April 24, 2010
And here is an example why:
This past Monday was Monteverde Day. School got out at noon so everyone could attend a community picnic celebrating the 50-something anniversary of the Quakers arriving in Monteverde. I did not want to go. Socializing saps me of my energy and I had spent the entire weekend socializing and was depleted. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a field, roasting in the Costa Rican mid-day sun and try to make conversation. Please don’t let my attitude misrepresent the charming and interesting population of Monteverde. It’s not for lack of cool people to talk with, it’s my own idiosyncrasy (I’m trying to put a charming twist on my grumpiness).
A few hours of class with charming kids on Monday morning had put me in a considerably better mood (although still grumpy), and by dismissal I was considering attending the picnic. Two of my students sat munching food on the steps of the library. One is a third grade girl I will call FutureFamousArtist. She is the most insightful, creative, articulate and loving kid I’ve ever known. Next to her was a fourth grade girl who I’ve struggled coming up with a name for. I’ve settled on Down, since she is truly very down in all senses of the word, and I’m not sure there is any more admirable quality a person can have. Needless to say, I totally adore these two kids.
I walked past these two students on Monday afternoon with a Should-I-Stay-Or-Should-I-Go? scowl on my face.
“What’s wrong?” called Down from her perch on the steps.
“I’ve been grumpy all day and I’ve done a great job of hiding it and now that my professional responsibilities are over, I’m letting it all out!” I barked at her.
She smiled and already I felt a little better. She waved me over and I sat down next to her. She looked up at me.
“Who was that guy you brought to Frisbee?” she asked, innocently. I feigned my own innocence.
“What guy?”
“That guy. His name was like, a letter of the alphabet.”
Busted. Ji had come to Frisbee when he was here a month ago and had even sat in on part of my class. Not a single student had asked a question about him, until now.
“Oh,” I said with a smile, “you mean Ji.”
“Yeah, Ji,” she said with a little laugh. “Who’s he?”
“He’s Ji,” I responded, still avoiding. I don’t want to lie to people, but I’m also not that eager to divulge personal information.
Down laughed. “Is he your boyfriend?” she asked. No avoiding this one.
“Yes, he is my boyfriend.” FutureFamousArist had been listening quietly the entire time. She piped up now:
“Do you love him?” Jeeze, they sure are direct little buggers.
“Yes”, I answered. “I love him very much.”
“He’s your boooooooyfriend”, laughed Down. She asked a few more questions about why he still lives in NYC and then she and FutureFamousArtist started talking about their favorite foods and I was off the hook.
And I knew, that if I were going to have a chance at a good time that afternoon, I had to convince these two kids to hang out with me. And I paused, wondering if it is appropriate for a twenty-six year old woman to really, really want to hang out with an eight and nine year old. But I asked them anyway.
They made the appropriate phone calls, grabbed their bags, and we were off. FutureFamousArtist had to bring home her guitar and struggled with it as we walked down the driveway of the school. It was almost as big as she was, and probably weighed just about as much also. Down took one look at her struggling and said, “We’ll take turns.” Shamed – my thought had been, “There is no way I’m helping this kid lug that thing.”
We stopped by the Cheese Factory for a milkshake, which I needed their help finishing, passed by the store for a snack to pass and then headed to the picnic. Once we arrived at the picnic they took off and I didn’t see them again until the following day at school but I could not have been more content.
Youth is My Salvation, Example Two:
The next day at school I was sitting outside at a picnic table with a group of five students doing a phonics program called Wilson. Wilson is for kids who are still struggling with decoding fluency and accuracy and spelling. Wilson is old school and very teacher directed. Wilson, for me, is boring but useful.
We were doing a spelling activity that entails me saying a sound, sentence or word, the students repeating it and then writing it. Zero room for creative thought or interpretation. No free thinking here. So, it should come as no surprise that after every repetition at least one student would start a conversation as they wrote. One cannot be patient all of the time and last Tuesday, this was driving me crazy.
“Why,” I half snapped, half grumbled, “do you have to have a conversation between every single question?”
Four of the five students feel silent, recognizing that they had just been reprimanded. Down, seated to my left, looked up at me with a smile.
“Because,” she said quietly, “we’re kids.”
P.S. – Live-scorpion-in-the-house count is up to five, after finding a fat black female cruising the walls of my bathroom in the middle of the night earlier this week. Captured and tossed successfully
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Missing Pictures
April 21, 2010
The howler monkeys are back and I could not be more delighted. I’m not sure why I’m so thrilled by the sounds of rumbling indigestion outside my window, but I am.
