Nicaragua Trip Day 3

Our third day in Nicaragua started off with a nice breakfast at the restaurant that is kind of paired with the hostel we stayed at. Soon enough, our tour guide came along, as well as a young Dutch guy who was finishing up a medical volunteer program in Nicaragua, a German tourist and an Australian tourist who didn't speak much Spanish. The tour was super interesting. We visited a medium sized cigar factory, with about 40-50 employees, all within about a city block worth of land. There is a larger and more famous one outside of Estelí-but they didn't have tour guides that met us at our hostel. The guide was very informative, as well as one of the managers of the factory (I think the son of the owner). He explained in great detail the selection of the leaves for the different qualities of cigar, all while passing around a cigar and helping us smoke it (I at least required instruction). 

It was awesome how open the tour was-we were walking all around the factory, right next to the people working, even picking up and examining cigars about to be boxed. One item of interest is that the rollers work in pairs-and always one man and one women. The man works the machine that presses the filling into the cigar and the women rolls on the outer cap by hand and trims the end by hand as well. Employees are not allowed to take products home (unless they pay) but can smoke as much as they want when working-and there were a few that were definitely taking advantage. The cigars are essentially made completely by hand, the leaves are picked by hand, sorted, soaked, and dried by hand. They are then further sorted by hand, and aided only a bit by the simple machine (hand powered) in the rolling process-and are then packed by hand as well. The manager explained that with Nicaragua's cheap labor, high import costs, and due to the size of the company, it still makes economic sense to do most of the work by hand. 

Nicaragua is a growing presence in the cigar production world, as we were told that Cuban quality leveled off many years ago due to a variety of factors. Cuban emigrants in the 1960s and '70s brought the know-how and seeds to Nicaragua, Ecuador, and other places, and these countries are now starting to reap the benefits after adapting the plants to their soils and climates, and especially with Nicaragua, it's benefitting from stability and peace after its long and destructive civil war. So, be on the lookout for Nicaraguan cigars-I certainly might've been to the factory where they were made. 

Barton, Brian, and I spent the rest of the day cruising around beautiful and tranquil Estelí-I really can't stress how much I enjoyed this town. We headed to some of the less worn parts of the town, into the dirt road, trash all over poor area-and peeked in on a pick up soccer game at a small stadium. We ended up chatting with the coach-who appeared to be an former player from the professional team. He talked about how they had started this youth soccer league to help keep kids off drugs and healthy. It was a great conversation, we shared a bit about what the Peace Corps does, things about Costa Rica. 

After getting our fill of the town, we headed to the bus station, grabbed a bus to León, met up with Andrew at the hostel, walked around town as the sun set, grabbed dinner in a pool hall that didn't serve alcohol or allow smoking (we figured it must be an AA pool hall). We got ice cream cones for something like $.25 (Nicaragua is awesome) and checked out the local scene in the central park. A nice and pleasant evening-which is what vacation is all about. 

The Final Fortnight

I have just two weeks left in my Peace Corps service. My original Close of Service (COS) date was December 17, exactly two years after myself and 43 other volunteers of Tico 21 swore in. (Tico 21 is the 21st input group since around 2000 when the Peace Corps Costa Rica post was reorganized). I moved up my COS date by 10 days, in order that I can travel around with my brother Peter and not have any problems with the Peace Corps regulations on vacations. 

The blog is about two months behind on my real life, and will probably be so for a while. I'll be crazy busy during these last two weeks, and want to spend it saying goodbye to the wonderful Costa Ricans I've met, soaking up the sun on some beaches (because that won't be happening in Des Moines!), and saying goodbye to Peace Corps friends I've made during the past two years plus. But, updates will come occassionally, and should be much more consistent and substantial after Christmas-when sitting under a blanket on my computer is what I will want to be doing. 

Thanks again for all who read, and don't forget to check out my Picasa web albums and my Tumblr page-links to the right. 

(here's me at a presentation I did at my school about the US--Peace Corps Goal 2)

Nicaragua Trip Day Two

Our main purpose in going to Estelí was to take a cigar factory tour, but as it was Sunday, we had to wait until Monday for that to happen. So we just walked around. And it was incredibly delightful. I had pretty much planned the whole trip, and the answer I got from Brian and Andrew was: whatever you want to do is fine. Barton had a few ideas about things to do, but they were mostly in León and Granada. I'm a big fan of walking around foreign towns. It's not that I'm opposed to seeing the famous cathedral, monument, museum, or natural wonder-but-walking around a regular town or city gives a great impression of what daily life in a country is like. We had beautiful sunny weather, and Estelí truly is a gorgeous little hub town in a mountainous tobacco and coffee region. When we got to the edges of town, with dusty streets and adobe colored houses, it looked kind of like the towns you see in old Western movies with scenes in Mexico. 

One thing we immediately noticed was the amazing painting on the sides of buildings. Like in much of Costa Rica, the general construction model is cinder blocks with corrugated tin sheet roofs. Well, in all of Nicaragua that I saw, and especially the smaller towns, instead of printing posters or signs to put on the walls outside a commercial establishment, they just paint the cinder blocks. It was gorgeous and at times hilarious. It certainly gave lots more character to the car parts store, barbershop, supermarket, etc. Another thing we discovered about Nicaragua was that not only do they love baseball, but they also love hot dogs and hamburgers. There were food carts with empanadas or meat on a stick, but there were a lot more with hot dogs and hamburgers. And, holy cow, do they load up their hot dogs. Sadly, I think I was too hungry to take a picture first-but it had onions, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and perhaps a few more fixings I'm forgetting.

(where we had more than one meal during our time in Estelí)

*Remember-lots more pictures on my tumblr or on my Picasa album-links to the right. 

