Pen Pals

Swing on over to my World Wise Schools blog for a video of a pen pal correspondence struck up between Limon 2000 and a middle school in the Bronx.

Pura Vida

The Valley

Below is a story I wrote for our in-country volunteer publication, La Cadena. 

The Valley

 “…just like the cholos in Talamanca.”

                I grow flush with frustration, but it’s not like she’s going to notice.  How is my Spanish ever going to improve if my own host family doesn’t let me speak?  For three weeks I bided my time, waiting for this very vacuum:  an empty corredor, a silent TV, no one but Doña Ivonne and me pushing around the humid air with our breaths.  As important as the Spanish practice was, sharing my story of the Peace Corps Guinea evacuation was the real reason I waited so long.  It’s a huge part of my recent past.  It’s why I’m here, in her house, serving her community.  Shouldn’t she be interested?  Four sentences:  Ramadan, Muslims fasting through daylight hours, us volunteers sneaking lunch so not to offend, the communal eating style.  I made it to four sentences this time, probably a record.  Her eyes were glazing over even before she interjected.   Am I that boring?  Or is it the years of blaring telenovelas?  They must’ve sapped her interest in anything but Doña Bella’s latest exploits, or at least her attention sp…

                “They eat from the same bowl.  When I worked in the Valle, they used to come down from the mountain once a month, carrying a hollowed out husk to share between them whatever drink we’d serve.” 

                …or maybe that well of hardship is so deep that any faulty step—any misfired word—sends her tumbling back into sixty years of memories.  Think about what Nisha just wrote in her letter:  “…90% of my day is spent listening to people talk.  Everyone likes to tell their story, and I’m letting them.”  This woman is scrolling through a whole chapter of her past.  So let her. 

                “Wait, Doña Ivonne, you lived in the Valle de la Estrella?”

                “Fifteen years.  I worked there on a bananera.”

                “Were you with Don Carlos back then?”

                “No, this was way back aooouuuuuuuuuuu, right after I separated from my first husband.  We had been living in Guácimo.  His father would beat me and demand coffee; and he’d beat me again if he didn’t get it.  My husband did nothing to stop it.  He already wanted out at that time.  So we split.  I took Ananías and Roberto with me to the Valle and started working on a bananera.  There my neighbor Estela took care of the boys while I was gone in the fields, bless her heart, for I was out there for hours on end. 

                “Anyway, the indigenous tribes came down about once a month.  The men usually congregated at the only cantina in town.  The women would pass from house to house, demanding what they saw.  They carried what they claimed in these beautifully colored textiles that hung from their heads down their backs.  We’d hide what we could; but if I had left a shirt out on the line to dry and a woman liked it, she would point to it, waiting…”

                “And you gave it?”

                “Yeah we gave it.” 

                “Everyone just gave away their belongings?  I imagine there were some pleitos, people who didn’t want to give up their stuff.” 

                “No, actually.  It was quite tranquilo.  We did it out of respect—respect  and fear.  We were afraid of them.  Those who refused or who didn’t offer a meal would come down with a bout of bad luck or an illness.  They’d hex you.  So I’d always cook up a pile of arepas and coffee.  They’d gather in a circle.  The coffee would go into the husk and get passed around, and they’d divide everything equally between them.  Once the arepas were gone, they’d move to the next house and sit again in a circle.

                “One day, as the groups were joining back together to leave, a woman and man returned to my house.  He was older, and I could tell he was important.  He motioned me to come with them.  I was hesitant, but he wouldn’t leave.  When he pinched his fingers together and held them to his mouth, I realized they were inviting me to dinner!  I was afraid and excited all at once.  Estela took the kids for the night, and I set off with the group up the Talamanca mountains for what seemed like an eternity. 

                “The paths thinned until we were putting one foot in front of the other just to keep from falling into the monte.  Finally, it opened up at the top of a hill.  There was a small hamlet in the clearing, but let me tell you not one of the homes was more than a handful of sticks holding up a roof of banana leaves.  There weren’t even walls.  Still, you wouldn’t believe how well swept a dirt floor could be until you saw one of these homes with your very eyes.

                “The largest of them was like their salón communal. There the women were preparing dinner in an enormous clay pot with three legs, shoving leña underneath.  Everything—absolutely everything—was getting thrown in.  Yucca, banana, plantains…they even slaughtered a pig and threw him in piece by piece, bones and all.  A group of men was just outside preparing the chicha.  Up to five of them shuffled around the pot at the same time, stomping the life out of the corn in a beautiful rhythm.  Finally, they covered it, saved it for another day to drink.  

“Everyone gathered around the clay pot once the sun had set.  I couldn’t concentrate for the silence. They were all looking at me.  Their knees pulled close to their chests, they waited for me to help myself, but I just couldn’t.  We stayed that way for a couple minutes, me just waiting for someone else to spare me of this anxiety and make a move.  Finally, an elderly woman reached over and grabbed my wrist, dropping my hand into the stew.  Plao!  All at once the pot was filled with hands reaching for their share.  And no wonder:  it was absolutely delicious.  When we could see the bottom of the pot the chicha started getting passed around. 

                “Except for the youngest girls, everyone was drinking from thin, dried out gourds.  An old woman grabbed an empty one with three fingers, dipping it into the vat until it filled to the top.  ‘Tome,’ she said.  I told her I didn’t drink.  ‘Tome o no se va,’ she answered.  It was then that I tried to head home on my own.   I stepped outside.  The moon was out, and I could see that there wasn’t just one path leading from the house, but what seemed like dozens fanning in every direction.  I picked one and started out.  Five minutes later I was back at the village, having made a loop without even knowing it.   There was no way I was going to find my way back.  So I went back inside and reached for the chicha that was still awaiting me, plugged my nose, and swallowed it all.  Oh man did my stomach start churning!  The woman didn’t make me drink more, for which I was thankful, because it took an effort to keep it down. 