Mini-Course update: Last Thursday was maybe the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here in Costa Rica, visits from loved ones aside. I remembered my running clothes and ran up to the farm with a handful of kids. They had all decided they were going to run but only about five or six actually ran the whole way. It is wonderful to be with a group of fun, dynamic kids who beg you to do something with them that you love to do anyway. This is the first time in my teaching career that I share common interests with students, and it feels great. Outside of a few books, movies and the Mets back when I had TV access, I never really had many interests in common with my NYC kids.
Arriving at the farm sweaty and happy, we were pleased to learn that this was the long-awaited day: cow milking! And it doesn’t make much sense to milk your cows and not milk the goats at the same time, so we got to do that too. I had learned once how to milk a cow and a goat, probably about ten years ago. Needless to say I did not get the same strong, steady, frothy stream that some did, but I got milk from both cow and goat! The last activity was to wait out the downpour (the first real sign of the rainy season’s arrival – quick, fast, hard afternoon drenching) and feed the baby goats.
************************************************************************************
Now I’d like to share a fun little story that I am choosing (with heroic effort) to put in the Exciting Life Adventures category, instead of the Reasons To Hate My Life in Monteverde category. Last Thursday night as I was sitting on the toilet I looked past the trashcan and saw on the door frame a tan and black splotch. I looked closer and concluded that it was a bundled mess of five or six multi-colored cockroaches, of the type I’d seen when we went to the butterfly garden.
(insert picture)
When I finished my business I moved closer to the mass of roaches and crouched down to get a closer look. Upon closer inspection I realized how far from the truth my initial observation was - I was actually looking at two male scorpions, snuggled together, head to head, I’m assuming for warmth. They may have been, in fact, plotting how to make my life miserable.
(insert picture)
Gross. Why are they so gross? I sighed. Up until that point, I had only seen one scorpion in my house since I arrived last August. Oh yes, plus the one outside on the porch on one of my first days, before I really even know that scorpions were a reality of Monteverde life. I chose the same plan of action last Thursday night as I had on my two previous scorpion-in-the-house encounters: I walked away and pretended to ignore them.
I say pretended to ignore because of course it was the first thing I told Ji that night when he called. Most appalling to him, it seemed, was not the fact that I had two scorpions cuddling in the bathroom, but that I had done nothing about it. I explained that with two of them being perched on the corner of the door frame, capture or extermination seemed uncertain and I didn’t want to piss them off and send them scurrying into another part of the house such as my bedroom, where I was about to snuggle in for the night.
“What’s keeping them from just going into your bedroom during the night anyway?” asked Ji with a laugh.
“Please,” I shot back, “that’s not gonna happen.”
And almost as if I had willed it into being….
I woke up at about 2 a.m. because I had to pee. I hate getting up in the middle of the night, even if it will alleviate the ache, and laid in bed trying to will myself back to sleep. And then I heard a noise. A faint little noise. A clickslap noise.
“Hmm,” I thought. “That sounds a lot like exoskeleton on tile.” Pause. “Nah.”
And then I heard a second noise. A distinct, loud noise. A rustling of the plastic bag in the trash can right next to my bed noise. I sat bolt upright, slammed on the light and there it was: a small, tan and black male scorpion walking around the top edge of my trash can, tail up and claws extended, open and reaching. Luckily, I have a large, heavy knife that I keep unsheathed on my bedside table (that’s another story). I grabbed it and flicked the scorpion into the trashcan.
After my heart stopped pounding I figured I might as well pee since I was now awake and alert. I crept slowly towards the bathroom, knife in hand. I stabbed at the wall a few times with the knife blade in an attempt to turn on the bathroom light. When I finally found success I glanced down, expecting to find only one scorpion, but there were still two in the same place, same tender embrace. After some rapid middle-of-the-night mathematics I came to the unsettling conclusion that there were now THREE LIVE SCORPIONS IN MY HOUSE. Holy. Crap. I didn’t know that they traveled in packs.
At this point in the story, even though I am the main character of this autobiographical tale, I get confused. I had three ugly and poisonous creatures in my house and had captured one. They had shown themselves very capable of coming into my room in the dark and performing acts of great balance and athleticism. I needed a plan of action, so I tied up the trash bag with the scorpion in it, put it in the dining room so I wouldn’t hear the rustling while I tried to sleep, and CRAWLED BACK INTO BED. That’s right, I once again turned my back on the lovebirds. I’m not sure why I thought this was a good idea, but I once again chose to pretend to ignore the situation. Pretend to ignore, because I didn’t try to sleep, but stayed up reading for a least an hour.
