July 4th & Uvita

Well the 2 weeks of “winter break” are drawing to a close and while I’ve only been here for a little over a month, it was already a nice break and most importantly, a great opportunity to see some Tico 25ers again.  A bunch of us met up in San Jose on the 3^rd for an Embassy picnic on the 4^th.  We checked into our hostel, grabbed lunch (buffalo chicken fingerssss J ) and headed to a mall where we shopped for a bit and basically just hung out in a Chilis where I was able to again get boneless buffalo wings.  They weren’t quite like the ones in the states, but they were for sure close enough.  That next morning I took my first hot shower in a month and cherished not only the hot water, but the fact that it was cool enough in San Jose to warrant a hot shower.

                    

Buffalo Chicken for Lunch...And Dinner.  My Perfect Day.

We headed to the July 4^th event and it was the first time I was surrounded by more gringos than Costa Ricans and we all simply enjoyed all the English that was being spoken all day. Live music, American food, unlimited beer, and fantastic friends celebrating my favorite holiday certainly made it a bit easier to not be so homesick.  Last year as I sat on the lawn of the Capitol with Kristyn, James, and David watching the Capitol 4^th concert and the fireworks over the Washington monument, I never could have imagined that in a year I would be celebrating that same holiday with new friends, in a new country, living a completely different life.

                                        July 4th, 2013

                July 4th, 2012

The next morning we all headed out bright and early to Uvita, about a 3 and a ½ hour bus ride south.  We met more of our Tico 25 group there along with some other Tico groups and we had an awesome weekend all together catching up on all that had happened in the past month in our new sites.  It was a great balance of hearing about everyone else’s experiences in site and also meeting some PCVs who have been around for about a year and had plenty of advice to offer us newbies.  It was a gorgeous beach made even better by being surrounded by such great friends and it yet again made me realize how lucky I am that I’m serving in Costa Rica... and not Mongolia…

Uvita

While there were plenty of hiccups in getting back to site, I did eventually make it back and while we all know how much I love my host fam, it did feel good to be back.  There’s a familiarity here that is comforting and while my host fam drives me nuts, at least I know they’re going to drive me nuts, there’s no surprises there and I feel like that is oddly helpful in dealing with everything.  It was good to slip back into a routine (minus the school part since it’s still vacation) and I’ve realized that there are a lot of little things that I’ve found helpful with dealing with this whole crazy new life.  Just a few:

1.     Hot sauce.  I put hot sauce on every single food I am served and it really makes a big difference when most of those meals are rice and beans.

2.     Learning useful Spanish. General vocab is great and all but being able to be sarcastic back to my family when they say something sassy to me has actually helped a ton because I feel like they took my lack of Spanish to be unintelligence which I never appreciated so now I feel they respect me a bit more now that I can quickly give them some sass back.

3.     Watching Grey’s Anatomy in Spanish.  I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter that there aren’t subtitles in either language because I apparently can recall the dialogue by heart and hearing it in Spanish has been helpful to learning a bit more without just reading my textbooks.

4.     Washing my own clothes.  I feel like I don’t have control over much.  I don’t really have a say in the food I eat, the time I eat, what I’m going to end up doing with my day, etc.  Being able to convince my host mom that I could handle washing my own clothes was a small victory and some Tico 25ers now attest that I give pretty good massages since washing clothes by hand is a pretty good hand workout.  It’s a win-win.

5.     Being messy.  I’m not usuallyyyyy a super messy person but now that I have a lock on my door I’ve been relishing in the fact that it doesn’t HAVE to be clean and organized.

It was great to come back to site and on my first bike ride since being back, having many of my students come running up to me screaming my name to give me a hug.  The next morning I met up with many of them and we went to the plaza to play games and I even got them to count in English while playing hide-n-go-seek.  It was a small victory in my life.  They all picked flowers for me on the way and the boys fought over who could walk my bike.  Adorable.

So all in all…all is well down here in the heat of Costa Rica.  I had a fantastic Fourth, a great beach weekend with new friends, and have been able to talk and catch up with many friends from the states since being back in site.  Seriously, it makes my day to get e-mails about the craziness on Capitol Hill about the Farm Bill or to get WhatsApp messages with a play by play of Jersey Fresh.  It feels good to be connected to back home and makes this whole crazy journey just a bit easier.  And seriously Jersey Fresh, start winning some games for me...?

So What Am I Doing These Days?

A little over 2 weeks in site and I’d have to say, todo bien (minus the fam still).  I’ve fallen into a schedule, which is great and am certainly starting to feel more and more apart of the community little by little.  It’s a little difficult to explain to people that I’m not actually doing anything until September, but after being here, I completely understand why PC says it’s best to wait since I certainly have my hands full trying to integrate, befriend my co-teachers, and study a bit more Spanish.

