May 31, 2010: one out of 104.

We have survived one week at our site! This may be unimpressive to you, but to us it is a bit miraculous. I don’t think either of us expected such a difficult entry. After all, a lot of what we are facing here is familiar: we live with a mid-thirties couple of professionals; we have a nice room and regular hot meals and nice showers. There is TV in the house and we make our own breakfasts, which do not involve exotic new foods. There is a school and a highway and tourists. We know all these things, and should have some semblance of normalcy, right?

Yet here we are, wondering the following existential questions:

• just what the heck we are doing here?
• how in the world did our 3 months of training in any way prepare us for this?
• how can speaking Spanish (especially when we already spoke Spanish before) be so tiring?
• how do we deal with people who are shy and don’t want to talk to us without being insulted and then immediately depressed?
• how to re-focus a conversation with your first interviewee who has decided to tell you nothing but the local (bad) gossip about the family you are living with?
• how to feel good about 2 hours of work when you are used to an 8 - 10 hour work day (sure, things start slow, but...)?
• how to know more than 3 people in the village that you can greet by name?
• how to recall more of those deep-breathing-for-stress exercises you laughed at last year and now might scratch someone’s eyes out to remember how to do properly?
• how to enjoy being in your room, but not too much because you don’t want to be one of those shy or lazy volunteers but you also want to prove you can be alone but not too much or people (like your host family) will talk about solitary, individualistic Americans?
• how to get people to stop giving you that funny "you are a foreigner!?" look when you say "good morning" - in a culturally correct way - in the street?
• how to respond when someone says, "what projects do you want to do?" in a way other than "do you think i have any clue at this stage, jesus christ, I’ve only been here 4 days! i can barely find the corner store!" ?
• how to stop worrying about sweating? I mean constant sweating, the kind that makes it hard to be presentable at the local community meeting, the kind that requires the constant lady-like swipe of the handkerchief or unlady-like swipe of the shirt sleeve at the risk of being otherwise blinded by sweat in your eye?
• how to make things start to happen in a positive way?
• how to give yourself a break and realize this is only temporary?
• how to survive 103 more weeks?

May 20, 2010: the end of training.

Yesterday were our final interviews before swearing-in, where we touch base with the Country Director, our Program Director, and everyone else in the office: before we officially pledge to stay here for 24 months in front of the U.S. Ambassador, shortly after we unintentionally slaughter the Costa Rican national anthem.

We also lost another volunteer yesterday, which makes four.

The first people to leave were a married couple in their 70s, and their departure was outside of their control. It’s hard to get used to a new environment and new foods and a diet consisting almost entirely of rice and grease, and the effects of that change get amplified by age. It was hard to see them go, but it happened relatively early in training, and the problem had been growing and growling in the background for weeks when they left, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected. When they left, I became the oldest person in Tico 20, a role I fit into without a problem, given my incessant use of the word “rad” and receding hairline, both of which are strong indicators of being older than Jesus.

The third left shortly after our very first interview with our program manager (which, in my hazy recollection, was around the third or fourth week). She had left a job she loved very much in the States, a career path she had groomed and blossomed in, and simply realized she wasn’t in the right place. I respect her decision: she sounds amazingly happy to be back in the U.S., and, while you usually hear this said in a condescending manner, the Peace Corps isn’t for everyone. What I mean when I say that is that this volunteer’s departure was definitely the Peace Corps’ loss: she is smart, professional, and talented, and will make a tremendous difference no matter where she is. She made the decision that she would make more of a difference back home.

The thing is that all of us could probably make a bigger difference back home, if one looks at things with any measure of objectivity. We’re working in a foreign culture, in a second language, in low-resource environments and isolated from friends and family: not exactly a recipe for workplace efficiency. This is more of a new-frontier-testing-the-mettle-of-our-youth kind of experience, a development-cum-cultural-exchange-program-cum-two-year-ropes-course. We will all do good work: I have no doubts that my compañeros in this group – an amazing, inspiring, and dedicated group of people – will change the lives of hundreds of Costa Ricans over the next two years. All I’m saying is that our ability to do that work is strongly amplified when we don’t have to spend 60% of your time attempting to interpret cultural clues we’re utterly unfamiliar with.

