Sabanillas de Acosta

A while back Nicole B., a volunteer from my training group invited me to go back to visit our training community as her host family was hosting a party for their daughter, who had recently turned 15. It was not a full out fiesta de quinceñera that are common throughout Latin America when a girl turns 15. The family, and Margaret, their daughter are pretty low key, and didn't want a party like that. The party was lots of fun aka lots of whisky and lots of grilling! Nicole has visited our training community a lot (she's geographically closer and was closer with her old host family). For me, it was great to see El Rosario again. I stayed with her host family, where I had spent lots of time during training, but had a chance to go visit my old family, have lunch, and catch up with a few of the sons. 

A more interesting aspect of the trip was staying at Nicole's for a night before we went to El Rosario. I thoroughly enjoy visiting other volunteer's sites. It's interesting to see the differences between their sites and mine, as well as to get a bit of a glimpse into different regions of Costa Rica-small towns tend to be very representative of the region. As I learn more about Costa Rica, I've learned which institutions are controlled locally and which are controlled nationally-using this knowledge, a fair amount can be gleaned about a town's organization level based on a few institutions. 

Nicole lives in Sabanillas de Acosta, a very small town nestled in the coffee hills southwest of San José. As the crow flies, it looks like it's super close to San José, but as the bus goes, it takes almost as long to get to her site as mine, despite mine being five times the distance. The second leg of the journey to her site is fairly adventurous/incredibly uncomfortable and dangerous-depending on one's perspective. Up and down bumpy mountain dirt roads, crossing one lane bridges as one crosses one's fingers that this bus won't be the one that breaks it, and having to back up for 200 meters so an oncoming truck can make the turn (oh, yes, all the turns are effectively one lane). But, by far the oddest thing about the journey was that the bus driver seemed to know everyone on the bus, but me of course. He checked to make sure I knew where I was going when I paid for my ticket-apparently not a lot of people visit Nicole's site that don't belong there. The chatty, friendly bus driver was the exact opposite of the drivers that I encounter on my bus route: they're just trying to move things along as fast as possible. And, with 13 different buses a day, it's not like I'm going to be getting to know the drivers anytime soon.

(me in front of Nicole's house)

Her town is one of the smallest I've been to in Costa Rica. I think she said 250 people, or something like that. The incredible mountain views were quite different than the views around my town: semi truck parking lots. Additionally, I was in jeans and long sleeves in the evening-and under plenty of blankets at night. We might be in the tropics, but her site, like much of the Central Valley, gets quite cool at night-being up in the mountains. A nice respite from Liverpool, where I occasionally sweat at night: no blankets, just boxers. It was obviously due to the tiny population of her town, but it felt almost ghost town like to me, there were so few people walking on the streets. I went to the pulpería just down from her house to buy some Tang, and there was no one there. As in, no clients and the lady running it was across the street, apparently making coffee, because she popped over after a minute or two with a hot cup. This was very different from Liverpool, where I've never been at the pulpería without at least one other customer. One more thing about the bus, in case you're wondering where the school bus you rode in as a kid is, it's transporting people from San Ignacio de Acosta to Sabanillas, among other stops. 

Fence, fence, fence, fence

I don't often write about perhaps the aspect of my life which is most different here in Costa Rica than back home. Language. There may be some other aspects that could be more different, now that I think about it, but using a different language probably the winner. Of course, all my time spent with my Kindle or laptop is mostly done in English, so I'm certainly not in any sort of full immersion environment. I think the only way to do that in this day and age would be to throw away one's phone, laptop, and any books in one's native tongue. Yet, by living with a host family, a huge amount of my daily experience is in Spanish. This, of course, is one of the big parts of the Peace Corps. Unlike (I assume) volunteers serving in countries like Cameroon or Cambodia, I came to Costa Rica having studied Spanish for four years in high school and four years in college and having lived in Spain for a semester. Thus, my experience has been two fold: 1) learning all the Costa Rican twists on Spanish and 2) learning very specific vocabulary. Both of these learning experiences have been greatly enhanced by my new host family. 

