My Site!

I did it again. I came home from class and no one was home. I wanted to get some letters written so I sat down with my new stationary from Meghan, and new sharpies from my mom, and started writing. I heard an, “Upe! Dona Luz?!” and knew that I had to go outside to tell whoever it was that Dona Luz wasn’t home and that I couldn’t recharge their phones. I barely stepped out of the front door when a gust of wind slammed it shut. Shit. Why do I keep pad-locking the gate?

I was not about to sit for another hour, so I immediately started, quietly, shouting “Upe?” at my neighbor’s house. I heard movement so I waited. No one came. I shouted a little louder, and a little louder, and louder until I was using my cheerleading voice. Finally, my neighbor poked her head around the curtain and saw me standing about a foot and a half from her window, just on the other side of the cement wall. She came out and I explained that I was locked in my yard and asked if I could climb over the wall and leave through her yard. She laughed and told me “tranquilla,” which is relax, and said of course. Within ten minutes of getting locked in, I was able to get out and walk to the safety of Dona Luz and her keys. It’s amazing what changes in a week. I don’t know if it was my overwhelming confidence that made me believe that I could explain my situation to my neighbor using Spanish, or my dread of sitting there for more than an hour that made me take action, but I am so glad I did.   

On to the really exciting news, I officially have my site placement! For the duration of my service, I will be living in El Capulin, a barrio of Liberia, in the province of Guanacaste. El Capulin is only two kilometers outside of Liberia, which is the capital of Guanacaste, the home of an international airport and has a population of about 40,000. In contrast to the fancy living of Liberia, El Capulin is a pretty poor town and fairly small. I will be working in two elementary schools, each with less than 200 students. Each school has one English teacher and I will be working with them to improve their English and teaching habits. Hopefully they like me.

Guanacaste, the province I’ll be living in, is dubbed the wild, wild west of Costa Rica. It is hot and dry and there is a lot of cattle ranching. I don’t know what El Capulin will be like, since it is so close to a city, but lucky for you, and me, I am visiting it from Saturday until next Wednesday and can give a more detailed post then.

I am really excited to finally have a place to call home for the next two years. And I am super nervous to actually move there and start my life, which will be in three weeks. I think once I am there, everything will feel real and I might freak a little. I have to live with a host family for the first six months, so hopefully I won’t feel super lonely. But I think the reality that I am going to be here, in Costa Rica, for two years, will sink in.

But, hopefully the site visit this coming week will give me a good idea of what my site is like and what I potentially will be working on. How exciting!

This past weekend sixteen of the trainees went to Manuel Antonio, on the Pacific Coast, to get a little sun before we are all split up throughout the country. The beach was gorgeous and the water was fantastic. There were waves and surfers and parasailing and food and sarongs and everyone had a really fun time.

This coming week is the site visit and the week after that is swearing-in and moving out. Everything is moving really fast but I like it! I am feeling really great and comfortable with Costa Rican living and Spanish and teaching. I know that will change when I move, but for now, I am very content.

Thanks for all of the letters and packages. It’s really incredible what an amazingly fantastic group of family and friends I have. I hope to get a PO Box in Liberia, so look for a new address in a few weeks.

I love and miss you all! And Happy Happy Birthday to Meghan! Hope you had the best day ever!!

Annie     

Changes in San Miguel

Time has gotten away from me and kind of a lot has happened since the last time I wrote. So far, I’ve thought about my time in Costa Rica in chunks and those chucks tend to have some big event related to them. I always tell myself, I know I’m going to want to write about that, so I’ll wait until it’s over. And I wait, but the next week has another event that I’m going to want to write about so I wait again. And now it’s been almost three weeks and I have lots of stories.    

Going back to Semana Santa, aka Holy Week:

Costa Rica is a Catholic country, and because of that, schools are closed and many people have the entire week off of work. Unfortunately, I had classes until Wednesday, but the rest of the week I had free.

I think I mentioned this before but my host sister, Ruth, was pregnant. When I came home from class on Wednesday, Dona Luz, my host mom, told me that she was at the hospital all day with Ruth because she was having contractions and it seemed like Jimena, the baby, would be born. I love babies; so obviously, I was super excited to have a host niece around.

About two hours after that initial conversation, Dona Luz told me to pack a bag for one or two days and that we would be leaving in an hour.   Whut?    Now, I had remembered that the week prior, Dona Luz talked about going to visit the Province of Cartago, where her son lives. But, we have talked about other plans before and rarely do they come to fruition. And Ruth was in the hospital. So, I thought, hm… ok, we can go to the hospital and hang out for a bit until the baby is born. It’s a little weird, but I’m down if that’s what we’re going to do!

