Art for Peace

This past weekend I went to la Fortuna to participate in a workshop called Art for Peace. It’s an event that the PCV’s in my region of Costa Rica put on each year. Volunteers bring elementary/middle school aged kids from their sites and everyone meets up in la Fortuna to have this big day of art. The PCVs set up tables, and the kids rotate from station to station. This year a lunch was also catered from a restaurant in la Fortuna that is run by an ex-pat. The whole event is free for the kids, and they get to meet kids from other parts of Costa Rica. For a lot of them it is the first time they have ever been able to travel outside of their communities. I had a theater table, and we did some improve games. I was nervous about my table at first, because as a rule, Costa Ricans are really shy. I have kids in some of my English classes who are still too shy to talk to me, and school has been in session for almost two months now. But, the kids at the workshop really got into the improve games, and I am thinking it might be fun to start a little theater club for the kids in my town.

I know that when I was a kid I was really shy, and theater really helped me feel more comfortable expressing myself. It sounds kind of dorky, but it’s true. I remember in 2^nd grade I was invited to participate in OM – an activity where kids write and produce their own plays – and how acting on stage gave me this structured outlet to express emotions. I got on stage and acted all these things that I was too timid to do in real life. Slowly, the skill transferred from something I did on stage to something I did in life. Because of my experience with acting I changed from being painfully shy to generally shy to slightly shy. I continued with OM all through elementary school, and then did theater in middle school and high school. I still feel like I am shy person, but I tell people that and they laugh at me. I am shy on the inside, maybe, but I have figure out to act like I’m not.

Well, I got to thinking about how successful the one day workshop was, and how a theater club might be a good project to start up here. I have talked to some of the kids about it and they seem interested.

I haven’t written yet about how painfully shy the people in my town are. I am still overwhelmed by it. For instance, I was helping the committee that works with the senior citizens to organize a party. The party is something they do once a year for the senior citizens of Chimurria. They have a little band and music, and it’s just a way for the town to show their appreciation to the senior community. As I was wondering around the day of the party, helping organize things, I ran across a local friend. He is about 50 or so, and had been invited to the party because he had helped the committee a lot over the past year. I asked him if he was going to the party. He said he didn’t think so because he wasn’t used to being out in public like that. He has lived in the town his whole life (the town has a population of less than 600), and is too shy to go to a party for senior citizens because he is embarrassed to be seen by so many people –all of whom he knows and has known his entire life. In this instance the shyness just deters one man from enjoying a nice party, but there are a thousand instance that I can think of where that kind of shyness can have more detrimental effects. Especially for women and girls, who spend almost 90 percent of their time inside the walls of their own home, and are too shy to leave their houses alone.

I was also thinking a theater club might be good for another reason. In Chimurria, the girls and the boys do not play together. If they are playing soccer or baseball, it is always girls vs boys, and they can’t seem to work out how to play together. If it is not girls vs. boys, it is the girls playing one thing and then the boys playing another thing. They don’t have very much successful interaction together. Even in school they sit on opposite sides of the room, and eat on opposite sides of table at lunch time. I would love for them to be able to do something positive together, and to learn how to work with each other.

So, that is my new plan: start a theater club. Well see if it picks up. I hope so.

Back to the Art for Peace workshop:

So, I had a theater table. There was also friendship bracelets, origami, homemade play dough, making wallets from milk boxes, cake decorating, and a few other tables. Around 75 kids came, and I think the workshop was a great success.

After the workshop, a few of the PCVs spent the night in la Fortuna and hung out. La Fortuna is this Costa Rican tourist trap, mostly because of its location. It sits right at the bottom of an active volcano and is surrounded by hot springs. It is the kind of place where you see more tourists than locals. In fact, so few Costa Ricans go to la Fortuna, that the bus to Upala doesn’t even bother to go through it, and we had to catch our bus in a sleeper community about 7k outside of la Fortuna.

Hanging out with PCVs is like magic. Every time I spend time with my peers I leave incredibly impressed by the resourcefulness of my peer group. My friend wanted to make me a birthday cake, but there wasn’t an oven in the hostel. I kid you not, that between everyone we thought of at least 4 different ways to bake a cake without an oven. In the end she put a pot of water to boil on the stove, and put the cake batter in a covered pan over the boiling water. And if it wasn’t the tastiest chocolate birthday cake I ever had.

happy birthday to me!

Yesterday was my birthday and my host family surprised by planning me a surprise party. It was the sweetest thing. I kind of got a heads up from my 7-year-old little brother; he kind of has a hard time with the secrets.

