First Camp

It was small and in the neighborhood, but the fogata was lit, the tents were up, and the full moon did the job of our lanterns as the night wore on. We were camping.  

I’ve made little effort in describing my work on this blog. Most of the time it’s been wildly varied. The one constant in my time in the barrio has been the Scouts, a project that almost didn’t get off the ground. The idea came to me at our In-Service Training (IST) last August. The national director of Guías y Scouts de Costa Rica gave an info session on the history of the organization, as well as the steps involved to getting a group started.

Between having just finished my CAT (a 45-page community assessment) and frustrations at the school, I was more-than-ready to get something started that gave me a little autonomy. Scouts were a perfect fit. I felt akin to the movement after four wonderful years with the Cub Scouts as a kid, and there just happened to be a community member that had once led a group here in Limón 2000. I jumped at the idea, initiating contacts with the regional and national directors, urging the neighborhood’s former Scout leader to help in the planning, and handing out over three hundred flyers to kids and parents.

What came next can only be explained as a dip on Delia’s roller coaster, a phrase I should first briefly explain. Delia was the PC staff member responsible for our cultural integration and personal well-being during training. One day she unveiled a poster with a cartoon-like roller coaster undulating its way from left to right across the page. Atop the peaks and under the valleys were various labels that identified the two-year  emotional trajectory of a typical PCV. Getting to site we were to experience the thrill of the new environment, of meeting new people and plowing forward with our plans to change the world. After a few weeks comes the first crash. Isolation, initial work frustrations, and lack of control (food, privacy, cleanliness) sends us down into the throes of depression.  In-Service Training was to be the event that sent us back on a climb.

And it did. Refreshed from warm showers and food variety beyond our wildest fantasies (“wait, there are more vegetables than starch? How had I forgotten that?”) we hopped back on our respective buses for the corners of the country. We had rekindled the friendships formed in training. Information sessions and idea sharing had sent us soaring, ready to inspire entire communities as they watched us lassoing clouds from below . I was with them, hurriedly trying to rally the school and the community behind this new project idea.

Reality set in the day of the event. It was to be an hour-long meeting with children from the community, followed by an information session with parents. The kids showed, about fifteen. The national and regional directors showed.  After my convincing him not to cancel and reminding him several times the same day of the meeting, the community counterpart ‘showed’. And not a single parent showed. There I stood,  swallowing the words of the old scout leader, “I told you no one would come; people in this community just don’t care.”  The higher-ups sped off in their pickup as I stood at the entrance to the school, waving apologetically. The highs of IST were already artifacts of a distant past.

So there the project slept smoldering for a month. In late October I miraculously received a phone call from an individual from a nearby community who claimed interest in helping me start a Scout group in Limón 2000. Word of mouth had passed from Sergio, the national director, to Roberto, a former scout. In just a few calls, we were staging the first of what has come to be nearly ten months of Sunday meetings with youth from Limón 2000.   

I wish I could say the path since that first call from Roberto has been a straight one. Many of the problems I faced still remain—parents’ lack of involvement, broken families, lack of resources, broken promises—but they all were lost in the flames last Friday. Roberto’s strengths are seen in his moments in front of the kids, which was never more evident than when he led the songs and dances around the campfire.

The rest of the supporting cast was equally helpful. Roberto’s wife Lupita snapped photos and prepared food, while their daughter Ivony, the night’s honorary guía, provided much of the entertainment (including the most amazing robot dance I've ever seen). The pastor of the Salvation Army, on whose property we were holding the camp, led a half hour animación de la fe, which included a dramatization by members of his youth group, and the regional director Gustavo even showed up to give a session on knots to close out the event.

Perhaps the greatest addition was my former college roommate Mark, who had just arrived for a week’s visit. Taking in stride lost luggage and our lack of repellent, Mark offered a hand in nearly all facets of the camp, setting up tents, sharpening palitos for marshmallow roasting, hacking up bamboo for the knots and ties workshop, etc. We even put him to work leading morning exercises.