Now, disclaimer here, Dona Luz very well could have said exactly where we were going and why I needed to pack a bag. And she probably did. But with my Spanish abilities I get the really important information, like pack a bag of clothes, but not the minor details, like where we are going, what to bring, how long we’ll be gone, who’s coming, ect.

So, just in case, I packed three outfits, six pairs of undies, and a bathing suit.

And good thing I did. It turns out we were, in fact, going to Cartago and we were going to stay at Freddy’s house, Dona Luz’s son. We stayed there for two nights and he was a fantastic tour guide and cook. We went to a couple of church ruins, La Negrita Cathedral, Rio Paloma, and other little stops along the way. It was really interesting to be traveling with Costa Ricans who know the history and stories that go along with the sites. It was a lot of fun but also quite a learning experience not knowing all of the details of the trip. Since that experience, I’ve gotten better at asking questions or repeating back information to make sure I understand it correctly and I have it all.   

Tech Week:

The week after Semana Santa I went to visit another PCV in a town next to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui. [This is not the Puerto Viejo where Coco and Chris will be honeymooning, but it is the Puerto Viejo where Will Smith and his son were just filming] The goals of this week were to observe four hours of classes, co-plan for four hours, and to co-teach for four hours. And I did just that along with some other non-work-related things.

La Guaria, where Marlene volunteers, is super hot. I was sweating all the time. It’s in the plain lands but there were mountains within walking distance. There were a ton of pineapple and banana fields, which is where the majority of people work.

Marlene works in two primary schools and both are fairly large. Also, there are basically two school days in one, which I found interesting. One group of k-5^th grades comes in from 7:00am until 12:00 and another group goes from 1:00 until 5:00. The teachers teach the same lessons twice every day. And while the kids get about five hours of school every day, the teachers work about ten. The kids were really great though and I thought the English teachers that Marlene works with had a high level of English and worked really well with her.

She also has a community class that I observed and taught in. It is a beginning class and she has about 30 adult students. It was awesome. The classroom was packed and every student was engaged and interested in learning. We played a lot of really fun and interactive games to help reinforce the vocab and get them speaking. I loved it and I thought Marlene did a great job.

When we weren’t working, we did some non-English-teaching related things. Marlene and I went to a “Zumba” class and it is in quotations because, in reality, it was a pretty hard core dance class with cumbia and meringue and other Latin dance moves. My hips just don’t move like that, but maybe by the time I leave Costa Rica I’ll be dancing like a Latina.

We also took a boat tour on the Rio Sarapiqui and it was gorgeous. We saw a crocodile, monkeys, an iguana, bats, and a ton of birds. All in the wild! It was super cool and I felt really one with nature. And, it was free because the boat driver was one of her community class students and insisted it was free. I can’t wait to have a community class!

I loved visiting another place in Costa Rica and seeing variance in weather and landscape firsthand. It was a great week.

Additions to the Family:

When I came back to San Miguel this past Saturday we had four new additions to my host family. We gained a dog and two parrots before I left for tech week, and Jimena was born on the Thursday that I was gone. She is beautiful, with a full head of hair, and sleeps a lot.

I had gotten a text from Dona Luz saying that Jimena was born, so when I got to the house on Saturday and no one was home, I figured they were at Ruth’s admiring the baby. I was going to drop my bags off and I head over after but, very suddenly, I became a prisoner.

Let me set the scene. Practically every house in Costa Rica has a fence around it. The one around my house is green and very tall and impossible to climb. It also has a padlock. On top of that, the door to the actual house automatically locks when it closes.

So, I got home, unlocked the padlock to the fence and locked it again to signal that no one is home because I didn’t want to talk to anyone to explain that Dona Luz wasn’t there (people ask for her a lot because she recharges cell phones). I unlocked the door to the house, put my stuff in my room and took Pinky, our new dog, out front to pee. As I walked outside, one of my students was walking by and stopped to ask where I was the last week and when I would be coming back. We were chatting it up in Spanish and I was feeling really good about it until I heard a SLAM of the front door. I whipped my head around just to confirm my fear that I was now locked out of my house, but inside my front yard without my phone or keys. Awesome. I explained this issue to my student and he laughed and waved goodbye and I was alone with Pinky who kept staring at me like, “Now what are we gonna do?”

