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.