                “After I drank the chicha the older women warmed up to me a lot.  They were very curious about me and of very good humor.  Through the one man who knew Spanish we shared our stories and jokes, pantomiming most of the time.  And that’s how the night wound down, with us laughing ourselves to exhaustion as we retired one by one to the hammocks hanging in the moonlight on the hill.”

Meet My Friend the Missionary

As our bus pulled out of the Caribeños terminal, Bec and I continued our discussion that was bound for all the gaps that eight months and 2500 miles create.  We started on the TUASA bus that had brought us from the airport to the center of San José, and walked to a rather touristy soda to sample a traditional tico casado:  rice, beans, fried plantain, a leg of a bodybuilder hen, salad, and a fresco.  They even warmed us up with olla de carne, the closest tico food to American vegetable soup, but with half a cow thrown in for flavoring.

Between the coffee stop near the Teatro Nacional and the nauseating turns of our next bus winding its way to Limón, we began filling in a lot of those gaps.  At one point Becky continued, “…and when they ask me, I just say, ‘He’s doing--uh--community development.’”  In that glorious moment when I had the stage to elucidate my accomplishments in Limón 2000, I deferred to silence.  Awkward, guilty silence.   How do I explain that, despite being a half year into this adventure, I’m still devoting the bulk of my energy to breaking inertia?

 When a stranger asks me the same question  I usually fall back on explaining the three objectives of the Children, Youth, and Families (CYF) program and examples of successful projects for each.  Be it my sustained deficiency in the Spanish language or just a general failure to get the point across, the end result usually is a nodding tico saying, “Oh, I see.”  On our next encounter the same individual will introduce me to another with, “Meet my friend Kevin the missionary.  Kevin, which church did you say you belonged to?”   

But Becky is my sister, someone to whom I’ve spoken several times since swearing  in as a volunteer last May.  We’ve talked about struggles, about my day-to-day, about people.  Still, it was a shock to me that even my own family couldn’t articulate my role as a volunteer with nothing more than her own inquisitive stab.  Beneath my pause on the bus was a lot of pent-up stress.   I’ll save that discussion for another day, since describing my job in theory merits its own bit of time. 

At its highest altitude, the Peace Corps mission promotes three main goals:

1.      Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.

2.      Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

3.      Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

The cross-cultural elements that the second and third goals  imply are quite naturally a byproduct of our being in a foreign country living with a foreign family.  Every single day we walk through our communities under a microscopic of cultural analysis, and every phone call back home carries with it an element of comprehension on the part of those receiving the call.  There are measures to gauge how much we’re doing to promote understanding of Americans (Goal 2) and bring the culture back home (Goal 3).  For example, Peace Corps has set up a wonderful program titled World Wise Schools that connects a volunteer with a specific classroom in the States.  Still, despite the Peace Corps’ efforts to boost the importance of these two goals, they often fall into the background noise.  Emphasis, as one may assume, is unequivocally placed on Goal One. 

Here in Costa Rica we have three main projects:  Rural Community Development (RCD), Community Economic Development (CED), and Children, Youth and Families (CYF).  That is to say each program has its own specific Goal One purpose, CYF’s being:

Children Youth and Families living in difficult environments are empowered with the education, skills, and resources necessary to guarantee their rights under the Convention of the Rights of the Child, and to assume positive roles in the healthy development of their own lives, of their communities, and in the world of work. 

Kindergarten students pose outside before heading to lunch

That’s a mouthful.  When measuring outcomes and reporting, we tend to break it down even further, stating that Children Youth and Families in our communites will: 

1. Increase and apply life skills and healthy living practices to be better equipped to meet life’s challenges – e.g. sports clubs, life skills workshops, cooking classes, children’s rights workshops, scout programs
2. Be active citizens, trained to engage in voluntary service and development activities in their communities – e.g. service days, service learning projects, fundraisers, recycling programs
3. Be prepared with the academic and professional formation needed to succeed in the world of work – e.g. tutoring, English classes, study skills workshops, linking youth with working professionals, world map project.

Dig deeper and you’ll find sub-objectives and outcome indicators that further divide the CYF project's objectives.  I’ve spared you the details and instead listed a few examples of what sort of activity would fall under each category.  With such broad objectives pretty much anything we do can be lumped into at least one of the above.  The range of potential projects can be rather overwhelming.  In an ideal world they would strike a small area of overlap, between the goals of our Peace Corps program, our own personal skills, and the wants and needs of our individual community. 

And how do I determine what my community wants and needs?  My first three months at site were devoted to nothing more than performing a community assessment, which involved document reviews, interviews, personal observations, surveys, and focus groups.  All this information was compiled into a document that identifies the available resources in the barrio, its needs, and the available opportunities for development.  Our program’s focus is obviously on children and youth, so most sections (e.g. health, education, available in-community resources) attempt to also focus on need or opportunity from a youth perspective. 

Despite its hiccups and snags, the process was actually quite enjoyable.  It was an excuse to get out and meet other people in the community, as well as a structured scavenger hunt of facts that will eventually help us with our work.  Limón 2000 has an interesting history.  I probably never would have learned it had I not had an excuse to be so necio, to dig deeper and deeper into someone's past.  I’ll do a little story-telling in the future, but I’d rather not break up this dry, uninspiring entry with something exciting.  It’ll wreck my flow. 

The challenges presented themselves in the expected places.  Finding where valuable information was hidden—if it existed—required a lot of perseverance; and even if I was pointed in the right direction, my Spanish often prevented me from pulling the thread entirely.  There had to have been countless times when  a fact was given or a sound opinion offered, and I just didn’t grasp it for lack of vocabulary or the strain of a sustained conversation in a foreign language.  School documents tended to be heavily opinion-based, and extracting statistics from them proved to be more of a mining activity than strictly a ‘take it for its word’ one. 

Hardest of all was breaking down the myriad conversations into a comprehensible set of paragraphs that reflected the neighborhood’s viewpoint on various social issues.  It seemed that every topic had those with opinions on both extremes.  Teenage pregnancy?  “Not a problem!” says my counterpart.  “We held a number of workshops in the past to address this issue and have seen a significant reduction.  The only pregnancies in the colegio have to do with girls from outside of Limón 2000.”  Says the Catholic priest, “Last year there were eighteen teenage pregnancies in the barrio.”   Laughably, in just the following week a girl was rushed out of school with early labor pangs, collapsing in the street as she was trying to make her way home.  My counterpart drove her to the hospital. 

