December 7, 2010: Cuerpo de un Par de Talleres

The Costa Rican school year is about to end – here classes and grades run from January to December. Last week, Nate and I were invited to give a series of workshops to elementary school students in Portalón. We ran three workshops over the course of three days – making books with the 1^st and 2^nd graders, do art about themselves and their communities with the 3^rd and 4^th graders, and discussing the importance of going to high school with 5^th and 6^th graders. 

The work with the 1^st through 4^th graders was great. They were energetic, had trouble listening and waiting their turn, talked out a lot in class, asked for help constantly, and… they were tons of fun. As an old cynic, I am constantly amazed at how open young children can be when you make things interesting, are willing to act a little goofy, and give them some positive attention.

The workshop for fifth and sixth grade was a bit more challenging. We used an existing curriculum from Junior Achievement about the economic incentives for staying in school and modified it to our audience and time constraints (one big challenge: the older kids are distracted because  vacation is just a few days away and see that we have little authority over them as we are not their regular teachers).  We talked about success in life, dreams for the future, how much money high school graduates versus drop-outs make, how to build a budget and live within your means. The kids had to write a letter to themselves in 10 years, expressing their goals for future jobs and the work they could start now to achieve their dreams.  All this to a large group of boisterous pre-teens, some of whom had already been held back a year, most of whom have parents who did not go to high school or dropped out of high school. A workshop all the more needed for being held in a small rural town in which unemployment runs high and parents sense that new skills and education levels are needed for their children to succeed in a vastly altered economy, but, maybe because they themselves aren’t sure about the future, don’t talk to their kids much about specific plans. And these kids are heading to 7^th grade, the grade with the highest drop-out rate (just like in the States).

At one point we asked the 5^th and 6^th graders to define “success,” and they ended up giving a far more holistic definition than I had expected. Having done similar work with middle and high school students in the States, I had anticipated receiving the “success = Lil’ Wayne” answer, the big car, big house, wearing-gold-chains-while-being-massaged-in-a-hot-tub-by-bikini-clad-women music video stereotype. These kids talked more about being happy, about having a healthy family, about having the freedom to do what you would like to do, about doing something you like to do. Money didn’t even come up until a good ten minutes into the conversation – and the conversation was 12 minutes long, because that’s pretty much the outer limits of group discussions with 12 year olds a week before vacation. Some of these kids, it would seem, have more realistic and healthy expectations for the future than people I know in their 30s and 40s. Are the kids just telling us what we want to hear because they’ve already done this workshop and everyone was too polite to tell us so, or are we bumping into a different cultural definition of success? 

It was fascinating to see what kids knew and did not know. Fifth and sixth graders don’t know how much rent costs, or how to budget for food each month. They don’t know how much money you can make as a waiter or teacher or farm worker. They don’t know that to get a master’s degree you need at least five years of university.  And many of them struggle with basic math and writing, creating a dilemma for Nate and me as teachers. How much do you encourage children to dream big and how much to realize the need to be realistic given the fact that an already sub-par education has put them at a huge disadvantage in life? I hate the feeling (whether it happens to you in Denver, Colorado or Aguirre, Costa Rica) of looking at a kid and thinking to yourself, “Let’s be realistic, you aren’t going to be a lawyer or astrophysicist. Let’s just get you through high school.” It feels like a betrayal. But those two opposing ideas are always there. You want to tell your student, “You are still young. All doors are open. You can be anything!” yet you also want to just help them hold on for dear life, keeping them away from the worst catastrophes you know are out there: drugs, early pregnancy, illiteracy, abusive households.  That tension is there, in the back of your mind, during the entire session, pushing and pulling between dreams and realities. This is, I suppose, a central dilemma of all teachers, and all development workers.  And it doesn’t go away.

For the most part, I want kids to have ridiculous ambitions. They should aim to be astronaut veterinarian rock stars, because outsized dreams often lead us to achieve things we never expected we could – or that others told us we could never do. I know it’s my own cultural bias, but I find it depressing when all the girls in the room say that having a family is the most important marker of success to them, because – especially from 6^th to 10^th grade – the girls are always the smartest people in the room. The kid who wants to be a truck driver is being realistic, and the economic jump he’s contemplating – his father’s an agricultural day laborer, doing intermittent, subsistence-wage work – is probably larger and more ambitious than anything I could ever contemplate. Why do I want him to tell me he wants to be a forensic pathologist? Am I setting kids up for failure or pushing them to aim higher?

