Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Site Assignment and More!

Hola! Wow, so much is going on now, where to start… today has been a crazy day. This morning I had Spanish class in the little city 30 minutes away from my town. Then I rushed back with Jenny, the other volunteer in my class, so we could give English classes at the local elementary school. I taught a 5th grade class and as they were learning about internal organs (obviously a really important thing for 5th graders to know about in English, right?!) I had them make little books entitled “My Body” and they drew pictures and wrote, “This is my brain, in my head,” etc etc. It was really cute. Then Jenny and I did our “Community Field Activity” together with the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders of the school which was all about Earth Day or “Dia de La Tierra.” We gave a little talk about the importance of caring about the environment, then they made little posters about what taking care of the environment means to them, and then we picked up trash around the school. The kids got really into it and it went a lot better than I was expecting-- I can’t wait to do something like this in my town.

Speaking of which!!!!! This past Friday we had our site assignment day. I cannot describe the feeling of receiving information about the place that is going to be my home for the next 2 years—it really was indescribable, but definitely a day full of emotion. They had the whole group of 53 of us and pointed out our site on the map in front of everyone and then we got a packet of information all about our pueblos. According to PC rules, I’m not supposed to say the actual name of my town for security reasons (if you want more details, send me an email), I can say that it’s a little town of 300 people about 2.5 hours away from San Jose (I have the RCD site that is closest to San Jose which is nice since I’m really centrally located in the country and can get north or south pretty easily—and I’m not too far from the beaches on the Pacific Ocean side!). The town’s economic activities are coffee and sugar cane, as well as “animal husbandry.” I can’t wait to learn about the process of growing coffee! The little packet of information they give us says that possible projects are working with a women’s group that is just forming, helping teach people use computers (they have a computer lab, but haven’t learned how to use them), working towards building a high school (they currently give classes to the 90 high school students in the local community center), working with the sports committee, and lots more! Needless to say, it seems like there is a lot that I will (hopefully!) be able to get involved in throughout the next 2 years. This Friday we have our site visits where we will go for 5 days to our site to stay with our future host families and basically get acquainted with the place where we will be spending our next 2 years. It’s really exciting and scary, but definitely more exciting than scary. I can’t wait to meet people and just see what my town is like!

So this past weekend was Passover. While most volunteers went to this crazy Imperial concert with Incubus and Smashing Pumpkins, I ventured with 2 other volunteers to the orthodox synagogue in San Jose to attend a community seder. We were really nervous beforehand because we had heard from other volunteers that the Jewish community in San Jose is not very inviting and inclusive, but we found the exact opposite to be true. As soon as we got in (there is very high security, but we had sent in information like passport copies and our synagogues in the states beforehand), people could not have been nicer. It was funny because it definitely didn’t feel like we were in Costa Rica. People were speaking a mix of Spanish, Hebrew, and English and the Jewish people in Costa Rica mostly came from Russia and Poland as a result of anti-Semitism right around the time of World War II, just like lots of Jewish people in the states, so they all looked (not to stereotype) just like people who would be in my synagogue at home. They were definitely on Tico Time though, it was supposed to start at 6, but we didn’t get started until 8. The seder itself was really nice—the 2 rabbis leading it were really enthusiastic and made it interactive (for example, each table acted out one of the 10 plagues). It didn’t end until 12am (a little different than my family’s seder which usually goes for about 45 minutes until we’re ready to start eating!) and the family we were sitting with offered to take us back to our hotel, which was so sweet. So although I really missed my family in CT a lot, I’m really glad to of had such a positive experience with the Jewish community in Costa Rica and am looking forward to coming back for another Jewish holiday and also to see the museum that is part of the big synagogue’s compound.

On that note, I’m off to bed because I have to get up at 5:30am tomorrow to catch the bus to go to San Jose for a special Spanish class at one of the universities. I’ll definitely update when I get back from my site visit—we’ll see how it goes!

Buenas noches,
Tes

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Exploring Costa Rica!

Wow, it feels like it’s been a long time since I’ve last updated, but no fear, I have returned! Training has been crazy busy and seems that it will continue that way until the end, so I haven’t had too much time to write since I’ve barely been online. For example, this past Monday I had Spanish class in the morning, then helped with an English class at the local elementary school (we are teaching an “official” class in a few weeks that will be observed/evaluated by one of my bosses, eek!), and then led a community meeting with the other volunteers in the evening. The meeting was awesome—basically it was preparation for the kinds of meetings we’ll give in our towns in order to assess the wants and needs in the town to develop the projects that we’ll work on for the 2 years. So for this meeting, we split the members in 2 groups (men and women) and had them discuss and write down the resources, accomplishments, needs, and dreams of our community in 4 boxes. It’s really interesting to do this in groups in order to see group differences. While most of what they discussed was the same, the women talked about a need for an EBAIS, a health clinic, while the men did not. This makes sense since it’s the women who have to care for the sick children (they did not hesitate to point this out to the men, either!). So it went really well and it’ll be even more great when we get to do this in our actual communities because we’ll be able to take this information, do a priority ranking and then get started on projects!