Anyway. You may be able to tell I’ve been thinking a lot about this. And maybe have a little self-doubt.

The volunteer who left today felt different. I felt jerked around, disappointed. That’s not fair to the volunteer who left, I suppose. He had his reasons – doubts which he had expressed from the first day I met him, the first day we were in Costa Rica – and I’m in no position to judge whether he made a good decision or not. It was just different. Going through training with someone for 11 weeks and then watching them leave a day before we become actual volunteers was hard in a way I hadn’t expected it to be.

It certainly made me think about my commitment. Tomorrow I take an solemn, official oath, right hand in the air and tie tight around the neck, that I’m going to stay here in Costa Rica for two years; that I will dedicate my next two years to living in a tiny community of 700 people and doing my best to befriend all of them; that I will sweat incessantly for the next two years; that I will eventually, at some point in the next two years, probably wear sandals long enough to finally feel comfortable in them; that this is real and I will actually be a resident of Costa freaking Rica for 24 months. I will know the tiny side streets and the holes to look out for and which pulpería has the cheapest ice cream. I will get to know local politics in a way I never did back in Denver. I will make friends and we will only talk in Spanish. I will learn what makes Costa Rican high school students laugh, besides my terrible accent. I will get terribly tanned and live on a beach. I will be broke all the time. I will learn to swim in the ocean.

I will feel like I’m home when I lay down at night.

I’m ready.

I think.

May 16, 2010: Posh Corps

As most of you know, when we first signed up for the Peace Corps, we were supposed to go to Africa. We spent months reading African history books, practicing sweating all the time while secretly hoping for a mountain placement in Lesotho, and mentally preparing ourselves to have parasites and intestinal bugs all the time. Then the infamous medical clearance process hiccuped, our departure date was bumped, and we were told we'd have to wait almost another full year before we left. We asked for other options. And now we're in Costa Rica.

The mental shift has been rough: when one has prepared to go to Malawi for a year, waking up to one's host brother playing Grand Theft Auto in the next room is a bit odd. Costa Rica is commonly referred to as "Posh Corps" or "Beach Corps" by other Peace Corps volunteers, with the insinuation (or outright assertion) that we have it so much easier than everyone else. In terms of standard of living, this is absolutely true: I wake up every morning in an actual bed, in a house with running water and flush toliets and a coffee maker and a phone and (sometimes) internet. I even had hot showers for a couple weeks, until it broke and I discovered that the little electric warmer things they stick on the spigot can shock you while showering.

The way I justify our presence here, or at least make myself feel better, is by arguing that the flip side of Costa Rica's high level of development is that expectations are that much higher. People are higher up Maslow's hierarchy of needs: I can't impress a community by building an outhouse or handing out malaria medications. I have to do the same level of work I did in the States - working through government bureaucracies, finding funding sources, organizing and exciting people who have full-time jobs to do one more thing for the good of their community, but without resources and in another language. Try convincing a room of professionals you're competent enough to lead a workshop on volunteerism without having full mastery of the past tense - it's certainly not living in a hut in sub-Saharan Africa, but it's really, really hard.

Lena's job, for instance, is absolutely insane. She's inheriting a site from another volunteer in a town 3.5 km from where we'll be living. It's a town of about 400 people, wrapped up at the foot of a mountain by the new southern coast highway, where people make their living either by working in the insane tourist resorts of Manual Antonio, raising cattle, or working in the gigantic plantations of African Palm that cover mile after mile of the landscape. It's all of two dirt, hole-addled streets, a bar, and a pulperia (think convenience store/grocery store/Super Walmart in a closet), plopped on a flood plain next to a river. Five years ago, the town was devastated by a huge flood - you can still see the marks 6 feet up on trees. The National Emergency Commission of Costa Rica declared that the entire pueblo had to be moved to avoid future danger. In sum: Lena's job is to help move an entire town of 400 people. Well, that's one of her jobs. She has a whole list.

