October 21, 2010: ¨Yes, but what do you do?¨

It’s only seven months in, but we’ve finally started to do some work.

We know, we were also worried that we were rushing it – maybe we should hold on another five months, get to a full year of sitting on our itching, impatient hands before attempting to leave the house in a purposeful manner – but we couldn’t help it. Plus, people wouldn’t shut up about English classes.

So that’s what we’re doing. English classes. During training, we both said to ourselves: “Self,” because we always address ourselves in the third person when administering sound advice to ourselves, “I never want to set foot anywhere near an English class.” We didn’t come all these hundreds of miles, leave our friends and family, and switch to an entirely rice-based diet simply to explain possessive pronouns to someone in broken Spanish, we said.

After three months of having no fixed purpose at all besides writing an analysis of a community which seemed ambivalent about talking to me, I will gladly explain possessive pronouns to anyone who asks, simply to have something useful to do. I will explain personal pronouns. I will explain for the five thousandth time that that, unlike in Spanish, you don’t “have” 33 years, in English you are 33 years old. I will perform skits in which two people greet each other with exaggerated politeness and awkwardly avoid contractions like “I’m” or “you’re”, acting out both parts in funny voices, usually involving a high-pitched “girl” who swishes her hips a lot.

Please give me something else to do.

I’m sure there are some volunteers who live in areas where teaching English can seem like a nearly useless activity, tiny towns where the last person who spoke English and passed through town was part of William Walker’s army, but our towns are not those places. We live in commuting distance of the most popular national park in Costa Rica, and tourists pass through by the hundreds of thousands. Speaking English is a skill that people in our community can use to materially improve their lives, capitalizing on the fact that Americans are constitutionally unable to order a hamburger or casually insult a tour guide in any other language than English.

Teaching a community English class here, however, is an entirely different animal from teaching Spanish in some suburban church basement in the States. Cultural, social, and class differences often turn our teacher-student relationship into that of two ships passing in the night – through a thick fog, before the invention of radar, radio, or the international semaphore system.

For one thing, the average level of education is generally low: in Matapalo, 33% of people over 12 haven’t finished elementary school. Sixth grade seems to be the average level of education in our English classes, meaning we have to re-tune the way we teach: our default, having attended (especially looked at in retrospect) fantastic public schools and colleges, is to revert to grammar when we run into linguistic problems. Our students often have no formal grammar background in their native language. For example, one of Lena’s students recently asked her about the difference between two sentences about work – in Spanish, “to work” is “trabajar,” while a job is a “trabajo,” so it’s easy to see how the explanation could get convoluted. When Lena explained that “work” is a noun in one sentence and a verb in the other, her student nodded seriously, turned to her, and asked “what’s a verb?”

We’ve written a little about the school system here before, and the conditioning that adults have received in public schools also complicates our Spanish classes. Costa Rican classrooms are largely places where the teacher writes things on the board and the students hurriedly copy the collection of facts for the day in their notebooks. We’ve discovered that we have to be very careful in using the chalkboard, because students have a Pavlovian copying reaction to anything put up there – which means they will pay no attention to anything you say while they are writing. I tried to do an exercise the other day in my elementary school class where the students drew a picture of their family, and underneath each person wrote a few sentences – the name, age and occupation of their family member. I drew my family on the board, wrote some sample sentences about my father, and then went around the class, helping out with vocabulary, and as individual students asked about new words, I would spell them out on the board. At the end of class, everyone had a picture of a family that also mysteriously had three brothers and a sister; everyone had a father with a goatee who was a computer engineer; everyone had filled their notebooks with the vocabulary I had written on the board – in the exact same places I had written it, crowded in the extra board space around the drawings; and no one could explain to me the difference between “I am” and “he is.”

Realizing that most of our students aren’t attending these classes so they can finally read Henry James in the original English, we’ve been attempting to emphasize communication over formalized grammar – which means students have to speak in class. Yet getting students to take initiative and participate can be a challenge. We have several theories: maybe there are some cultural clues we’re missing, or maybe we’re asking the wrong questions, or maybe classroom interaction is just such a foreign concept that we startle our students into silence, but that old U.S. classroom trope of throwing a question out to the class, to check for comprehension or build student interest, tends to meet with the kind of quiet usually reserved for impolite bodily functions. We’ll let you know how this one goes.