When I did finally sleep, it was not very restful. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to capture scorpions. In the morning I awoke to no scorpions in the bathroom and felt half relief (now I really can ignore them!) and half dread (where the hell are they now?). I looked for them with minimal enthusiasm and found them cuddled behind the bathroom door. Poor babies, they had gotten chilled in the night and curled up behind the door for warmth. I wish they had frozen to death. I finally mustered the courage to flick them into a plastic container with my big trusty knife.
(insert picture)
Here they chilled while I showered and got ready for the day. I flung them into the woods on the way to work and tossed their companion in the trash where it will slowly die of starvation and I won’t feel bad about it. Come on, you would have killed at least one also.
Update: This morning at work our Belgium volunteer showed up a few minutes late and looked haggard.
“I killed twenty-one scorpions last night,” she whispered to me during the lesson. “I didn’t sleep very well last night.” I thought I must have misheard.
“Twenty-one?”
She confirmed with a grimace and a nod. She found one in her closet and suspecting company, investigated. She found a mother with her seventeen babies (gag, vomit) and killed them all. She counted them up and added them to the three she had killed earlier that evening, giving her the staggering sum of twenty-one. Later in the day she showed me a picture of them all, laid out neatly on a white background. I almost threw up in my mouth. She wins. I’ll stop complaining.
The howler monkeys are back and I could not be more delighted. I’m not sure why I’m so thrilled by the sounds of rumbling indigestion outside my window, but I am.
Mini-Course update: Last Thursday was maybe the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here in Costa Rica, visits from loved ones aside. I remembered my running clothes and ran up to the farm with a handful of kids. They had all decided they were going to run but only about five or six actually ran the whole way. It is wonderful to be with a group of fun, dynamic kids who beg you to do something with them that you love to do anyway. This is the first time in my teaching career that I share common interests with students, and it feels great. Outside of a few books, movies and the Mets back when I had TV access, I never really had many interests in common with my NYC kids.
Arriving at the farm sweaty and happy, we were pleased to learn that this was the long-awaited day: cow milking! And it doesn’t make much sense to milk your cows and not milk the goats at the same time, so we got to do that too. I had learned once how to milk a cow and a goat, probably about ten years ago. Needless to say I did not get the same strong, steady, frothy stream that some did, but I got milk from both cow and goat! The last activity was to wait out the downpour (the first real sign of the rainy season’s arrival – quick, fast, hard afternoon drenching) and feed the baby goats.
************************************************************************************
Now I’d like to share a fun little story that I am choosing (with heroic effort) to put in the Exciting Life Adventures category, instead of the Reasons To Hate My Life in Monteverde category. Last Thursday night as I was sitting on the toilet I looked past the trashcan and saw on the door frame a tan and black splotch. I looked closer and concluded that it was a bundled mess of five or six multi-colored cockroaches, of the type I’d seen when we went to the butterfly garden.
(insert picture)
When I finished my business I moved closer to the mass of roaches and crouched down to get a closer look. Upon closer inspection I realized how far from the truth my initial observation was - I was actually looking at two male scorpions, snuggled together, head to head, I’m assuming for warmth. They may have been, in fact, plotting how to make my life miserable.
(insert picture)
Gross. Why are they so gross? I sighed. Up until that point, I had only seen one scorpion in my house since I arrived last August. Oh yes, plus the one outside on the porch on one of my first days, before I really even know that scorpions were a reality of Monteverde life. I chose the same plan of action last Thursday night as I had on my two previous scorpion-in-the-house encounters: I walked away and pretended to ignore them.
I say pretended to ignore because of course it was the first thing I told Ji that night when he called. Most appalling to him, it seemed, was not the fact that I had two scorpions cuddling in the bathroom, but that I had done nothing about it. I explained that with two of them being perched on the corner of the door frame, capture or extermination seemed uncertain and I didn’t want to piss them off and send them scurrying into another part of the house such as my bedroom, where I was about to snuggle in for the night.
“What’s keeping them from just going into your bedroom during the night anyway?” asked Ji with a laugh.
“Please,” I shot back, “that’s not gonna happen.”
And almost as if I had willed it into being….
I woke up at about 2 a.m. because I had to pee. I hate getting up in the middle of the night, even if it will alleviate the ache, and laid in bed trying to will myself back to sleep. And then I heard a noise. A faint little noise. A clickslap noise.