And where to you tell kids to aim in a developing society that you yourself are new to? These kids watch YouTube videos on their 3G phones in class. But their parents have been peons their whole lives. Costa Rica produces both microchips and bananas in great numbers. Which world do you point students toward?

November 25, 2010: Lena´s No-oven Ayote Pie

Lena and her ayote.

Nate and I really enjoy cooking Costa Rican recipes. We eat black beans daily and are becoming moderately skilled and tortilla-making. We turn down expensive imported apples and save cheeses that aren´t queso fresco for special treats. We buy olores (onion, garlic, two kinds of cilantro and celery leaves) to flavor our beans, rice, and soups and eat local fruits and veg: notably plentiful and inexpensive are a little summer squash called chayote and pineapples. We are hoping to one day make some yucca (tasy root vegetable and good potatoe substitute) that holds together without becoming so gummy that it is only suitable for paper-mache.

But Thanksgiving is different. Thanksgiving is largely a time for traditional family recipes and it is hard to resign oneself to yucca and beans on such an occasionl. So I have been determined to make this holiday season a time to cook food that would at least be reminiscent of the American ones we know our families will be sitting down to enjoy, while at the same time adding some fun Costa Rican twists.

The challenges to this plan include:

• No oven
• Broken gas stove, only electric skillet and crock pot to work with
• Many traditional American spices, like sage and thyme, are not used here
• Noticeable lack of pumpkins

But I saw this as a chance to get creative. While everyone looked at me blankly when I asked about pumpkins, I realized that squashes are native to the New World and that Costa Ricans traditionally make a sweet squash dish (called chivere) during Easter. I asked around and discovered that my best bet was a big green ayote, which luckily is in season throughout the year here. A very generous family that works at the pulperia (general store) donated an ayote to the effort.

My Steps:

1. Boil/steam ayote pieces in the crock pot. Hope no Costa Ricans peep in and notice that there is no rice being made today, a this may be against the law.

2. Save ayote seeds and dry toast them. Will make delicious pumpkin seen sauce in future.

3. Put cooked ayote in blender to make paste.

4. Mix in condense milk, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg salt. No allspice (called ¨jamaican pepper¨) to be found.

5. Use theory that you are making a sort of flan/pudding type of pie (while ignoring fact that you have never actually made a flan/pudding type of anything that did not come out of a box), and hope you can reduce your saucy mixture in the crock pot. It works!

6. Pour saucy ayote onto crust made of crushed coconut cookies (Called ¨Cocanas¨-- not to be confused with the illegal Columbian ¨cocainas¨) and melted margarine (thanks to Sarah Stone for the idea!).

7. Let cool in fridge. Lena´s Super Special No-oven Ayote Pie is ready for Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our family and friends. This year we give thanks for all of you and the support and love you have sent our way.

November 22, 2010: Going Home

As some – or most, I imagine – of you already know, Lena’s father had a heart attack about two weeks ago. He’s fine – I’d be tempted to qualify him as doing great, especially for someone who had a quadruple bypass – and improving daily. As we didn’t qualify for family emergency leave, we were only able to stay a couple of weeks, but it was enough to see John move from a pale, quiet man at the hospital back closer to his red-cheeked, dry-humored self. We are extremely thankful for his recovery, his presence, and the continued support of friends and family for both him and ourselves.


