided to haul all of my materials to a rancho de palma, which is basically a traditional thatch hut made of bamboo-like wood and dried palm leaves. (One is pictured in the post below as ‘my office’.) I decided to organize all of the materials left behind for me into categories, mostly because it’s the only thing I could think of. Before long, about a dozen students (who I’m pretty sure were supposed to be in their classroom… but at this point I’d stop trying to make sense of the day) were in the rancho with me, shouting out whatever English they know in an attempt to please “Tichar.” Two sixth grade boys, Andres and Miguel, struck up a conversation with me, and to my surprise I had no trouble talking with them for the entire hour and a half that I was organizing. Some third grade girls eventually joined the fun and passed me things to place into piles, regardless of whether the item had already been placed into one. All the kids were extraordinarily nice and accommodating, and I definitely felt more comfortable with my ability to communicate with them by the time we finished.

With over an hour to spare and nothing to do, I walked around the rest of the school looking for things to do and students to meet. I eventually find my way to the computer lab which, as I had been told, is pretty amazing by Costa Rican standards. After talking to a few boys playing Mario Kart 64 on the computer (they take great pride in showing me the other games they have… Cruisin’ USA! I will find a way to plan a culture lesson around these games…), the computer teacher showed me to a computer with internet access, correctly guessing that all Gringos want to check their e-mail at every possible second. So, two hours into my first day of teaching in an indigenous Costa Rican village on the top of the mountain, I am checking Facebook to see what’s going on in the exciting world of wall postings.

10 o’clock rolls around, the kids go home, and the staff sits down around an outdoor table for the meeting. Mario introduced me to the rest of the staff. Here’s an exact translation, no lie: “This is Daniel, the new English teacher. He is single and good looking.” No comment. We get a couple of letters that I’m able to follow along with, and I’m feeling pretty good about myself. Then, we get the meeting schedule: 26 items long, all of which will be addressed by Mario in monologue form. Sweet.

At this point, things get a bit hazy. I try to follow along, but it simply wasn’t going to happen at that speed. Then, I switched to my “at least look interested” mode, where I intently look at Mario, pretending to get everything he says. I do this for about 25-30 minutes, having no idea where we are on the list of 26 items. Mario pauses and checks off the first two items. Great.

The talking continues, but eventually we got some coffee. The talking continues some more, but eventually they brought us lunch. The only let up is when another Gringo, who seemed to be a tourist, walks up to our meeting, pulling the kindergarten teacher away to offer her some toys. As we listened in, we heard him struggle through the conversation. I spoke up for the only time during the meeting, saying that there’s at least one person in Boruca who speaks worse Spanish than me. My only joke of the day was a success, but it does nothing to lessen the dullness of the rest of the meeting.

Luckily for me, our school has a part time volunteer who’s half-Borucan/half-American, and she let me in on any important points I missed. Which turn out to be… well… not much. We talked for a good while after, and she’s a huge help in finding out the ins and outs of Boruca and its small-town quirks. I head home to get a second dose of lunch, then head back to school for two nondescript hours of classroom arrangement. The room that I once considered massive (by Costa Rican standards) is now packed to the brim with 30 desks, with barely any room for aisles let games that involve movement. A slight downer, but I was still planning on holding half of my class outside anyways.

Soaked in sweat and covered in dust, I head home to hang out with Nashaly and the family’s new tiny dog, Dooby. ‘Tiny’ as in, he fell asleep in my palm. The family’s other dog, Scooby (get it?!) is a bit jealous, but you’d be too considering Dooby's cuteness:

Nashaly and (sleeping) Dooby

Dooby wakes up right as I take the photo. Cuteness remains.

‘Tis all for now. Another 1,200 word post. I’m going to have a book by the end of the year. Hasta luego.

DP

First few days in Boruca

El Colegio en Boruca, 1:30PM

(Typed at la oficina de Tichar Dan, as pictured above.)

(After finishing this entry, I realized that it’s kinda… no… really long. Then again, I had a two hour block in my morning with nothing else to do, so I decided to write a little. Still working on the piece about my week in Bataan building houses; hopefully that’s up soon.)

It’s now my third day in Boruca, and things are going about 100X better than I thought they would. After catching the last bus up the mountain on Tuesday, I walked across the street to my house to find that nobody was home. Awesome. Considering that home security in Boruca is nothing more than a string looped around the doorknob and nailed to the wall, I decided to let myself in after spending a few silent, awkward minutes with an old man who was also awaiting the return of my family.

After a few minutes of cleaning my backpack outside from the dirty week in Bataan and dirtier bus ride up the mountain, Asdrubal, the oldest brother in the family, showed up and offered me coffee. Asdrubal is an English teacher in another town, so I got to practice my Spanish with a sympathetic ear, as well as ask more specific questions that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to pull off in Spanish. The rest of the family eventually returned home… turns out that Oscar, the father, had simply forgotten that I had called and said I’d be on the last bus. It happens. The youngest daughter, Nashaly (4 years old), and Asdrubal’s son, Dillon (3), immediately rejoiced at my arrival by shouting “TICHAR!,” the named bestowed on whatever tall white guy that happens to be living in the town, since the white guy is always the English teacher. Nashaly and Dillon have become my best friends here over the first few days. I ask them how to say different words in Spanish, and they happily oblige while laughing at my Gringo pronunciation.