We went over to a neighbors house who is raising an abandoned leopard cub...

Yeah, I know.

I hadn´t seen the baby leopard yet, and the pretext of the trip was to go see the cub. But when we got to the house, all my community friends were there! We ate tres leches cake, pizza, fruit, and there was even a piñata. It warmed my heart that they put so much effort into organizing and planning a little party for me. And it made me feel really special, and like I was really starting to be part of the community.

Also, and this is fun. There were no classes on my birthday because all the public school teachers were on strike! So, I didn´t have to go to school and teach! Bonus birthday present :)

Where I Work

I am working in three different schools: Chimurria, La Maravilla, and Colonia. All the schools I work with are varying degrees of small. The biggest school is Colonia, it has about 130 students. The smallest school is La Maravilla and has about 35 students grades K-6. Chimurria falls in between the two and has around 100 students.

Colonia: I work at Colonia on Mondays and Tuesdays. English lessons in my area of Costa Rica only last for 40 minutes, so even though I teach 6 classes a day, it is only a total of 4 actual hours in the classroom a day. However, I spend around 8 hours in Colonia when I go there, waiting for breaks between classes, lunch, recess, etc. I get there a little before 7, and leave a little before 3. I ride my bike to and from, it’s a little hilly but not too bad, and it about 7k. I love riding my bike in the morning. It’s not too hot, and there is this beautiful mist that sits on top of all the farm land-at least when it’s not raining. Occasionally, well, more like half the time, I get poured on. I am told that it is currently the dry season, when the rainy season comes I am sure I will have to give up the bike and take the bus. The problem with the bus is that it doesn’t come very often, and I’d get to school about an hour early if I took it. In the states this would be normal, maybe, for teachers to come early. In Colonia everyone arrives between 6:50 and 7:10. (Class starts at 7ish) And the gate to the school doesn’t open until about 6:55. So, my choice is to either ride my bike in the rain for twenty minutes, or sit outside the school and wait in the rain for an hour. The main issue of concern is that the bus ride would also amount to about 2 dollars a day. This is, unfortunately, out of my budget. The TEFL volunteers are talking to the Peace Corps office in San Jose about giving us a little more money in our stipend for travel costs to and from schools. For me that would be about $25 a month. Hopefully it works out in our favor.

La Maravilla: I work in La Maravilla on Wedensday and for half of Thursday. It is about 3k from my house, I also bike there. I could easily walk there if it wasn’t for the rain. This school is so much fun to work in because of the teeny classes. They have one regular teacher, and another teacher who also serves as the principal. There are two classrooms, a building for kindergarten, two bathrooms, and a little kitchen. That is it. There are six students in the first grade, and they are all super adorable. The second class I teach is a combo class of 2nd and 4th graders. There are only two students in the 2nd grade, a little boy and a little girl. 4th grade is the biggest grade with a whopping 13 students. Those are the morning classes. *side note* In most schools in rural Costa Rica, students only go to school for half the day, in order to accommodate the number students with the number of teachers and classrooms. There is a morning shift from 7-11:30 and an afternoon shift from 12-4:30. All my schools follow this schedule. *end side note*
In the afternoon there is a 3rd and 5th combo class. Then sixth grade is by themselves, there are four of them. When we teach the combo class, English class is 2x as long. However, the teacher I am working with there and I are not 100% on how to simultaneously teach two classes with two different curriculums at the same time. If there wasn’t a set curriculum to follow it would be easier to adjust a lesson to two different levels. But, since we have to follow the curriculum, and the curriculums don’t exactly line up, class is kind of a mess. Teach this topic to one side, give them work to do on their own. Then run to the other side, teach one thing, give them work to do on their own. Continue until class is over. Oh yeah, and they don’t have English books or a copy machine. None of my students in any of my schools have English books, but the school in Colonia does have a copy machine. So, if anyone out there has some advice on how best to teach the combo-classes, I would love to hear it. I need some ideas.

Chimurria:
I teach here, in my community school, for half of Thursday and on Fridays. There are two English teachers that teach at this school, the other schools only have one. The English teachers for the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders is also the teacher for La Maravilla. He just got notified from the Ministry of Education that he has to attend an English teaching class from 8-3 for every Friday until July. So now I only teach in Chimurria for half of Thursday (the other half is in La Maravilla) and half of Friday (now I have the other half free, because the English teacher is hung up in that workshop). Its got me kind of down that I am spending more time out of my community than in it.

Anyway, that is my “teaching” schedule. But I am also co-planning with the teachers, doing community English classes, and organizing English workshops for my teachers. Holy crap it is exhausting.