So why such a broad range of opinion?  I’m still trying to figure that one out.  Obviously teen pregnancy can’t be simultaneously a non-existent issue and a rampant social issue plaguing the barrio.  Violence and crime in Limón 2000 can’t be both receding  and as bad as they ever have been.  Neither is there a contrast in socioeconomic status between one side of the barrio to the other, which might explain broad shifts in opinion.  Are people lying to me, then? 

Unfortunately, dishonesty does turn out to be an element of the equation.  While reviewing a list of interview questions for a house-to-house survey, my counterpart advised me to cut certain questions that were unlikely to elicit an honest response.  These questions mostly had to do with food or available resources to the family.  “They’re going to lie,” she said.  “They’re going to exaggerate their situation because they think you might be able to offer them handouts in the future.”  This is quite true, as Limón 2000 has a rather heavy dependency on subsidies, scholarships, and other forms of assistance.  The event at my school that draws the largest crowd is always the day when IMAS comes in to take applications for becas, a monthly paycheck the government hands out for schoolchildren living with a single parent or in an economically depressed household.  

Entrance to Limón 2000

In the early days of my time in Limón 2000 I was skittish about walking around on my own.  This is obviously a natural response for a foreigner in a new environment, but it turned into a complex for me.  Limón 2000 has a reputation in Costa Rica for being a rough neighborhood.  Even a few months in, after I had gotten to know my fair share of people, I continued to struggle with my own perception of personal safety.  Where is that line?  Where’s the split between paranoia and precaution, and how much am I compromising my early task of integrating into the community by stressing about it so much? 

Part of that internal struggle had to do with conversations with my host mom.  It’s one thing to tell me, “Take off your watch, because you don’t want to be wearing anything that calls attention to yourself,” and another to say, “Don’t go running in [neighboring  community] Río Blanco.  You’re going to get jumped or shot.”  I felt I had no choice but err toward self-preservation early on.  But as time wore on I realized that Doña Ivonne’s tales of gloom and doom were often extreme extrapolations of a very compressed past.  For example, a gringo getting jumped on the road to Río Blanco in 1998 equates to a present danger today. 

More fitting than ‘lie’ might be the phrase ‘liberal exaggeration’ or ‘filling in the gaps’.  I can’t blame Doña Ivonne for being a little overprotective of someone for whom she feels personal responsibility, nor is my counterpart’s case (denying the presence of teenage pregnancy in the school ) a behavior isolated to tico culture.  In the U.S. we also seek to legitimize our hard work; we also pray that our backward glances will verify forward movement.  But it’s frustrating as a foreigner to sift through all of these declarations, especially when my assignment for the first three months was to collect facts.  And, as an overwhelming majority of volunteers will attest, facts can be pretty hard to come by in this country.  For example, the sergeant at the local branch of the Fuerza Pública (police) pointed me to the Limón headquarters for crime stats in my neighborhood.  So I decided to take the bus into town and ask if a document existed that captured this information.   I was advised to consult the Organismo de Investigacion Judicial (think FBI) down the street.  An hour in the waiting room later the desk clerk at the OIJ called me forward and explained that I’d need to speak with the police to find that specific information.  How about those teenage pregnancy stats?  Every local health clinic is required to create an annual statistical report…except ours, apparently.  And Doña Ivonne’s knowledge of goings-on in the barrio is generally limited to her communicating with a handful of adults who come over to visit; the opposite rarely, if ever, occurs.  

Absence of fact begets greater dependence on personal opinion.  I guess that’s the absurd conclusion I’ve reached at this point.  But does it really make a difference?  All one has to do is walk through the neighborhood to sense the social problems that exist:  to see the dilapidated steps of a house, to smell the pot smoke and the raw sewage as they course their way through the streets, to feel the eyes of the out-of-school youth on your back as you pass.  Still, I’m feeling more and more comfortable here.  It’s not facts that have created that increased comfort; and it won’t be facts that convince my host mom that leaving the house more and participating in the community will heighten her own sense of security. 

The Difference Between Moi and Mí

In Bodié I rarely faced the question, “What are you doing here?  Information traveled fast, to the extent that villagers from my town knew Peace Corps was evacuating before I even opened my mouth.  If someone was just curious to talk with the new white villager and pose the question, the answer rarely required a follow-up.  I was going to be teaching physics at the collége, 7^th grade through 10^th.  Everything from my schedule to my social status was fixed to this response.   Even our service assumed a certain rigidity.  By the second week our ‘projects’ were literally sitting in our laps, in the form of the national curriculum.  Our performance as teachers—all external influences aside—translated directly into the discrete acquisition of knowledge and problem-solving ability by our students.  Test results were a poor measure, as cheating was rampant.  Adult greed further complicated matters.  While in Mali I had the pleasure of meeting Bonnie, the previous volunteer in Bodié.  On mentioning the school’s principal, Monsieur Bangora, her smile curled in disgust.  The man was notorious for making ‘family visits’ the week before grades were issued, especially to the houses of the poorer-performing students.  

The huge contrast between Guinean school teacher and Costa Rican youth development volunteer began the moment I accepted the position.  I was still volunteering in Peru at the time and quickly found that the answer to, “What are you going to be doing?” didn't fit nearly as easily into a concise sentence.  What exactly was I going to be doing?  Included in our welcome package was a ‘CYF Project Framework’, which outlined the overall purpose of the program; but the generality of these goals was a huge deviation from, “Students should be able to identify the composition of white light,” or, “Students should be able to use Ohm’s law to derive the amperage of a circuit, given its overall voltage and resistance.” 

