Us on the couch at my house
Canopy tour in Monteverde
Bulls on the beach in Playa Samara
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Hellooo,
This past month has been SUPER busy. Started off with a 2-day visit from 8 trainees who came to observe my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer and to get to know an actual Peace Corps community and how it varies from where they are living right now (in bigger communities for training). Then my dear mother came for a fabulous weeklong visit! We went to Monteverde and then Playa Samara and then came back to my site for about a day and a half. Monteverde was fabulous apart from the treacherous drive up which gave us a flat tire thanks to the unpaved river bead like roads. While in Monteverde we went to the serpentarium, took a tour of the Monteverde cheese-making factory, ate Monteverde brand ice cream 2x a day, and went to visit the women’s artisan cooperative CASEM. This is a cooperative of about 150 women artists who all have united to sell their products in the same store. Perhaps the thing that Monteverde is most known for is the canopy tours, which is a series of zip line cables strung through the forst. Monteverde is great for this because it is up high in the cloud forest and there are plenty of mountains and valleys. We did a canopy tour that included 15 cables, a brief rappelling experience and a torturous tarzan swing (of which mom and I were the only two to opt out thank you very much). The longest of the 15 zip line cables was 750 meters long and felt like 5,000 feet up. In all it was an amazing experience; I recommend that everyone do a canopy tour once in their life and all the better if you can be in Monteverde to do it.
After Monteverde we continued on to Playa Samara, which is in Guanacaste out on the Nicoya Peninsula. The beach was exactly what I needed, relaxing and beautiful. We stayed in a great hotel across the street from the beach and spent the days just laying on the beach reading and swimming. One day we went to the nearby Playa Carillo which was also breathtaking.
Finally, we headed back to my site so she could see where I live and get a taste of what my life is like. The first night here was the last night of the environmental festival that my town has each year. We went to see an event with bulls. We thought it would be a bull riding competition but instead it was more like a bull torturing event. A bull would be released into the ring without anyone riding it and whoever wanted to mess around with the bull could jump down into the rink and kick it, pull its tail, try to touch its horns, etc. There were only about 6 bulls that were released with people riding it. I think just about everyone and their mother commented about how little time my mom was going to be spending in my site. ¨Just two days???!!! Why cant she come for a month!!??¨ hmmm…
After my mom left I received another visit from a trainee but this time it was just one girl. The objectives of her visit were the same as those of the bigger group. The only difference was that she was here for more time and it was on an individual basis….the idea is that it was a more intense version of the group visit.
Project ideas are continuously coming to me but I have to be careful about which ideas to pursue. Everything here just seems to take so much more time. Not only economically and resource wise but also just culturally. Realizing that 7 months has already gone by makes me freak out a bit because I don’t feel like I´ll be able to accomplish the things I want to before I leave. When an idea comes to me I have to calculate the amount of time it would take to do it in the US and then add about 2 months and see if it still seems worth pursuing. Not EVERYTHING is like this but for the most part.
As of right now, some new things I am doing are:
- Starting a new English class (this time with a different program and stricter classroom rules and attendance policy dammit!)
- Starting a basic computer class for adults where I will teach them how to use Word.
- Painting a map of the world on the outside wall of a building in the elementary schools with the 6th graders.
- Doing a cost analysis with the womens group that makes souvenirs out of bamboo. They have been setting their prices using only fairly educated guesses. We will be calculating what it costs them to make their different products so that they can start to add the % of profit they want to make as a group.
Ok, must go!
Love you all!
Emily
This past month has been SUPER busy. Started off with a 2-day visit from 8 trainees who came to observe my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer and to get to know an actual Peace Corps community and how it varies from where they are living right now (in bigger communities for training). Then my dear mother came for a fabulous weeklong visit! We went to Monteverde and then Playa Samara and then came back to my site for about a day and a half. Monteverde was fabulous apart from the treacherous drive up which gave us a flat tire thanks to the unpaved river bead like roads. While in Monteverde we went to the serpentarium, took a tour of the Monteverde cheese-making factory, ate Monteverde brand ice cream 2x a day, and went to visit the women’s artisan cooperative CASEM. This is a cooperative of about 150 women artists who all have united to sell their products in the same store. Perhaps the thing that Monteverde is most known for is the canopy tours, which is a series of zip line cables strung through the forst. Monteverde is great for this because it is up high in the cloud forest and there are plenty of mountains and valleys. We did a canopy tour that included 15 cables, a brief rappelling experience and a torturous tarzan swing (of which mom and I were the only two to opt out thank you very much). The longest of the 15 zip line cables was 750 meters long and felt like 5,000 feet up. In all it was an amazing experience; I recommend that everyone do a canopy tour once in their life and all the better if you can be in Monteverde to do it.
After Monteverde we continued on to Playa Samara, which is in Guanacaste out on the Nicoya Peninsula. The beach was exactly what I needed, relaxing and beautiful. We stayed in a great hotel across the street from the beach and spent the days just laying on the beach reading and swimming. One day we went to the nearby Playa Carillo which was also breathtaking.
Finally, we headed back to my site so she could see where I live and get a taste of what my life is like. The first night here was the last night of the environmental festival that my town has each year. We went to see an event with bulls. We thought it would be a bull riding competition but instead it was more like a bull torturing event. A bull would be released into the ring without anyone riding it and whoever wanted to mess around with the bull could jump down into the rink and kick it, pull its tail, try to touch its horns, etc. There were only about 6 bulls that were released with people riding it. I think just about everyone and their mother commented about how little time my mom was going to be spending in my site. ¨Just two days???!!! Why cant she come for a month!!??¨ hmmm…
After my mom left I received another visit from a trainee but this time it was just one girl. The objectives of her visit were the same as those of the bigger group. The only difference was that she was here for more time and it was on an individual basis….the idea is that it was a more intense version of the group visit.
Project ideas are continuously coming to me but I have to be careful about which ideas to pursue. Everything here just seems to take so much more time. Not only economically and resource wise but also just culturally. Realizing that 7 months has already gone by makes me freak out a bit because I don’t feel like I´ll be able to accomplish the things I want to before I leave. When an idea comes to me I have to calculate the amount of time it would take to do it in the US and then add about 2 months and see if it still seems worth pursuing. Not EVERYTHING is like this but for the most part.
As of right now, some new things I am doing are:
- Starting a new English class (this time with a different program and stricter classroom rules and attendance policy dammit!)
- Starting a basic computer class for adults where I will teach them how to use Word.
- Painting a map of the world on the outside wall of a building in the elementary schools with the 6th graders.
- Doing a cost analysis with the womens group that makes souvenirs out of bamboo. They have been setting their prices using only fairly educated guesses. We will be calculating what it costs them to make their different products so that they can start to add the % of profit they want to make as a group.
Ok, must go!
Love you all!
Emily
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