All this said, and aside from the joys of ordering textbooks in a nation that is still largely cash-only and refuses to adopt any standardized postal address system, our English classes seem to be going well. (Except that I think drop-out is starting.)

We’re also doing other work: in Matapalo, Nate has started an art club with local kids and was surreptitiously elected to the board of the local community security group when he left the meeting to use the bathroom. Lena is working with a tremendous group of women in Portalón who have built a hydroponic greenhouse and started a small cooperative business selling produce, and she’s also helping organize a community group that works on promoting children’s rights. We’re still wildly emotionally volatile, with lots of ups and downs, but there are occasionally things written in our daytimers now.

P.S. – This is completely unrelated, but startling enough that we felt we should share it with everyone. We have a lot of bichos (Spanish for “critters”) in our house, many of whom are unwelcome and are liable to be struck sharply with a broom if we see their hideous, inhuman faces again. We have, however, grown oddly fond of geckos. Maybe it’s because they eat mosquitoes, which, aside from ants, represent the best argument against the existence of an all-powerful, benevolent God which I’ve ever seen. We have a particular fondness for one gecko, who we have named Gordon and who lives in our kitchen.

Here is the disturbing part: we have found out that Gordon is a “Wandering Gecko,” and that his species is parthenogenic – meaning they don’t need partners to reproduce – and female-only. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to de-gender Gordon’s name (Gordona and Gordonna haven’t really stuck), it would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you could give us a short description of how in Hades parthenogenic reproduction works in multi-cellular animals and if this inbreeding is related to why geckos feel compelled to poop in my skillet every night, that would also be welcome.

September 21, 2010: Our House, La Chasa

We live in La Chasa or La Antigua Chasa (more on this name later). It is a two-room apartment with a bright blue door and a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom of our very own. It used to be a soda, a restaurant, but was recently converted into three cabinas ("cabins," I guess - like little apartments). We love having privacy and the chance to buy and cook our own food. We are becoming experts in hand-made tortillas, rice and black beans.

Nate toasting his work and our newly installed mosquito-net bed, a must have for the rainy season. And the dry season. Pretty much all the time.


We do our laundry in a little Chinese-made machine, then line-dry among bananas and cows.

Lena in the kitchen, making pancakes, which are especially delicious if you haven't eaten them for six months.

This was one of our first house guests, a palm-sized toad. Lena is a mighty hunter.

Our rooms have been vacant for awhile, so we're still negotiating our use of the space with several of the previous tenants, who have included: the above toad, two tiny frogs, a dysfunctional family of at least three geckos (they do a lot of biting of each other), a spider bigger than Nate's hand which had claimed our trash can, and what appears to be every ant in Costa Rica. Please don't let this list dissuade you from visiting.  We have two mosquito nets, so you'll be totally safe. Or at least won't get gecko poop dropped on you in the middle of the night.

September 20, 2010: Diosito: On the Ontological Implications of Calling God “Little”

Nate teaching computer skills to his youngest student ever, the little girl we used to live with.

She is the cutest bebita ever! 15 months old.

(Among family and friends we have quite a range of Spanish knowledge. From a fluent brother who can trick people into thinking he is Argentinean, to a German-speaking Grandmother with little orientation to Latin languages, to everything in between. So, if you find this explanation ponderous, please bear with us.)

Spanish has a fairly well-know and rather charming ability to take a word, a noun or adjective, and modify it to make it diminutive. Take a noun like casa (house). A little house is a casita. How about a perro (dog): a little dog is a perrito. Just add –ito or –ita to a noun and you have created a whole new word and cut out the need for a separate adjective. This can refer to either the actual physical size of something (a tiny house) or how adorable it is (such a cute little house!) or both. So instead of saying “I live in a little house, and I have a little dog” a Spanish-speaker is able to get away with something akin to “I live in a housey-wousy and I have a doggy-woggy.” And no one laughs.

