Sometimes, you just come home and there's a severed pig's head in your sink, you know?
With that being said...
April 17th
It’s been an eventful week and a half: vacation, the most un-Eastery Easter ever, the culture shock of returning to Boruca, and perhaps my weirdest day at school yet.
Puerto Viejo was amazing – probably my favorite travel spot that I’ve yet to visit in Costa Rica. It’s located on the Caribbean coast, with a large portion of the population coming from a Carribean/Rastafarian background. This means that almost everyone speaks English, which was like running into a brick wall on the road to learning Spanish. The town itself is centered around two or three relatively busy streets with restaurants and bars, but luckily it’s been able to maintain the Caribbean vibe and hasn’t become too touristy. There are beaches within 100 yards of the center, but the further you walk away from town, the better they get. A day-by-day account would probably be boring (plus I’m lacking in the travel-writing department), but here’s some highlights:
(Actually, no. After spending twenty minutes typing out just the highlights, I realize that even they make for boring reading. Unless the story involves travelling to space or getting kidnapped, hearing about someone else’s vacation is about as exciting as hearing about someone’s fantasy baseball team or how smart their child is. Here’s the highlights of the highlights, in as terse as manner possible.)
- Kayaked down jungle river. Saw monkeys. Waved at monkeys. Monkeys did not wave back. Monkeys preferred to sleep.
- Watched Red Sox at a bar. A reggae bar. A loud reggae bar. Left. Found another bar to watch Red Sox. This bar played only 2Pac. Sox lost. Sang along to “Changes.”
- Ate avocado for breakfast. Ate avocado while riding bike. Ate avocado while standing in line for ATM.
- Saw sloth climbing a tree. Took photos. Was not satisfied with only photos. Approached sloth. Sloth reached out and shook my hand. Bonding. Invited sloth to come to dinner. Sloth said yes; we ate lobster. Last sentence was a lie. Sorry.
So there’s my five days in about 100 words. All in all, I recommend Puerto Viejo, but not as much as I recommend meeting a sloth.
It being Semana Santa (Holy Week) and all, we had to catch a bus out on Thursday or get stuck there for the weekend, as the country essentially shuts down. We made it back to San Jose by late afternoon, and the streets were so deserted that I was waiting for a horde of zombies to appear from around the corner. We spent a few days in the city, which wasn’t all that eventful but relaxing nonetheless.
Easter Sunday was definitely a weird one. Good Friday is the more important day in Semana Santa (essentially everything is closed), and Easter is more of a travel-back-from-wherever-you-are-day. I spent ten hours on or waiting for a bus on Easter, and my Easter dinner was me eating some cold chicken, rice, and beans by myself at the only fast-food restaurant open in Buenos Aires, the town where I catch the bus to Boruca. If it sounds depressing, it’s because it is. On the bright side, one of my friends from WorldTeach (who had been in Puerto Viejo and San Jose with me) had been kind enough to buy us all some chocolate eggs that morning, and I got to have my one Eastery moment while sitting on a curb in the hot, dry, and dusty plot of concrete with the terrible misnomer of Buenos Aires.
Getting back to Boruca was probably the biggest case of culture shock I’ve had since arriving in Costa Rica. Making the immediate switch from English, restaurants, beaches, and Red Sox to Spanish, rice and beans, more Spanish, and lesson planning was tough to handle all at once. Oh, and we didn’t had water in the house for five days after I got back, and apparently my family is building a small house for some family member outside of my room. Stressful and dirty would be two good words to use to describe the situation. Mondays are usually tough enough because three of my four classes are either first or second graders, but this past Monday I was unable to speak properly in any language by about 1:30 in the afternoon. Fortunately, all the other teachers seemed to be feeling the same way, so we made a collective decision to have an extra ten minutes in between each class.
