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, 7th grade through 10th. 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 3rd 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.
love you Kev! keep plugging away.
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