Arte por la Paz

The word proud doesn’t even come close to how I felt today at the “arte por la paz” event in San Jose today. As I wrote in my last post, today was the culmination of a month’s preparation with a group of 5^th and 6^th graders in the elementary school. Kids and volunteers from around Costa Rica came to San Jose to show off their plays, dances, poetry, and art work. It was an all-around wonderful day, but by far the best part was watching my kids do the play we had worked so hard on throughout these past weeks. I think I was probably as nervous as they were, especially because in our rehearsals we really had yet to get it 100% right, but I was totally blown away by their performance and when they were finished was practically bursting with pride. They even won the silver medal in the play category which was like the icing on the cake. All in all a truly wonderful day: as I was telling my Mom, certainly one of my top 5 days in PC.

Speaking of counting days, May 16^th marked my one-year as a volunteer. It’s strange to think: is this where I thought I’d be after being in my town for a year? I guess the answer to that question is that I really had no preconceived notion of where I would be after a year, especially as it wasn’t like I was coming in with a specific goal of improving “health education” or “agricultural practices” or something more specialized and specific like that; community development is quite broad which certainly has it’s advantages and disadvantages: I can involve myself in any project that I want in my town and that can be considered developing the community, however then it comes down to, is what I’m choosing to do in the community the most worthwhile? Is it sustainable? What kind of an influence am I having?

As I have mentioned before in my blog, doing Peace Corps truly epitomizes the “live life one day at a time” motto that of course is adaptable to life in general, but particularly so here. Something I’ve talked about with fellow Peace Corps friends is the intrinsic need to have some kind of quantifiable achievement: “I built a community center” or “I started a women’s group.” The first problem with that is that it is never just the PCV who is doing a specific project (or at least shouldn’t be, as that defeats the whole purpose of a sustainable community-driven endeavor). Second, so much of what we do as PCV’s is plant seeds for ideas that may not take place until the future (ie recycling), but the work is cut out for us in terms of at least beginning the process of changes in mentality or conscientiousness about issues.

For example, in terms of working with youth, while it may not be easily quantified, seeing those kids up on stage performing for the first time in their lives and doing an excellent job, I was confident of the positive influence this experience has had on them. I know that the self-esteem of each of them was soaring today, especially when our town was called for the silver medal. On the way home, they were already asking about next year and kvelling over how cool their medals, t-shirts, and even the name tags were. It was so sweet that something so seemingly insignificant as a laminated name tag meant so much to one of the boys. But long after the medals are lost and the t-shirts don’t fit anymore, I hope that they will look back on this day as a time when they did something completely out of the box that they didn’t think they had the confidence to do, but did anyway and did it well, learning that hard work and dedication does pay off in the end when you put your heart and mind to do something. And so, certainly for today, I feel really good about what I am doing here.

Here’s to having even more days like this in the coming year!

Finally, an update!

It’s funny now looking back on what I thought would be my projects for the two years when I first arrived to my town.  As they say here, “nada que ver”: they have nothing to do with what I am involved in right now.  As I said in a previous post, one’s projects are really ever-evolving and my host Dad once joked that I at least had my foot in with just about everything going on in the town, which I suppose is the idea, although I hope in the coming months that several of these projects really take off (which is what I have heard happens in a volunteer’s second year).  In terms of what I’m doing right now, it would be the following:

 Lots with the elementary school which I have found to be really rewarding. 