So, what AM I doing in this small, Costa Rican community everyday? Well, on Mondays I head to the escuela in the town next to mine.  To get there, it is just one dirt road that passes through my town as well for about 8km and that is the only way in or out.  Therefore, I just stand at the edge of my street around 6:30am every Monday and wait for a teacher to drive by and give me a ride.  I’m clearly the only gringo around, so I’m pretty easy to spot.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are spent at the escuela in my community and while I was pretty skeptical how I would actually like it (considering I generally don’t like teaching…or kids…) I actually love it. Each grade has roughly 5-8 students and there are 2 English teachers (since they are only there 2 days a week), the director of the school who also teachers, one other general teacher, a janitor, and a cook.  Talk about small but I love it and totally feel like a part of the staff already and could not appreciate more how welcoming they all are.  I am also basically a 5 year old when it comes to sports and games and love playing soccer, tag, kickball, and hide n go seek with kids during all their breaks (which are often).  They generally have an hour and a half of class and then a half hour break…I certainly would have liked that schedule when I was in elementary school!

So while I'm not actually teaching, I'm at the schools observing all the classes, getting to know the students, becoming better friends with the teachers, and sometimes I help with pronunciation.  After September I'l hopefully start co-planning and co-teaching the lessons. After school, I generally don't do much in the afternoons since it is just too hot to function.  When it starts getting cooler around 5pm though I usually head out on my bike and say "Adios!" to anyone I see.  Sometimes I run into students and they introduce me to their parents and other times I just smile to the people I pass.  It's my current integration strategy and I think it's working pretty well for now.  I'm just waiting to start getting stopped by these people I say hi to everyday when they finally get curious enough to ask what in the world I'm doing here...

 There may be tons of bugs but at least it's a pretty view on my daily bike rides

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.

Tico 25 Swears- In!

Sunday, June 9, 2013

     A LOT has happened since the last post.  I returned to Heredia and went through the final weeks of training, swore in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer, and am now officially in site where I will be for the next 2 years.  The biggest of those events was obviously swearing in, so I’ll mainly focus on that during this lovely update to all of your back home.

     If you’ve ever met me for more than about 10 minutes, you probably know I’m not a big feelings person.  Don’t ask me to talk about my feelings and if you’re talking about yours, I’ll certainly be wishing I were anywhere else.  This has often led my mother to tell me I have no soul if I don’t cry at movies when a normal person would or when I refuse to have heart-to-heart conversations.  It just isn’t me.  And while we’ve constantly been told PC would be an emotional rollercoaster, I didn’t really know if that would apply to me.  But I do have to admit, I uncharacteristically broke down in tears twice on swearing-in day and was overcome with so much emotion from the outpouring of support I received that I guess even I am not immune to the PC emotional rollercoaster.

     PC volunteers are told to bring one nice outfit with them to country and swearing-in day is the one and only day you will most likely ever need that outfit during your 27 months.  On Wednesday morning, I woke up insanely early, put on my referenced one nice outfit, made sure the faux-hawk was perfectly gelled, frantically finished packing, and tried to eat one last breakfast with the fam but was far too nervous to actually eat.  Luckily, I do actually speak a bit of Spanish these days so I was able to explain to them why I couldn’t eat so they didn’t freak out and think I was sick or something like they would have 3 months ago when I didn’t eat.  I lined up all my luggage at the door as my fam was going to have to bring it all to the ceremony with them and I said goodbye to my 2 sisters and brother at the house.  I ran out the door as Naty’s Mom pulled up to take us to our bus (I totally busted my ass on our apparently wet tiles) but we made it to San Isidro in plenty of time to catch the bus.  Once all of Tico 25 arrived, it was off to the Ambassador’s residence.

     Now the best and worst part of this day was the fact that I was giving the speech on behalf of our training group… in Spanish.  I was sick to my stomach and it wasn’t made any better by our arrival and finding out that a name needed to be changed in my speech, so I spent the next 10 minutes memorizing how to say a new Latino name and the respective title.  Thankfully though, the ceremony went extremely well and I think the speech was a success.  There were certainly a few tears in the audience and from Tico 25, so I’ll take that as a win.  The Ambassador praised my Spanish and I couldn’t have felt luckier to have been given such an opportunity. 

     What made the day so incredibly special was the fact that the ceremony was livestreamed.  I am truly blessed to have so may people who wanted to watch and for having the greatest office who totally took over the chat.  It was beyond overwhelming to check my phone after the ceremony and have received a screen full of texts from PCVs in country, more WhatsApp messages than I could count from friends back in the states, and a list of emails from family, friends, and coworkers saying congratulations.  Every text, email, and Facebook message made me realize how lucky I am to have so, so much support and I was simply overwhelmed with gratitude for having such amazing people in my life.  Being able to share swearing-in day with all of you back in the states made it so much more special and definitely reminded me how much I miss you all!!  I was able to get 2 phone calls in after the ceremony…one to Mom at school and one to Team Lance in DC.  I did break down in tears on the phone with Team Lance (I guess I just miss you guys too much!) but it was fantastic to be able to talk to many of them in the office.  I spent much of the day having quick chats with so many people back home and again, for any of you reading this, thank you, so so much for all of the kind words last Wednesday and for simply taking the time to be apart of it with me. It meant the world to me.

     I had to say goodbye to my training host parents after the ceremony which was definitely no easy task when my dad started getting chocked up.  But we said our goodbyes and it was off to San Jose with all of Tico 25.  We all spent the night in San Jose together at a hostel (where they had a buffalo chicken sandwich, so I was clearly in heaven) and the next morning was filled with even more goodbyes as we all departed for our sites…  Talk about an emotional 24 hours.

Tico 25, Official Peace Corps Volunteers!