Back to Peru.  I remember a few times sitting in the kitchen waiting on ratatouille, crêpes, or whatever the frenchies were cooking up, just wondering what the heck I would be doing 7-8 months down the road.  We discussed it a few times, I’m sure; but I don’t know if I ever actually envisioned anything.  I was too busy trying to find my footing on this shrinking island of French and simultaneously immerse myself in the language I would embrace for the next two-plus years.  And we all seemed to be warding off sickness; a bacteria could  knock you down like we were just thrown backwards into the ring for a blink with a heavyweight.  Bam!  Three days and 5 pounds gone, bouncing like a oddly-weighted pinball between the bathroom and the bed.  

Whenever they asked about Costa Rica, I’d flash back to the day Sidiki sat me down in the Mali volunteer training center.  He showed me a slideshow video put together by a group of stateside high schoolers he worked with for Courts for Kids, a national program that sends kids to other countries to help put up a basketall court.  Sidiki (Adam) was a Costa Rica CYF volunteer before signing up for another round in Guinea, and I imagine his electric personality served him equally on both sides of the Atlantic; they still talk about him here, three years later.  We were all so drained from evacuation—hearts so heavy, swaying back and forth from hope to hopelessness every morning we'd receive a new Guinea political briefing from Diouldé—we were willing to grasp onto anything that didn’t crumble before our eyes in a few hours.  I remember that brief time with Sidiki as the first time my heart leaped for anything other than the remote chance of re-entering Guinea.  The idea didn’t even require his boundless enthusiasm.  I was sold.  

Later on came the gut check.  I had started showing serious interest in the program while in one of the most challenging times of my life.  Was it really prudent to have been making such serious decisions when I was just trying to make sense of this  evacuation?  Guess everyone else is doing it.  (Well Kev, if everyone decided to join pagne-smugglers on a 50-hour international bus ride, would…YES!!!)  Amidst the kids in Ayacucho my reactions were mixed.  Some weeks weighed heavy.  The clock moved a little slower as I settled further into the routine.  The diapers grew a little stinkier.  Some days we were nothing more than babysitting, which gave me a sharp reminder of exactly what I didn’t want to be doing.  Whenever someone would ask about Costa Rica, I’d just answer, “Not sure.  Prob something like we’re doing here but at a higher level,” i.e. planning on the larger-scale for the kids rather than making sure they all washed the scraps of picadillo off their plate after dinner.  Looking back, I realize how much of a gem Adeline was.  Another frenchy, she had spent eight months at La Casa de Los Gorriones, and the way the kids listened to her and respected her was an example of what structured attention can bring you when applied with care to a youth.   But that’s just scratching the surface.  She was inexhaustible, diving into everything from Sunday discussion groups to planning a freaking series of rock concerts in Lima.

And how priceless were some of those moments that erupted from interminable hours with the kids.  “Pira-TA!  Pira-TA!,” Eberson would scream spontaneously, his underdeveloped legs gracing every step in the orphanage from memory, even as he dangled from our arms.  Finally, we get to the merry-go-round where he’d spend the rest of the week if he could so choose.  Where we going Eberson?  “¡Vamos a Li-ma!”  Woosh, off he goes spinning, the centrifugal force tilting his smile to the sky. 
   

…or, how about our favorite pastime of asking little precocious Chino to show us his gut.  “Chino!  Show us your gut!”  He was a skinny kid, but his stomach was trained to expand beyond a normal 3-yr-old’s, for he ate like he was prepping to take on Joey Chestnut in Coney Island next July 4.  The kid had a will.  On New Year’s we had a little party for the kids and served homemade snacks.  Their gauge needles wiggling in the red, you couldn’t keep the little buggers off the ceiling (nor the popcorn off the floor) as they ‘partied with the big kids’.  At one point Em sits down on a bed pushed up against the wall.  Chino’s curled up like some virus’s got him good. 

“Chino, what’s up, my man?  Why aren’t you dancing?” 

“Nooooooo pueeeeeeedoooo.”  I can’t, he answers in a moan, rolling over in pain to face her.  Soon the source of the ailment presents itself, a fistful of unfinished french fries still clutched in his right hand.  The three-year-old was determined to defy the physics of a full belly.

“Chino!  Show us your gut!”  He’d run up to a couple feet  from you and lift up his shirt, and man could he pop that belly out like he was in his 3^rd trimester, proud of the bébé, smiling wide and slapping on both sides like a bongo until someone caught the beat and joined along…and just when we thought he couldn’t squeal any louder with joy we’d pick him up and blow so hard on his stomach that you could hear the fart sound from the volunteer house down the road.     

I feel a little guilty here that I haven’t even scraped together what a bunch of young, penniless volunteers had done in Ayacucho after having just spent a few weeks there.  But I must also remind myself that’s somewhat of a false memory.  They had a staff of full-time adults, and a system for the volunteers to easily plug in and out of.    Hell, we were an army at one point, hitting 20 around New Years.  And we mustn’t forget to subtract the bureaucracy of day-long meetings here in Costa Rica, and getting stuck in holes with the interdisciplinary team just talking and talking and talking.  Here, unless we’re tailing a previous volunteer, it feels much more like being dropped upside-down into a pool—which, if one scrolls back to Dec/Jan timeframe, was exactly what I was hoping for when I accepted my post here.  Oh, how things change when you realize the green grass on the other side is there because it rains so damn much.  

Even today, after over a month in Limón 2000, I sit with no concrete vision of my future work here in the barrio.  It sounds frustrating and often is.  But much of our pre-service training was geared to prepare us for this reality of development work.  Especially here in a Latin culture, forming relationships trumps any organizational abilities one might have in the early going.  Very few people are going to move a finger for you if you dive in without asking about the family or accepting cafecito.  So how, then, does ‘work’ translate?  For three months my primary objectives are to build trust among members of the community and gather information.  At the end of this period my group of new volunteers heads to San Jose for another week of training, at which point we’re expected to hand in a Community Assessment Tool (CAT), or the culmination of all this fact-finding.   More on that later.  For now, here’s the ‘day in the life’ stuff:

It’s 5:45.  Don Carlos and Doña Ivonne have already been up for at least a half hour by this point, preparing cafecito and strapping up for Don Carlos’s 6 a.m. departure to whichever location in Limón is currently demanding construction.  I roll out of bed and unconsciously scratch out the damage of whatever snuck under/through the mosquito net the night before. 

