Hola y muchas gracias por leer! (hello and thank you so much for reading!) It has been a few weeks since my last post and there are a ton of things that I want to talk about, so many in fact that I’m not even sure where to start. So, I’ll just jump in…
First and foremost: PHOTOS! I have been taking tons and tons of them, and have started dividing them into the following albums (click on each word to view): people, food, landscapes, and teaching. It’s incredible what a wide array of flora and fauna is waiting for me right outside my window here in Costa Rica… every time I go for a walk or a hike I see new plants, animals, and insects that I had never seen before. I love being surrouded by views like this:
...or this (it's a view of Boruca from above!):
...or this (that's my house in the center of the picture!):
....so yeah, it’s pretty amazing. I highly recommend checking out my albums! (Note: I don't have any up-to-date pictures of my classroom yet, but I will post them soon. Keep checking back!)
Life here is…… in a word, full. Very alive. My brain is continuously busy, working on lesson plans, learning Spanish (and Brunka!), writing music, getting used to the culture here, missing life in America and Germany and Austria, and so many other things… whereas some of the other volunteers I’ve chatted with have commented on having tons of free time, I’ve been having the exact opposite situation. I have 149 students and 8 classes (because 1st and 4th grade were so big they had to be broken into two) meaning that my schedule looks like this:
Monday and Wednesday: 7-8:20 1st grade B 8:40-10 6th grade 10:20-11:30 4th grade B 11:30-12:00 LUNCH 12-1:20 2nd grade 1:40-3 3rd grade
Tuesday: 8:40-10:00 5th grade 10-12 LUNCH 12-1:20 4th grade A 1:40-3 2st grade A
Thursday: 10:10-11:30 5th grade 11:30-12 LUNCH 12-1:20 4th grade A 1:40-3 2st grade A
Friday: planning
…last week was my first full week of classes, and by the time I got to Friday, I crashed a little bit. I shut myself in my room and listened to music and vegged out and talked to friends all morning, just savoring NOT having to be in a classroom surrounded by TEACHER TEACHER TEACHER.
This is without a doubt the hardest job I have ever done. There is an incredible amount of effort that goes into teaching—not only the lesson planning and follow-through but also discipline and management, counseling and guidance of students, classroom decorating, faculty meetings, parent-teacher conferences (I’ve already had them—in Spanish!), and so many more things. Teaching is an all-encompassing undertaking and doing it well requires an incredible amount of dedication, especially when it involves elementary-aged children who are still in the process of learning to learn. To add to all of that, I’m teaching without many of the resources that are available in the US in a school full of teachers and students who do not speak my language (and I am still learning theirs), making for a strangely isolating and challenging experience.
BUT…. All of that said, this has also already been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. While it is true that I end some of my lessons feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, there are also lessons that end with me literally jumping up and down in my classroom from the sheer JOY of getting to watch these fascinating young humans in the process of learning, of not only getting to WATCH them but also to guide them and help them and inspire them and make them laugh. (Don’t worry, I usually shut my door before I start jumping up and down… I don’t think they’ve caught me yet!) I am keenly aware of the fact that everything I say to these children has the potential to impact not only a few seconds of their lives but also their long-term development (both intellectual and personal.) It’s an incredible responsibility and honor that I can’t help but think about each and every day that I am here in Costa Rica.
Some of the biggest challenges of my job so far are: lack of many resources, lack of books, bad chairs and desks—and not enough of them!, several ‘problem children’ with behavioural issues and learning disabilities who have been grouped in with all the other students, not understanding my fellow teachers and director and students sometimes when they talk to me in Spanish, very high workload
Some of the most rewarding aspects of my job so far are: the incredible energy of the children, their hugs and smiles and gifts and compliments, watching them learn, the support I feel from my coworkers, feeling my Spanish abilities grow, how empowering it feels to plan and put into action a successful lesson.