Nicaragua Trip Day One

During the first two weeks of September (actually in between the local and regional spelling bees) I took a trip to Nicaragua with fellow Peace Corps volunteers Barton, Brian, and Andrew. Barton and Brian are in my TEFL project and Andrew is in the business assistance project, but was also among the 46 Americans that got on board a plane to San José, Costa Rica on October 3, 2010. This trip would have been my biggest vacation during my time in Costa Rica-had an earthquake and volcano eruption not shortened it-but I'll get to that later. While Peace Corps gives us a generous amount of vacation days, unlike when I was in China, I don't have a lot of extra money to take advantage of this. Of course, I've spent more than I should have on trips in the last five years of my life-but that money's spent. So, this trip to Nicaragua was the big one of my two years here in Costa Rica-and it was a blast. Andrew, Barton, and Brian are awesome guys to travel with and Nicaragua is a beautiful country with a  very interesting and event filled history. 

We rode up on the bus with TransNica. It was a comfortable ride, the bus wallah was helpful, they charged us an extra $3 to get into Nicaragua-but also took care of getting our passports stamped and did so quickly-a service I'm willing to pay for.  Of note at the border was that we were able to buy a SIM card and put minutes on Barton's phone-in a matter of maybe 5 minutes (we had to figure out which carrier would work with his brand). So, Nicaragua is added to the list (Thailand, Hong Kong) of amazing countries where you can get going on a cell phone just like that! We had a 30-40 minute delay because there was a political riot/truck with speakers/barbecue in the middle of the road. Maybe all three were related-we never knew. But, we arrived in Managua, taxied to the hostel, grabbed dinner at a mall food court, and headed to bed-looking to take advantage of the next morning.  

So, two paragraphs in and we're finally to day one. We got up early and set out to see what Managua had to offer. Most of the guidebooks advise skipping it, but it is the capital city-so I figured we could give it a half day. The new cathedral's gates were all locked (it was a Saturday morning). All maps indicated we should have seen a giant statue dedicated to Rubén Darío, a famous poet, but all we saw was a big rotunda that looked like it used to have a statue. Besides those two hitches, the rest of the day was a great success. We saw the old cathedral-which was either burned or ignored-but appears to be in a restoration process. We toured the national museum, which was a kind of natural history and art museum combination. We visited the silhouette statue of Agosto Sandino-up on a hill with great views of the city. We ran into an American guy on the street that chatted us up a bit (more on this later), had a nice walk through parts of downtown Managua, determined that in Managua people sleep in on Saturday mornings (the city was eerily empty until about 11 as we walked back to our hostel). 

(me with 2,000+ year old statue and mural at the national museum)

We then took a taxi to a bus station in order to take a bus to Estelí, a small town in northern Nicaragua. Only it wasn't really a bus station. Instead it was just a big open area, full of puddles, food vendors, bus touts, and street kids peddling candy. Luckily, I'd seen this set up a few times before-and in a language I didn't speak. So, we ignored the bus touts grabbing us and trying to put us on buses we didn't need to get on, and asked where to buy tickets. Soon enough we were on our way to Estelí. Being in the front of the bus, we had an opportunity to observe something I'd never seen before. On the bus in front of us, a man climbed out the back door onto the small platform on the back of the bus (an old American school bus). He then proceeded to unzip his pants and pee off the platform. He appeared to have been an expert, as he knew how to turn so as to not urinate all over himself. We arrived in Estelí, safe and dry, found our hostel, and grabbed a delicious dinner at a little family run joint. We bought half a chicken, plus salad, rice, beans, and Cokes-and got out of there for like $4 a person. Nicaragua is awesome!

Remember you can see more pictures by clicking on the My Photos-Picasa Photo Gallery link to the right. 

Spelling Bee: Regional Style

The idea of the spelling bee (see post) was for the best kids from each volunteer's community to then meet up with students from other volunteer's communities. One complication was that none of the volunteers near me did the spelling bee-so, that made the "regional" bee a bit more of a challenge. The two volunteers that organized it live near my old site, in Sarapiquí, which-although it's on the same side of the mountains as my site-isn't really that close. But, they were the closest volunteers that had done the spelling bee. As they only work with elementary schools, our regional bee was only with elementary kids. 

(Andreina writes her word before spelling it)

So I practiced and practiced and practiced with the three students heading to the regional bee. They were great, coming early or staying late to practice with me-of course they didn't always have the greatest attitude-but practiced nonetheless. We met at 6:15 in the morning and headed into Limón, from there getting a bus to Guápiles, and from there to Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí and with a quick taxi ride to La Guaria-my coworker Marlene's site. Thus, after about four hours of traveling and waiting, my students had a chance to relax, grab a snack, and then it was time to start the spelling bee. There were three students from my school, three from Marlene's and three from Beth's.

(Tiffany writing her word before spelling it)

Much like the local bee, the kids came up one by one, we picked a word out of the envelope, said the word, read a sentence with the word, and said it again. The kids could write it on a little white board if they wanted, and have us repeat it. They only got one chance to spell the word-and we had an impartial judge (Athena another PCV). In the local bee I was a lot more lenient, but I had prepared my kids for this. Sadly, Beth's students all went out in the first or second round. She had been away on vacation and traveling to help with other projects just before the bee, and it appeared they didn't practice too hard on their own. Crazily, the winner of Marla's local bee went out early-which was a surprise to us all. So, by the fourth round, all three of my students, and two of Marla's remained. Unfortunately, my first student went out with the word 'walk'. This really was a bad turn of luck, as I later realized that there were two or three words out of the 150 that I had missed when I made flash cards. Granted-we still had read through the whole list-and they had it to study on their own. But being 6th graders, not much studying got done on its own; so-me having not made that flash card (which we had reviewed incessantly) very much hurt her chances of getting the word right. Although, she's kind of a punk and had the audacity to claim I pronounced the word wrong. Getting the 'silent letters' concept across to Spanish speakers is often quite hard. 

