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!