While the work is difficult and the sense of responsibility and obligation extremely intense, it’s at the same time liberating to realize that these children see me as an Adult. A Teacher. An Authority Figure. They do not see me as a nervous 24-year-old who isn’t fluent in their language who is far from home and her friends and family and lonely and worried and tired and floundering her way through everything—they see me as a faculty member at their school. When I tell them to line up, they line up. When I tell them to take out their notebooks, they take out their notebooks. When I dance around and act silly, they giggle with glee not just because I look funny but also because I am an Authority Figure who is breaking the normal, accepted bounds of the classroom. And that’s pretty cool :)
I bought a bookshelf for my classroom this week, which is a huge deal. It cost 90.000 colones (about 180 dollars) and I paid for it partially with donations from a lovely family from Idaho who visited the reservation a week or two ago. The bookshelf was handmade by a man from Rey Curre, the nearby town where my friend Sara teaches.
… so yeah, that’s a bit on the work front. On to:
Living with my host family! So, yeah, I’m living with a very well-to-do family here in Boruca. Well-to-do by Borucan standards means that they have computers and a car and can afford to eat things other than rice, beans, and eggs (which is literally what some of the other volunteers are eating day in and day out! One of the volunteers was telling me how she wanted to cry with joy when she was given a strawberry.) … I live in my own wing of the house that I share with Carlos, a math professor from the highschool. We share most of our meals in the giant green kitchen with Oscar, my host father (also a teacher at my school) before all leaving for work, which starts at 7 am.
The family has been welcoming enough, though not affectionate. It’s easy for me to see the silver lining of their reserve – I treasure my independence—but at the same time I miss having people around me who think I’m awesome. That’s one of the reasons I love to go visit my friend Sara in Rey Curre (where the festivals were a few weeks ago) – her mother adores me and hugs me and compliments me and it makes up for some of the distance I feel here in Boruca.
The Peace Corps volunteer who lives in Boruca, Kelly, is awesome. She and I have been hanging out a lot lately and we’ve helped each other with our classes (she teaches adults a few times a week.) She’s really tall, like me, so we joke a lot about that.
The food is good but generally bland. My host mother, Yaneth, only seasons things with oil and salt and occasionally a bit of garlic. I had to do a bit of soul-searching before going in to Buenos Aires and buying myself a shaker of black pepper… it seemed far too luxurious in a way and like I was snubbing my nose at the Costa Rican culture. But in the end I opted to get the pepper, simply because I missed having another flavor.
My typical breakfast is rice, beans, and a fried egg. A typical lunch is rice, beans, some other kind of starch (potatoes, yucca, or noodles), some kind of protein (eggs, chicken, some chunks of beef or pork cooked in salt and oil to gnawy toughness), and if I am extremely lucky, some kind of vegetable (onions, tomato, chayote.) A typical dinner is usually leftovers from lunch, sometimes with fried plantains added. Moral of the story: lots of rice, beans, starch, oil, salt, and not much else. Last weekend I bought some carrots, onions, tomatoes, and cucumbers in Buenos Aires just because I missed them so much…
Ticos love their coffee (they’re kinda like Europeans in that regard), but I don’t drink a lot of it. I pretty much only use it if I’ve had trouble sleeping or have a headache. I managed to get through several years of living in Austria without getting addicted to caffeine… so I’m optimistic about being able to manage the same feat here in Central America
Because my schedule is so full on Mondays and Wednesdays, I’ve taken to getting up in the morning and making my own breakfast so as to get to school by 6:30. Normally when Yaneth cooks, breakfast is at 6:30, and I really value that half an hour of calm before the craziness of classes begins. Plus, when I cook for myself, I can throw in some of the vegetables I bought! It’s amazing what a TREAT it is to be given things here that I take for granted in the States. It I a huge, huge highlight of my life here to be fed vegetables. Being given more than one egg makes me feel like I’m living like a queen (because it is almost never an option). Yogurt, which I buy myself when I go in to Buenos Aires or occasionally at the pulperia (little shop) in Boruca, is a special special thing to be savored.
I actually had to take the afternoon off sick yesterday and go in to the clinic because my stomach was hurting so much... the doctor gave me a shot of anti-nausea meds, a bunch of pills, and told me to stop eating so many fried foods. HAH. That will be a challenge.... :)
Anyway, I think that this post has gotten long enough. Thank you so much for reading this. As always, I love love LOVE to get emails from all of you. Though I am very busy here, it’s also a pretty isolated life, so I love to hear news from the rest of the world!
I think about all of you a lot. It is good to not be alone in this.
Besos!
Raquelita