Costa Ricans have an idiosyncratic version of this usage. Instead of –ito, they use –tico. So a small amount is not just un poco. It’s un poquitico. If you need just a minuto (minute), you can ask for a minutico. Due to their tendency to use this form, Costa Ricans are themselves nicknamed “ticos.”

During my eleven years of speaking Spanish, I have always felt that this was a cute trick, that the creation of a new adorable word from an otherwise boring specimen is a nice creative flourish, nothing too profound, but fun. The linguistic equivalent of floral accents in a room. However recent usages by people in our town have led to doubt. It may be that something more profound is going on. Maybe by using –ito, instead of a free and independent modifier, you actually make the thing itself more itsy-bitsy because it is now inherent in the thing itself to be so darn cute and small. Further, the widespread use of this linguistic tool does what all language does: it helps shape the way we think and illuminates the cultural processes by which we see ourselves and our world. –Ito has changed in my mind from mere décor to vital ontological window.

How?

Let’s take three examples: Feíto, pobrecito and Diosito.

Feíto: The use of –ito acts as an excellent social lubricant and is key for those who need an ambassador’s skill to communicate with people who regard politeness as important and look down on aggressive or overly direct social behavior. Let’s say you need to describe accurately someone who is not handsome and is overweight. You could call him feo (ugly) and gordo (fat), but why, when you can much more politely and endearingly name him as feíto and gordito. What if you need to get a meeting with an otherwise recalcitrant co-worker but can’t risk being seen as pushy? Easy! Ask her ever so politely for just a little of her tiempecito (time). Is someone asking you to do something you’d really rather not do right now? Let them know you’ll get to it ahorita (sometime around now, or a bit later than now), and you have anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 years to get to it! You were still accurate with your words (sort of), and yet everyone is happier with you because otherwise overly harsh, direct or impolite words were softened.

Pobrecito: Pobre means poor, but a pobrecito is quite another matter. This is the term universally accepted to describe someone to whom bad things have happened and over which s/he has little or no control. Catch a cold last week? Pobrecito. Did the river flood your house? Pobrecito. Did you lose your homework? Pobrecito. Not show up to that key meeting because you forgot about it? Pobrecito. Can’t get a job because you never leave the house and why would you anyway, your mother cooks and cleans and keeps a roof over your head so there’s really no need? Pobrecito. The seemingly harmless addition of –ito covers a wide spectrum of culpability and victimization, with the effect of diffusing responsibility from said pobrecito. Whereas a Tica mother might say, “Pobrecito my son, he can’t get his act together,” a traditional mother of American Puritan persuasion might respond, “Pobrecito my hind foot, he needs to take on some responsibility and get a job while he’s at it!” Thus, the whole idea embedded in this word is the metaphor of a tiny, helpless human who cannot fight circumstances in a universe beyond his control. This has traditionally been referred to as Latin American “fatalism.” It’s a complicated phenomenon and far from universal, but suffice it to say that the seemingly innocuous phrase holds telling clues to this idea that we, at least, see manifested quite often in the Costa Rican countryside.

Diosito: Dios means God. We have actually heard the term Diosito used several times, once by a priest and once when someone was petitioning God for something. This has got to be the ultimate and most baffling use of the –ito diminutive. What does Diosito mean? Little God? Cute, adorable God? Tiny, smoothed over, no-more-fire-and-brimstone God? Just-the-baby-Jesus God? Creator God that is now tired out like an old man so He’s shrunk down a little? Can you really add a diminutive onto the Someone or Something that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving? Perhaps Diosito is a divinity you can feel more comfortable with, a more personal God along the lines of born-again Protestantism, a guy that you can really talk to and maybe play soccer with on Saturdays. We don’t know. Perhaps all we can say for certain is that the Spanish language itself offers theological possibilities that are not available in English.

There’s no better opportunity than learning another language to realize how much the words you use shape the way you view the world. One tiny suffix can make anything adorable and absolve you from any personal responsibility, as well as softening the blow of any word’s ultimate meaning. We’re working on adopting -ito into English: we live in an house-ito, do a little bit of work-ito in the Peace Corps-ito, and suffer from the tiniest bit of homesick-ito. Don’t worry, we aren’t poor-itos. We’ll always have the Spanish language-ito to keep us going.