“Buenos días.  ¿Cómo amaneció?” settles in my ears the moment I enter the kitchen.  How did I wake?  Doesn’t matter, the correct response is, ‘Fine, and you?’  If I had been mauled by pumas in my room the night before, that news comes later; but it has no place interrupting this regular sequence of morning pleasantries.  And as far as I’m concerned, it can now wait for the remainder of the ritual.  My café’s already waiting on the counter.  Doña Ivonne’s almost finished slicing open the belly of a baguette and handing me a piece with a slab of fresh Turrialba cheese.  Don Carlos finishes preparing his lunch, usually fried pork cutlets, and we make our way out to the corredor to watch the rest of the neighborhood wake up.  This is my favorite time of day, when no telenovela or regatón music blemishes the cool morning air.  Just an older couple and their foster son conversing between sips and bites.  In a blink Don Carlos has popped into the house and is back out on the corredor, work boots in hand.  He’s already donned his red, flat brimmed baseball cap and teal button-down shirt.  Now he sits, picking the rocks out of the grooves in the soles, tossing them one by one out the porch window.  

An added benefit of waking early is that I’ll have my breakfast half-digested before arriving at the RECOPE’s polideportivo.  I’m lucky enough to have a free gym within a short bus ride, and on weekdays I try to make it through the front gate by seven so I can be back in time to attend whatever activities are planned at the school.  One hour is often not long enough to keep rice, beans, fried sausage, and coffee from tumbling around on an early run, but I’m thankful for the opportunity to at least keep them from turning into a spare tire around my waist.

The walk to the school is only about five minutes.  Just inside the gate is the office of the Equipo Interdisciplinario (EID), a standard team that functions much like a guidance counselor’s office in the States.  My community counterpart, Ada, serves full-time as the team’s planificadora economica y social.  Combined with informally attending to discipline and family issues among students, Ada’s job is largely to organize and plan projects for the school.  The majority of her recent work has been in support of a push for a community recycling program.  Today I arrive in time to tag along on a taller (pron. tahy-YEHR) to teach a small group of 5-7 year-olds how to recognize recyclable plastic and what to do with it.  An overwhelming emphasis is being placed on the ‘reuse’ element of the equation, with Ada holding up items as fragile as an old plastic bag that used to hold beans and asking how it could be used again.  One kid raised his hand eagerly and shouted out, “…to hold more beans!”  Still, the kids left the room thinking about plastic’s staying power in the environment and its potential to be used again.  The meeting also illustrated a trait I had almost completely forgot about in children:  when comfortable, they’re full of unbridled honesty.  As Ada held up a plastic Ziploc baggy, one excited girl volunteered, “My mom fills those with milk and takes them to my brother in jail!”

Early on I tried to use my time at the school for document review.  A number of annual reports and three-year plans are stuffed into an upright bin in the office.  Required information, format, and span seem to have been left largely at the discretion of whoever put the document together.  Regardless, they’ve proven to be great resources for piecing together Limón 2000’s past.  After reviewing one I generally come to the office charged with a list questions for Ada, who after twelve years working in the community knows about as much about its history as many of its oldest residents.  Finding a moment to ask the questions has been the real challenge.  The EID office is always open—except for the lunch hour, you don’t mess with the lunch hour—and it’s rare to not find at least one or two kids inside.  They pop in for any and every reason.  Early on they came with excuses to enter, just for a closer look at the new gringo.  The shy ones paused by the windows until they’d catch my eye or muster the courage of a group to shout, “Hey-lo!”  A regular bunch makes a point to come in almost every day.  Ada has been a steady presence in their lives ever since the first time they entered the school.  For some this daily visit is more than an exchange of greetings; it’s an opportunity for them to cultivate a routine that might not exist outside the guarded school gates.

By three or four I’m usually saying my goodbyes and headed home.  Afternoons are quite random, their one consistency being a cup of coffee on the corredor.   There I usually take advantage of the heat to get some studying done before the zancudos—like mosquitos, but much faster and infinitely more cunning—stage their ambush.  Pirula is usually yawning her way out of a day-long nap and pacing the patches where the sun slices through the rebar rocking chair.  Soon she’ll be stretched out across my lap, purring herself back into the dream world.   

All this changes if I catch whiff of a mejenga.  Some days I can’t turn a corner in the school without another kid asking, “Are you going to play?  You’re coming, right?”  Even if my evening is filled, there’s no escaping a commitment.  “OK then, we’re playing tomorrow.”  Of all the training we received on community integration and info-gathering, nothing I do in these initial months will have a larger effect than bola.  Stuffed between two baseball countries, soccer reigns here in Costa Rica.  Kids too young to make their way to a field are kicking whatever they find over the packed dirt in front of their houses.  With cross streets often too narrow and uneven to accommodate anything other than an achy car crawling to rest, street games of two to six kids surge from start to finish.  I continue on to the deepest corner of the neighborhood, where a small cancha rests in back of the Salvation Army.  A regular mix of kids attends these games, so I’m slowly picking away at names I still don’t know.  They’re usually between eight and thirteen-years-old, so I also stand half a chance to make up for any footwork mistakes by just running my fanny back into position.  After a half hour or so, boredom has usurped any earlier semblance of organization.  What once was a a ball game has quickly devolved into a free-for-all, with trips and pushes having replaced strategy.  It’s still all in fun, but more often at this point kids are just standing around as one of them goes off into the brush to track down the ball he just carelessly sent sailing.  

Around six a muffled, two-note phrrr-phrEER!  comes from just outside the house.  “¡Voy!”  comes booming from the kitchen.  The tinker and bang of thin pots continue for 5-10 more seconds, followed by Doña Ivonne shuffling for the portón, keys in hand.  The fussy padlock rattles in place a moment, and then  the two of them are heading into the house.  Don Carlos plods  through his few remaining steps of exhaustion before kicking off the evening ritual:  off with the shirt, off with the boots, in goes the cigarette, up goes the volume.  Soon, cheap tobacco and even cheaper telenovela dialogue are wafting through the house.  