My community, on the other hand, is a community of about 700, butted up on a beautiful, unspoiled, and quiet beach. There's a sizable community of foreigners who have bought up businesses and land, and, along with the opening of the new highway, a new stream of tourists. In turn, the tourists have brought things like crack cocaine and the commercial sex trade. I met a 20-year-old crack addict who has been stabbed 5 times. On the other hand, I also got to walk a 25-km stretch of beach entirely by myself and watch fireflies weaving over a soccer field. They have a high school with a cattle program where kids learn how to make cheese and yogurt, a private forest reserve with a troop of monkeys, and the school has just started an experimental emu breeding program.

My job is to do something with the kids. I currently have no idea what I'm doing here, but I'm sure it will all become clear eventually.

We move to our site this Sunday, after swearing-in to become official Peace Corps volunteers on Friday.

April 4, 2010: Feliz Pascua, yo.

Hey. Not much time to compose this, as my battery is about dead, but we wanted to say "Happy Easter" and share some pictures from this past weekend - Holy Week is much bigger here than in the States - everything shuts down, they tape seals across the doors of bars and liquor stores, and you cook massive quantities of food for everyone in your town. I was lucky enough to spend the week with Lena's family in Rio Conejo, where we cooked chiverre (think watermelon/pumpkin hybrid), made the most massive tamal ever, walked in a procession, saw a re-enactment of Jesus' trial and crucifixion, and generally had a hoot. No chocolate or fake plastic grass or real family time (though we had plenty of host family time), but it was pretty all right.

March 25, 2010: It's really hot near Panama.

NATE: This weekend was our volunteer visit – we were sent to the site of a current volunteer to learn what life as a Peace Corps volunteer is really like. We were lucky enough to go to Talamanca, where we visited two married volunteers, Nicole and Jonas, working on an indigenous reservation of the Bribri people.


The trip out was an exercise in trasero (Spanish for “butt” – check out my new vocab!) durability. Lena’s first leg was from her village, Rio Conejo, to my town, San Antonio. Then we went from my host family’s house to San Jose (about half an hour). The second leg took us from San Jose to Bribri, a 5 hour journey which took us through the Brauilo Carrillo forest, lush and emerald and almost impossible to enjoy through the drunken lurching of the bus, then Limon, and then down the Carribean coast. We met Nicole, one of the volunteers, at Bribri, and took another bus for another 45 minutes, up and down rock-addled roads, splashing through what, in the U.S. west, would probably be called rivers, but are just rivulets here, and gaping at the massive, sprawling river which separated us from Panama. We got off in a tiny town and got on a boat – essentially a very long canoe with a motor attached – to cross the river, and then got on another bus to get to our host site. Our host volunteers described it best: picture the river from Apocalypse Now. It’s like that, but hotter. We were in the jungle: palm fronds, ferns, vines choking everything, plants leaping over plants in an impenetrable tangled surge of life.

The Bribri traditionally live in houses made of wood, with no windows, sitting 4 or 5 feet above the ground on stilts, and covered with a roof of woven palm leaves, cured with smoke. The government of Costa Rica has built several families “beneficios” – free government houses – which are concrete cubes with zinc roofs that are extremely hot, collapse when there is an earthquake, deafen everyone inside when it rains (which it does quite frequently in Talamanca), and grow mold when it floods every year. I liked the indigenous houses better.