September 2, 2010: the phone.

When I used to receive phone calls in the States, the usual order of business was something akin to:

“Hello, this is _____. May I please speak to _____?”

You may notice two things here:

1) The person calling states who they are.

2) The person calling asks for who they want to speak to.

The first public phone was installed in Matapalo in 1979, which one would think would allow enough time for people to develop some sort of system for using phones. Instead, the most common call we receive at our house goes like:

LENA: Hello?

MYSTERIOUS PERSON ON OTHER END OF LINE: Hello?

-- LONG PAUSE --

LENA: Hello?

MYPOOEOL: Hello?

-- LONG PAUSE --

LENA: Hello?

MYPOOEOL: Hello. Good afternoon.

LENA: Good afternoon.

--LONG PAUSE—

LENA: Hello?

This can go on for hours. Usually, we have to overcome our sense of indignation at having the expectation that we psychically guess the intentions of the person who called us, and ask who is calling or for whom they are calling. This is followed by another awkward pause, in which we wonder if the mystery person is now indignant at us. Then mystery person finally spills that beans by stating someone’s name in a confused voice.

At first we thought this was an artifact of answering someone else’s phone. We always felt bad that the friends and family calling our hosts were seemingly so upset that strangers with gringo accents were answering the phone that we caused a sudden inability to hold a logically ordered phone conversation (we were also frequently hung up on). We have since learned that this still happens when you have your own cell phone AND it happens when you put up flyers asking people interested in English classes to call Nate or Lena AND it happens to other volunteers in a variety of otherwise unrelated situations.

So we have come to the conclusion that a legit PC project could be teaching rural Costa Ricans to initiate and professionally carry out phone calls. We’re only being somewhat tongue-in-cheek; because the irony is that a growing industry here in Costa Rica for the up-and-coming working and middle classes is… customer service call centers!

September 2, 2010: Pictures from San Jose.

In the Mercado Central (the traditional market in downtown San José).

How we get around.

Lottery vendor (chancero) walking in street.

In the workers' cemetery.

Family outside of the La Merced church.

Interior, La Merced church.

September 2, 2010: Police, the fuzz, the heat, 5-0, etc.

Costa Rica has 500 different types of police officers. There are the Fuerza Publica (the closest to what people in the States think of as “police”), Transit Police, Tourist Police, Municipal Police, the OIJ (Organización de Investigación Judicial – the people who actually investigate crimes)… actually, that’s all I can think of right now. To restate: Costa Rica has five types of police officers. That we can remember.

Anyway: police are a big deal in our town. Where we live, there is only one police station in the whole district. It’s a two-room wood building without windows painted a sad institutional blue. This small outpost is all the law and order there is in for 3000 or so people. Inside are three police officers, and, theoretically, two are always on duty while the other sleeps.  In practice, sometimes more than one is asleep, sometimes they’re all awake, and sometimes no one is there at all. They sometimes have a motorcycle, but it’s usually broken, which means the officers limit themselves to patrolling the 100 yards between the station and the pulperia down the street, where they can buy a coke.

They seem like decent guys, but you never get the chance to know them, because they’re rotated out roughly every week – a policy apparently instituted to keep corruption at bay. They also have a difficult job, patrolling a huge area without transportation which has seen a huge uptick in drug trafficking in the last couple years. That said, they are also a constant source of complaints in the community. The stories range from the common – the police are called but never show up, the police are called but never answer their phone – to the ridiculous: someone recently discovered a pair of addicts throwing rocks at their house, apparently in retaliation for being stopped from robbing the kitchen earlier that day. When the police were called, they said that A) it was a pretty long way to the beach, so they didn’t think they could make it out there, B) there’s not much they could do if they were there anyway, C) the best thing to do with crackheads is to take them out to distant, abandoned fields and beat them, which they, as police, are really not supposed to do, but D) they highly recommend that everyone else do it.  I’ve heard similar stories from several people, which makes me worried there is some confusion about the difference between participatory democracy and vigilantism here.