(Edwin waiting to spell his word)

In the next round, another one of Marla's students went out, so I was feeling pretty good, and pretty nervous. I was now guaranteed at least third and second place for my students. They later told me they weren't that nervous, but I can tell you I sure was. Tiffany ended up in third place, unable to spell 'scared' correctly. We had practiced it plenty, but it was always a word they had trouble with-often messing up the vowels, and sometimes using 'k' instead of 'c', which is what she did. So it was down to Edwin, one of my students and a student of Marla's. Her student was sharp, and I think they both spelled their words correctly for two more rounds. It was impressive, they both were very confident, spelling their words right away in a strong clear voice. But, lucky for Edwin-Marla's student misspelled her word after he had spelled his correctly. He then spelled his next word correctly, becoming the champion of the regional spelling bee! I was proud of him, as he had taken me up on my offer to practice on the weekend before and had a better attitude than the other two students. He certainly deserved to win! 

(me with my three students and my school's English teacher)

Unfortunately, we won't be able to hold a national bee this year. As it was the first year that Peace Corps volunteers organized such an event in Costa Rica, it was a grand learning experience. We learned that it took the students longer to learn many of the words than we had planned-as many of their English levels were far below what we had hoped. Scheduling regional spelling bees between the school's, teacher's, volunteer's schedules-and getting approval from the parents and principals also pushed us behind schedule. So, more than anything, we learned that it's important to start it earlier in the year and even more importantly, get it on the official ministry of education's calendar and list of events. Not having the national bee on these two lists severely limited us from getting support for a national bee. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed working with the students at both the high school and elementary school, and it provided a great use of my time and skills-as I've had a tough time working with my teachers here in Liverpool. 

S-P-E-L-L

With huge thanks to my coworkers Beth D. and Marlene R., I've had something very productive going on in site ever since after the 15 day holiday in July. They had the grand idea to try to put together a spelling bee (in English of course-as we're TEFL volunteers) in various schools across the country. They found some information from Peace Corps volunteers that had done them in other countries and put together guidelines, word lists, and sent out information to volunteers. I was able to get the sixth and fifth grade teachers to let me come into their classrooms a few times a week for a month. It was tough at first, both with the kids seeing the time I came to class as the time to screw around, and with the English teacher at the elementary school having not done a great job of teaching the kids the alphabet. So, instead of starting with trying to spell words from memory, we started with trying to correctly pronounce the letters. But, I shortened the word list to seventy words, and with flashcards and persistence was able to make some progress. 

(me with all the students and the English teacher)

At the high school, I worked with the English teacher to identify some of the better students in English or those with lots of interest and formed a group of eleven or twelve students. We met twice a week for a month as well. The group wasn't always constant, as sometimes the students couldn't get permission to leave class, and shockingly, shockingly indeed some of the students said they were going to spelling practice but would skip out and head to town or to the woods. But, a committed group of students did a great job learning the words and had a positive attitude each week as I brought more and more words for them to learn. 

(a student grabs scratch paper to write his word before spelling it)

So, towards the end of August I arranged a spelling bee at the elementary school and the high school. The elementary school bee was a bit rough, for two reasons. The first was that I didn't have a whole lot of support from the principal or English teacher, the sixth grade teacher was helpful, but got called to meet with the principal just before I was ready to begin. So, I was both managing the behavior of thirty five or so sixth and fifth graders that decided to participate in the spelling bee and trying to run the spelling bee. It went okay, but due to so many students having such a poor background in English that my few sessions just couldn't overcome, a lot of students went out in the first or second round. I was down to the five or six students that I thought I would be down to (minus one unfortunate first round exit) by the third round. By the fourth I had just three students (which worked out great-because that's how many I would be taking to regionals) and by the sixth round one student had won. 

(handing the certificate and prize to the 1st place winner)

The high school bee went much better, both because I was just working with a small group, and because the teacher at the high school was more helpful in planning it with me. So, we had some treats for the kids and parents (two moms showed up!), the counselor and teacher were there watching, as well as José, one of my bosses-who was passing by that afternoon-so I contacted him and he worked his schedule around coming. The audience gave it a good atmosphere as well as the fact that two students had studied quite well, and although after five rounds only the two of them remained, they went until the 11th round until one of them committed an error.

Soon, I'll post about how my elementary school winners did at the regional bee! 

Ask the American

Two of the Peace Corps' three goals have to do with sharing-sharing American culture in the country in which a volunteer serves and sharing that country's culture with friends and family back in the States. I'm sure back in the '60s it was all about sharing the American values of freedom of expression and of the markets, as opposed to the principles espoused by the Soviet Union. While there are occasionally chances to share about some of America's great attributes (diversity, freedom of expression, great infrastructure, an entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit), more often than not I end up sharing about much more quotidian details of American life (or at least American life as known by me). Even more often than any of this, I get asked questions about the United States that are hard to answer without a lot of explanation. Many of these questions are hard to answer because the US is so diverse. When I lived in Jiangsu Province in China, which has over 99% of the population of the same ethnicity, people didn't like my long answer as to what a 'normal' American looks like. These long answers often tests my listener's patience, but more than that leaves them wondering whether I have any clue what I'm talking about. Added on to these simple questions that don't have simple answers are often very obscure questions. In a country like Costa Rica, which has less people than the Houston area, it's not that hard to know all the really famous people in the country. Yet, for an American, there are easily more than a few world famous Americans I know little or nothing about. Needless to say, again, people doubt whether I'm really American or criticize my ignorance about my country. 

