Re-orienting after Orientation and Life in La Esperanza!

Ay dios mio...where to begin???  Sorry it has been a while since my last post! Life this past month has been quite a lot of ups, downs, lefts, rights, and, in the case of teaching, many circles in that I go and I go and I go and find that I end up...where I started.  So we've all been in situations, specifically new microcosmic circumstances, where our perception of time seems to work differently, right?  You know, where something feels like it was 12 minutes ago and 6 months ago simultaneously?  That is how everything here feels.  Possibly to blame is operating on "Tico Time" (if a Tico tells you they will be there at 5:00 pm, expect them in July).  Since punctuality has never ever been my strong suit...or really even my suit at all, this works perfectly for me!  Only now am I realizing that I've never aaaaaaaactually been late for a single thing in my life...I've just been been in the wrong country and America has just been too early! Oh silly silly America!  So I only bring this up as a preface for the inevitable disjointedness of the rest of this post...I will try to keep things in order, but I feel a bit like my Zayde (in that I remember what I wore my first day here, but I can't remember what I ate for breakfast this morning...or what I am wearing right now for that matter!  But if I had to guess, I'd probably say it was rice/beans and chalk dust, respectively. For my Zayde, it was probably cheerios/bananas and creme, and skechers with black socks, shorts, a white v-neck undershirt, and a salmon colored blazer) :-) :-)

                So, I'll start in the very beginning. For it's a very good place to start!  In Engish we begin with ABC, but in Spanish we begin with...Ahhhh Beh Ceh.  Sorry, already getting ahead of myself!  So, to backtrack a weebit (for inquiring minds, a weebit is the offspring of a weezle and a rabbit), I am IN LA ESPERANZA!! I've been here for about 2 weeks now, and like I said, everything still feels so foreign to me while I simultaneously feel like I've been here forever.  Throughout orientation, I had many conversations with fellow volunteers where we would, in words but not yet really in terms of actual internal acceptance, acknowledge the fullness of the committment we were all making for a year and would remind ourselves that though it felt incredibly immediate and important at the time, orientation was but the tip of this iceberg.  Though the orientation was merely the pregame for the English-Teaching fiesta, it went down smooth and got me just the right amount of drunk on Costa Rica.  I especially had to remind myself of the impermanance of orientation during the many times that I just wanted it to end so I could stop feeling the anxiety of anticipating my time in La Esperanza and just be experiencing it.  However, with the retrospect of being here in weelil' La Esperanza (a weelil' is the offspring of a weezle and Lil' Wayne)for 2 weeks, I am actually very glad that I had those first 3 weeks in Orosi.  It was a great opportunity to meet some really quality people...unfortunately I have realized in this retrospective contemplation, though I knew it before, that my host family in Orosi was not part of those quality people.  It became disappointingly obvious to me by the end of orientation that they were clearly only hosting me for the money that they received from WorldTeach for doing so.  I was the umpteenth volunteer they had housed in the past 8 years and they really didn't seem interested to get to know me at all.  They didn't come to a single family/volunteer activity that we had UNTIL the last one, where they sat in the back and didn't speak to anyone and stayed only long enough to get their check and leave to go home without saying goodbye to me.  I don't know why, but while I was actually in Orosi, none of this really bothered me at all...I just saw it as unimportant because it was temporary and it gave me an opportunity to get to know other peoples families and spend more time exploring because they never really cared where I was or when/if I would be back...it was kind of like a really nice bed and breakfast that gave me gallopinto everyday!  And hey, I'm in Costa Rica! It's going to take more than that to get me down!  However, for some reason (I think the way they acted at the final activity, really cementing my suspicions about their disinterest in me...not dislike, just complete indifference), and in retrospect, I'm disappointed...not mad just disappointed (oh my god, I really must be a teacher for using that phrase).   It is good to be in La Esperanza and though I am still feeling out my entire family (and by entire family, I mean the whole town...it is 200 people and ONE big extended family....all of my students are cousins!...I think all of the couples might be too....yikes?), I feel much more welcome and everyday I feel a little bit luckier to call this place my home for a year.

                So orientation ended on February 1st, but we didn't  need to be to our sites until February 10 for the start of class.  Naturally, to unwind and relax from the 8 hour days of meeting after meeting, Spanish lessons, and general cultural confusion, 4 friends and I decided to climb the tallest mountain in Costa Rica! It was SO COOL!  Up until about 2 years ago, the tallest thing I'd ever really climbed was Griffin Pahl in order to see the stage on D Day at U of R.  The 5 of us (my friends Eric, Kai, Megan, and Ross) set out to San Gerardo de Rivas which is the town at the base of Cerro Chirripo, the tallest mountain CR and the 5th tallest mountain in Latin America.  San Gerardo de Rivas happens to be Eric's placement, so we were all able to stay in his house...and by house I mean mystical wooden shire where dreams come true and everything is Disney animated.  Picture soon to be included!