Security is a growing concern in Costa Rica – a recent national poll ranked it above jobs and the economy – and there is a fear that it’s only going to get worse.  We’ve been told that a member of the Fuerza Publica can’t actually arrest anyone unless they’re caught in the act (if they’re outside the house holding your TV, you have to call someone else to investigate the crime), and the byzantine sentencing laws make it really hard to actually send anyone to jail. This is a country where there is no institution responsible for even mid-level property crimes and, it is estimated, 98% of all crimes go unpunished.

Yet we feel remarkably safe. I’m the last person to say that police need more power, and I come from a country with a larger jail population than the total population of most other countries, a country that condemns children to life sentences, and a country that – in some states – mistakes revenge for justice and gives the state permission to kill its citizens. I actually like a lot of what Costa Rica tries to do in terms of communal security, in organizing towns to prevent crime through keeping kids active and happy and watching out for each other, or the fact that, unlike the rest of Central America, Costa Rica has a healthy democracy, one which uses government spending as a way to ensure a relatively fair distribution of wealth. All these factors help prevent high crime rates. Our experience here is a testimony to how important the rest of the community is to safety: you don’t need that many police when everyone knows each other, when there’s a sense of community and common interest.

It also helps when a key value of your culture is to be tranquilo: calm, relaxed criminals can only do so much harm.

On a loosely related note, whereas the stereotype of the fuerza publica is that they’re largely ineffective, the stereotype of the transit police is that they’re corrupt. This has been exploited brilliantly by the Costa Rican artist Banton, whose video is below. You need absolutely no Spanish to understand what is going on in this song – which is hugely popular here – and, if you get lost, just listen to the funny voice of the transit cop and watch the midget dance.

August 28, 2010: Mother's Day.

NOTE: we're a little behind the curve on this post - it was written a week ago, but with the week of training we just finished, we hadn't had a chance to polish it up. And now, with all the thoughts inspired by IST (in-service training for the non-volunteer and/or acronym impaired), we want to write another post. So you get this one in all of it's unpolished glory. And also a beautiful picture Lena took that has almost nothing to do with the post, except that it has some mothers in it.

A modern invention of the nationalist age and the card-flower industrial complex, Mother’s Day is not celebrated on the same day everywhere. Although May is a big favorite around the world, in Costa Rica (and apparently a small part of Belgium) August 15th is the day. And it is a big day—bigger than in the US. It is a national holiday with a day off granted to state workers and some schools are closed. Sales for presents are high, as in the US, and many businesses consider Mother’s Day as their way to stay in the black until Christmas arrives. Flowers, clothes, perfumes and home appliances are all hyped in advertisements for months ahead of the day – not too different from American tastes, except for the large number of ads attempting to entice you to buy hotpants and short shorts for your sainted mother.

When we were in church on Sunday the 15th, we learned why Costa Rica chose this date. Costa Rica is the longest-lasting democracy in Latin America, yet it does not have church-state separation. The Catholic Church is the official state Church, and the 15th is the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven, where she is crowned the Queen of Heaven by Jesus.

According to some of the teachers we know, there is a tradition of local schools holding big parties for their communities on Mother’s Day. Many schools, overburdened with other, more academic, tasks no longer commit the time and resources required, but my town is an exception. We were asked to help set up and then invited to attend the festivities, and, not realizing what a big deal Mother’s Day is, we did not know what we were getting into.

The first clue that we had no idea how intense this celebration was going to be was that there was a theme: Hawaiian luau. This evening, the town hall was filled with streamers, balloons, and a gigantic welcome sign featuring two large-eyed waifs in grass skirts dancing on an island and wishing the reader a happy Mother’s Day (as a side note: if the creators of Precious Moments were ever to sue for back royalties due to the unauthorized use of their work, just in the province of Puntarenas alone, they would be entitled to billions of dollars in damages). Enough tables and chairs were set up for 100 people, and in the centerpiece was a pineapple, covered with candy that had been speared with toothpicks and then jabbed into the fruit, making an already bizarre-looking fruit that much more surreal. At the front of the room, two large tables were stacked high with ribboned and sparkled loot to be handed out to parents that night through the raffle, because it is written in the constitution of Costa Rica that raffles must be held every three to 15 days.