The other day, within about an hour, I received two questions from my host family that were worth writing down-mostly because they both left me thinking about them far after I had finished answering them. The first question occurred when JuanCarlos, the husband of my host mom's cousin's daughter and my next door neighbor, had an English question for me. He came into my room with a piece of paper on which was written: "please rejoin group at the embankment." I went straight into it, and did my best job to translate it-the only problem being that I wasn't quite sure how to translate embankment. In checking later, I realized I didn't really know exactly what an embankment was in English. Either way, I gave it my best shot, and Juan Carlos seemed to understand exactly what I meant. I hadn't a clue why he wanted this translated. I asked him, and when he explained for a "war genre video game" I immediately understood. Granted, there are students that want to learn English to communicate with English speakers in order to get a good job. Yet, this afternoon, the culture sharing needed of me was to figure out where to go in a video game. 

Later that same night, as we were watching Primer Impacto, a highly entertaining news program made in the US for Latin Americans living in the US, but shown throughout Latin America, they mentioned something that had been posted to Twitter. This prompted my host dad to ask what it was and then my host mom asked which was better Twitter or Facebook. Both my host parents have Facebook accounts, and are pretty active users. Hopefully you see the problem with this question, but I'll explain it nonetheless. As Twitter and Facebook serve similar, but different, purposes they can't really be compared so simply as one being better than the other. That's more or less how I answered-as my most mom cut in once or twice trying to get me to declare one as better than the other. My host mom and dad are pretty aware people, they've both worked in other countries, and although not very well educated, have been around the block once or twice. Yet, questions like this have happened more than once. I'm not really sure why questions like this get asked, or why people seem impatient with my explanation, but hey it's part of the job. 

Most wonderful about these two questions was that the impetus to my host dad's question about Twitter was that he had heard that it was where a photo of Sofia Vergara's thong could be seen-due to a wardrobe malfunction at the Emmys-and thus wanted to get involved with Twitter. 

Corcovado National Park

Rivaling the trip I took to Chirripó was a trip I took to Corcovado National Park in July. It was amazing-and reminded me yet again why so many people visit Costa Rica. I took advantage of the two week mid school year break to visit the park, as well as visit my friend Barton R., his host family, and his site. I stayed at his house a few days before we went to the park, and stayed two days afterward as well. It was super interesting visiting his host family-his host parents raise chickens-so the whole house smells of chicken poop-and right next to the sink where one brushes his teeth-they might be de-feathering and cleaning dead chickens. Because it was vacation-there was all sorts of family in and out of the house-add in five Peace Corps volunteers and it was pretty crazy.

I was lucky to visit the park with five amazing guys-Barton and Kyle from my TEFL group, and Elliot, Andrew, and Jonathan from the Community Economic Development group that formed the other half of Tico 21-my Peace Corps training group. Our trip to the park was three long days of action. We were up at 4:30 am the first day for an hour and a half ride into the park in Barton's host uncle's beat up pick up truck. Out of the truck, backpacks on, and we hit the beach. Corcovado National Park is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet-and maybe the most biodiverse in the Americas. In order to protect this-much of the trail to and from the ranger stations and the campsite are along the beach. We hiked all day-I want to say something like 21 K, arrived at the ranger station, got our tents set up, changed out of our shoes-and headed to the beach in hopes of spotting a bull shark or otters. Barton and Kyle saw the bull shark, I was too slow to follow their lead and spot it. We spent the second day making two different hikes in the trails surrounding the ranger station-as well as napping and relaxing. One of these hikes was at the break of dawn-as that's the best time to see animals. The third day we were up well before light again-made a quick breakfast-and were off to hike the 21 K back to the park entrance-where Barton's host uncle picked up back up.

Our packs weren't crazy heavy during the trip-and much lighter on the way out. At the ranger station there are rooms-but they were full-and we opted for the floor anyways. There is a large covered area where you can pitch tents-the park provides foam mattresses. We just brought mosquito nets and rope-which is pretty much a tent-just that everyone can see in! Along with that-we brought in all our food for the trip and packed out all our trash. Barton had a camp stove, so we could cook our breakfasts and dinners. We had oatmeal for breakfast, PB&Js for lunch, oranges, apples, granola bars, and trail mix for snacks, and spaghetti for dinner.

The main point of visiting Corcovado National Park is to see wildlife. We had great success. It has primary and secondary lowland tropical rainforest, which is pretty awesome to walk through and check out on its own-but the plethora of animals makes it a real treat. It's hard to take pictures of monkeys-as they move a lot between leaves and branches. Actually, this is true for most animals-so, I elected to take videos of some of the animals we saw. There are five of them, but most are short, and some even feature informative narration! Along with these animals, we also saw an anteater, squirrel monkeys, white faced capuchins, howler monkeys, a sea turtle (above), tinamou, great curassow, scarlet macaw, and all sorts of birds, lizards, and insects (lots of spider webs).

A video showing some of the ants we saw on the trip. Did you know the mass of all the ants on earth combined is about equal to the mass of all the humans?

It was crazy how close we could get to the coatis before they would scurry away. 

Monkeys are awesome. Many times the rest of the group had to get me going, because I could just stand and watch and take videos of them all afternoon. 

Corcovado National Park is full of hermit crabs. I couldn't not take a video. 

This is kind of the grand-daddy of the animals to see in the park (besides jaguars that no one sees), as there are only four species of tapir in the world, and the Baird's is the only one in Central America-and Corcovado National Park is by far the best place in Costa Rica to spot one. We saw a guide stopped ahead on the trail-he held his hand up to quiet us-and then we saw this tapir-super close-just going about its business eating vegetation. 