After dinner I tend to retreat to my room, choosing between any of several juggled activities.  If my day involved an interview or some other activity for the CAT, I’ll spend some time moving the information from notebook to computer.  Otherwise, I’m usually doing some sort of Spanish study or losing to the computer at chess.  By 7:20 or so the day’s drug busts and car accidents have cycled their way through the news, and it’s safe to come out and see if any world news has snuck in.  By 8, I’m practically gone, making my way to the bed with a book and my headlamp. 

That’s it.  The early days of volunteer service.  

Address Update

Quick note - I've updated my address info (see link to the left). I should be able to receive envelopes and smaller letters much more quickly with the new PO Box.

Thank you Tina for your regular letters...hope you got the one I sent you late last month. And thanks to all who have sent packages in the last couple months. They're still waiting for me in San José, but I should receive them in a week or so when I come in for my In-Service Training.

Love, Kev

Sunday

It’s unseasonably brisk, mostly because ‘season’ loses meaning in Limón. By 9 a.m. the sun was already relentless, but a miraculous cloud cover has blotted it out for this brief moment. Not the low, gray stuff that hangs and threatens. Just a thin sheet, enough to break the intense monotony of the Limón sun. It’s pegado, sticky. I’m in my usual location on the front porch, an old emerald sofa that sits in profile to the house’s façade. Actual comfort spots are limited, but I can usually wiggle my way between a bulging spring and the wood crossbar, settling in where the fabric already sags from hundreds of butts having danced the same dance. It’s the only place in the house where air finds a way to shrug off the afternoon languor. Everyone else is tucked into the idea that Sunday and movement are not to be mixed. Especially today, when much of the country woke up at sunrise to watch Slovenia and Algeria face off for the day’s first World Cup action.  I’m wrong about the clouds. The rain begins tiptoeing on the roof just after lunch. Doña Ivonne leans forward in her seat. “Oooh, que riiiiiiiiiico,” she smiles. “You know what that sound means?” Slapping her hands together, she pauses a moment, then cocks her head to one side and nestles them underneath, feigning sleep. Pushing herself up from the lame office chair in the corner of the porch, she shuffles inside. The seat’s color is no longer recognizable. Its back boasts a radial pattern of stitched yarn, alternating mostly between black, red, and pink. The faded pattern is stretched beyond repair at the top, with most of the material drooping below. Doña Ivonne uses this hobby to add a homey touch to otherwise colorless corners of the house; yet most of her finished stitchings sit in a box tucked away somewhere, waiting for Christmas.

The porch looks out onto the first cross street of Limón 2000, followed by a bright pink health clinic that Don Carlos had a hand in constructing. From just beyond come the moans of air braking semis on Route 32. Unlike the barrio, this road never seems to get a break. Even on Sunday hundreds of payloads bounce between the port of Moin and San José. Outbound are undoubtedly trucks full of some sort of agricultural product. Bananas don’t have to travel far. Just fifteen minutes down the highway the view in all directions is nothing but a low, broad-leafed canopy, broken only by the mountains in the distance. Blue plastic bags hang underneath like cocoons of concentrated pesticides and fertilizer.

I’m slouched over an old newspaper. La Nación doesn’t come to my neighborhood, so when I do get my hands on one I read it cover-to-cover. Unlike La Teja, which is delivered to the house, its World News section of La Nación actually contains more info than “Chinese Baby Addicted to Cigarettes!” and topless girls painted with country flags to celebrate the World Cup Team of the Day. There are six or so daily newspapers in Costa Rica, and over half are painfully tabloid. Non-flying-saucerish articles are likely devoted to yesterday’s murders, car accidents, and soccer action. La Teja is the worst. Nonetheless, any of them at this point make for good Spanish education. Lying next to the paper are usually a dictionary and Spanish notebook to take down any words I’ve yet to learn. All of this is spread out on a mesita that Don Carlos threw together one of the first mornings after my arrival. He and Doña Ivonne noticed the paper, the dictionary and pen, strewn all across the couch and my lap. Before I realized the purpose behind the pounding, Don Carlos was walking up to me, small table in hand. Out of enjoyment for seeing me grab it en route to a study session, Doña Ivonne will comment, “Wearing your new belt buckle again, eh?”

The only space remaining on the mesita fits a wide green mug perfectly. Coffee normally comes at breakfast and dinner, so my normal mid-afternoon craving means that I’ll be heading inside to chorrear a mug of my own. And to chorrear, one requires a chorreador, which loosely translates into “strainer”. Really, the whole setup is composed of a tightly wound fabric bag, a thin formed wire holding one end forever open like a fish’s mouth. The bag is suspended over a container by fitting into the top of a wood stand. In go the grounds and then the boiling water from a steady, pouring hand. The whole of the actions require little more attention than flipping the switch of a coffeemaker. Still, the pace of the process brings a new appreciation for what fills that last empty space on the mesita, and eventually, my waning stores of concentration.

First Week

I’m sick of emo entries and want to share a little of my current life, especially since tomorrow marks the fall of a long-standing record. One week and a day: the longest I’ll have ever spent at my site. The previous guy in Bodié (my Guinea site in the Fouta) had beaten me by two weeks, and he was actively trying to leave. Not sure how or if I’ll celebrate yet. I had originally been considering taking the half hour bus ride into town and buy a nice lunch, but I’ve been getting fed so much recently that I’d rather stroll the market stalls in search of a second-hand Ab-Roller.

I’ve been sent to Limón, along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. My site is the closest to Puerto Limón, which houses two of the three major ports in the country and probably the most important when taking Costa Rican history into consideration. The neighborhood I’ll call home for two years is named Limón 2000. How baller is that? Many of the Tico 20 sites carry pretty interesting names, like 'Field 2 1/2' and 'The Fight', but I think Limón 2000 takes the cake. Fellow volunteer suggestions for future projects have been audaciously optimistic. I’ve settled on either creating a superhero headquarters there or forming a rap group.

