Peanut butter is oh so good

I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich today….and it was absolutely delicious. I have been in Costa Rica for almost a month now and in many ways it feels like I’ve been in Portrero for much longer. I don’t pay much attention to the  chickens and cows walking around or the dozens of dogs following us everywhere. I am continuously dirty and sweaty except for about the half hour after a cold shower. I don’t even really miss hot showers, but I do miss peanut butter, which is why couldn’t resist buying a (very expensive) jar when I was in the big supermarket in Liberia yesterday.

 It’s really funny what I realize I miss most about home when I leave for a while. This trip it’s been furniture and peanut butter. I eat at the counter in the kitchen on a very beat up stool and there are two torn arm chairs in the living room. Other than that, I sit on plastic chairs or stools or the floor at home and in the office. I will be very excited to sit on a clean, soft couch again. And rice and beans is still delicious most of the time, but I am also excited to move into my own house so that I can vary my meals a bit (still using rice and beans though because they are cheap).

Overall, I love it here, especially the fact that I have children and adults saying hi to me all over town. I have also given direction to multiple tourists and also translated for an American vet who was returning the dog to a family near my house. I can’t believe a month has gone by. So much has happened, but I also feel like I still have lots to do (work and travel related). Here are some pictures and stories from the recent weeks:

This weekend, a group of volunteers drove to Rincon de la Vieja. This is a national park with a volcano about two hours from Portero. We left at 5:30am and arrived in Liberia around 7am. We stopped to get our lunches and breakfast in the center of town, which was nice because I didn’t have any idea what Liberia was like. It looks like it’s pretty small with not much to do there. I might still go for a day sometime though. We then asked for directions (oh yeah, the car company forgot to give us the GPS) from a man and were on our way down a gravel road (with signs for the right place thankfully). This road took us straight to the park and we started our hike just after 8am.

Geothermal plant on our way into the park

Picture of the map of our hike. The ranger station didn't have any copies so we had to rely on the picture.

We decided to do the hard hike to the waterfall since the other option only took about 2 hours total. Our hike was 5km each way and it took us about 2 hours walking up to the waterfall (about an hour and a half back).  “Hard hike” was definitely the truth because we were climbing up and down hills with roots and rocks for much of the walk. The most interesting thing for me was walking through the different habitats all in just a few kilometers. We started in the dense forest (and saw anteater-like animals and monkeys!) and then came out into fields with small shrubs and trees under the full sun. Then we continued walking up and entered a forest of what might have been yucca plants (they were huge!). We cycled through some of these different environments again until we ended back in the forest where we found the waterfall.

We started out in the forest

Then we walked into a forest with these huge plants!

We saw monkeys!

And we walked through fields with little shrub plants 

Back into the forest

Back into the plains-like field

Rocky hike!

Made it to the waterfall!

Lizards were everywhere

Boiling water pots from the volcano

Last weekend, a few of us did a hike from Portero up the hill to a castle. Apparently some man who lives here wanted to build his house looking like a castle on top of a hill overlooking all of the neighboring towns and beaches. This hike ended up being much more intense than we anticipated and it took us 2 hours of walking nearly straight up the hill to get to it. The castle has been under construction for 7 years and isn’t done at all (no one lives in it) but we got to walk inside of it and climb up into the tower.

View hiking up to the castle

View from the castle

Inside

The most incredible thing about the castle hike was  meeting one of my adult English students there. In class earlier that week she had told us that she lived at the castle, but I didn’t know how far it was from Portero. She lives in a house next to the castle with her two young children taking care of the property. She comes to English class 2 times a week making the hike down into town with her friends who also work in the very large houses up on the hill. Knowing how far the students walk to come learn English shows how dedicated they are to the classes. My beginner English class is made up of mostly Nicaraguan immigrants who work in the big houses here and they know that learning English is a way for them to have more opportunities here in the touristy beach towns.

Work is also going well and is busy. I’ve taken on teaching two more adult English classes so now I have two beginner classes and one advanced class. Teaching adults has been challenging and requires a lot of patience, ,especially in the beginner class. Teaching students who have pretty basic literacy skills and no strong understanding of parts of speech, etc. in Spanish makes it extra difficult to teach English to them. On the other hand, the adults are really committed to working hard and learning as much as they can. I start the advanced class this week so it will be interesting to see what the new and different challenges for that class will be.

I am helping in kids’s classes to some degree but really need to start focusing on writing the curriculum, which is an office job rather than interacting with the kids. I’ve been to enough classes that I know most of the kids though and it’s really fun to work them too. The school textbooks for English class are very basic (even the older grades) and it is clear that there half hour English classes only a few times a week are not teaching the kids very much. Our program tries to review what they learn in school and add new vocabulary and grammar skills. My task is to write lessons for each of the units and grades including activities that volunteers can do to reinforce the English lessons. So far it’s going okay, but it is a lot of work and I need to continue working on it because time is passing very quickly here.

Kids' soccer game- Portero vs. La Paz (private school with mostly American kids). 

Portero won 12-0

The last thing that I’ve been working on is thinking about the upcoming Cross-Cultural Education Conference. I submitted a proposal to speak about how to prepare prospective volunteers for volunteering abroad and I am thinking about changing or adding to the topic. Watching volunteers teach adults and children English using the materials we have has gotten me more interested in the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy. Most volunteers do not have education backgrounds so the classes are based only loosely around known language teaching methods. We also have limited materials to work with, which makes it even harder to plan classes.  For example, we labeled parts of the housing using the picture below. To a child never having been out of Portrero, the room in the picture looks absolutely nothing like their own houses. I have talked with other volunteers about this topic and I think I will be leading a small discussion at the conference about it. I don’t have any answers to these issues, but it will be really interesting to hear how others work through these difficulties.

Example teaching materials. When will the children ever have a dog holding  a newspaper or a baby in a high chair in their dining room? Many of the houses don't even have dining rooms or tables!