We almost didn’t make it out of the country. The day we left our site (November 2nd) was the beginning of a storm that paralyzed most of Costa Rica for the next week. We took the earliest possible bus from our town, carrying our luggage to the bus through the water that had already started to pool outside our house. Over the course of our 5 hours on the bus, the rain grew steadily worse, falling in thick sheets that hid mountains and trees, and we twice plowed through water that had jumped the banks of rivers and was churning in brown curls across the highway. The running dialogue between the driver and passengers (“Can we make it?” “We can totally make it.” “How high off the ground is the engine?”) didn’t do much to soothe the nerves. We must have been on one of the last buses to make it out of the Central Pacific region – within 24 hours, nearly all the highways in the country were closed due to flooding or landslides. Since coming back to our site, we’ve learned that water was waist high in the parts of town near the beach, and several families were evacuated from their houses and had to live out of the elementary school for two weeks. Amazingly, our house, 20 meters from the creek that runs through the middle of Matapalo, the same one that jumped its banks and knocked aside trees and left the high school’s cows standing in the middle of a gigantic, muddy lake, saw no flooding. The worst we had to deal with was a skillet we left uncleaned in the rush to leave the country. It was really gross, but I will gladly take scrubbing mold over a flooded house.

We hadn’t planned on going back to the United States at all during our service. Part of this was a bit of romanticism: we thought the experience wouldn’t be as “authentic” if we interrupted it with a return to our state-side privilege and comfort. The other part was probably emulation: Lena’s parents served in the Peace Corps in Morocco in the 1970s. They not only didn’t go home during their service, they didn’t even call home – flights between Morocco and the U.S. were prohibitively expensive, and international calls involved going to the post office and waiting in line for hours. We, on the other hand, live in a country which is an international tourist destination, meaning flights here from Denver are often cheaper than flying to Ohio, and we have a cell phone. All of which, I suppose, reinforces Peace Corps Rule Number Three: “Never compare your Peace Corps service to that of anyone else, including those in your own country.” For those who don’t know, Peace Corps Rule Number One and Two are, respectively, “You will never be able to kill all the bugs, so stop trying” and “Try to think of skin diseases as interesting rather than disgusting.”

The really odd part the whole experience was we didn’t have much chance to notice we were home. The reason we were there curtailed any sort of reflection; we were too busy worrying or cleaning or running errands to mull over the lessons learned in our eight months in Costa Rica or analyze our personal growth and change. (That had to wait until we were back in country and woken up by a backhoe in our front yard at 5:30 in the morning, just an hour after we had chased off some long-clawed animal crawling in the ceiling above our bed, thus giving us the necessary impetus, if not the rest, to wake up and type this.) It was remarkably easy to slip back into life in Colorado, with only a couple of exceptions:

1) I felt simultaneously guilty and elated every time I flushed toilet paper down the toilet (Costa Rica functions largely on a septic tank system, meaning you can’t wash your toilet paper down the bowl, and instead throw it out like other trash).

2) I had to suppress the urge to say “hello” to every person I came across on the street or in stores, as it appeared to make most people uncomfortable.

3) Lena reports feeling odd not kissing everyone she knows when greeting them. Costa Ricans greet people with a kiss on the side of the cheek – not actually on the cheek, but an “air kiss,” shot broadside of the face. Being a person who sometimes feels awkward hugging people I know and love, I didn’t feel the same.

4) There is a marked lack of ants swarming over everything you own in Colorado.

Deeper reflections have had to wait for our return. It has been, if we’re to be honest, a difficult couple of months for us, with frustrations over our work (or lack of it), doubts about our plans and priorities, and watching fellow volunteers leave to pursue other opportunities. The chance to step back a bit, to receive advice or a pep talk from friends and family, was valuable. We come back, we make new plans, see familiar things again and forget all our Spanish. Our goals change, they contract or expand. Some things you think you’ve learned you have to repeat again. You repeat vague platitudes to cover up the fact you have no idea what you’re doing. And you take pride in the small successes you achieve. Sometimes they are very small: today I figured out, after three months, how to pay the garbage man. Welcome back to Costa Rica.

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.

August 6, 2010: El Empache & Cold Water (by Lena)

Anyone who has ever been told by a mother or grandmother that they must lie still while vapo-rub is swabbed over their chest or that the ancient recipe of tea with brandy, lemon and honey will cure their cough, must be aware that we all have certain beliefs about health and sickness that have not been, to put it mildly, subjected to evidence-based medicine. Costa Ricans are no exception. I learned this first from a handout given to me in Spanish class that explained words like quebranto (“a mysterious elevation of the body’s temperature that is not enough to cause a fever but serious enough to warrant missing work”) and empacho (“indigestion brought about by ‘heavy food’ especially of the sort that comes in a can, rather than being homemade, and including such diverse comestibles as tuna, fruit, and pigs’ feet”). Now, as a nurse with a certain anthropological interest and an at times self-satisfied sense of open-mindedness, I thought, “How interesting! How different!” and maybe even, I must admit, “How cute!”