                It was a 2 day hike up to the summit at 3820 meters (12520 feet...on a clear day you can actually see the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean at the same time...unfortunately we got beautiful clear skies over our heads but clouds in the distance so the views were spectacular, but ocean-free).  We hiked about 17k the first day and then woke up at 2:30 am to climb the remaining 5k to watch the sunrise...and it was COLD, but unreal...there are pictures on the picasa website, but justice is not done).  Also in true Mark Sobel camping/hiking style, we had not even close to enough food and way too much water.  So, after about 27 total miles with 35 pound packs on, a total of about 10000 feet of altitude gained and then lost in just over 24 hours, 4 days in a row of getting up before 4:30 am, and a hillarious shortage of food, we made it back to Eric's magical cottage content and satisfyingly exhausted.  Believe it or not, it really was exactly the adventure and escape into nature that I needed to recharge in preparation for a year of struggling to do things like competently teach the ABCs.

                Speaking of ABCs, teaching a new language while really focusing on learning a new one has its interesting little quarks.  In some ways, Spanish and English really aren't so different...like when I don't know a word, I kind of just turn it into an English cognate and 9/10 out of 10, it actually works!  Sometimes the old joke of just adding an "o" to the end actually works!  However, sometimes it realllllly doesn't.  For instance, in Orosi, I was talking to the my friends parents and wanted to share with them my excitement to be here in Costa Rica.  Soy tan....hmmmm...how do you say excited in Spanish I thought??? (for those of you fluent in Spanish, you probably see where this is going...).  Hmmmm...car in Costa Rican Spanish is carro and telephone is telefono....I bet excited is excitado!  So, proudly and with full confidence I turned to my friend's host parents and said with a big smile, "Soy tan excitado a ensenar los ninos de Costa Rica!".  Funny thing about the word excited...it's the 1/10 where guessing isn't a good idea.  Excited in Spanish = emocionado.  Excitado in English = aroused.  Goal of my year in Costa Rica #8279: accidentally convince a local family that I am a sex offender. CHECK!  Other interesting linguistic quarks:

1) Como se llama (if the ll is said like a "y", which is the correct way to say it) = What is your name?...Como se llama (if the ll is said like a regular L in English) = How are you licked?

2) When people speak with a thick accent here it is very hard to distinguish between a few letters.  V's sound just like B's and R's sound just like D's.  Partly to try to sound less gringo, but mostly because I just do it subconsciously, I find myself trying to mimic the accent.  Interesting thing about the difference between R's and D's..."Cuando tengo duda" = When I have doubt.  "Cuando tengo dura" = When I am getting hard.  Goal of my year in Costa Rica #8294: No seriously, REALLY accidentally convince the locals I am a sex offender. Check and CHECK!

3) Cono.  Sounds like a harmless word right? Well it is!  It's what you put ice cream in! Coño. Sounds harmless right? Well, it isn't!  It's a very very naughty way to refer to a part of the female anatomy. Goal of my year in Costa Rica #6549: Freak out the ice cream man at the local street festival.  CHECK CHECK AND CHECK!

                Honestly though, I am actually really proud of how my Spanish has been coming along and these little conversational snafus are about 5% embarrasing and 95% hillarious.  However, I feel like I am reaching a plateau  Spanish ability.  I would say very confidentally that at this point I am fully conversational, but it seems like the jump from "getting by" to eventual fluency is in the grammar that I just don't know how to use and apply.  I hope that I will keep improving by talking to everything here that moves and is willing to speak to me and that by the end of the year I will really be able to consider myself bilingual, as that really is one of my big goals here:-).

                So far in my community, I feel like I can subdivide my existence into 2 categories: School and Family.