LENA: It was really interesting to get to see an indigenous culture (very separate from mainstream Costa Rican culture) from the inside. We had only a short time, but we got to see how families interact with each other, women and men walking together to the banana fields with machetes in hand, children wading through chest-deep rivers to get to the next village, and hear snippets of Bribri interspersed with Spanish. The Bribri live on a sort of reservation, and it seems that they face challenges similar to those of Native Americans in The US. There is a high unemployment rate and many people live off the land, leaving little by way of communal resources to develop their communities. There is a big problem of dependency on handouts from well-meaning national and foreign organizations with little stake in long-term solutions. The Bribri also struggle with the fact that they aren’t unified in agreement about what development should look like, how much to integrate into the outside world and what things like eco- and cultural-tourism would like like for their communities. In fact, one of Nicole’s and Jonas’ host brothers talked to us a lot about this, and asked us many questions about Natvie American tribes in the US and the challenges they face (whew! Thanks to Dave Hays for many years of Western history conversations: we just barely made it through their detailed questions. How do you say “vast historical injustices” and “disappearing cultures” in Spanish!?).



We learned a lot from Nicole and Jonas: we watched them run a meeting for a new microcredit cooperative they are helping to start and observed (and served as the exotic attraction at) an English class. We ate with them at their host family’s big elevated house every night (mmm, stewed plantains) and learned about living with ants marching across the living room; black mold eating all natural fibers; having a, yes, flush toilet that, oh no, does not flush when the rains raise the ground water level (this happens weekly); shopping without a fridge; and hand washing your clothes. They also took us to Puerto Viejo, 2 hours away, a low-key surfer town, where we ate nachos (NOT rice and beans), and Lena had her first beer in 3 weeks and it was the greatest beer ever! We also saw an eel and tiny tropical sea urchins. YAY!

NATE: Last week was a bit rough, as I had to switch host families, but it's turned out for the best. Thanks to everybody who wrote - it really means a lot to us.

Love, Lena & Nate

PS: Talking to other volunteers, we've learned that the best thing you can do to ensure any packages you send to Costa Rica actually arrive at their destination is to lie about the contents. "Books" and "religious items" always get to their destination. Just so you know.

hey, everybody

we've had a lot of questions about our mailing address. It is:

Lena Potyondy, PCT (or Nate Stone, PCT)
Cuerpo de Paz
Apartado Postal 1266-1000
San Jose, Costa Rica

we've been informed that the best thing to use, if you're not just sending a letter, is those pre-printed US Postal Service boxes - the ones that are about the size you used to get at Macy's when you had a shirt wrapped for a present, or like grandma used to send you pajamas in for Christmas. Anything bigger usually gets opened, searched, and then taxed - if we get to see any of it at all. Tax usually amounts to about 10-300% (yes, 300%) of the value of the objects inside.

We've also been asked if we need anything. DVDs are awesome, and I really would like some socks that aren't so darn hot. Besides that, we'll probably need some books in a month or so - we actually don't have very much time (or energy) to spend reading. The best thing would be just to hear from you.

March 8, 2010

Hey everyone.

We've completed our training week. It was an amazing experience, which Lena and I wrote up in beautiful and poetic terms on our computer which has no access to the internet. I will email it to you sometime. Suffice it to say, what we came away with the most is the sense that we've signed onto the Peace Corps with the most amazing group of people you could gather in one room. We have ex-marines, a 70-something-year-old couple, business men and counselors and social workers and all of them have tremendous stories behind what brought them here.

Also, we had an earthquake. A tremblor, really (it was only 4.2), but it was my first earthquake. Nothing happened. I though someone was running across the roof - we had just finished a safety session, where there had been some skits of robberies and hold-ups, and for some reason I was momentarily convinced someone was running across our roof in order to jump down into our apartment and rob us. This was not, in fact, the case.

On Saturday, we were place with our host families, who will house us for the next 11 weeks. Lena is way out in the country in a place called Rio Conejo. She already knows everyone in the town, found a newt in her room (which she wanted to keep and her host mom wanted to kill), and became the center of an impromptu parade through town when everyone came out of their houses to see the new gringos.