Seeing the handout come to life did not take long. During training, my host family provided first-hand experience. Thus, Doña V, a motherly and gregarious woman in her 60’s, was convinced that I had contracted a cold with sore throat due to the fact that I had been drinking too much cold water. With every intention of being helpful, cold water was denied to me for the next two months. This same venerable señora was also convinced that if she did not wear a hat outside on nights when temperatures dipped to, say 68 degrees Fahrenheit, she would catch the serena, which my handout helpfully identified as “a mysterious substance that comes down at night as a cold breeze and affects children and the elderly who do not use well-wrapped scarves.” I was also encouraged to wear either a scarf or sweater to avoid this night air, although, luckily, as a 33-year-old, my life was not considered to be at risk. Later, when made miserable for a day or two by an inevitable but light bout of travel’s diarrhea, I was told it could not possibly be food poisoning, but rather must be the “heavy food” I had to eat on the days I went to class and missed a regular home-cooked meal.

My initial reaction to all these events was to take the position of an amused foreigner willing to dialogue about cultural differences. The Peace Corps would have been proud. In fact, I imagine there is another handout somewhere about this, with such helpful advice as: “Use the new perspective presented to you as an opportunity to learn. Do not make rash, judgmental remarks. Ask questions about your new friend’s viewpoint with curiosity, but also with respect. Perhaps this is a chance for you to share your culture, too, as you open up a new way of thinking and begin a cultural dialogue, etc. etc.” But, as the months passed, I found myself in the lot of all long-term travelers, getting less patient with this idea and less interested in the attractions of a cultural dialogue I’d already had countless times. One can only be warned away from the open fridge after exercising so many times before something snaps.

It is thus with embarrassment that I relate the following:

I was not feeling particularly patient, and I did not have a Peace Corps handout available when I ran into D the other day on the road to the school. It was about a million degrees out and I had just arrived by bike and I looked like a hot, sweaty gringa. In contrast, D, as most women here are mysteriously able to manage, looked as fresh and clean as a flower. She gave me a sympathetic nod, which nonetheless said, “You look terrible.” Here is the subsequent dialogue about health that we ought to have had, as it could have appeared in the Peace Corps handout:

D: What a hot day. Did you bike from Matapalo?

Me: Yes, it’s so hot. But I just stopped by the river to stick my feet in, so I feel refreshed.

D (with concerned look): Oh, you shouldn’t do that, it’s very dangerous.

Me: What? Why?

D: Because if you are very hot and then you cool down too quickly with very cold water you will get sick.

Me: How interesting. I do not share this cultural belief. Please tell me more… Have you always believed this?

D: Oh yes, it is quite commonly known to be true.

Me: I am respectfully intrigued by this information… Perhaps someday we can have a coffee together and I will tell you about my grandmother Julianna’s cure for the common cold.

D: Lovely.

Unfortunately, no, no, this is not what happened. Instead, a shameful combination of a nursing education that had been lying dormant for seven months, a slow-onset ire at the Costa Rican need to tell me, against all common and empirical sense, that cold water can kill, and the irritation of being hot and sweaty led to the following:

D: What a hot day. Did you bike from Matapalo?

Me: Yes, it’s so hot. But I just stopped by the river to stick my feet in, so I feel refreshed.

D (with concerned look): Oh, you shouldn’t do that, it’s very dangerous.

Me: What? Why?

D: Because if you are very hot and then you cool down too quickly with very cold water you will get sick.

Me (annoyed): No. No, that is not true.

D: But everyone knows this.

M: No, I don’t believe you. That’s just not true. (Barely stifled derisive laughter) Listen, I went to nursing school, and they never taught us anything about this. I just don’t believe in what you’re saying. I’m telling you, it’s not true.

