27 Months of La Pura Vida

June 29th, 2015

Hard to believe that I have been here almost a month but time is flying by and the community is slowly coming around to having me here.  Everyday I get more "adios" as I walk by houses, more waves in the street from passing motorcycles and even had a couple people actually start a conversation with me!  Crazy, I know!

Anyway time passes slow throughout the day even though the weeks seem to fly by.  Each day I really make my own schedule and there have been days where I have absolutely nothing to do and have to find SOME reason to leave the house and pretend to be somewhat active.  Part of the integration process I think is simply getting my face out into the community so even just going for an hour walk around the town (and being drenched in sweat after 5 minutes) I think provides so source of "integration".

The two big events of the past two weeks were the following; had my first big presentation about myself, Peace Corps, and the English classes I will be starting to teach within a few weeks hopefully and secondly, got to meet up with a bunch of other Limon volunteers in Puerto Viejo this past weekend.  On top of these events, I was a judge for the science fair in the high school, presented myself to all the Colegio students and almost all the escuela kids and parents.  I think the hardest part is that there has been almost zero Community Economic Development work done and the Cooperative doesn't seem to be motivated to get a move on.  However, thank god that the kids seem sooo motivated to begin English and computer classes.  During my first presentation about the English class, 75 people showed up and my host mom received almost 15 other calls from people who lived too far away to attend a 5p.m meeting.  Mind you, 90 people is a ton for almost any community  but for a community like mine where there is only 400-450 people, 90 people is unheard of.  During the meeting, I presented about myself, Peace Corps and then gave out a diagnostic that allowed me to gauge which day of the week and time would be best for the escuela, colegio and adult students.  And all in all I think it went really well and my Spanish actually got the main points across (although there were plenty of blank stares as well).  As of right now, I will be starting 5 English classes on the 20th of July; 2 for escuela, 2 for colegio, and 1 for adults.  Computer class information to come later!

The Puerto Trip was the first trip I got to see some friendly faces in almost a month which felt extremely strange after seeing them everyday for the previous three months.  Puerto Viejo is down south in the Province of Limon fairly near the boarder with Panama and has just enough tourism attraction to bring in business and tourism but still has a very undeveloped almost virgin appeal to it and up until this point, was my favorite beach in Costa Rica.  There was about 20 volunteers that made the trip from all different Tico groups and all different project sectors.  We had amazing tacos made by the CED volunteer in Hone Creek (about 10 minutes up the road), beer and had great opportunities to see what other volunteers were doing and get some advice from the more experienced volunteers.  The best part that came out of this is that almost every CED volunteer from my group isn't doing any CED stuff and all the older volunteers said that were able to start until 3-4 months in site and some still do very little CED projects.

July 4th is next weekend so it looks like I will be out of site again to celebrate in San Jose with a huge celebration hosted by the American Colony Committee in Costa Rica.  The next two weeks are school vacations for the kids so there will likely be little going on here but will try to update next week.

-Conor