Wednesday, my first full day, was an exercise in filling time. After waking up at 8:30 and learning that my school director, Mario, was out of town until 3, I had a ton of time to fill with limited resources. My schedule, with no time noted because I’ve learned that specific times don’t mean much here:

- Eat breakfast. Gallo pinto, eggs, and coffee. Delicious. Nashaly laughs in my face for a good minute when she pounds her entire cup of coffee in the time it takes me to drink half of mine. Four year olds chugging coffee… nice.

- Shower. Possibly the biggest news of the year: AGUA CALIENTE! Since my last visit, my family installed an electric showerhead that allows me to take hot showers. It was my first hot shower in a week and a half, and I don’t think I’ve been so excited about something since the Sox won the World Series. Also, there were no big spiders in the shower like last time. That was a plus.

- Read. A lot. One of the things that I’m excited about this year is all the reading I’ll have time to do. With my last five years filled with college, teaching, and having friends that speak my language, I haven’t had a ton of time to read. I’ve been able to finish two books since arriving in Costa Rica – David Sedaris’ “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and Dennis Lehane’s “Darkness, Take My Hand.” Both are recommended, and both were comforting in certain ways: “Me Talk Pretty…” was largely comprised of embarrassing stories from when he was learning a new language, and “Darkness…” was set in Boston, including a chase scene over the Fore River Bridge that I crossed every morning to get to Cohasset. I’m now about halfway through “Into the Wild,” with another three books on deck.

- Watch the news. Basically, there were only two stories on the news today: every possible angle of Wednesday night’s soccer game between Costa Rica and Honduras, and Steven Segal’s visit to the country/meeting with Oscar Arias, Costa Rica’s president. Yes, you read that right. Not only is Steven Segal a national news story down here, HE GOT TO MEET WITH THE FREAKING PRESIDENT. If he can get a meeting with the president, who can’t? Do they tell him ‘yes’ but turn down Jared the Subway Guy? If so, Jared would have a legitimate gripe.

- Clean. Upon discovering the top shelf of my room was full of dust and materials from the volunteer that was here in 2006, I decided to spend a good hour or two cleaning. Things I discovered: a snare drum, a belt (I needed an extra one), and a backpack in the shape of a frog. Score.

- Walk to my director’s house and talk. On the walk there, I wasn’t sure if I should be excited or be scared enough to run back down the mountain. Well, when he answered the door with no shirt, dripping wet, and a towel draped over his shoulders, my fears were alleviated. We talked for a few minutes, and he told me that I could go to the school at 8 in the morning the next day.

- Take a walk. A long walk. It being 3:45 and my entertainment options exhausted until the soccer game that night, I trek out with some water and my camera with no real idea of where anything is. I follow the river for a few minutes to get to the plaza (soccer field), and with nothing to see there, I continue on up the road as it climbs up the mountain. There wasn’t a whole lot up there besides great views of Boruca and surrounding farms. Like this:

And this (my house is right in front of the big, ugly white building to the right):

I found an offroad trail that I followed for a bit through jungley terrain, but decided to turn around when I realized that getting lost in the jungle on my first full day was a good way to pick up some nicknames. On the way back, I discovered that the colegio (high school) offers internet access for 300 colones (about 50 something cents) an hour. Another score.

- Eat dinner. Rice, beans, and chorizo. Mmm.

- Futbol! The town started to rumble a few minutes before kickoff, with the sound blasting from the pulperia (convenience store/meeting place) across the street. The first half was pretty uneventful, with the highlight being an extended conversation about the different pictures on the back of US quarters with Oscar. In the second half, though, Costa Rica scored two quick goals. After each, you could hear the town erupting, with people cheering, dogs barking, and fireworks being set off. (I initially thought that someone had been shot… but that wouldn’t have made much sense as a celebration.) The game ended as a huge 2-0 win for Costa Rica, and I’ve been told that they play the US next. I might be watching that one alone. Bed time.

This morning, I was operating on Tico Time and assumed that my director would be too. Tico Time is when the stated time (as in, “I’ll be there by 7”) is more of a suggestion than a promise. After being told yesterday that he would be at the school by 8am, I roll out of bed at 8:30, shower, eat breakfast, and eventually arrive at the school by 9:15ish. He, of course, has yet to arrive. Tico Time can either be the greatest thing in the world or the most frustrating, depending on when it’s used. Today, though, I’m all about it. Once he gets there, he shows me around the school and my classroom. The school is impressive by Costa Rican standards, and currently undergoing a full cleaning. My classroom is different than the one I had a picture of before. I’m now in the “main” part of the school, which means I have a slightly nicer classroom with electricity. The downside as of right now is that I don’t have a wall separating me from the third grade class. Things could be worse, I suppose. I was able to carry on a simple conversation with him for the entire 25 minutes that he was showing me around, and he seems like a nice guy. Took a quick peek through the materials left for me by the last volunteer, and found out that there’s a good chance that I might only teach Mondays through Thursdays. Three day weekend every week? This volunteering thing isn’t too bad…

It’s just about lunch now, so I’m off for my standard dish of rice, beans, and __________. Hope all continues to go well back home, and as always, thanks for the e-mails, messages, and comments.

DP