D: …

Me: And what’s more, where I’m from the water in rivers is really cold, not like this water here. You call this cold? (Unstifled derisive laughter) I’m talking about Colorado, where the river water is from melted snow. That is cold water. This water here, this 3 inches of water I stepped in for 10 seconds, that doesn’t count. It isn’t even cold and it certainly can’t get me sick. It just can’t be so.

D: (uncomfortably looking at feet)

Me: I’m telling you there is no evidence for this to be the case. No, no sir, nope, I don’t buy it. It just can’t be. I know about these things and I’m telling you this theory of yours is not true. Let me tell you about a little something called evidence-based medicine….

D (stunned, but polite): Well, ok … see you later.


Alright, so maybe I didn’t go on quite that long, but I’m pretty sure that D is now convinced I am either an egomaniac or touched in the head (tocado). But, really, why I couldn’t just forge a middle path and thank D for the information and politely return to discussing the weather, I will never know. Either way, I’m thinking of bringing D some cookies tomorrow and, by way of apologizing, asking her how her mother is doing after that bout of empacho she had last week.

July 30, 2010: Going to school.

I would like to say from the beginning: I am going to do my best to be objective throughout this post, or at least describe things with as little judgment as possible, but I’m sure I will fail miserably. This will occur for any number of reasons, including:

1. My philosophical skepticism about the notion of objectivity,
2. The cultural biases I’m bringing into my observations, and
3. My tendency to get a little overheated when discussing education, but mostly because
4. I am very, very bad at keeping my opinions to myself.

Also, A DISCLAIMER: this post has some words that some people may find uncomfortable, but I figured if a class of Tico fourth-graders and I could handle them, the rest of the world could too.

That said:

When one walks into a Costa Rican school – after being exposed solely to United States schools, and especially schools in states where it snows – one notices a key physical difference right away: there are no windows.

This is not to say the rooms are dark, lightless caves; on the contrary, they are usually well-lit and airy because they are very, very open. That is to say: there are huge openings in the walls, but they have no glass in them. They have bars, usually, but their main purpose seems to be keeping the children in the room, which is managed to greater or lesser success. For anyone who has attempted to keep the attention of a room of 6th graders for anything longer than a fart joke, imagine trying to run class essentially in the open air. Distractions are everywhere: a breeze runs through the room and riffles through all the paper; another class goes to lunch, with all the accompanying yelling and scrambling; another teacher comes up to the window and reaches through a note to drop on a desk; I’ve seen birds and butterflies fly through classrooms.

******************

I was observing a class which, to me, seemed like complete chaos: I had already seen several kids just get up and walk out the door, one student had attempted to stab the teacher with a paper clip, and there were a couple of guys just hanging out on the floor, drawing on the underside of their desks. The teacher was making a valiant effort – she had managed to not punch anyone, which is remarkable, given the circumstances, and was obviously trying out different classroom management techniques in the hopes that something would work.

She had just gotten everyone in their seats when another teacher walked up to the classroom window and began to yell inside. “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!” she said. Students, teacher, and I looked around, unclear who was being yelled at. “WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS GRINGO WILL THINK OF OUR SCHOOL WITH ALL OF YOUR YELLING AND NOISE?!”

I tried to shrug nonchalantly in a vague attempt to indicate a completely objective and non-committal point of view. Kids wriggled uncomfortably in their seats. “YOU’LL EMBARRASS US ALL!” she yelled through the window.

******************

The walls are concrete – sometimes painted, sometimes not – and the roof is made of corrugated zinc plates, which fill the rooms with a deafening roar when the rain starts, like standing under a waterfall emptying on a field of marching band drums. When the rain is hard enough, no one can yell loud enough to be heard over it, and everything stops. The chairs and desks are made of wood, and, judging from their archaeological fields of initials carved across each other and the dull polish they carry, which wood can only get by being rubbed with elbows, forearms, and the occasional forehead, they may have been in use since the school opened in the 50s. There are still actual chalkboards, their surfaces fogged with white, and about which I had forgotten how much fun they are to draw on.