We were given the task of greeting people, which consisted of a polite buenas tardes, making the person sign in on the appropriate sheet (one for men and one for women), and then giving them a raffle number, a piece of candy, and, finally, draping a plastic lei over their head. We ended up with over 100 people – probably 120 – but at least a quarter of the population of Portalón.

Then the madness began.

Actually, that’s a lie: the madness began while we were signing people in. The LCD projector, sound system, and a computer had been brought over from the school for use as the evening’s AV system. At some point during sign-in, everyone in the room was suddenly startled by a horrible, repetitive car crash sound effect, played at what seemed to be 5000 decibels. One of the teachers had put together a slide show, complete with sound effects and music, of what started out as a series of pictures of unusual car crashes, but which quickly devolved into a series of pictures of morbidly obese people in bikinis and cats in zany situations. This was to set the tone for the rest of the evening.

Next was the first dinámica of the night, which is just the Costa Rica way of saying “embarrassing party game,” in which we were all asked to stand up and dance. Everyone seemed fine with the standing up part, but, when it came to dancing, there weren’t many takers. At this point, the MC began haranguing the crowd over the mic, at great length and at great volume. “COME ON! DANCE! THIS IS FUN! THIS IS A NIGHT TO HAVE FUN! DANCE!” Unmoved, the crowd continued to, for the most part, watch the teachers dance. Then the threats began: “IF YOU DON’T DANCE, YOU WILL HAVE TO COME UP HERE IN FRONT OF EVERYONE AND DO THE CHICKEN DANCE!” Guards were posted throughout the room to identify the non-dancing scofflaws and drag them to the front of the room.

This, of course, is the point in which Nate was dragged up to the front of the room and instructed to do the chicken dance. Not that he hadn’t been dancing before, mind you, but let’s consider the logic: just say you’re running an event. The crowd isn’t really responding, but you feel compelled by some intense, uncontrollable, pathological urge to make them dance. After threatening them with public embarrassment if they don’t dance, you obviously have to follow through, otherwise you lose face and all control over the evening. On the other hand, if you actually force someone to embarrass themselves, you may very well scare everyone away, as they flee your terrifying totalitarian dance party. The answer? Make the gringo dance. Gringos dancing is universally considered to be funny is Latin America. Luckily, Nate has been conditioned by years of high school drama and working with children and is not easily given to embarrassment, and he was a good sport in sating the appetites and curiosity of the party-goers.

The night continued on, sometimes interminably so: at least 4 more dinámicas were done, dinner was served, raffles numbers read until every single adult ticket holder received a present (somewhat defeating the purpose of having a raffle, now that we think about it), and the teachers and hosts for the evening did an amateur dancer number in spandex and luau flowers which involved a lot of booty-shaking at the audience. Some of these women were over 40, and several were not in peak condition, making even Lena look like a swimsuit model. It was one of those situations in which you would be embarrassed for the lot, but since the party was now well into hour 4, all you could do was look on with mild perplexity, hope vaguely that you would not be pulled to the front of the room to shake your white ass, and remind yourself that later you should look into the armchair sociologist theory that one culture’s shame is another culture’s entertainment. And then smile wanly, knowing it was important for the guest gringo to seem to be having a good time.

But the real high point of the evening was yet to come. It involved the enactment of a skit claiming, as stated in the introduction, to represent a “typical Costa Rican family situation.” The plot was simple: a busty and booty-heavy Costa Rican housewife works hard to do the housework and feed her family. Her wayward and shallow husband goes out drinking at the local cantina, picks up slutty women, and comes home drunk. The wife kicks him out but he returns to repent. Harmony is restored when she, and her two daughters, forgive all. Now, we actually found this particular celebration of motherhood to be entirely depressing, but it was probably the most popular event of the night (other than the free stuff from the raffle). It relied on that well-worn trope of community theatre everywhere: put the most well-known town leaders into wigs, use pillows for potbellies and balloons for boobs, and watch the audience erupt in laughter. Despite the light-heartedness of this skit, Lena had a hard time seeing anything other than an almost entirely negative depiction of a rural woman’s life. They say good comedy tells the truth, and maybe that’s why so many women, as well as men, were laughing.