School: I have always known that I love working with kids, but being here is really solidifying my feelings of "at-home-ness" that I feel leading a group of children.  This is probably because I am just a big kid myself.  Because I am really just a 7 year old trapped in a 23 year old body, my biggest worry about having to teach was not losing respect of the kids by being a goofball and a softy...i.e. my teacher stare pictures.  Refreshingly and surprisingly though, I have found that with these kids, I have found a good balance of being strict with the important things when I need to be and relating to the kids and making them laugh and have fun while learning.  Honestly, I think this is much more a testament to my kid's desire to learn than it is my competency thus far to teach.  Especially my first week, I had great classes where I would feel all-powerful and brilliantly creative, immediately followed by a class where I would feel inadequate, borderline overwhelmed, and very self-conscious of how completely all over the place I think I must have appeared in front of the kids.  However, no matter the circumstance, my kids seemed to be along with the ride with me the whole way.  They are hardly little angels, because kids will be kids and there is no such thing as a quiet 1st grade class, but I have been blown away by how attentive they are and how much respect they seem to give me just because I am the teacher.  I really can't tell if it is because I have somehow earned there respect in only one week, but it seems to me they have a real desire to learn English and actually want to be in school, though there reasons are sometimes pretty funny. One of my sixth graders wants to learn English so she can grow up to be either a nun, a misionary, or a gynecologist.  Ahh, the holy trinity! The Father, the Nun, and the Hole-y Spirit.  In total I have 22 students and am teaching 1st-6th grade.  Because the school is so small, I teach 1st and 2nd grade separately for 40 minutes each but then teach 3rd and 4th grade together for 80 minutes and 5th and 6th grade together for 80 minutes (it is a 2 room school and the only other teacher is the headmaster...fortunately though I get the other room and it feels really good to have my own turf to teach in).  I have decided to do my classes "immersion style" which means they are entirely in English.  As my kids don't know English (yet!), you could imagine this is difficult, but I have improv to thank for my charades and miming abilities.  To explain Valentines Day I put on a little 3 character show where I played a girl, a boy, and cupid and then fell in love...with myself.  It was met with rave revues.

                 Though there have been obvious expected little behavior issues and confusions, I really couldn't have asked for better behavior from my little weeones (yeah that's right, my students are the offspring of a weezle and a Formula One racecar).  However, the double edged sword of this is that if they don't seem to be getting a new concept at all, I really have only myself to blame.  Though this has definitely led to a few fleeting moments of nervousness and self-doubt, I am glad it is this way, as I would rather the failure be in my approach than in their motivation, as I can change my approach much more easily.  All in all, I love my kids and a few already own my heart because of how almost intolerably cute they are.  Oooo! I almost forgot!  So two of my student's (brother and sister) mom is a singer and she organized and directed a small choir of 12 students last year.  I haven't heard them sing, but apparently they are really really good...so good in fact that they went to a national competition last year and WON!  Now, I know you are probably thinking, "Oh silly silly Mark, you must be confused.  That's just the plot to Sister Act II".  Well, right you are! But, this is real!  And as a prize, they won a ridiculously nice brand new yahama keyboard.  Alexis, the school director, asked me if I could play and when I told him "mas or menos" and kind of shrugged my shoulders, he started to beem.  Apparently nobody in the town has any idea how to play so this beautiful brand new instrument has just been sitting in gaining dust in the closet.  We broke it out and my classroom is now the proud new owner of a piano!!  I have already used it in lessons and the kids love it and I am so psyched!  I also talked to the choir director (my student's mom) and we seem to have very similar personalities and I think we hit it off.  We were discussing a lot of plans (in Spanish! because she knows no English) for the choir this year and I want to put on some type of show/play/presentation/cough...a cappella group cough...for the kids to present to the community and she is all on board to help me out!  We also worked up a deal that she will teach me some guitar if I help her with the pronunciation of English music.  My first assigntment is to teach her the correct pronunciation and meaning of the lyrics to "I Can't Live if Living is Without You", "And I Will Always Love You", and "My Heart Will Go on".  Worldteach forgot to include "how to teach early 90's Diva love ballads to a middle aged woman" in their teaching manual so I'm gonna have to wing this one.  But moral of the story: I have a piano in my classroom (no indoor bathrooms and 2 cinder blocks as a goal for their soccer field, but a piano), and an ally with the town choir director = AWESOME!