Eventually, you will notice that there are no books. Costa Rica rightly celebrates its very high literacy rate – one which is higher than that of the States, in fact – but it has apparently managed to achieve this goal without books (which is a feat in its own right). Students essentially have to write their own books: each student has a series of notebooks, usually one for each subject. Each day, the teacher writes on the board or recites the lesson for the day, and the students dutifully copy it down, verbatim, in their notebooks. This kind of rote repetition is, from what we’ve seen, the main method of instruction, varied occasionally by presentations or collage exercises.

******************

I observed one class where the teacher was covering basic sexual anatomy. Opening her curriculum book, the correct page, she began to read: “VULVA!” she would yell, and the whole class would, almost in unison, say, “What?”

“VULVA!” she would reply, “V-U-L-V-A!”

Kids bent over their desks, writing the word hurriedly.

“THE FLESHY LIP-LIKE MEMBRANE WHICH SURROUNDS THE VAGINAL ENTRANCE!” the teacher would yell.

“Fleshies?” the kids would say, printing a chicken-scratch of words, “Membrain?”

“KEEP UP!” She would reply. “CLITORIS!”

This went on for 40 minutes, interrupted occasionally by the class wise-acre who kept demanding that the teacher explain what a vagina is, which she pointedly refused to do. “Where is it?” he would ask, in his best mock-innocent voice. “What do you use it for?”

I was then asked to draw a uterus on the chalk board, which is certainly not something I had come prepared for. I did receive, however, many compliments from the class on the quality of my uterus.

July 6, 2010: Eating and House Visits and Outright Lies.

For the past six weeks, the vast majority of our time has been spent doing house visits and eating. Actually, if you were to put them in the correct order, it would be:

1. Eating
2. House visit
3. Eating
4. Abortive house visit in which no one is home even though we made an appointment and thought we were quite explicit about when we would be at their house
5. Eating
6. Eating

In that spirit, we would like to share our reflections on two cultural differences we have noted here in Costa Rica.

Open Doors Policy:

If I was to show up at a complete stranger’s house in the United States – at least in the cities I’ve lived in – stopped at their gate, yelled “HEY!” and then asked if I could come inside and talk with them for a bit, I estimate I would get the following results:

• 50% would completely ignore me, either actively hiding or pretending not to hear anything by turning the TV up even louder.
• 25% would go their front door and wave me away with an exasperated air.
• 15% would come up to the gate, ask what I wanted, and then tell me to go away with an exasperated air.
• 9% would sic their gigantic, frenzied dog on me, film the results, and then post it on YouTube.
• 1% would invite me inside.

However, so far in Costa Rica I’ve had about a 90% success rate for invitations, and the majority of this 90% also serve you a fresco (juice or Kool-Aid, only with more sugar) once you are sitting on the couch. The other 10% only refuse because they’ve already got someone inside their house who showed up, yelled, and then demanded to be served fresco, and there’s only so much fresco to go around.

The equivalent of knocking on the door and yelling “HEY!” is standing in the street and yelling “UPE!” (say it “oo-pay!”), which, as far as we’ve been able to tell, is only used when you’re outside of someone’s house gate and want to invite yourself in. The story we’ve been told – a story which is almost certainly apocryphal, because it is too cute to be true – is that there was a time when every other woman in Costa Rica was named Guadalupe, which, we can all agree, is difficult to yell. This led to a convenient shortening of “Guadalupe” to just “upe” by those who stand outside of houses and yell for people – and, because at half of the houses you would be yelling for Guadalupe, “upe” eventually just became shorthand for “let me in and give me fresco.”

An important difference should be noted, however: in the States, you can walk up directly to people’s houses and knock on their door. This is impossible in Costa Rica, because either

1. The house is surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire, or
2. The house is surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire which barely holds in the raging dog beast-monster guarding the house, or
3. The gate is open, but Ticos are too polite to just walk into someone’s yard without asking permission, so you have to yell first.

Rice:

Every time our host family has to leave, they are sure to let us know the house’s Rice Status. As in, “I’m going to work. There’s rice made,” or “We’re going to run some errands. There’s rice, you just have to warm it up,” or “You haven’t eaten yet? But there’s no rice!” This family can go for weeks on end without bread, but rice is made daily. As lovers of toast, we find this challenging.