A few of us were lucky enough to get a ride from headquarters on Monday. Dan, our outgoing (as in on his way out) boss had to get Donna down to Bribrí near the Panamanian border by nightfall, so we were lucky to beat the rains and take the main road from San José to Limón. This road—well constructed but poorly placed—experiences landslides so frequently that it often closes at night strictly as a precaution; so a closed road would've meant an extra 1.5 to 2 hours. I was the first stop of the afternoon, and Doña Ivonne was at her usual spot on the front porch waiting. My new host mom was happy to see me, unlocking the front porch´s steel gate before running to the kitchen to prep some coffee. Coffee. I couldn´t have asked for a better welcome. The rest of the afternoon was spent putting up my mosquito net and setting off what will likely be a two year food binge.

Don Carlos and Doña Ivonne are an older couple, both in their sixties. First impressions remind me of Marilyn and Bubs, albeit at higher volumes. The television’s usually blasting telenovelas or a daytime game show. If the phone rings, it switches to speaker phone, at which point it becomes a shouting match between Doña Ivonne and whatever soap characters are hogging the screen; Don Carlos joins in if he’s home from work. The two are filled with humor and dichos (proverbs and whatnot), so I’m doing my best to stay on my toes. Yesterday at a grandson’s birthday party Doña Ivonne had her cell phone out while Chino was blowing out the candles: “Damnit, I was trying to take a video on the phone! You know I can’t work this damn thing, now you’ll have to light the candles again. Go on, light ‘em!”

They’ve lived all over the country, as Don Carlos migrated often working farm labor. He later entered into construction work, and the couple settled down in Limón 2000 before the government housing projects began. I imagine it’s grueling work. He’s out the door by six and home no earlier than six. Evening ritual includes walking through the door grinning through his long-lost incisors, tearing off his shirt, and plopping onto the couch next to his ashtray.
Most of my time out of the house has thus far been split between the escuela and the cancha. My local counterpart (with whom I'll initially be working most closely) is the school's 'social planner'. Ada had already taken me room to room on my three day site visit in early May, so the kids were eagerly awaiting my re-arrival. So in addition to being completely overwhelmed with the steady current of students coming to visit in Ada's office,I have more soccer invitations than I have 10-year-olds to school me (and that number is already in the dozens).

I've recently moved things around on this site to better organize info. Telephone information and address information are now current. I expect to open up a P.O. Box in Puerto Limón sometime soon. That address will be for smaller packages and envelopes.

Thanks to all for the well-wishes and congratulations. It feels good to be a volunteer.

Love, Kevin

I Swear

We lowered our right hands after taking the oath from the U.S. Ambassador. Mine readjusted a silk blue tie before dropping heavily into the right pocket of my pleated pants. Eight months ago there were no pockets, at least readily accessible ones. Perhaps one of the seventeen of us was ingenious enough to have requested a hidden pocket tailored somewhere into our boubous or compléts. It wouldn’t have mattered. We were busy embracing, marveling in the standing embassy representative’s perfect French. One of the most heartfelt speeches we had ever heard had just been directed at us.

Today’s speech could have been plucked from a manual. The Peace Corps country director perched next to the podium translating each of the ambassador’s automatic phrases while we shuffled in our foldout chairs. toying with our ties and our dresses, ready to step down one of landings of the Ambassador’s lawn and into some imaginary wedding rehearsal. The most memorable line in those five minutes came from behind me, a fellow CYF volunteer pointing to the back of his newly-issued Peace Corps ID, “There’s a 2-for-1 bloomin’ onions coupon for TGIFridays on the back.” The speech ended. We filed one-by-one to the front for a handshake and a quick photo in front of the Peace Corp emblem. How did most take the manufactured pomp? Probably as another step in this novel process of becoming a volunteer, maybe even an exciting punctuation. For them, after all, there’s really nothing to compare.

I kept my seat as the audience slid into disorder. Three years of patient frustration were over; and all I could do was sit there trying to shake the sudden melancholy. After a few minutes the new volunteers were summoned for group photos. I sprang up and began walking toward the lawn, happy for a reason to step back out of the past.

Parallel Transport

In Bamako, while we were in limbo awaiting the closure of the Guinea program, a fellow evacuee asked me, “What do you think you’ll do next?”

“Well, someday I’d like to volunteer in the Peace Corps.”

The two most reasonable paths for G18 volunteers were those of direct transfer and re-enrollment. Our education group split almost evenly, the transfers all remaining in West Africa. Only a couple were able to continue serving in the capacity for which they had trained The reality of a transfer is that there likely isn’t a perfect fit given the circumstances. My decision to Close of Service and re-enroll was due to a number of factors: the emotional drain of the entire evacuation process, the little say I had in choosing the program I’d enter into, my open-ended future, our callous treatment by the Peace Corps rep as he handled direct transfers.Llargest of all, I couldn’t separate the Peace Corps experience from the bond we trainees had formed during those initial three months—both with each other and with our training staff. If I had to bear three more intense months to re-form those relationships, so be it. The decision wasn’t easy. I pulled my name off the board just before the Friday deadline, fully aware that my future plans would be delayed at least year as a result.

Of the nine of us who chose Close of Service, eight are on their way back. Jake was the first of us to leave, accepting a teaching position in Uganda last February. I was second. Several elected to wait for the next round of education programs leaving for West Africa (Cameroon and Burkina Faso). Jess will be joining me in Central America, leaving this coming October for Peace Corps Nicaragua to participate in its TEFL program (vacation destination, woot!). Emily, with whom I volunteered in Ayacucho, elected to continue working in Peru while prepping for future enrollment in nursing school back in the States.