Of the event’s ‘lessons learned’, perhaps most palpable was one I had learned years ago watching The Gremlins: don’t feed them after midnight. In a more practical setting, midnight is more like 10:30 p.m., as late-night s’mores and the excitement of their first night under a full moon left the kids in a frenzy and us camp leaders with less than two hours of sleep. 

We went home exhausted. Mark and I crashed for a good chunk of the afternoon, waking up in time to welcome fellow volunteer Matt over for stir fry. The great week continued with ziplining at a place within walking distance of Limón 2000, plenty of rice and beans, chess and frisbee on the edge of the Atlantic, howler monkey sightings, a host family visit, and one of the greatest bike rides I’ve ever taken: 52km from the top of Irazú Volcano down through the picturesque agrarian Cartago province and into Orosi valley.  In between we caught up on two years living, which have passed faster than the light of the space station that crossed the night sky in our last meeting, camping high up in the Sierras.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Celebrity Teach

The only opportunity we G18 stagaires had to teach in Guinea was during practice school.  This three-week span was to be our ‘trying out’ period, to which we had slowly been  building through peer teaches, minor lessons in front of a handful of students, etc.   The turnout was quite incredible considering the kids had absolutely nothing driving them to sit for consecutive two-hour blocks in the incubated slow cookers we called ‘classrooms’.  We were literally seeing fifty students in attendance for voluntary classes.  I must note, however, that in a remote West African town during summer vacation, school pretty much was the only option for breaking up the mental lethargy.  And besides, what teen would choose another morning in the fields unearthing handfuls of rice over a chance to socialize with his friends.

Peace Corps had been holding Pre-Service Training in Forecariah for several years.  The community was somewhat used to our foreign antics.  A semi-private pagne-party (think colorful toga party) at the volunteer house was more of an annoyance than the complete cultural shock it must have been a few years earlier.  Still, we retained a certain celebrity status, and it attenuated very little among non-adults.  The youngest ones might not have remembered the last batch of trainees that were ushered in and out of the town.  These were the most adorable, as a baby could traverse his entire range of emotions (utter delight to sheer terror) in a matter of seconds.  Nothing builds confidence in a future father like a baby who shrieks at the sight of him.

The toddlers fell into a kind of ‘dancing bear’ mentality.  As we passed certain sections of the neighborhood, their token chant would start up from some hidden corner of a house:  “Fooooohh-tayyyyy!  Foooohh-tayyyyyy!”  crescendoing in the first syllable and snapping at the “t”.  Like crickets they’d multiply and build until we were surrounded by a unison chorus of petites calling out “white person” in Susu.   Obden and I would often comment on the quality of the surround sound.

                “What do you think, stereo?”

                “I’d give them a little better than that.  Good stuff, but that spot with the big tree in middle of the road still takes the cake.  They’re at least up to Dolby, just need a good adult to join in for added bass.”

The attention sure made my runs fun.  Once I got past Rock Thrower’s Row, it felt like I was in some inside-out reality where the white man always wins the African distance races.  Children and adults alike paused from their backbreaking labors to cheer me on.

In the heat of September and amidst the deprivations of Ramadan—forty days of fasting from sun-up to sundown, where individuals technically weren’t allowed to swallow their own saliva—student curiosity won out over the hardship of a packed, sweltering classroom.  We were foreign.  We were strange.  We were downright fascinating and scary.  They wanted to know more about us.  The shy ones just wanted to be closer to us, wanted an excuse to step out of the burning distance and into the shadows of a classroom.  More than a few truly wanted to learn.  Practice school was their chance. 

For us the three weeks were invaluable.   We finally had begun to coat our skeletons with experience.  With it came the joy of students’ comprehending nods and the pain of grading those same students’ failed tests.  We found nerves that had been buried since adolescence.  The cultural roadblocks began to appear, and though we had been reminded of them several times, there’s nothing like living one of those moments when you’re forced to spur another into deconstructing his own pile of educational and cultural experiences. 