Costa Rica's Best Holiday

Since I last posted I've returned from Nicaragua and gone to the official close of service conference-which is a conference that Peace Corps volunteers go to three months before we officially end our service. But-as some people leave early-it's the last time my training group was all together in one room. In the middle of coming back from Nicaragua and going to the conference, was Costa Rican Independence day. I posted briefly about it last year, but this year was able to participate in activities at the elementary school and take my camera down to the parade. I went to the parade in downtown Limón-the port city 20 minutes away from my town. Sadly, my elementary school nor high school had marching bands-so they weren't in the parade.

(the raising of the lanterns)

(raising my lantern)

First, a brief note on the history. Due to both Spain being embroiled in a war with Napoleon (the Peninsular War) and growing tension between Mexican born and Spanish born citizens, Mexico fought a war of independence against Spain from 1810 to 1821. Taking advantage of a Spanish state troubled by the Peninsular War and much weakened in the Americas by the Mexican war, the Central American provinces-all ruled from Guatemala, drew up independence papers and declared themselves independent on September 15, 1821. So, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica all celebrate their independence day that day. One of the independence day activities is a torch run, which represents the original riders riding by torchlight to bring news of independence from Guatemala to the other countries.

(1st-3rd graders perform a traditional dance)

My host parents went to Heredia (a big city in the Central Valley) to spend the holiday with their kids and other relatives that live there, but there were some complications with an in-law, so there wasn't really space for me to go. But my host mom left me something important: a very well done lantern that my host brother had made the year before. This was important because last year, I was busy taking my pre-all night party nap and didn't get to to go to the lantern activity. 'Faroles' as they call them here are an important part of the independence day celebrations-especially in the elementary schools. Somewhat  like Paul Revere's ride, a women in Antigua Guatemala ran around, using her lantern, telling her neighbors of the great news of independence. So, elementary school kids make and decorate lanterns, then after an assembly and then singing the national anthem at six p.m., light their lanterns and raise them to celebrate independence. Because my host mom dusted off and showed me the lantern, I got to participate with the kids! I was also pretty excited that the national anthem was played with a slideshow-featuring pictures of Costa Rica-but having the lyrics at the bottom. Sadly, I haven't memorized the lyrics yet-but the slide show saved me!

As I said above, the next day-independence day itself-I went down to Limón Centro to catch the parade. I had been told it would start at ten, so went to catch a bus around 9:30. After seeing three buses pass by completely full (apparently everyone was going to the parade) , I got into a bus that was operating as a bus taxi with about 15 other people. I was worried I would have missed most of the parade when I arrived. Yet, true to Costa Rican form, despite arriving at 10:30, I was able to Limón's corpulent mayor lead off the parade. The parade was great-the bands here only play percussion instruments-which gives the parade a pretty amped up feeling. It was super hot-but I'll take that over rain. Lots of the kids had their hair pretty done up-both guys and girls. My favorite high schools were the ones where all the teachers helping with the parade (read: giving kids water) had coordinated outfits with the school's color. I grabbed two patty (spicy meat pastries) and a coke from my favorite patty place, as well as a Gatorade later-but after two hours baking in the sun and feeling the parade was about done-I grabbed the bus home. I've seen every holiday in Costa Rica, and independence day is by far the one they do best. More pictures at this link.

Quick update

I'm currently on vacation in Nicaragua with three friends from my training group. Soon after we return to Costa Rica we'll all attend the Close of Service Conference. Although I don't finish service officially until December 17, we meet three months in advance to start all the end of service paperwork. This is a government agency funded by you, the taxpayer, so there's plenty of it. As of the last email, it looks 38 of the original 46 volunteers that flew to Costa Rica on October 4, 2010 will be attending the conference. It will be great to see the whole group together, for the first time since our mid-service training in January.

Fun and interesting things have been happening (every once in a while-at least), and there will be plenty more posts to put up after my trip in Nicaragua, and I promise to get to that eventually, but for the meantime, my tumblr picture blog will update every day (moving its way through my service chronologically), so click on over there and check out those pictures.

http://kferr027.tumblr.com/

Keeping kids busy

Recently, I've been giving a very informal class to my host cousin, three of her friends, and two other host cousins. I focus on pronunciation and basic sentence formation-two things that get overlooked within the high school English program. The other day, I handed out some homework that I had prepared for them, as I was going to be gone on vacation and we'd be missing some classes. I said it wouldn't take too long (which is true) but one of them commented that it was like a test. In being three full pages of questions and exercises, she was right, it was almost as many pages, and certainly had more questions than any of the tests the students were used to. (Lots of instructions and poor usage of space cause the less content tests to take more space.) This comment reminded me of something I had been thinking about a fair amount recently. If you read my recent post on education and incentives, you'll note that many things here are very regulated-homework is one of them. Teachers are only allowed to give two assignments per trimester and are limited in how much weight can be assigned to the homework portion of the grade. I'm certain high schoolers in the US are jealous. And even some teachers might say the absence of busy work is a good thing. Yet, my experience here has made me reluctant to agree. 

 Learning occurs through a variety of ways, and different people learn differently-but I think there are two things that most teachers and people that know a lot more than me about learning would agree on. First, learning something in a variety of ways helps retention. A student just seeing a word might recall it, but a student seeing, saying, writing, and hearing the word has a much better chance. This is because this allows different style learners to all be touched, and because the different experiences with the word get imprinted on different parts of our brain. The second thing is that repetition helps retention. It's why one practices dribbling a basketball, playing a song on a trumpet, or typing on a keyboard. Doing something over and over trains our bodies(controlled by the brain)-and reading or writing or saying or hearing something over and over trains our brains directly. To a certain extent, language learning is a lot of brute memorization. There are creative and fun ways to memorize words-but they still need to be memorized. 