The main reason is that my host mom and host brother are very willing to answer any and all of my questions. Additionally, my host brother speaks knows a lot of English, and spends a lot of time online-where he often encounters words and phrases he asks me about. So, we often have exchanges about language where, in the act of teaching, I tend to learn things about Spanish as well. Lastly, I've told them and my host dad to feel free to correct me any time I make a mistake--which is one of the most important things about learning a language. Sadly, I have recently noticed that I've adopted the second of the two characteristics of Costa Rican Spanish I detest most. The first trait, using Usted instead of tú as the second person singular pronoun, I had to adopt the first week to be polite. The second, adding a diminutive suffix for no real reason at all, I'm ashamed to say I've noticed myself doing a lot recently. But this is the inevitable consequence of spending so much time chatting with native speakers and watching Costa Rican television. 

(the source of my error)

On to the title of the post, which indicates an interesting discussion/learning experience I had the other day. An important maxim in language learning is that you can't translate everything. I hold fast by this statement-and think all language learners should. This discussion the other day was about me being a bit cavalier with my used of the word 'fence.' Like a fence around a yard, not the sport. Fences, gates, bars on windows-these are a big part of Costa Rican (and Central American) culture, a fancy sport with swords-not so much. Having learned the word 'cerca' for fence, I, until recently, had used that for all fences. But, my host brother had corrected me once or twice, as I referred to the fence in front of our property as a 'cerca' that it was actually a 'tapia' because it has a cement wall as a base (it has wrought iron fencing on top of it). I casually ignored his instruction, thinking, a fence is a fence, no big deal. So, I once again committed the error, and he decided I needed to learn. He brought up some images on Google Images, and taught me. So, I've learned: 'cerca' is used for fences made of wood-like your traditional picket fence, 'tapia' for fences made of concrete or cinder blocks (some of them we might call walls in English-which can be done in Spanish too 'muro'), 'malla' is used for chain link fences, and 'verja' is used for wrought iron fences (as well as bars on windows). So, how do you say 'fence' in Costa Rica: refer to the previous sentence. It's quite a specific example, but, it's things like this-that in Spanish instead of adding a word to 'fence' to describe it, they have different words-that I find fascinating about languages and learning languages. And, it's this type of thing that doesn't get covered in Spanish classes; literary analysis: check, being able to point to a fence in Costa Rica and not look stupid: fail. Remember: cerca: fence, malla: fence, tapia: fence, verja: fence. 

Los servicios

There are very few things that everyone does every day. A short list would include eat, sleep, and go the bathroom. Certainly there are days when people don't sleep, and sadly, there far too many people around the world that have days when they don't eat. But this blog is about the third item mentioned: going to the bathroom. Well, rather it's about the facilities themselves. After dealing with two years of squat toilets, bring your own toilet paper, and a lack of stall doors in China, I figured that restrooms in Costa Rica would be a paradise. And, yes, they are considerably better. Costa Rica isn't a rich country by any means, but it's considerably richer-on average-than China, and, with the 66th highest GDP/per capita in the world, it's right on the edge of the richest 1/3 of the countries in the world. Most importantly, tourism is a huge part of its economy, and swathes of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans visit the country every day to take in its beaches, rainforests, volcanoes, and wildlife. Yet, I find that public restrooms continually fall short of achieving the triple play that I hope for in every bathroom.  


