First Days

I moved to Comte Sunday May 23rd. My host brother picked me up from the bus stop and during the dark, rainy ride to the house I kept thinking, wow. Here I am.

These past few days have been a bit of a reality check. I´m realizing that I´m here for 2 years, it´s going to be hard, but it´s going to be great. I can´t describe how welcome I feel in the town, and it´s only my first week. The few days that I´ve gone to the grade school the kids love to yell my name (those that don´t remember my name endearingly refer to me as ¨the new Katherine¨) and give me hugs. Walking up and down the street, everyone says hi to each other. It is something about the town that I already appreciate. There´s another family in town that is super kind and have already designated a rocking-chair on their porch to be ¨my chair.¨ Each time I´ve passed their house they´ve waved me down to sit, drink fresco and talk. They´re on my walk to the high school, so I feel that I´ll be spending a bit of time at their house.

The first 3 months here I plan to get to know everyone, better my Spanish, and complete the CAT. The CAT, which stands for Community Assessment Tool, is something that every volunteer has to complete in there first 3 months. It´s basically what it sounds like, an analysis of the community with details such as history, population statistics, education, crime, needs, opportunities, etc etc. From that, we should be able to see potential projects.

In the meantime, I´m going to start on some small things that I know I´ll be doing in the future. The volunteer before me taught English classes at the grade school and HS. Since there are already English teachers at both schools, I felt that it would be better for me to work with the English teachers to help them with pronunciation, fluency, etc. The teachers are really happy about this, and therefore so am I. I also someone became a pseud0-leader of a women´s exercise group. They asked me if I was interested, and of course I said yes, and today found myself leading everyone in stretches before going on a run. Aftwards they had a Zumba tape that they wanted to do. If you have seen this before, picture me and a room full of 40 year old women rockin out to Zumba exercises. It was a lot of fun.

Pura Vida!

Pura Vida

Pura vida is a phrase you hear a lot in Costa Rica. My best translation of it is a mix between "live good" and "chill." If you are walking around town and pass someone you know (or don't know), you can say, "pura vida." You can refer to a person as being, "pura vida." You can refer to an event as being, "pura vida." The other day someone in my town refered to another person as pura vida and I decided that is the ultimate compliment in Costa Rica, and I hope that one day someone refers to me as pura vida. That being said, one day Edwin (a volunteer in my town) was sitting outside when I dog came up and peed on him. This can be referred to as "dura vida."

Focus. The point of this post is my site visit. Yay! There's a million things I could say, so I'll try to hit the main points.

Comte: This place is the Campo.. capital C. The town has about 600 residents. It's about 8 hours of traveling from San Jose, and the closer you get, the hotter is gets, and the more rural is gets. It's pretty much 1 main dirt road. Maybe 20 min walking from 1 end to the other. On the main road there's a grade school, high school, soccer field, 2 pulpereias (small mom and pop store), 2 bars... that might be about it. There is sort of a pseudo-square of houses, where the majority of people live.

Host family: The house I will be living at isn't located in the main cluster of houses. It's on the other side of the main road, surrounded by trees, so it's a nice and peaceful location. There are 9 members in the intermediate family, mom, dad, 2 daughters, 5 sons. The daughters and sons are all in their 20's. 2 sons live elsewhere, and the wife of 1 son lives in the house. I spent the first night there sitting in rocking chairs on the porch, chatting with the 3 girls, I felt very content. I'm looking forward to living in the house.

Gente: The people that live in Comte are amazing. Everyone I met was so warm and welcoming. It's a little intimidating because it's obvious that everyone loves the current volunteer, but I felt the same warmth and love when I met everyone. I am really excited to be a member of this town.

I'll leave this post at a final comment. During my site visit, the current volunteer and I went to the high school, and when we arrived, the entire school was sitting outside waiting for us. They did a goodbye bit for Kathrine, and a hello bit for me. Then the director called me over to introduce myself in front of everyone. It was a really gratifying moment because I stood in front of over 600 people (the high school has 600 because kids from other towns attend it) and talked for a bit in spanish. It was great. Yay Spanish.

Site Assignment!

Friday we were given out site assignments. I am beyond excited about my placement. My site is located in the province of Puntarenas, if you look up Golfito, I am in that area. Its right by the coast and by the Panamanian border. I will be taking the place of a Peace Corps volunteer from the CYF program (the program involves working with youth and families), so my counterpart is the director of the local school. The town is small, about 600, but it seems to have a lot of resources. Among programs I will be involved in are teaching ICT classes, helping to form a development association, helping with hydroponic systems (very cool), possible doing some summer camps for kids, and more. I am really happy about the location and nature of work and feel so lucky to have been assigned exactly what I wanted. I am very grateful. There´s a lot more to say about everything, but I am going to visit the site next weekend so I will update after that. On Thursday and Friday we have counterpart workshop where we meet out counterpart and begin working with them, then on Satuday we travel to our site for 5 days. It´s about 10 hours of traveling from San Jose to my new site. Oy!