My time working with students and teachers in Costa Rica has really shown me the value of repetition-due to its almost complete absence. Sadly, what happens all too often, is that students are 'taught' a bunch of words, memorize them quickly, take the test, and then never again have to use the words. Actually, that's just a few students, most don't ever 'memorize quickly' most of the material. This is because they aren't forced to do so. 'Busy' work as it is pejoratively called, if well designed, should keep students busy learning new material. A student can be taught that "am" goes with "I" and "is" with "he, she, it", but they can forget it just as easily. But, if made to do 15 or 20 exercises demonstrating this, they'll have a much better chance of learning. A few weeks later, (even after the test), another 15 or 20 exercises will do a great job to help them remember (or re-learn) the skill. Many teachers here might say, 'but the student is just doing exercises, she's not learning' because the student isn't writing down or reading new material. This attitude is that learning is a one time, one step process is holding so many kids back from learning, and is really frustrating. Some teachers I've talked to balked at the thought of giving a worksheet with 15 or 20 questions. Granted, I don't know the perfect number for every skill-but I'd rather error on the side of caution-and have a good sample that the student has mastered the skill. 

The homework issue I briefly discussed above certainly inhibits the ability of teachers to keep students busy learning outside the classroom. Yet, I can't even begin to imagine the number of classes I've seen let go early because the students finished writing the three questions the teacher assigned or had completed the four sentences the teacher asked for. Call me old fashioned and a brute, but I'd much rather see the students staying in class doing 'busy' work (aka busy learning) than outside writing graffiti and throwing pebbles at their girlfriend in another class. Even crazier than the comment that the homework assignment was bigger than a test was that two of the students immediately set to work on the worksheet-maybe because the information was fresh in their minds, maybe because they're excited about learning, or maybe to show off to the other students that they could complete the exercises. It certainly has caught a bad name-but I'd much rather a teenager is busy practicing the foreign language they've learned than a whole host of other things.

London 2012 Olympics: An Analysis

For maybe the first time in my life, the Olympics have been on and I haven't had a whole lot going on, and I've had the Internet. While I have spelling bee classes going on at both the high school and elementary school, I'm not doing very much work with either of my teachers (although I'm more than willing to do so). So, even dropping by either the elementary school or high school every day, I still have had plenty of time over the past two weeks to watch the 30th Olympiad. If you're connected with me on the Facebook social network, you're well aware of this. I love the Olympics because I thoroughly enjoy many of the sports it displays, sports like running and swimming, which otherwise have a low profile, but are some of the truest tests of athleticism. Additionally, it feels good to be a winner, or at least from the same country as the winners, and for an American, the Olympics offers up this feeling in boatloads. 

The purpose of the Olympics is to me two-fold: to showcase the athletic talents of various countries via competition and to encourage international friendship and awareness. There's always plenty of controversy surrounding the Olympics because these two purposes are almost at odds with each other-stiff competition can encourage friendship and unity, but is also quite likely to produce acrimony, bitterness, and malfeasance. I'd highly encourage reading the following three articles to get a sense of the awareness and progress that the Olympics can bring about back in the countries that participate. (First and second and third.) Sadly, the Olympics also can be a place where oppressive dictators seek legitimacy, because, well, pretty much everyone takes the Olympics seriously. But, nothing's perfect. I've taken to analyzing the medal tallies from these games to give a bit of a deeper look behind the first purpose of the Olympics-the country competition. 

The way that the Medals Table was always presented was simply by most gold medals. I'm not a fan of this, because, first of all, they award silver and bronze medals too. Secondly, I had more than a few discussions arriving in China the day after the Beijing Olympics of Chinese people explaining how they had won the Olympics (as they had won 51 golds to America's 36) and me fighting back that America had won more total medals (110 to 100). But, to get the tables started, below are the top ten countries according to the typical way the table is presented. Also, here I'll mention that 203 countries participated in the Olympics, and only 85 of those countries earned any medal of any kind. 
*note-I don't know why some fields are white in the tables...it probably won't get fixed unless it's an easy solution

	COUNTRY	Gold	Silver	Bronze	TOTAL
1	United States	46	29	29	104
2	China	38	27	22	87
3	Great Britain	29	17	19	65
4	Russia	24	25	33	82
5	South Korea	13	8	7	28
6	Germany	11	19	14	44
7	France	11	11	12	34
8	Italy	8	9	11	28
9	Hungary	8	4	5	17
10	Australia	7	16	12	35

Instead of using this method, I prefer to tweak it a little bit to give credit for each medal earned. My method is to assign three points for gold, two points for silver, and one for bronze. Perhaps this scale doesn't correctly represent the effort and winning margin between the different medals, but it seems pretty logical to me. In case you're wondering, by this method, China did win the 29th Olympiad, with 223 medal points to the United States of America's 220. So, below are the top ten countries from London 2012, using this method, with their total medal points. 

	COUNTRY	Medal Points
1	United States	225
2	China	190
3	Russia	155
4	Great Britain	140
5	Germany	85
6	France	67
7	Japan	66
8	Australia	65
9	South Korea	62
10	Italy	53

Using this method, you'll see that South Korea falls from fifth to ninth, and that Hungary disappears from the top ten, replaced by Japan-which was 11th but jumped all the way to seventh. This method also almost exactly follows the total medals order, with only France slipping ahead of Japan and Australia, due to those two countries being heavily weighted towards silver and bronze medals. The table below shows the top 15 according to the medal points scheme, as well as the individual and total medals won by each of these countries. 

