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?