During my final class, I saw the sixth graders carrying wood and dried-out palm leaves towards an empty spot about 30 feet outside of my window. It was interesting enough to investigate after school, and they told me that they were building a rancho palma hut for Tuesday’s celebration of Juan Santamaria Day, a national holiday commemorating a battle between the Costa Ricans and a group of invading American southerners in the 1850’s. The group, led by William Walker, were trying to establish a state in Costa Rica in order to obtain more votes for slavery in Congress. The basic plot is that a young man named Juan Santamaria died in an effort to burn down the American’s fort, becoming a national hero in the process. As the Americans fled, William Walker, the leader of the Americans, was eventually captured and killed, putting an end to the invasion. (History lesson over.) I helped build the hut for a while, with my official job being the tall guy who nails in anything that’s too high for the Ticos to reach.
As I walked past the school gates the next morning, I was greeted by the normal cries of “TEECHAR!”, only now every one of them was aiming a fake wooden gun at me. Turns out that all of the students are asked to bring fake guns to school for a reenactment of the battle. Since the battle, you know, involved shooting at Americans and all, guess who got shot at all day long? After failing to convince the other teachers and some older students that William Walker wasn’t representative of my part of the country, I cheerfully played along, happily grunting, choking, and dying every time I was shot at.
First period went by normally, as I practiced numbers 1-100 with one of my third grade classes. Right after taking attendance for my second-period sixth graders, we were all called to area in between the two main buildings to begin the assembly. Some pre-school kids dressed up as historical figures and told the story of the battle. In case you’re wondering, pre-school plays are the same everywhere. After what I’m sure was three or four weeks of practice, one kid got the microphone and said, “Hola, yo soy…,” turned to his teacher and asked, “Como se llama?”
The students were then sent class-by-class to the area around the rancho palma. At the time, I had no idea why we were moving, but since I technically was in charge of the sixth graders I was told to go with them. I then found out that since they’re the oldest in the school, the sixth graders had the honor of going inside the rancho palma while everyone else stood about 30 feet away. After about two minutes of huddling inside the rancho with 18 sixth graders and having NO idea what was going on, one of them finally told me that we were about to reenact the battle. Why, then, were we inside a hut? Well, guess who was playing the part of the Americans? Yup! So, one by one, each class (playing the Costa Ricans) ran up and ‘attacked’ the hut, with the sixth graders fighting back and forcing them away. The hut was cramped, but I admit that it was fun fighting off 7 year olds who were attacking me with wooden guns. After about five minutes of this, we had successfully repelled every class, and a long pause ensued.
Then I saw the torch. One of the teachers was wrapping a towel around a stick and getting a lighter ready to set it on fire. Still huddled in the rancho palma hut, I asked the kids if we should leave. They said no. At this point, I figured it was a good time to start recording a video. The teacher eventually lit the torch and handed it off to a student chosen to play Juan Santamaria. It was right around this point when I realized that our reenactment was going to be pretty friggin’ realistic: the rancho was going to be lit ablaze with us inside, and we would have to run for our lives. Let’s take a moment and remember that this is a school assembly. Felix, the student playing Santamaria, did his best hero impression and stumbled toward the rancho, falling down and reaching out with one last stretch to light a corner on fire. Being made of dried palm leaves, the caught fire almost immediately, with 17 students and one confused teacher inside. It wasn’t until smoke filled the hut and one wall was completely engulfed in flames that the students decided to make a run for it. We pushed our way outside, and as soon as I was out of harm’s way, I turned around to record what our fate would have been had we waited a few more seconds: The hut had turned into a fireball, with flames reaching more than 20 feet up into the overhanging branches of a nearby tree. The entire school chased after the student who was chosen to play William Walker, and they returned a minute later with him ‘captured,’ forcing him to face a 155-student firing squad shortly thereafter. Just like that, the assembly was over.
Not quite knowing how to react to government-sponsored arson and child endangerment (but having thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless), I let my sixth graders know that the rest of class would be cancelled so we could watch the video over and over again. I’ll upload it to YouTube/this blog the next time I’m in San Jose with a fast connection. Even though a school assembly where a hut is set on fire with kids inside of it would probably be a national news story in the US, apparently it’s no big deal here. By lunchtime, everything was back to normal – except for the fact that my room reeked of smoke.
That's about it for now. I'm hoping to do devote my next update to my host family, house, and a day in the life. We'll see if they allow me to take photos of them. Thanks for all the messages!