It was a nice day so I sat down and I thought I would wait for 30 minutes and someone will probably come home. They knew I was coming home at 2:30 and they would meet me here. So I sat. And 30 minutes go by and I start thinking about an escape plan. I could hop the fence between my house and my neighbor’s house and leave out of their front yard. But, I was wearing a skirt and I would have to explain my situation to a stranger and my family should be coming home any time now. So I sat. And another 30 minutes passed and I was getting cold and I was coming to terms with the fact that I really need to take action. Just as I was about to start yelling for my neighbor, a friend of Dona Luz’s drove up and tells me that everyone is at Ruth’s house and what am I doing just sitting outside. I explain to her the situation and she starts cracking up. Not just a chuckle or even a laugh, but a full out belly laugh. She would have been rolling on the floor if she wasn’t in a car. Once she regained a smidgen of composure she said she would go back to the house and tell someone to release me.

About five minutes later Raquel and Angelo walk up, laughing, and let me out of the cage that I had been stuck in for more than an hour. It was absurd and all the while I kept thinking what a great story this is for my blog, but a horrible situation in real life.

This Friday I find out where I am living for the next two years and I am beyond excited and anxious to know. I cannot wait to google it and ask people about it and find out what type of schools I will be working in! We all go to a country club with a pool and we find out in the morning and they hang all day. So exciting.

And Saturday to Sunday all the trainees are going to Manuel Antonio, a beach on the Pacific Coast, that is supposed to be one of the best.

I was going to wait until these events were over to blog because I know I will want to, but good thing I didn’t! This sucker is loooong.

I miss everyone a ton and love you all times a million.

Annie            

Out of the Routine

So, the schedule that I explained in the last post has been my life for the past five weeks or so. It was nice to get into a groove and feel some form of stability, but I was ready when we had two activities planned that were out of the norm.

First, each PCT visited a TEFL PCV. These are volunteers in our same program that have been in Costa Rica for about a year and a half. The point was to see how and where a volunteer lives and what they do. I visited Jackie for four days and we had a lot of fun. She lives in Congrejal de Acosta. It is in the San Jose Province, but is up in the mountains on the other side of the city from San Miguel. It was about an hour and a half bus ride to Acosta and then another 45 minute drive, in a yellow school bus, up the mountain to Congrejal. This was the first time that I felt like I was in more of a developing country. The roads were pretty bad and the town where she lives does not have many resources. There are about 300 people living there and most are cattle farmers. It was pretty hot during the day, but cooled off nicely at night.

Jackie moved out of her host family’s house and lives in a “mansion.” It is a two story house with a pool in the backyard. It doesn’t have water in it, but it is there… There are also a ton of orange and mango trees on the property and pigs and a horse. The house is a vacation home for a Costa Rican family and Jackie rents it from them. I was told not to expect something so fabulous wherever I am going.

The first day we hiked out behind Jackie’s house, down the side of the mountain, to a waterfall and river. It was gorgeous like something out of National Geographic where only five people have ever visited. It was really nice to hang out and swim there. We also visited another volunteer who lives an additional eight kilometers up the mountain in Sabanillas. We hung out at her house, way smaller and more Peace Corps-ish, and sang Karaoke at the bar next door.

The next day a couple of men were going to be installing toilets in the cultural center that Jackie is helping to organize so we went down to “help.” It was really cool to see the project. The building is an abandoned elementary school that Jackie is converting into a space for workshops, meetings, band practices, parties, and a library. She said it has taken some time getting everything in order and gathering resources, but it is coming together really nicely.

I was also able to go to one of the schools where she teaches and observe her in her first grade class. It was a lot of fun and the kids are so adorable. The school does not have an English teacher, so she is there alone which is kind of difficult to make sustainable, but the kids looked like they were having so much fun.

It was a great weekend and it was cool to see a glimpse of what my life might be like in a month and a half. I liked it.

The second event was this weekend. A PCV group planned a night for all the volunteers in Costa Rica to come together to welcome my group coming into the country and to say goodbye to a group that will be leaving in May. We all booked rooms at a hostel in San Jose, had a cafecito and then went to a bar for pizza and dancing. It was a lot of fun to meet the other volunteers and to hear everyone’s stories… and to be away from home.

This morning we had time to hang out and do whatever so, naturally, a group of us went to see The Hunger Games. Movies are CHEAP in Costa Rica and that movie is fab! We wandered around the mall and downtown before getting on the bus to come back home.

This week coming up is Holy Week. Costa Rica is a Catholic country so pretty much everyone except Peace Corps has the entire week off. Schools are included. I have class Monday through Wednesday and then there are a bunch of processions and activities that happen Thursday through Sunday. My family is actually not Catholic and does not celebrate Easter, I might meet up with another volunteer and their family to go to church.

And the week following Easter is “Tech Week.” I will be going to visit a different volunteer and will be teaching in the schools where she works. That is pretty much all of the information I have on that unfortunately. We find out more details on Tuesday, but it should be really good practice and will hopefully give me an idea of what working will be like.

The love is still rolling in. Thank you!

Love and miss you all.

Annie