• Last week I started back up the Chicas Poderosas from last year who are now 3^rd and 4^th graders.  They are absolutely adorable and I missed working with them.  This week we are going to talk about nutrition and the importance of a balanced diet and then make  whole wheat pancakes—yum!  I am thinking of continuing with them until the school vacation in July and then starting up a new group with the 1^st and 2^nd graders until the end of the school year in order to spread the Chicas Poderosas love around a bit.  
• These past few weeks I’ve been busy with “Arte por la Paz” which is a nation-wide PC initiative to promote peace and touch on issues such as war and domestic violence using the medium of art.  In different regions of the country, volunteers work with groups of kids to develop a skit, dance routine, poetry, or paintings related to the above-mentioned themes to bring to a conference consisting of other groups in the region where they can show off their talent.  I am working with a group of 5^th and 6^th graders on a play about a superhero named “Peace Man” who interrupts precarious situations (two friends fight about a soccer game bet, a father gets fired and takes his anger out on his family, and a girl whose parents are getting divorced and wants to try drugs to feel better) to offer a more peaceful alternative.  The group of 6 kids is really awesome and it’s always interesting to get involved in new activities that reveal different facets of their personalities.  Speaking of which, uncovering my “director” facet has been quite the experience– who knew all the roles I would be playing when I signed up to do Peace Corps!
• There is a really fantastic organization called “Kids to Kids” through which kids in the states do fundraising for projects for kids in developing countries.  Kids to Kids works (I believe exclusively) through Peace Corps volunteers and their local counterparts in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Belize on educational, athletic, and artistic projects (http://kidstokids.org/).  With my elementary school’s principal, I sent in an application for a grant to expand the recreational opportunities in the school. Last year they built a multi-use concrete field whose only multi-use is by everyone in the town, not just the kids for whom it was intended.  However, that is about to change!  Our grant was approved and we are going to put up basketball and volleyball nets and purchase a ping pong table for the less athletically-inclined (or perhaps Forrest Gump hopefuls).  It’s perfect because this year the school has a gym teacher who comes once a week, so he will be able to teach the kids to play these new sports.  The scope of recreational opportunities is slowly but surely expanding in my town from soccer, soccer, and more soccer to something NEW!

In the high school, the principal and I have been working with a group of kids to start up a recycling project in the town.  This is not as easy as it sounds, as there is a total lack of consciousness when it comes to littering, let alone recycling.  I am trying to help us not get too ahead of ourselves and focus on improving the trash situation at the school and then move on to spreading the word on a town-level.  A difficulty that tends to happen a lot is that people get really excited about a project, make all these lofty plans, and then don’t follow through on any of it.  I am trying to be realistic and know that the concept of recycling will never be an over-night phenomena that will have instant success in rural CR.  If one has lived his whole life throwing trash out the windows of buses and in the road of his very own town, it will be difficult to explain the benefit of collecting and separating one’s trash and then bringing some of that trash to the large city so that it may be recycled.  However, as with everything, it’s “poco a poco.”  I have to be happy with the ever-increasing spread of consciousness in terms of littering and recycling on the part of the students, in the hope that down the road they will think twice before burning their trash and think instead of how they themselves can recycle products to be used in their homes and maybe even on a more organized level.

In non-youth work, the biggest project the development association and I are working on is improving the roads.  This is the #1 priority according to essentially everyone in my town, especially as the rainy season quickly approaches.  Slowly but surely the project is getting more focused and an engineer came last week to make a blue-print and from there he will create a budget of what we want to do, which is create concrete ditches on the sides of the road and put in some large sewers in places where water often overflows onto the road.  In the past year (yes, this May 16^th marks my one year as an official PC volunteer!), I have certainly learned that working on a large-scale project such as this one is a slooooow process with entirely too much bureaucracy, but I do believe that with hard work this project will happen-- I will keep you all posted!

Two possible future projects that are also slowly taking form (and which I barely want to write down here for fear of jinxing them!) are the expansion of the aqueduct and the creation of a playground in the soccer field.  The aqueduct project has always been intriguing to me as potable water is such a basic necessity that some people in town do not have easy access to.  There are two parts of my quite spread out town that do not use the aqueduct system put in place about 15 years ago.  These families use systems of hoses connected to nearby streams for their water.  The problem is that during the dry season (summer), which has progressively been getting dryer and dryer in the past few years, the water is drying up.  Then in the winter, the water gets all sloshed around with the mud so the water that reaches them is all dirty.  The playground idea is another possibility with a lot of interest in the community.  The youth committee I was working with last year just changed members, so we’ll see if this year’s members are into the possibility.  A playground, like the improvements to the elementary school field, would offer a new recreational opportunity, particularly for the younger kids in the town which would be a welcome addition to the current soccer field.  

Alright, I think that’s a good update for the moment!  Hopefully some of these projects will epitomize the saying “slow and steady winds the race” as I really want to accomplish these very worth-while projects, though I know I also have to accept that sometimes the best of intentions does not a project make.  The PCV's role in the development of projects is to help guide the group in the right direction but not do the actual work for them.  It’s like the quote, “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”  However the simplicity of that quote does not delve into the challenging reality of sustainable grass-roots development as it is quite a balancing act that involves many factors, but I am doing my best and we will see what happens!