Family:  So I didn't include community as a 3rd category of my life.  That's because family and community are synonymous.  As I said before, the town of La Esperanza is about 200 people who are all from ONE family.  Both my host mother and host father have 13 siblings each and all of my students are brothers, sisters, and cousins.  As expected, nothing is really what I expected it to be (if that makes sense).  Though I tried really hard to come into this experience with zero expectations, the reality is that I think it is an impossible ambition to have zero expectations when knowing you are going into the unknown.  For me, at least, it is.  In the same vein, anyone who claims to be doing something like this for entirely altruistic reasons is lying to themselves.  Though my primary purpose for being here is really starting to focus on teaching and connecting to the community, when I applied for this program and up until recently my reasons were, admittedly, more self-serving in my quest for a life/perspective-changing experience and a desire to experience a minimalist lifestyle for the sake of fulfilling my romanticized preconceived notion of what "roughing it" really is and experiencing how much of the world lives.  I wanted something new and different to open my mind and broaden my understanding of the world, but paradoxically, I wanted that new and different to fulfill notions and images I already had in my mind.  As I am really really trying to let go of my expectations, I am realizing that it is of course easy to desire a life devoid of any Western and modern convenivent with the pretense of only a year of committment as a taste of this different, harder life, knowing that my life full of advantages that have been given to me by a combination of a very loving family and luck, awaits me when I want it.  The reality is, my life here is not fulfillling those "desired challenges", i.e. living with no electricity, learning to hunt my food, sleeping in a hut, having no phone or internet, etc...These are the challenges I was "hoping for", which is why I was disappointed to discover that I would be living in a new house with most modern conveniences and two of my host brothers not only speak English, but have lived for several years in the States (in New Yar-zee of course) .  The challenges I have been met with were unforseen ones, which is almost redundant to say because almost nothing that is fully expected is as hard as those things one is completely unprepared for.  One of my biggest challenges so far has been an overwhelming feeling of living in the former volunteers shadow.  She was the very first volunteer in the town (prior to her, there had never been ANY English instruction in La Esperanza).  As the second volunteer, they only have her as a comparison, and from what it sounds like, she did an absolutely incredible job assimiliating with the community and was a damn good teacher to boot.  I suppose I didn't expect to have to prove myself so much trying to create my own identity in the town, but I am very hopeful that in time, things will change and in time I won't just be confusing people as to why someone has replaced the other English teacher.  Another unexpected difficulty has been with the family.  There seems to be a lot of tension between my two host brothers and somehow I feel like I have found myself in the middle of them venting to me about the other.  Perhaps this is just very salient today because yesterday was quite a fiasco...one brother got drunk and got into a fight at a town fiesta that we were at.  The other was beyond wasted and tried to get involved too, but this got the other brother mad.  After the fight, we went home to find that my sisters house, which is right down the hill from the family's house where I am staying, was broken into and someone stole her TV and DVD by breaking in a window and going out the front door.  Just as we were going back to the house, we noticed a scratch in the car which seems to have been done by somebody keying the car earlier that day.  Needless to say, going to bed last night felt great if only to end yesterday and start today anew, but family tensions are feeling pretty thick and I don't know what role, if any, I should be playing in helping out.  Along with this, I can't understand a single word my host mother says because she breaks the sound barrier with her Spanish and my host father is a very somber gent who doesn't really talk to anyone.  Challenge numero tres has come with trying to understand the social hierarchy going on in this town.  The community is completely sustained by coffee farming and right now is the peak of the harvest season.  For the 4 or so months of summer, which is when the coffee is ready, Nicaraguans and Panamanian immigrants come to the town to work in the fields as the pickers.  As such, alongside the 200 permanent residents of the town, there are tons of foreign workers here just for a few months and there seems to be an unspoken class system which is making me uncomfortable.  All of my students, except for one who is a Panamanian Indian (she's an awesome 2nd grader name Johanna who wakes up at 5 am every morning to walk the hour to school everyday), are Ticos who come from familys that at the very least have semi-decent houses to live in.  However, everyday I see little immigrant children walking around with no shoes on gathering firewood because the shacks that they live in during the harvest have no electricity.  It just doesn't quite feel right that these kids aren't getting any education and I am here with the purpose to teach in a rural disadvantaged community and those who seem most disadvantaged are getting nothing.  I really really want to offer free tutoring so I can get to know the kids and at least give them a few weeks or months of school before they go back to Nicaragua and Panama, but I am not so sure of the social implications, if any, i.e. if this would possibly insult the immigrants or confuse the Ticos or whatnot, but something just seems amiss given the reason an English teacher is placed here in the first place.  I am going to talk to my host family tomorrow to try to figure out the best way to go about offering some type of tutoring and how to get the word out, as many of them don't even speak Spanish, but only apparently something called dialecto, which is a native Panamanian language.

Holy Moley I wrote a lot!  To sum up, I am still getting used to being in such a tiny town teaching in such a tiny school and also being tall and surrounded by such tiny people! (my host brothers are 5'7" and 5'4"...I think it's because, no joke, Ticos start drinking coffee around the age of 1).  Basically, everything is just tiny but I am embracing this tiny world as much as I can and am feeling a little bit more comfortable in it everyday and ojala (hopefully), this tiny place likes me even though I'm big and white (though one of my 6th graders didn't believe I was really from the U.S. because "my skin is too dark"...I think she glasses, but I took the compliment!).  So much love to all of you back stateside and I send you abrazos y besos galore! Paz, amor, arroz, y frijoles!