First Days in Site

Officially been in site for a little over a week and honestly, it feels much, much longer than that.  For week one, I think I’ve been extremely busy and productive, so that feels great.  I got driven to site by a member of our project team so he could have a chat with my family about the previously mentioned craziness and I certainly think it’s helped a bit.  I’ve been able to leave the house by bike and can take the bus to Santa Cruz by myself, but we’re still not up to letting me go running by myself.  As everyone has been saying about my Spanish, poco a poco (little by little), I’ve certainly adapted that to describing life with the new host family as well.  Just taking it one day at a time.

I arrived last Thursday around dinnertime and Friday morning was up bright an early to head into Santa Cruz for an English festival at the high school.  I met Richard, a fellow PCV, and together we met up with both of my co-teachers.  They introduced me to a friend of theirs who I discovered teaches at a school one town over from where I live, so one conversation later, I had found another co-teacher and another school to go to. Perfect.  When the festival ended we planned to get a ride with the teachers to a town about 10km away where another PCV was having a spelling bee.  Apparently the teachers had another plan and we ended up in the garage of a pottery maker and got to watch him make and explain how he makes pottery all by hand.  It was fascinating and certainly an unexpected adventure.  We did eventually get dropped off at the spelling bee right in time for it to start.  It was good to see a bunch of the Santa Cruz cluster of volunteers and afterwards we headed back into Santa Cruz and waited at a fellow volunteer couple’s house until our buses came (I only have 6 buses a day to and from site) and I was home by 6.  Talk about a long, productive day.

The rest of the week was filled with a student government inauguration at my new school and 2 days of classes at the school in my site.  My day off on Wednesday quickly turned into going to a local university with one of my co-teachers for a workshop instead and it was certainly one of those situations where it was simply good to be seen at compared to actually being useful for me.  It was like being in tech class all over again, which wasn’t so bad until they morphed into a philosophical discussion on teaching which also morphed into them reverting to Spanish.  I could catch a word here and there but I’m not up on my philosophical teaching conversation vocabulary.

 

The week ended with a day at the beach with Richard and Tara in Tamarindo where we thankfully ate non-tico food and conversed in English all day.  While it may have only been just a little over a week in site, it was already a much-needed reprieve.