Costa Rican Memories

Playa Samara at sunset

I was adding some sugar to my morning cup of coffee when the voice from my host Mom I lived with in Costa Rica popped into my head:

"Ooh, la chica están una pequina hormiga!"

"The girl is like a little ant!"

Oh man and she is right. This girl never passed up a good Duncan Donuts or Diary Queen she didn't like.

I remember Costa Rica last year, living on the ocean in Playa Samara, and skipping the coldness from last winter all together. For one precious month I got to call the ocean my home, and to an inland Midwesterner,  that is bliss! Then reality hit again when I took a teaching job in mountains three hours away from the ocean in a bustling town on the outskirts of San Jose called Heredia. It was difficult finding jobs anywhere else, let alone finding a school near a beach. (which would have been prime! but no.) I didn't want to end up in San Jose; I had heard to many stories about how high the crime rate was and how easy it is to get mugged there in pure daylight. My lonely planet guide didn't even have anything interesting to mention about other th

an a few market streets and fancy Catholic churches. Every Costa Rican town has one of those.  

Playa Samara at high tide

So back to the beach. Playa Samara is a tiny beach town with no street lights or stop signs. Horses and cattle roam around freely on the streets and roosters from nearby houses coo every morning and all day. and the sounds those birds make! One moment its like they are singing a peaceful tune and next moment they are crowing death calls as though someone is about to make chicken nuggets out of them. The animals noises I do miss though were the cute, high pitched chirping from the bitty little geckos that crawled around everywhere. There were at three on every ceiling at our house at any given time. During the day, iguanas would sun themselves on the tin roof of the house and it would sound like some dragging a handful of chains across the tin tiles every time they moved. I about freaked when I first heard that early in the morning. 

Sitting like Gollum on a rock in Playa Domingal

Between classes at the TEFL college, (thats Teaching English as a Foreign Language) my friends and I were at the beach. Surfing and swimming, running and tossing a Frisbee were the highlights. Nights consisted of dancing and partying at the beach side night clubs. Ok, by clubs, I mean two!

At the hot spring near Cuidad Quesada

I surfed most of the weekends, the surf-able waves lasted between a window of about 4 hours. I wanted to surf every minute of it even if somedays it  meant enduring jellyfish stings from the tiny jellyfish that drifted in one day, or face-planting myself in the water after another wipeout. I tired my best to teach myself by watching others surfing nearby. and there were some good examples too.

When I got really tired I would just paddle around on the board and watch the dozens of pelicans flying overhead swoop down into the water to catch fish. "Get 'em pelly!" I would cheer when one would dive bomb. and you should of seem too, they fell like torpedoes. 

We visited other beaches nearby the town, the ones that were nearly untouched and empty because they were difficult to get too. We took rainforest hikes and kayak trips.  At one point we met at La Fortuna, a paradise of Costa Rica located in a rainforest at the base of an active volcano. We zip lined 300 feet about the trees and over waterfalls, sat in hot springs and rode horses through the jungle. We stayed at a backpackers resort that did live up to it's name of a resort. It had 5 start looks and services with 2 star prices. After a perfect month of TEFL studying and beach going, it was time to hunker down and go back to work. and this is where the difficulties started.

Cafe Britt Coffee Plantations. Free
samples of coffee and chocolate, and
this little hormiga had her fill. 

I began work in Heredia in February. I had choose to live with a old Tica Lady who leased out rooms in her house for foreigners who were living or studying at Heredia's language schools and universities. Rent included two meals a day, hot showers and laundry.  (hot water is a luxury in Costa Rica!) I enjoyed being there so much. The host Mom, Dona Maria, was a humous and caring Mom of three with two other grandkids. She did not speak any English, and this was a blessing in disguise because she is the main reason my Spanish got so much better.  When times were tough at school, she was my Mom away from home, listening to my rants in my broken Spanish and make me tea or cut fruit from the market she had visited that day. This was about the best part of my three months living in Heredia. That was the hardest past, saying good bye to her after I had quit the teaching job.

Capoeira on the beach. Photo from, well,
Google Images. 

The other highlight of living in Heredia was the Capoeira classes I took. Capoeria is Brazilian dance fighting, I guarantee you have seen a form of this on TV; two people throwing kicks and dodging over the other's head without touching them, dancing and spinning to drums and a string instruments called berimbaus.  It is more a dance than a Martial Art, and it feels just like break dancing. It was a far cry from my taekwondo days in Korea. Half of it was actually a music class as is was practicing the movement. You couldn't learn one without the other. It was a great release and workout after a difficult day in the classroom, and that was most days.

So what went wrong? Let me start by saying that most of my students, (most not all) were clever and adorable kids that try to do the right thing and wanted to get to know me. What  was faulty was the educational system. Listen to some of the Costa Rican laws that all schools, private or public must follow; one, it is illegal to grade a students paper in red ink. It is considered to emotionally damaging. What? Should I take out my pink gel pens and draw butterflies and unicorns on an assignment half completed and mostly wrong? Good job Juan-Degas Esperanza,  you got them all wrong again! Two, it is illegal to give a kid a detention, have them miss recess or lunch or tell them to cut their hair. This would "ruin a kids right to play and ruin their right to individuality!"

Zip lining in La Fortuna

When exams are given, all teachers must, by law, write out a study guide that mentions all items given on a test and from where the students should study from; their notes, textbooks or handouts. Teachers must give this handout exactly 8 days before the test and have their parents sign it. and then show me so I can sign it. and then show their parents again. Hand this out a day late and parent can take it to court to get the test date changed. Ah yes, it is their right! and pop quizzes? Off to jail with you!

These laws written down on paper probably sound like really good ideas with all the best intentions, but when put into practice, they have only turned many students into lazy and unresponsiable learners. They can argue that they have a RIGHT to not do homework, and any forgotten homework or poor test score will always look like the fault of the teacher. I had no method of disciple to get my kids to pay attention that did not break some law, and in overcrowded classes of 35 students, I wanted to make like a gecko and stick myself to the ceiling.

Not only was I not informed of any of these laws, I was not given a curriculum to follow, no textbooks in the first month, and all memos and meetings were done in Spanish. At a Bilingual school. I recall too many late nights of writing lesson plans from scratch, throwing together spelling lists and work sheets because I wasn't told they had to be done until that day. Until a parent had called to complain about my new seating arrangement I'd made, having the class bully seated away from his friends, I'd had a enough.

I hugged my host mom good bye and thanked her for keeping me together those past three months.

"¡Muchas Gracias Doña Maria! ¡Yo siempre le perderé!" Thank you, I will miss you.  

I gave it my all in Latin America. But it was time to go back to Asia. 

Pura Vida, Costa Rica!!