The whirlwind of Christmas is behind me and I just thought I
could recount some of my past adventures with you’all… Before Christmas, we
wound down the school year. I was
surprised at how little formal assessment there was to finish up, and it seems
that everyone who showed up over the year got pretty good grades. Graduation from Sixth grade is a big deal
because kids move to high school from there, and also traditionally it was the
last grade required by the government. That
has just changed, and now each student is supposed to finish 9th
grade although there is no enforcement. There
are kids who quit coming to school every year to help their families or because
school is too far away.
Then, I went to the US for Christmas, and recharged my batteries
a little. I started by seeing family and
enjoying the better aspects of life. It
was funny to be in awe of some of the silly comforts in life. For example, I saw a post on Facebook saying
that a PC friend was having reverse culture shock. I thought to myself that driving around in a
nice car listening to NPR was not so tough; for me, I was just enjoying a
vacation in a different place. I also
went skiing, saw live music, slept on a couch, saw friends, and drank good
beer. I really had a great time and was
able to just relax for awhile without some of the pressures of Nicaragua on my
shoulders. I didn’t hand-wash a single
article of clothing, I only spoke a little Spanish on a ski lift, was never
woken up by my neighbors music, I didn’t have to take any public transportation
(unless flagging down a nice pizza delivery guy on New Year’s counts), nobody
stared at me, and the lights never went out.
My return ticket sent me to Costa Rica to enjoy a little
Central American R&R before coming back to site. In San Jose, I used couchsurfing.org to find
a couple people to go out with one night, and also spent one night at a
computer programmer’s house who showed off his new health kick of weighing each
of his six meals a day according to type of food - while chain smoking. I also went to some more touristy spots,
including Manuel Antonio National Park, which put the summer crowds at some of
the US national parks to shame. It is a
biological hot spot where there is enough rain on the Pacific Coast to support
rain forest, which is primarily found on the East Coast. It happens to be on a stretch of pretty
beaches, with many easy to spot mammals, and easily accessible to a weekender
or the un-intrepid tourist. For these
reasons, the park was wall to wall people.
I also went to a nature reserve opened initially by Quakers
on the continental divide. Started in
the Vietnam War days, the Quakers were looking for a way out of the US, and so
decided to raise dairy cows on the hills.
Realizing that there was an abundance of cloud forest in the area, a
biologist helped them start caring and managing the land, promoting year round
water and biodiversity. The place became
a tourist mecca when National Geographic declared this reserve the best place
on earth to see the quetzal, a type of pretty bird. (Yes, I saw one by dawdling near a tour group
who had paid for a guide and looking up when they did) Anyways, today there is plenty more than bird
watching to do here, however I had no money or friends with which to share a
bungee or kayaking experience, so I just hoofed it around the cloud forest for
a couple of days. On the top of one hill
is the TV towers for most of the networks in the area, I hiked up, took
advantage of the lack of fencing to do something I had always wanted to, and climbed
one of the towers (not to the top, it was too windy!). A cloud forest is essentially a swamp on the
side (or top) of a hill. It is super green;
there are about 40 types of trees, and then many hundreds of plants that live
on the branches of the trees, so everything is beautifully and dramatically draped
over and on top of itself.
When I got back to site after vacation, things got a little
crazy. Despite my best efforts, I had
little success planning summer camp with my expected volunteers until it
actually started. Settling in to town took
quite awhile (beans cook for about 4 hours on my stove, for example) and by the
13th, I had a soccer game and then got peer pressured by my team to
drink after the game. That night, some
other volunteers came to site to take part in the neighboring town’s religious event,
which starts with a walk from my town.
The next day, we started off and made it to Esquipulas without a hitch,
although I talked to a seminary in training who told me the Catholic Church has
no problem with holed condoms. By the
time I got back on the 15th, I was pretty unprepared for camp to
begin that day, so I was pretty lucky that almost none of the kids took my
radio announcements or permission slips I gave to each of them seriously enough
to show up. So, I spent afternoon going door to door
looking for kids, which was exactly what I had hoped to avoid. The next day, about 50 showed up.
Camp was a lot of controlled chaos, where we had events and
a timeframe set up and could only hope that we stuck to it at all. Some of the events were tough just for the
sheer number of kids, although this year went better than the last. I was able to get some help from some Young
Life workers, which is an international Christian organization which has an
office in town. Their help really came
in handy maintaining discipline, thinking up different games on the fly when
the kids were bored with the planned activity, and to explain the activities in
ways that make the most sense to the kids.
For example, basing the explanation of a new game on their shared
experience really helped make some of them smoother. Anyways, the school year is starting up
again, so I will be back to working a more fixed schedule and have more on my
plate.