So to celebrate site assignments, most of Tico 20 went to the beach this weekend. About 35 of us went to a beach town called Puerto Viejo. The weekend was perfect. We have beautiful weather, the ocean was amazing, and we all got to spend time together before heading out to our new sites. The town was very tranquilo. We stayed at a place called Rockin J´s, where one sleeping option is to rent hammocks. The day involved laying on the beach, playing in the ocean, listening to a live band, dancing, and spending quality time together. I am going to miss spending time with Tico 20.

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.

VAC dinner and more

Last Saturday I went to a CED project fair. There were about 10 current volunteers there from CED, who talked to us about some current projects in their community. Some of the things we heard about were community newsletters, ECCs (empresa de credito comuntario) <-- I hope to get to work with this, chicos/as poderosos/as (camps and workshops for youth), environmental projects, teaching english, teaching ICT, starting computer centers, and more. It was great getting to hear from current volunteers and get a better idea of what our next 2 years here could be like. I especially liked talking to some of the volunteers about ECCs, which is something that I am very interested in. I really like the idea of starting a community funded credit union and the potential that this project can have.

After the project fair we went to San Jose for VAC, which is a get together of all trainees and current volunteers. The night included spending time with Tico 20, meeting some volunteers from Tico 18 and 19, dancing, eating, and disfrutaring (disfrutar = to enjoy).

On Tuesday we were given our assignments for Tech Week. For Tech Week, they split CED in half, and each half goes to different sites in Costa Rica to learn more about volunteer life/our preferences for our future site, learn more about current projects, and help work on some projects relating to ICT and teaching English, among other things. Myself, and 8 others from CED are going to a current volunteers site in Alajuela. It should be a good week.

In 2 weeks we receive our site assignments. In 5 weeks we move. Good times.

Semana Santa

This past week is known as Semana Santa in Costa Rica, or holy week. Ther have been lots of celebrations and masses going on at the church every day. I attended mass a couple of times with my family. There have also been a lot of processions, which is a sort of parade. We had classes Monday-Wednesday, then were off on Thursday and Friday. Having days off has been nice. There is a pool at my house, which was just filled this week. We have been playing a lot of pool volleyball, and there is a basketball hoop so I taught some of my siblings how to play Horse. I really enjoy just hanging out at the house with my family, I feel like I am always laughing (and sometimes being laughed at for my Spanish failures)

Next week is sort of a mid-way point for training. We have our next Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) to see how we have progressed in our Spanish in the past 5 weeks. In order to swear-in as a volunteer you have to be at a language proficiency level of intermediate-mid. I tested in as intermediate-low. The LPI is basicallya 30 minute conversation with one of the language facilitator. As far a my Spanish goes, I am definitely learning a lot, and feel that I can have conversations more fluidly and with greater ease. I especially like learning Costa Rican pachuca, slang. Heres a goodie I learned while playing cards the other night, tome chichi. It means take that sucker. Good stuff to have in my Spanish vocab. At the 5 week mark we also have to turn in all of the work we have done for our classes in the past 5 weeks. So I have been putting that together and making sure that I have everything.

Nothing too eventful going on next week besides classes. Next weekend there is something called VAC dinner, which is a get together for all volunteers and trainees in Costa Rican (there are about 150 total). That is in San Jose so I am going to that and they most of us are staying in town over night, which will be fun.

Service Learning Project

This week we met some students from the local high school. In order to graduate, they have to complete a service learning project. So we are going to help them with these projects. Edwin and I are working with a group of 4 kids to help them forumate project ideas and start the project. Today we went to the school and had our group draw a community map. It was really interesting because when we first arrived, we did this same activity. It was interesting to see the perspective of a visitor (we did the map our first week in town) vs kids that live here. Having them draw the map was a great way to get talking about their community, likes and dislikes, resources, dangerous places, etc. The kids are awesome and I had a great time hanging out with them this afternoon. Side note, we ate with them in the cafeteria and when we were being served our food Eric asked the cook if it was chicken or fish.. she smiled and said, its a banana. We´re still amateurs.

I´ve also pseudo-adopted a little puppy. My brother found a 1 month old puppy in the street and brought it home. I´ve been feeding it and cuddling it every day since. Nancy and I decided on the name Lily. It is the most precious puppy. My host mom always calls her a chiñada because every time I hold her she falls asleep in my arms. My family asked me if I wanted to bring her with me to my community.. duh I do. So I will have to find out about this. Go figure I´d be trying to adopt dogs 3 weeks in.

I´m looking forward to a relaxing weekend. It has been a very long and tiring week. There is an arts festival in San Jose. I am planning on going to that with my sister tomorrow. On Sunday I believe we are going to check out a local waterfall/river and maybe do some swimming.

Also, I went around town and took some pictures today. I will be posting those soon.

Another thought, one thing I love about being here (and Ive briefly mentioned this before) is being in the mountains, so close to the clouds. Sometimes a fog will roll in from a cloud passing over the mountain. It is the coolest sensation.

Love you guys.