A funny cultural note: we’ve been told that having cafecito and snacks is an essential aspect of any community meeting so even though our meeting was at 7pm, we bought coffee/milk/sugar and made a HUGE pot. So at the end of the meeting, we asked if anyone wanted coffee and only one person did. So although Ticos do love their coffee, apparently they don’t love it at 8:30pm (which makes sense!). Now we know for next time to ask who wants coffee before making a gigantic pot of it. We also made popcorn to have as a snack and a “little piece” of the USA and they all loved it which was really cute.

The other weekend we went on our very first PCV Visit to visit current volunteers who are out in the field. The RCD-ers split into 2 groups and my group of 9 went to Guanacaste, a province in the northwest area of the country bordering the Pacific Ocean. It was really nice to get out of the San Jose area and see a new part of Costa Rica and the two sites we visited, albeit very different, were both really cool. We went way up to the border of Nicaragua (we could actually see it from one volunteer’s site) and visited two volunteers who, although not very far away in distance, had totally different sites. One site was reminiscent of a Wild West cowboy movie—pretty dusty and flat, but with a beautiful view of a nearby volcano. The volunteer there, who is about to finish his 2 years, was absolutely awesome. He was the perfect example of an integrated volunteer—we literally couldn’t walk more than 3 houses without him stopping to chat with one of his friends. In his 2 years, he’d worked with a women’s panaderia (bakery), helped reinvigorate the town’s water committee when the town went 6 months without a steady water supply, among many other projects. We helped bake pasteles at the panaderia and later sold them door to door which was quite hilarious—our selling point was hechos por gringos (made by gringos) and I must say, we sold out quite quickly! We also went to a nearby river which was (as my mom would say) positively delightful and relaxing.

The other site was way up in the mountains—we had to take a 40 minute ride from the closest (quite small) city in the back of a big truck to get there. He was telling us that 5 years ago there was no road to his town and you could only get there on horseback and 2 years ago there was no electricity (some of us stayed in homes that did not have electricity—needless to say, they went to bed around 7:30!). The volunteer there was working to get deeds for the land, because as of right now, nobody has official deeds recognized by the government and in order to be eligible for governmental money to build things like health centers, these kinds of documents are necessary (therefore the work he is doing is incredibly important). The trip overall was really great. It was awesome to get an idea of what puts the rural in “Rural Community Development,” since my training pueblo is nothing (in terms of rustic-ness (rusticity?!), proximity to a city, and concentration of people in the “center” of town), compared to these sites. I truly cannot wait to find out where this adventure will continue for me, where I will be for the two years. We find out a week from Friday, ¡qué emoción!

This weekend we’re going on PCV visits, again, but alone. It’ll certainly be interesting navigating through Costa Rica by myself to find the volunteer’s site, but that’s what I’ll be doing for the 2 years, so I guess it’s best to get started. The difficult thing is that San Jose is not an easy city to get around. Perhaps it is that I am not very direction savvy (as Jess my trusty navigator can attest…), but it does not help that in Costa Rica, they don’t use road names. At all. Instead, they give directions using a given place’s proximity to a specified landmark. For example, the address for the bus stop that I need to get to on Saturday morning is: “La Coca Cola (which is an area of town, not a street name), 50 meters norte de la Mussmanni.” Mussmanni is a Costa Rican panaderia chain. It gets worse: many times, an address can include a landmark that is no longer there, that you just have to KNOW where it is. So how does that work?, one might ask. I will tell you: not very well! It’s fine for the Ticos, who know all the landmarks and somehow have an internal compass, but for yours truly, it is a recipe for disaster. The good news is that I’m not afraid to ask for directions, so hopefully I will figure it out (or else just stay in San Jose for 5 days…!).

Alright, my updates have begun to feel like mini-essays, so I will leave it at this and go read. I’m starting Snow, by the Turkish author Orham Pamuk, which was recommended to me while visiting Istanbul. It’s very well written and an interesting story, so I’m looking forward to having some time to read this weekend on my PCV visit!

Mil besos a todos,
Tes

PS I would like to dedicate this post to Alessandra Colia, one of my loyal readers(!), who gave me the incredible news a few nights ago that she is coming to Costa Rica to work this summer. I cannot describe how happy I am to know that I will 100% be seeing her this summer and it’s such perfect timing because she finishes in August, which is when I’ll have been at my site for around 3 months, so I’m sure I’ll be ready to see a familiar face (not that I wouldn’t be happy ANY time to see a familiar face, but it really could not be more perfect timing, so yay Ali— I can’t wait to see you!!!!)