“Hmm,” I thought. “That sounds a lot like exoskeleton on tile.” Pause. “Nah.”
And then I heard a second noise. A distinct, loud noise. A rustling of the plastic bag in the trash can right next to my bed noise. I sat bolt upright, slammed on the light and there it was: a small, tan and black male scorpion walking around the top edge of my trash can, tail up and claws extended, open and reaching. Luckily, I have a large, heavy knife that I keep unsheathed on my bedside table (that’s another story). I grabbed it and flicked the scorpion into the trashcan.
After my heart stopped pounding I figured I might as well pee since I was now awake and alert. I crept slowly towards the bathroom, knife in hand. I stabbed at the wall a few times with the knife blade in an attempt to turn on the bathroom light. When I finally found success I glanced down, expecting to find only one scorpion, but there were still two in the same place, same tender embrace. After some rapid middle-of-the-night mathematics I came to the unsettling conclusion that there were now THREE LIVE SCORPIONS IN MY HOUSE. Holy. Crap. I didn’t know that they traveled in packs.
At this point in the story, even though I am the main character of this autobiographical tale, I get confused. I had three ugly and poisonous creatures in my house and had captured one. They had shown themselves very capable of coming into my room in the dark and performing acts of great balance and athleticism. I needed a plan of action, so I tied up the trash bag with the scorpion in it, put it in the dining room so I wouldn’t hear the rustling while I tried to sleep, and CRAWLED BACK INTO BED. That’s right, I once again turned my back on the lovebirds. I’m not sure why I thought this was a good idea, but I once again chose to pretend to ignore the situation. Pretend to ignore, because I didn’t try to sleep, but stayed up reading for a least an hour.
When I did finally sleep, it was not very restful. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to capture scorpions. In the morning I awoke to no scorpions in the bathroom and felt half relief (now I really can ignore them!) and half dread (where the hell are they now?). I looked for them with minimal enthusiasm and found them cuddled behind the bathroom door. Poor babies, they had gotten chilled in the night and curled up behind the door for warmth. I wish they had frozen to death. I finally mustered the courage to flick them into a plastic container with my big trusty knife.
(insert picture)
Here they chilled while I showered and got ready for the day. I flung them into the woods on the way to work and tossed their companion in the trash where it will slowly die of starvation and I won’t feel bad about it. Come on, you would have killed at least one also.
Update: This morning at work our Belgium volunteer showed up a few minutes late and looked haggard.
“I killed twenty-one scorpions last night,” she whispered to me during the lesson. “I didn’t sleep very well last night.” I thought I must have misheard.
“Twenty-one?”
She confirmed with a grimace and a nod. She found one in her closet and suspecting company, investigated. She found a mother with her seventeen babies (gag, vomit) and killed them all. She counted them up and added them to the three she had killed earlier that evening, giving her the staggering sum of twenty-one. Later in the day she showed me a picture of them all, laid out neatly on a white background. I almost threw up in my mouth. She wins. I’ll stop complaining.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Oh yeah, I forgot
1. I'll be in NYC this summer and wanting to have a paying job that does not involve children. If you have any ideas outside of temp agencies and craigslist, please let me know.
2. Ji-Soo came for a visit and it was wonderful. There is nothing better then this:
freshly showered after a few hours of barefoot Frisbee, reading in the hammock with the early afternoon sun. And then he left and I tried to not get sad.
2. Ji-Soo came for a visit and it was wonderful. There is nothing better then this:
freshly showered after a few hours of barefoot Frisbee, reading in the hammock with the early afternoon sun. And then he left and I tried to not get sad.
Farm Master B
Today at meeting a lot of good things happened, but I walked out feeling sad.
Thursday April 8, 2010
Thursday afternoons have become the highlight of my week. This is how today went: At 1:30 after clean - up (a ten minute period where every student in the school is responsible for the cleaning of some part of the school) I met up with my group of kids aged 8-12, one other teacher and two brand new volunteers to walk to Benito's farm and learn farm skills. Each of these 15 kids and the other teacher is pretty fantastic and could constitute their own entry easily.
At the farm we met up with two more volunteers (one is an occupational therapist and has been working with some of my kids - thats a whole other entry, its fascinating stuff!) and their eight year old son and Benito. I like to think of Benito as Farm Master B. To give a taste of how cool he is, he is the one raising the baby sloth and who walked the 13 km walk-a-thon last year on stilts.