I rode into the first day of physics class on a wave of ideals.  After all, we arrived in this country with honed tools of logic and reason that would utterly annihilate the years of rote training these kids had received.  Right?  The normal routine—lesson, boardwork, test—be gone!  Two nights prior to the start of classes I had pushed through the morning hours, struggling for a way to present electric circuits and the composition of white light in some way other than the usual passive transmission.  The second night, around 1 a.m., it hit me.  The scientific method!  They have to learn it anyway, but I’m going to make it leap off the page.  I revamped my entire week of lesson plans to incorporate the strategy:  instead of spending an hour on it, take them from start to finish; make it the basis of all my lesson plans for the year!  They were going to learn that every single one of these concepts was not just handed to those who discovered them.  They were going to make hypotheses and test them, just like the men and women who poured their lives into their uncovering. We’re going to do experiments!  We aren’t just going double voltage in the formula, we’re going to ask ourselves, “What’s going to happen to the lightbulb if I add a second battery?” and we’re going to test it.  In time these kids will be the most forward-thinking bunch in all of Guinea.  The curiosity will spread like wildfire.  Soon whole bands of youth will be begging for more, knocking on doors and asking, “Why haven’t we had those elections the junta promised us last year?  I lit another candle, always keeping one on each corner of my notebook to minimize the hovering shadows while I worked. 

With G16 volunteer Levi and my host siblings who participated in Practice School

Teen hormones and rote learning got in the way of this mini-breakthrough.  So did time; after all, we only had these kids for five classes.  Week 1 test results came back with a jaw-dropping variance.  Most failed to even grasp the concept I had dedicated the bulk of my time to (science is a process of questioning the world around us and taking steps to discover it).  The reasons are obviously multi-dimensional, and my fishing from a shallow bank of memories wouldn’t do them justice as I sit here hitting keys eighteen months later.  A few examples are enough:

• The 10^th graders in my physics class weren’t even able to solve a simple algebra equation (V=IR), despite having learned to do so in grade 8. 
• How some 10^th graders were able to make it this far without even being able to read raises one to question the quality of testing in the Guinean school system.  It might have something to do with the fact that some principals delay the release of year-end test results to make personal “visits” to struggling students’ families.
• Students don’t have books (which is also true here in Costa Rica).  An inordinate amount of time is therefore wasted copying a sentence to the board and waiting for it to be replicated in their cahiers.  The slower writers never even had the chance to think about what I was explaining.  These notebooks are normally checked by Guinean teachers to ensure their impeccability, so even physics is reduced to two hours of orthography practice.  I wish I had a photo of the looks on their faces when I asked my class for the first time to write their own hypothesis.  They were to guess which color would appear when I shined both a red and a green flashlight on the same spot of a blank white paper and then write it on the prescribed line of their cahiers.  Utter panic.  They froze.  Most waited until the experiment was over to enter the result (yellow).  Those who guessed wrong leaped for their neighbor’s white-out to quickly rectify the “mistake”. 
• Cheating is hilariously unchecked.  One volunteer trainer was so fed up the previous year with wandering eyes and consecutive verbatim test responses that he asked his class to write an essay on the importance of not cheating.  A particular student’s (paraphrased) response actually shed a new cultural light on the issue:  “In my family we are taught to share and help our neighbor.  If I have an answer and my neighbor is struggling, why not help him?”   The next paper in the stack began, “In my family we are taught to share….”

Every Day?

How is the weather down there?  Ours is freezing cold I can not stand this weather! In all of the places you go does anyone have an accent?  I just have a normal accent.  Has a blue morpho butterfly ever landed on your head or hand?  One time one normal one just landed on my head and it scared the living daylights out of me.  What is Costa Rica currency? 

Perhaps the greatest reward for participating in the World Wise Schools program is a renewed glimpse of a child's curiosity.  The most recent opportunity came in a burst of letters from an Indianapolis area fourth grade class, which I found in my PO Box about a month back. Above is a small snippet from MacKenna.

