27 Months of La Pura Vida

April 18th

Another week of training down.  Officially 5 weeks into training which means we are just about half way done with training already.  It feels so unreal that training has been going by this fast but it is also incredibly exciting to be thinking how close we all are to the "real" experience.  We had the last Spanish class with our first teacher, Mari, yesterday which was fairly sad.  She was definitely a good teacher and we are sad to see her go but our new teacher also seems to be very good and was teaching the advanced group the first 5 weeks.

I had the opportunity last Sunday to travel with Katy's mom to visit my mom in Cartago where she is staying for the week to help my host brother care for his new born baby.  Absolutely beautiful city and the greatest climate; not too hot but not cold enough to wear a sweater.  The main attraction (besides the baby) is a large church that was under construction in the early 19th century but was damaged by an earthquake.  Then again in the middle of the century, when construction began again, it was again damaged by an earthquake.  The construction was then abandoned but instead of tearing down the existing structure, the local government decided to make the church house a garden and a park.  I took a few pictures of the park as well as the massive Basilica in the city which hopefully I can upload.

The main reason for this post is to inform everyone that I will be heading to Tech Week starting tomorrow until next Saturday.  Tech Week involves traveling with 6-7 other trainees to a "successful" volunteer's site and putting into practice all the tools and technical training we have been receiving the past few weeks.  We will be working in pairs or trios with community members to lead classes, work through some of the preliminary steps of the more complicated tools and evaluate our abilities in working with communities.  I am heading to a town in the Cartago region called Pacayas which in a larger sprawling community in the mountains but apparently nothing like the actual sites the majority of my training class will be receiving unfortunately.  The volunteer, Chris, has been extremely successful implementing some of the Junior achievement course that work with youth to build their business and financial capabilities and even has taken three groups through the process of creating a business idea and working through the steps of making the idea a reality for a national competition.  On top of the Junior Achievement courses, he has been holding basic English classes in his community, worked closely with 2-3 different women's groups to help with the business aspects of their artisan groups and holding a variety of business classes.

Also wanted to include a little about the work I have been doing in the community thus far.  For the most part, up until now it has been mainly just talking with random people in the community about their culture, their perception of their community and trying to get a better idea of the tico culture.  However, today myself and two other trainees have to begin our first of 3-4 sessions with the Boy/Girl Scouts in San Rafael.  During these sessions, we have to present on a business or economic related topic, include a variety of activities to incorporate all the different learning styles and (hopefully) teach someone something.  Today, we are presenting on the topic of "Savings" to a group of 15-20 seven year olds and then again to a group of 15 fifteen-eighteen year olds.  Wish us luck!

Thats all for now, will hopefully write something after Tech Week and more about how our week with the Scouts went.

-Conor

Update:  See more on scouts here