In case you're wondering, the triple play is as follows: soap, toilet paper, and a towel/paper towels/air dryer. To be clear, I'm talking about public restrooms here, although more than a few bathrooms in houses I've been to lack the towel. Bus stations, schools, restaurants, bars, and stores-these are the types of bathrooms I'm addressing. There aren't any squat toilets here :), and almost every bathroom has a sink. Yet, to me, a sink doesn't serve much purpose if there isn't soap. Rubbing cold water around might get rid of some dirt, but isn't doing much action on the bacteria. If there is soap, it can in no way be assumed that there will be towels or a hand dryer. So, yes, essentially every person leaving a bathroom is shaking their hands like crazy and wiping them on their pants. Another symptom of the no towel situation is the wet handshake, which is something that I still am creeped out by. I'm happy this guy washed his hands, but I'm quite unhappy that my hand is now moist from the handshake…now I've got to look for an opportunity to stealthily dry my hand off on my pants. And, probably the most frustrating of all is entering a bathroom and their being no toilet paper. I always carry back up with me when I'm traveling, so it's no big deal. Surprisingly, the place where I most often encounter bathrooms with no toilet paper (and no soap or towels either) are at schools. I'm surprised by this because Costa Rica is a fairly health conscious country, and especially so for it's wealth/education levels. Additionally, Central Americans-Costa Ricans included-are fairly fastidious about maintaining a neat appearance. The fact that most of the school bathrooms I've used lack soap and toilet paper is shocking to me. But, maybe that's something they say at some student meeting I've yet to attend-always carry toilet paper and hand sanitizer with you. It's also hard to keep anything discreet when you have to walk to the office, grab the staff communal toilet paper roll and carry it with you to the bathroom.


To be fair, I'm sure there are few bathrooms not making a triple play in the tourist resorts and public services in super touristy towns. Of course, the Peace Corps doesn't often place volunteers on tourist resorts.  

Coming off the bench

Being involved in the Costa Rican education system has made me considerably prouder of my mom. Not that I wasn't proud before, both my parents are amazing parents-and I'd write that even if I knew they weren't reading this blog. But, being involved in an education system that doesn't have substitute teachers (or enough, or use them enough) has made me much, much more aware of how valuable my mom is. That's because, if it's not obvious, my mom is a substitute teacher.

Initially, looking back on one's days with substitute teachers, one might think: what's the big deal, all we did was watch movies or do busy work. Granted. But, that's a big deal, because, the students are doing something. The problem with a system that doesn't have substitute teachers, is, that, the students are doing nothing. Well, that's wrong, they're doing many a thing, but nothing very positive for the school in general. For the record, I'm mostly writing about high schools here. Most of the time, like when the teacher is to be gone for the whole day, elementary schools have substitutes. Sometimes the teacher leaves an hour or two early, and then he'll just let the group go. This generally means the kids will play on the playground and the janitors will keep control of them until it's time to go. But, in the high school, from what I can understand, unless the teacher will be gone for eight days (yes, eight) there will be no substitute teacher. Almost all absences except a surgery and recovery or a pregnancy are for less than eight days, so, essentially, there aren't substitutes in the high schools. 


So, as I was saying earlier, the lack of a substitute means that the kids are NOT sitting in a room doing a review worksheet or silently doing tomorrow's homework (as if there was daily homework, chuckle, chuckle). Instead, the kids are wandering around the high school, as they probably have another class in 45 minutes or an hour and a half and there's no bus to take them home. So, what does this mean? Well, a few things: students interrupting other classes and asking if they can talk to their best friend/boyfriend/girlfriend etc., students playing music on their phones just outside a classroom so everyone inside can hear it, students texting their best friend/boyfriend/girlfriend, urging them to cut class and head to the forest/town center to make out/smoke weed/play videogames, students playing soccer and blasting classroom walls with errant shots, students chasing each other up and down the walkways-making all sorts of noise. In general, when there aren't substitutes, all the kids from that class inhibit learning in the other classes. And, if it isn't obvious, every day without a substitute is a day the students aren't learning new material, or even importantly, reviewing what they've learned. I say that because there is quite a paucity of review activities.


This certainly is not the number one reason that students aren't reading English, and it is something that I can't effect at all. Yet, it is no doubt one of the many problems that is preventing students at the high schools I've worked with from learning what they could be, based on the time and resources at their disposal. And it's a great reason to appreciate substitute teachers everywhere, like my mom :)