As we have learned, however, rice goes with everything and it goes in everything. Here are the uses of rice as we have come to know and sometimes love them:

• Rice and beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes you can leave out the beans.
• Oh, also dessert: Arroz con leche. One of the few truly great ways to eat rice. Rice cooked in milk to make a sweet pudding with cinnamon and vanilla flavorings. As Lena’s Irish grandfather was fond of saying, “Potatoes are for dinner. Rice is for dessert.”
• Think you already have some starches on your plate and don’t need more? Think again. You can never have too many carbohydrates. Rice goes nicely with foods like spaghetti, chop suey, potatoes, tortillas, soda crackers, bread, and yucca.
• Gallo pinto, the national dish of fried beans and rice, traditionally involves a rice-to-bean ratio of at least 3 to 1. The other famous national dish is arroz con pollo, rice stir-fried with small pieces of chicken and vegetable. It is so commonly eaten that Costa Ricans call it “arroz con siempre,” or “rice with always.”
• Did you know that the Mayans worshipped arroz and called it “the food that makes corn taste bad”? I hope not, because that’s a lie.
• Rice is cooked, liquefied in a blender and added to pineapple juice to make a sort of meal-in-a-glass, a rice smoothie if you will. The rice tends to fall to the bottom and you have to mix well before serving. Very filling.
• The rice that sticks to the bottom of the pan after cooking and gets crunchy and browned but not quite burnt has a name: cancho. You can snack on this like crackers.
• When asked, many Ticos will state that their favorite food is rice. Not gallo pinto, not arroz con pollo, but rice. Think if instead of claiming spaghetti as your favorite food, you just said, “I like noodles.” Or, if instead of saying you loved cake, you always claimed to love flour. Kinda weird.
• Here, rice goes inside tamales. Next to the potatoes and corn batter, so that you have all the members of the starch family together in one little package.
• There is an egg dish, a kind of torta (like an Italian frittata) made only of beaten eggs and cooked rice.
• Did you know that arroz is an ancient Chorotega word for “makes children grow strong”? Not true!
• When someone gets sick , they are served rice water (agua de arroz). Rice is boiled in water, then strained out and the water reserved and served as a rehydration fluid. You can also leave in the rice and liquefy everything into a sort of mush. Agua de arroz is served to ill children in the national Children’s Hospital. Thus, the healing power of rice is actually endorsed by Costa Rican doctors.
• Rice goes into soup. Or you serve it on the side. And then you put it in the soup.
• Almost every family, even if quite poor, owns a rice cooker, a separate crook pot kept out and plugged in on the counter that is only for cooking rice. Huge, huge quantities of rice. An exception is older traditional cooks, but they similarly keep one pot at the back of the wood stove that always has rice made in it. As these intrepid cooks and housewives have told me, you never know when someone will show up, and a good hostess always needs to be prepared. Prepared to serve rice.
• Did you know that for the Bribri, one of the indigenous peoples of Costa Rica, the word for arroz in their tongue means “he who makes life possible and fills our loins with the seeds of our sons”? I just made that up!
• People will ask you if you don’t eat the gigantic mound of rice served to you and which takes up half your plate, or – even worse – if you try to sneakily serve yourself no rice at all, whether you aren’t sure that you would like some rice? Are you sure? Really? No rice? Really? Just a little?

June 23, 2010: let the weirdness wash over you.

We’ve been here four weeks, and they haven’t exactly been the seamless transition of happy, eager volunteers walking into the welcoming arms of a community eagerly anticipating the presence of a new stranger to know and love that we had pictured. We’ve both had days where we can’t walk out the door. There’s too much unknown, too much unplanned, we miss too many people, too many expectations. We've also had days where we get giddy and excited and fidgety and make huge plans and eat too many cookies. Those are the good ones.

Part of this is us: we don’t make friends easily. We’re kind of grumpy, tend to be a bit opinionated, need a lot of alone time, and generally hate talking to strangers. To answer the question which undoubtedly just sprang to your mind: sometimes we’re not sure why we’re in the Peace Corps, either.