I'm in a pueblito called Rio Azul - though, technically, I'm in Quebadras, which is just the part where Rio Azul ends. It's a tiny suburb of San Jose, where the dump used to be (and is now a hill behind the soccer stadium), packed with concrete-block houses stacked on tin-plate houses stacked on houses made of whatever anyone could find. It's very poor, but it's also very safe. During the daytime, at least, which is the only time my host mom, Jenny, will let me out of the house. My Mama Tica has three sons, Marvin (14), Jeicol (13), and Tayron (7), all of whom are really fun to hang out with and amazingly laid back about having a gringo come and live in their house. I came into the house expecting a humble house, with a single flickering lightbulb and concrete floors or something, but I was instead greeted by Jeicol asking me to play Grand Theft Auto (a horribly violent video game) with him and mom watching "Kicking & Screaming" (translated into Spanish) on DVD. Last night, I taught the kids how to play chess, partly in order to avoid more questions about if San Andreas, CA, is actually like what the video game makes it look like. I have my own room, a very, very cold shower, and the ability to lock my own door, which is nice. I feel like my Spanish is already improving, though I've been getting headaches every night from the effort. Jenny cooks me "comida tipica", which is usually rice and beans and some mysterious fried thing. There is a lot of grease in everything, and everyone is shocked that I'm only drinking water instead of Coke.

Post 1: May 2, 2010

NATE: The first week has been a tremendous, tumultuous, confusing, and exciting time. Honestly, I came in expecting to be mostly terrified with a small side of nervousness and a lot of awkward pauses. Instead, what I found was an amazing group of people of all ages (we range from 21 to 76), all interests, all backgrounds, and all of whom have interesting life stories. Despite my earnest attempts to remain ironically detached, I’m thoroughly excited about the next two years and the opportunity to work with such inspiring people.

LENA: We have been staying for several days at a retreat center in the central highlands (think YMCA camp), where there are parrots that greet us in great loud bunches every morning at 5am and palm and evergreen trees and soft wet earth. It is cool and misty. One gets the feeling that if the staff forgot the clean the rooms ever day the mossy green earth would take over in a matter of weeks.

NATE: We’ve been working 8 AM to 7 PM, mostly in workshops which introduce us to our projects and to each other. Today was our first venture outside the gates of the retreat center – a trip into Cartago, where we had to find lunch for less than 3000 colones (about $6 – a not-so-difficult task). I had rice and beans – because every meal in Costa Rica has to have rice and beans – with chicken, onion, some curried squash thing, and fried plantain, topped off with, of all things, baklava) and find a local landmark by asking locals for directions. We discovered that asking directions can be a risky proposition: the urge of Costa Ricans to be helpful often outweighs the urge to be correct. You will frequently be given directions that are utterly and completely wrong, but delivered in the most friendly manner possible – all because Tico culture insists that you help someone who needs help, even if you have no idea how to actually help them.

LENA: We’re slowly getting a better idea of what our projects and site placement will look like—I am realizing that, much like people who think they know Mexico because they’ve been to Cancun, I actually know surprisingly little about Costa Rica from living here previously as a middle-class student. Costa Rica, like any other developing county, has places and problems unseen by tourists. One recent volunteer was placed in a village of 170 people that took 3 hours of travel by water and one by horse to get there. She recently got ringworm and a parasite on a return visit. You may laugh when I write this but: her story made me feel much better, as I think many of us in the Peace Corps group had been asked before going or had wondered ourselves whether PC was needed here. Now I see that the challenge of rural development is alive and well in Costa Rica.

NATE: Tomorrow, we meet our host families for the first time and move in to our homes for the next 11 weeks. Lena and I will be living separately: she’ll be in Rio Conejo, which is 26 km from San Jose, while I’ll be in Rio Azul, which is 7.9 km from San Jose. We’ll get to see each other on Thursdays, when we have joint trainings with everyone in our group, and our host families have agreed to host us as a couple on weekends. I’ve never been in a situation like living with a total stranger and their family before – I’m nervous that, as bad as my English small talk is, it will be even worse in Spanish. Luckily, I’ll have homework to do which provides me with a more structured way to interact with my host family until we’re both comfortable with each other. I surprised myself by testing higher than I expected on the language tests, but I’m looking forward to improving my speaking over the next couple weeks.

We just had a minor tremor, which we will take a sign to end this.