NATE: The first week has been a tremendous, tumultuous, confusing, and exciting time. Honestly, I came in expecting to be mostly terrified with a small side of nervousness and a lot of awkward pauses. Instead, what I found was an amazing group of people of all ages (we range from 21 to 76), all interests, all backgrounds, and all of whom have interesting life stories. Despite my earnest attempts to remain ironically detached, I’m thoroughly excited about the next two years and the opportunity to work with such inspiring people.
LENA: We have been staying for several days at a retreat center in the central highlands (think YMCA camp), where there are parrots that greet us in great loud bunches every morning at 5am and palm and evergreen trees and soft wet earth. It is cool and misty. One gets the feeling that if the staff forgot the clean the rooms ever day the mossy green earth would take over in a matter of weeks.
NATE: We’ve been working 8 AM to 7 PM, mostly in workshops which introduce us to our projects and to each other. Today was our first venture outside the gates of the retreat center – a trip into Cartago, where we had to find lunch for less than 3000 colones (about $6 – a not-so-difficult task). I had rice and beans – because every meal in Costa Rica has to have rice and beans – with chicken, onion, some curried squash thing, and fried plantain, topped off with, of all things, baklava) and find a local landmark by asking locals for directions. We discovered that asking directions can be a risky proposition: the urge of Costa Ricans to be helpful often outweighs the urge to be correct. You will frequently be given directions that are utterly and completely wrong, but delivered in the most friendly manner possible – all because Tico culture insists that you help someone who needs help, even if you have no idea how to actually help them.
LENA: We’re slowly getting a better idea of what our projects and site placement will look like—I am realizing that, much like people who think they know Mexico because they’ve been to Cancun, I actually know surprisingly little about Costa Rica from living here previously as a middle-class student. Costa Rica, like any other developing county, has places and problems unseen by tourists. One recent volunteer was placed in a village of 170 people that took 3 hours of travel by water and one by horse to get there. She recently got ringworm and a parasite on a return visit. You may laugh when I write this but: her story made me feel much better, as I think many of us in the Peace Corps group had been asked before going or had wondered ourselves whether PC was needed here. Now I see that the challenge of rural development is alive and well in Costa Rica.
NATE: Tomorrow, we meet our host families for the first time and move in to our homes for the next 11 weeks. Lena and I will be living separately: she’ll be in Rio Conejo, which is 26 km from San Jose, while I’ll be in Rio Azul, which is 7.9 km from San Jose. We’ll get to see each other on Thursdays, when we have joint trainings with everyone in our group, and our host families have agreed to host us as a couple on weekends. I’ve never been in a situation like living with a total stranger and their family before – I’m nervous that, as bad as my English small talk is, it will be even worse in Spanish. Luckily, I’ll have homework to do which provides me with a more structured way to interact with my host family until we’re both comfortable with each other. I surprised myself by testing higher than I expected on the language tests, but I’m looking forward to improving my speaking over the next couple weeks.
We just had a minor tremor, which we will take a sign to end this.
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