--------

The icebreakers, the colored yarn to identify Peace Corps luggage, the airport waiting: it all was the same cookie cutter beginning I had lived just eight months ago. I found myself relishing in the conjured-up nostalgia, tucking into the recent past when downtime allowed.
We were lucky to meet the head of the Costa Rica CYF program (my program) during staging, our one day welcome to Peace Corps in Washington. Dan’s few words in front of the crowd resonated:

“A Costa Rica placement comes with its ‘Posh Corps’ flack. Inevitably, you’ve already received your share of, ‘Does Costa Rica really need volunteers?’ It’s true, this country’s literacy rate hovers around 97%, and it’s the wealthiest in the region. Therein lies your challenge. You’re going to be working alongside highly educated people—people who will have higher expectations of Peace Corps than in any other nation.”

As profound of a statement as this was, it did not prepare me for the next day. In November I had been too busy looking back, barely giving myself enough time to pack bags for Peru. Even there, Emily and I passed many evenings discussing our abrupt African exit. The same rush occurred when I got back to the States in February. There were too many loose ends to tie, too many people to visit and photos to post. Aside from logistically, I had never looked forward to Costa Rica.

No hand-painted welcome sign. No collection of volunteers patiently waiting to cheer our passing through frenzied customs. No multitude of berets and camo fatigues shouting orders over the din. Wafts of Cinnabon waited for us in the gate--Cinnabon! Starbucks and overpriced souvenir shops slipped past as we headed to the baggage claim. Every step in the process was slow and automatic. We had stepped off our connecting flight from Miami into a nicer airport than the one we’d left.

The bus slipped away from the arrivals area toward downtown San José. No mass of students studying under the tarmac lights--they were packed under the capital’s only reliable source of power during exam week--turning their heads to watch the buses fade into the darkness of Conakry. No scarred, deformed beggars piling slowly upon the windows of the bus as it stopped for traffic. No street fires. Pedestrian crosswalks and familiar signs littered the streets instead. We were moving slow enough through evening traffic for me to peek into a yoga class, which had immediately followed a Porsche dealership. Donna and Tiffany took to counting Pizza Huts.

I sank into my seat, swallowing tears, fearing I had just made the biggest mistake of my life.

Arrival

I arrived in San Jose after a day of training in D.C. More on both events later. For now, here's the new address. This may change in the future. If so, I'll update the link on the left.

For U.S. Mail
Kevin Roche, PCT
Cuerpo de Paz
Apostado 1266-1000
San Jose
Costa Rica

OK, here´s the deal. Apparently it's somewhat of a crapshoot on whether or not packages will be picked for inspection by customs. Those packages that are (usually larger ones) can incur taxes up to 100% of their total cost. In other words, please try and limit non-essential items. Flat-rate boxes tend to have a high success rate. As I find out more I may update again, but I can assure you nearly anything I desire can be purchased in San Jose, including a 911 Carrera.

For FedEx or DHL
Kevin Roche, PCT
Cuerpo de Paz
200 metros al oeste de Farmacia Fischel
Final del Boulevard Rohrmoser
San Jose
Costa Rica

Current Phone Number
From the U.S. dial 011-51-2276-3906

Ask for Kevin. I'll be getting a cell phone shortly and will re-post soon after.

abrazos

Home

Welcome to the standard Peace Corps entry starter: this thing should have been updated five times by now. Being home again for a month gave plenty of opportunity to share Peru stories by word-of-mouth. Unfortunately, my own priority list therefore shifts from a hermitic schedule in front of the computer to venturing out to see familiar faces. So I’m proposing a compromise: come to Costa Rica! A simpler option—more befitting to current times—is to park yourself down on the couch or cushy cubicle chair and take a look at some photos. Both the Guinea evacuation and Peru are pretty well captioned on Flickr, so a lot of the story can be found there.

Also available are a few additional entries on the Clark-2-Guinea correspondence page, my ongoing correspondence with a 4th grade class in the Indianapolis area. Here’s a sneak preview:



Time at home has been a refreshing mix of cold weather and hot showers. Stepping out of Logan airport with only a fleece was a chilling welcome back home. My dad reminded me of a distant phone conversation, probably around Christmas. Apparently I had alluded to a lingering nostalgia for snow. The apparent amnesia must have been a result of my good senses having left me, but not before punching me in the face at my sister’s doorstep on Comm Ave. The resulting swollen sinuses and cold were probably due in part to the stress of the Aguas Calientes evacuation. Regardless, it probably just aided my planned schedule of sleep in between visits with friends. I was back in the States. I was with Bec, with close friends…good coffee, clean clothes. Happy.


• Favorite traditional Boston experience: visiting the USS Constitution with Bec
• Favorite non-traditional Boston experience: a woman walked up to me on the T saying only, “I just love your Hello Kitty bag.”

Parents were waiting at the airport. The first stop was a long-anticipated visit to the Homewood Aurelio’s, the longtine pizza haunt for the Roche family, from a time long before I even had the capacity to remember. We walked in and sat at one of the red-and-white checkered tables, already knowing the order before the menus flopped in front of us. The waitress shuffled away to the kitchen.

Much of the questions revolved around what the heck happened in the four days I was stranded in Aguas Calientes, as well as the Inca trail. The theme binding them: “Can’t you find somewhere a little safer to live?! Geez Kevin, two evacuations in four months!” I heeded their advice. In my short time at home I shunned the dozens of adventure activities Northwest Indiana has to offer, like driving my SUV 20 over on I-65 during a snowstorm, and rashly sipping my americano just seconds after it’s served. Instead I played it safe. I went running. Now I sit in a Washington hotel room with a calf healing from a dog bite and an ankle still swollen after having rolled it on a frozen water bottle.

They say: Danger in Peru!
I say: At least the dogs have the courtesy to tell you when they’re attacking.
They say: Military coup in W. Africa!!
I say: At least they throw their trash on the side of the street instead of in the middle of it (somewhat a lie)

A conversation with my buddy KJ shed light on my possible changing of fortune. “Costa Rica has been stable for quite a while.” He added, “They don’t even have an army.” Hey guys, Kevin’s going to a resource rich country without a means to defend itself. Roll tape. But I usually take KJ’s words seriously. He’s a happily married father; he reads the economist and sings me breathy Marylin Monroe impersonations on my birthday. The guy knows his stuff.

Alright, early flight tomorrow. Gotta run.