On final tally, the most-often asked question had nothing to do with volunteering.  Let's skip the mundane and figure out what it's like sleeping under a mosquito net?  Do you like it?  I think it'd be fun because it'd be like sleeping under a tent.  No matter what the question, an outsider's curiosity is by far the quickest way to remind me that I've quickly gotten accustomed to living in my new, slightly tanner, cultural skin.  This is especially true with children.  While an adult might be busy stepping back to take in something altogether too big to fit into a paragraph, the kids are up close peeling at the flecks of paint to see what's underneath.

Are there movie theaters in Costa Rica?  Sure there are movie theaters.  Well, I guess not everywhere.  Romp around in the capital long enough and with confidence you'll come across a multiplex that rivals anything in a U.S. city.  During training I took my siblings to see Alice y el pais de maravillas, and we dumped our 3-D glasses at the door on our way out.  Puerto Limon is a city of over 100,000.  There's a rickety wooden building by the stoplight that supposedly shows films, but I've never seen the doors open.  The posters change.  Someone told me once that you just knock on the door with a DVD in hand.  The guy will wave you through and throw it on the projector.  I want to try it.

I'm slowly working my way through the questions from the fourth graders and am posting them piecewise on my WWS correspondence blog.

My buddy Adam from Guinea is currently teaching in a South Bronx neighborhood while working toward his Masters in Education from Columbia Teacher's College.  As a former Costa Rica volunteer, Adam was able to prep his middle schoolers for a pen pal exchange by presenting them a PowerPoint slideshow on tico geography and culture.  Just like with the mosquito net, the kids tended to hone in on very specific cultural details, yielding wonderfully entertaining results:

• I want to know about your country why do you eat so much for breakfast? 
• Do you eat rice and beans all the time? 
• Do you really eat rice and beans mostly every day?  ...and later in the same letter:  Do you really want to eat rice and beans every day?  I wouldn't really like to eat rice and beans every day.

The dynamic with Adam's students is quite beautiful.  Mott Haven is one of the more socio-economically challenged neighborhoods in the country; and in the letters the kids here read that the life of grandeur and prosperity about which they often dream is not always so accurate.  That reality is often manifested in the students' descriptions of themselves, as well as in their questions.  "How is life there?  Here it's hard.  I like my school and Mr. Johnson but I want to move."  "Is it dangerous there?"  "Can you bring two toy car for my family?"



Mott Haven is also replete with immigrants.  A good third of the letters didn't even require translation.  One interesting trend was the kids' identification with their heritage.  "I was born in Puerto Rico and moved here when I was six."  "My mom's dominican and my dad's black."  One student only knew how to write in French.  Another, only Arabic.  Especially among the Latin community, kids seemed to embrace their roots in their writing, whereas in Costa Rica a conscious effort is often made to slough off any peculiarities associated with another country.  That's obviously an overstatement, but it's an exceptionally exaggerated fact when it comes to Nicaraguans.  And I can't really blame them.  Profiling of Nicaraguans is rampant. 

I've had the pleasure of visiting two classes while on short stints in the States.  My last opportunity was particularly special, as I was able to visit my cousin Joanna's class at a Chicago turnaround school.  The greatest reward from the experience by far was witnessing Joanna--whom my history goes back to playing Clue on the cabin floor and splashing in Lake Michigan at family retreats--flourishing in her work.  The kids drew energy and love from her, and they reciprocated.

And again, I was rewarded merely by finding myself in the midst of innocent curiosity.  They looked on with smiling eyes as the images of exotic landscape and dress passed, but when we started talking about the Guinea evacuation, they really started digging.  "Wait, how is it that their own president doesn't want what's best for them?"  "An army can shoot at their own people?"  "Why don't they just do something about it?  Why don't they kick the president out?" 

May those voices forever retain their candor.  You can view the Prezi I created for the presentation below.  It's best viewed on the website, but you can get the idea by cycling through the steps below.  Just click on the play button, then use your left and right arrow buttons to follow the storyline.

¡Pura Vida! on Prezi