	COUNTRY	Gold	Silver	Bronze	TOTAL	Medal Points
1	United States	46	29	29	104	225
2	China	38	27	22	87	190
3	Russia	24	25	33	82	155
4	Great Britain	29	17	19	65	140
5	Germany	11	19	14	44	85
6	France	11	11	12	34	67
7	Japan	7	14	17	38	66
8	Australia	7	16	12	35	65
9	South Korea	13	8	7	28	62
10	Italy	8	9	11	28	53
11	Netherlands	6	6	8	20	38
12	Hungary	8	4	5	17	37
13	Ukraine	6	5	9	20	37
14	Spain	3	10	4	17	33
15	Kazakhstan	7	1	5	13	28

A short analysis of this table shows many similarities among these countries. The majority are western countries, with all of the major Western European countries represented (we'll call The Netherlands major) as well as the United States and Australia, western countries established on other continents-owing the majority of their culture and ethnicity to Western Europe. Additionally, China and Russia, two giant, populous, countries with heavy central control. The two most economically developed East Asian countries (excluding city states Hong Kong and Singapore), Japan and South Korea, which although possessing very distinct cultures, have been heavily influenced by the west in the past half century. Two giant, somewhat populous former Soviet Republics, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, as well as Hungary (a country very much in between the West and Russia) round out the list. Note that the only southern hemisphere country is Australia, which, if one's willing to offend a bit, can be seen as a British outpost that's developed a bit of its own culture. 

This analysis proves what I think is true to most Olympic observers, having lots of people helps you win medals. Hungary is the only country on the list with less than 15 million people. While a huge population doesn't guarantee medal success, see below, it's simple logic that having a larger pool makes it more likely you'll have some standout athletes in it. Culture and ethnicity obviously play a giant role, but, especially with team sports, countries with tiny populations most likely won't have enough interested, talented people to compete. The other great indicator of medal success is money. Not necessarily per capita wealth, but just simple wealth. You'll note that despite being Western European, super rich countries like Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, or Monaco aren't on the table. That's because the wealth needed to build a diving training center, or velodrome cycling track, or support a national basketball, volleyball, field hockey, or handball league isn't per capita wealth exactly, but a large economy that can support these things. Thus, the top ten medals winner table looks a lot like a G8 summit. Countries like China or Ukraine are lower or middle income countries per capita, but their economies are so big that collectively, there's enough cash left over to train some cyclists, weightlifters, kayakers, fencers, etc. (If there's a will-in China there is most definitely a will.) 

When one thinks about it, this doesn't seem all that fair. Evaluating countries with less than half a million people against China's 1.35 billion. Or evaluating a country like Mongolia, winner of five medals, who's entire GDP is just 6.192 billion dollars, against the United States and its 14.4 trillion dollar economy. These differences are on a scale of greater than 1,000. Check out the medal table, you can see that no country is anywhere close to winning 1,000 medals. In fact, only 962 medals were awarded in London (well more than that-but team medals only count as one in the medal table). Curiously, there were 52 more bronze awarded than silver (due to two bronze medals being awarded in judo, taekwando, and wrestling) and two more silver than gold (due to a tie for silver). On the other hand, to be fair, Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian ever, did win more medals than 165 of the countries that competed in London. So, in the spirit of looking a bit deeper at the medal table, I've prepared a table of the countries that earned the most medals based on population and based on wealth (nominal GDP). 

Top 10 countries based on population

1	Grenada	28.5714
2	Jamaica	8.8697
3	Bahamas	8.4828
4	New Zealand	5.8631
5	Trinidad and Tobago	4.5533
6	Hungary	3.7141
7	Slovenia	3.4014
8	Montenegro	3.2257
9	Lithuania	3.1371
10	Denmark	3.0440

*The metric used for this graph is medal points earned for each million residents.

Grenada, with Kirani James' 400m dash gold, and only having about 110,000 people, blows away the rest of the field in this category. You'll note that four of the top five countries are all Caribbean island countries that earned their medals in track and field. Why the fastest people in the world seem to come from the Caribbean or the US, I would love to learn more about. New Zealand won lots of medals in rowing and Hungary in canoeing, while Slovenia, Lithuania, and Denmark had very well balanced winnings. Montenegro is much like Grenada, it won but one silver medal, but due to its small population, makes the list. In case you're wondering, based on the population metric, America fared 46th among the 85 medal winning countries, just behind Canada and just ahead of Spain. 

Most populous countries not earning a medal

Country	Population
Pakistan	180.364
Nigeria	166.629
Bangladesh	152.518
Philippines	92.338
Vietnam	87.840
D.R. Congo	69.575
Burma (Myanmar)	48.724
Tanzania	43.188
Iraq	33.330
Sudan	30.894

Also worth looking at (in the table above) are the countries with the largest populations that did not medal at all. All of them did send a delegation-but earned no medals. Often mentioned Bangladesh is there; much discussion is made of the lack of Olympic medal earning by South Asian countries, especially Bangladesh and India. Pakistan appears to need to be added to the list, as it is the most populated country to not have medaled in London. Nigeria is probably the biggest surprise of the list, as it had a large delegation and certainly has a large enough economy to support aspiring Olympians. I would think that as it continues to develop and more of its population climbs out of extreme poverty, it will be an Olympic contender. Countries like Congo, Myanmar, Tanzania, Iraq, and Sudan make sense simply because of the incredible poverty or poverty and instability seen in those countries. 

