Tech Week

This week half of the CED group went to the province of Alajuela to visit another CED volunteer, Brigitte. Her site is absolutely beautiful. Its in a biological corridor between 2 volcanoes. The view of the volcanoes is amazing, especially at dusk when their outline is contrasted against the dark blue sky. Another cool thing is that every morning you wake up to the sounds of howling monkeys. Its a little different than the roosters that are normally outside my window, and I like it.

Saturday was traveling (about 7 hours) and meeting our host families. On Sunday we went to Rio Celeste, which was amazing. Its a big tourist spot where people come to hike, see the waterfalls, and swim in the rivers. We did one hike for about 4 hours, stopping along the way to swim in the river and sit by the waterfall. We ate lunch and then went to another river to cool off and swim. It was an awesome way to spend the day. Afterwards we played soccer for about an hour and a half with some people from the town. Talk about tired. I went to bed at a whopping 930 pm.

Monday through Thursday was a lot of work and a lot of fun. We had to prepare lessons for and teach an English class and a computer class. The computer class was especially cool because another volunteer and I helped a women set up an email account and she was able to send her first email. It was cool seeing how excited she was to be able to do this. We also attended a meeting with the local ECC (Empresa de Credito Comunal), where we had a question and answer session to get to better know the process or forming and maintaining an ECC. The ECC in the community was actually started with the assistance of the prior Peace Corps Volunteer so it was cool to see how it had grown in the past 2 years. The final activity was for Earth Day, where we went to a grade school and did a talk/activity on recycling. The kids were from 1st to 4th grade and were really enthusiastic and absolutely adorable. We started off by introducing ourselves and naming our favorite animal, and after each person said an animal the kids liked to share their thoughts on whether or not it was a good favorite animal. One little boy seemed to have pets of all the animals we were listing. It was a lot of fun and I hope to be able to work with a grade school in the future.

Overall it was a great week. I really enjoyed seeing the life of another volunteer and learning more about projects that Im interested in. We had our final interview about site preferences and we find out next Friday where we will be living for the next 2 years. Yay!

Ill be posting pictures from Tech Week on facebook sometime soon.