The other part is our community and our new life here. It’s weird, as we’re just beginning to understand. Its home to an intercontinental lucha libre champion who went by the name of the Costa Rican Gentleman. It’s small enough to be dominated by three families, who make up huge percentages of any given commission or committee. There’s so many people on bikes you get asked where your bike is when you walk to the corner store. There are extranjeros with tasers chasing crackheads. There are kids wearing school uniforms and playing soccer in 95 degree heat at a school with a principal who just came down with dengue. There’s a regional high school which has its own junkyard, cow pasture, experimental emu farm, and carefully recreated hotel kitchen (otherwise known as the laboratorio gastronómico). There’s an annual wave of young volunteer tourists who flood the beaches, saving turtle eggs by night and partying…well, also by night. Women wash their underwear by hand even if they own a washing machine, and you have to change your clothes a minimum of twice a day, simply because you stink of sweat by 1 PM. Here, we are constantly worried that we’re being perceived as lazy because we get up at 7 AM. It is four times muggier than Colorado and yet you will inevitably be served a steaming bowl of soup on the hottest day of the week. All public buildings are not, by any United States building code of which we are aware, actual buildings, being as they are completely open to the air and made of cinder blocks, chicken wire, and zinc plates. Last but not least, we live with a lovely, generous family, in a house surrounded by lemon and cas trees, climbing orchids, flowering bushes that waft perfume at sundown, and is home to a hideous, 3-foot-tall dog-beast that will eat us if we step out of the house after dark. It is named Cucho. Like Cujo. Like the dog in the horror movie that ate people who left their houses at night.

Also, Lena saw a dead crocodile on the side of the road yesterday.

What really throws you off is the fact that there’s just enough familiarity to make you drop your guard: I have a shower and a flush toilet, you think, sometimes I can check the internet and kids are trying to dress like Lil’ Wayne, you think, there is a TV in the living room and there is a movie starring Will Smith on it every Sunday, and, even though he’s speaking in Spanish, it seems just familiar enough that when you are walking down the street and there’s a skeletal, sweating, shirtless crack addict in a tree, 40 feet in the air above you waving a machete and wildly chopping off huge, heavy tree limbs which are dropping onto the squatter’s tin-roofed shack below him, it hits you a little bit harder.

Or maybe that was a bad example.

The other day, I was visiting with a family. We had previously made an appointment, which I missed because I was in Quepos and there are only three buses back to our town a day and I missed one, so we had rescheduled after a great deal of apologizing and self-mocking in reference to my inability to read a bus schedule. However, when I showed up at their house, they acted a bit surprised, as if we either hadn’t made an appointment or they had just expected me to flake out. (Mostly) unfazed, I attempted to put on my brave and happy face and asked if it was okay if we still did the interview. They informed me that they had to go catch a cow. It had made a run for it, but a neighbor had trapped it in his pasture across town.

Never having been blown off for a cow before, I was unsure how to negotiate this situation. Maybe they saw the lost, desperate look on my face and felt sorry for me, because Marielos immediately proposed that her husband could stay and talk with me while she went and got the cow. Fernando’s counter-proposal was that she stay and he gets the cow, but she insisted she had already talked to me at church. Eventually it was decided the cow could wait and they both could stay, it being only 3 in the afternoon.

We finished our interview, which was pleasant enough, and I walked to the school, where there was a meeting of the Patronato Escolar (think PTA). I was tired and made an amazingly embarrassing speech to the Patronato, which, in translation, sounded something like:

“Hello, good day. Name is Nate and happy I am to be here. Maybe you too? I am volunteer and sometimes will be here. We will do thing! Together!”

Needless to say, they were somewhat underwhelmed.

I managed to save some face by walking back and chatting with one of the members, Ana, and was in the middle of particularly badly-conjugated semi-witticism when she yelled, “watch out!” I looked up, and, 10 yards in front of me, was a gigantic bull – our shoulders about the same height – turning the corner, running at full speed with frantic eyes and a twitching haunch. At the same moment, a motorcycle came from the opposite corner, turning the same direction. The driver attempted to avert the collision by shooting his feet out, dancing in the gravel and sliding his bike sideways, but they were both going too fast.

And that is how I saw a motorcycle run into a cow. And it was awesome.

I guess this Peace Corps thing can be okay, sometimes.