Today we divided into three stations:
1. Five kids on a rope swing. The Mother of All Rope Swings. It swings you 30 ft in the air out over the garden.
2. Five kids with me pawing through dirt, which is actually old rabbit poo, hunting for earthworms. When we find the earthworms we put them in a tin can so Farm Master B can put them in the cow manure pile, which it turns out they like better. The pawed through, supposedly but never actually worm free dirt gets put in a bucket and taken to the next station where
3. Five kids are planting fig trees and cauliflower.
I stayed in the earthworm pit away from the black wasps that sting even when not provoked. 16 kids (I know, you're thinking 5 X 3 = 15 but don't forget the OT's son. I don't know what group he ended up in) and seven adults and only one wasp sting today. Poor brand new volunteer. But Farm Master B put some plant on it that made it feel better.
Towards the end the groups started to fall apart as everyone migrated towards the Mother of All Rope Swings and there were some rabbits that had to be fed and cuddled with. Then we headed back to the school. All in all only one kid cried and that's because it was too hot and dusty. I told her to bring a water bottle next time and wondered to myself what she's going to do when the rainy season starts any day now.
I like these people and I like what I'm doing. I like that they were excited to claw through dirt and compare worms and find beetles and suck on bright red coffee beans plucked right off the bush. I like that they rotate without complaints and that only one kid lied about how many turns they'd had on The Mother of All Rope Swings. I like that half of the kids begged me to run with them to the farm and back again and when I said no they pointed to my "Virginia is for runners shirt." I like that Farm Master B is almost organic but uses chemicals to kill ticks.
(Ok all you grumpy "You haven't updated your blog"ers, are you happy now?")
Thursday April 8, 2010
Thursday afternoons have become the highlight of my week. This is how today went: At 1:30 after clean - up (a ten minute period where every student in the school is responsible for the cleaning of some part of the school) I met up with my group of kids aged 8-12, one other teacher and two brand new volunteers to walk to Benito's farm and learn farm skills. Each of these 15 kids and the other teacher is pretty fantastic and could constitute their own entry easily.
At the farm we met up with two more volunteers (one is an occupational therapist and has been working with some of my kids - thats a whole other entry, its fascinating stuff!) and their eight year old son and Benito. I like to think of Benito as Farm Master B. To give a taste of how cool he is, he is the one raising the baby sloth and who walked the 13 km walk-a-thon last year on stilts.
Today we divided into three stations:
1. Five kids on a rope swing. The Mother of All Rope Swings. It swings you 30 ft in the air out over the garden.
2. Five kids with me pawing through dirt, which is actually old rabbit poo, hunting for earthworms. When we find the earthworms we put them in a tin can so Farm Master B can put them in the cow manure pile, which it turns out they like better. The pawed through, supposedly but never actually worm free dirt gets put in a bucket and taken to the next station where
3. Five kids are planting fig trees and cauliflower.
I stayed in the earthworm pit away from the black wasps that sting even when not provoked. 16 kids (I know, you're thinking 5 X 3 = 15 but don't forget the OT's son. I don't know what group he ended up in) and seven adults and only one wasp sting today. Poor brand new volunteer. But Farm Master B put some plant on it that made it feel better.
Towards the end the groups started to fall apart as everyone migrated towards the Mother of All Rope Swings and there were some rabbits that had to be fed and cuddled with. Then we headed back to the school. All in all only one kid cried and that's because it was too hot and dusty. I told her to bring a water bottle next time and wondered to myself what she's going to do when the rainy season starts any day now.
I like these people and I like what I'm doing. I like that they were excited to claw through dirt and compare worms and find beetles and suck on bright red coffee beans plucked right off the bush. I like that they rotate without complaints and that only one kid lied about how many turns they'd had on The Mother of All Rope Swings. I like that half of the kids begged me to run with them to the farm and back again and when I said no they pointed to my "Virginia is for runners shirt." I like that Farm Master B is almost organic but uses chemicals to kill ticks.
(Ok all you grumpy "You haven't updated your blog"ers, are you happy now?")
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Trying to be good about updates
My family came to visit and we went to Volcano Arenal. And then I updated my blog and didn't know how to turn off the underlining.
This was the view from my and Mary's room. It's super rare to actually get to see the volcano so we lucked out with two really clear days.
So cool. We got to hear it rumble and see it throw down debris. Yes, it is still active. Interesting bit of data: In 1968 the volcano erupted. Less then 90 people died but 45,000 cattle were killed.
Volcano at sunset.
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