Top 10 countries based on GDP

1	Grenada	3.8660
2	Jamaica	1.7873
3	North Korea	1.1403
4	Mongolia	1.1305
5	Georgia	1.0287
6	Kenya	0.5849
7	Ethiopia	0.5199
8	Montenegro	0.4865
9	Belarus	0.4387
10	Armenia	0.4268

*The metric for this graph is medal points earned per billion dollars in nominal GDP (2011)

Grenada, with its lone gold medal, again tops this graph and Jamaica gets second place again, just like the population comparison. The only other repeat is Montenegro, which is a medium income country, but with just about 600,000 people, has a small economy. The other nations on the list tend to be poor or medium income countries, with relatively small populations-exactly the countries you expect to be on the list-the small population with low/medium income means a small economy. The more telling fact is all the smaller, poorer countries that send Olympians but failed to earn any medals at all (think almost all of West Africa). As the Olympics tend to be somewhat of a rich club hangout (the winter olympics much more so) it makes sense that incredibly poor countries both don't have a culture or infrastructure capable of producing good rowers, they also don't have the money to send very big delegations. You do see the dictatorial regimes popping up on this list; as countries put Olympic medals way ahead of citizen well being on their priority list. Notable is North Korea's state run machine, using its money immorally to train weightlifters and wrestlers instead of feed its starving citizens. Belarus also could probably invest its limited resources in a few more constructive ways. The United States ranked 68th among the 85 countries, just behind Thailand and just ahead of Turkey. 

Largest economies without a medal

Country	GDP
Austria	379,047
United Arab Emirates	297,648
Israel	217,445
Chile	203,443
Philippines	199,591
Nigeria	196,410
Pakistan	174,150
Peru	157,324
Vietnam	103,902
Bangladesh	99,689

Continuing the comparison to GDP, the ten countries listed above are those with the largest economies that failed to win even a bronze medal at the 2012 Games. A number of countries are repeated from the population list (Phillipines, Nigeria, Pakistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh). The three countries that stand out the most are Austria, Israel, and Chile-three countries with the culture and wealth that should be supporting at least some medal winning Olympians. The UAE certainly has a giant economy, but with its fairly small population, and Muslim religious traits keeping many women out of certain sports, it's not much of a surprise that it failed to medal. 

Another way to test a country's effectiveness is to measure the medals it earns against the size of its delegation. Of course, the big and rich countries can field bigger delegations for the reasons discussed above. But, this is a good rubric for evaluating how much bang for the buck any particular olympic committee got. In figuring these numbers, just like the others, I used my medal points system instead of just total medals. 

Top 10 most effective countries at winning medals

Country	Points/Athlete
Botswana	0.5000
China	0.5000
Jamaica	0.4800
Iran	0.4717
United States	0.4245
Kenya	0.4043
Ethiopia	0.4000
Russia	0.3555
Georgia	0.3429
Azerbaijan	0.3019

The chart above shows the top ten countries in medal points per athlete. There is huge variety in the size of the delegations among the countries with the most effective delegations. Botswana sent only four athletes, but one gained silver while China was just as effective-but sent 380 athletes. The USA and Russia sent over 500 and 400 athletes, respectively, while the rest of the countries on the list had delegations of 30-60 athletes.
  
Five least effective countries at winning medals (but still won something)

Country	Points/Athlete
Morocco	0.0149
Greece	0.0192
Hong Kong	0.0238
Portugal	0.0260
Belgium	0.0348

All of these countries had medium to large delegations, with Hong Kong the smallest among them with 42 athletes. Both Greece and Belgium brought over 100 athletes to London. For comparison, Iran and Jamaica both earned over ten times as many medal points as Greece or Belgium, but with less than half as many athletes. The one important thing to take into account whether or not countries are participating in team sports. A country will bring 12 players for basketball, 18 for soccer, 13 for water polo, and so on. Each team only has the chance at one medal, whereas a country strong in swimming or running might bring a number of athletes that will medal more than once. While both LeBron James and Michael Phelps are amazing athletes (and I mean amazing) it's Phelps who helps out a score like this-as he scored 10 medal points (1/4 fraction for relays), but is just one athlete. On the other hand, because the Dream Team gold counts as one medal, LeBron earned .083 of a medal point. Don't in any way consider this criticism of LeBron James-that I don't do. 

The chart above shows the absolute 11 least effective countries. This is figured by the countries with the largest delegations in London that didn't win a single medal. The big shocker is the top one on the list, Austria. It has almost the characteristics of a medal winning country: it's Western, has a large economy, and additionally is extremely wealthy per capita. Its population of 8.4 million people isn't big, but it isn't that small either. What's more, it wasn't hurt by having teams competing, as all of its athletes, minus beach volleyball players, competed in individual events-including a number of swimmers, who are very likely to compete in multiple events. 

Country	Athletes
Austria	70
Nigeria	55
Israel	37
Ecuador	36
Chile	35
Angola	34
Cameroon	33
Senegal	31
Uruguay	29
Honduras	27
Iceland	27

I'll share a few more statistics that I find fairly amazing from the 2012 London Olympics. First is that the United States men's 4x400 meter relay team was .33 seconds away from winning gold, despite not having a single runner on the team that qualified for the 400 meter dash final. It's pretty crazy to be less than half a second away from the gold medal without a single one of the 8 fastest runners in the event. Additionally, Manteo Mitchell BROKE HIS LEG (fibula) while running in the qualifying heat-and ran 200 meters on a broken leg to help the United States qualify for the final. 

The last statistic is meant, with no ill will towards Indians, to show just how amazing Michael Phelps is, and well, why India gets the short straw because cricket isn't in the Olympics. In 23 Olympiads, dating back to 1900 in Paris, India has won 26 medals. This is a country that currently has 1.24 billion residents. Michael Phelps, the GREATEST Olympian of all time, has earned 22 medals in three Olympiads. 

*GDP, population, delegation size, and medal information from Wikipedia and www.london2012.com. 
*Photos from: http://nevada-outback-gems.com/prospect/gold_specimen/Natural_gold2.htm, http://www.fluid-forms.com/design-your-own/Earth-Brooch-Silver,http://hudsonvalleygeologist.blogspot.com/2010/12/bronze.html, http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,20612225_20617008,00.html