Cliches

*edited because I still click the wrong buttons using my netbook all the time. I've only had it for a year.


Today I begin trying to process this year through my blog.  One thing that has helped me immensely this year, though it is challenging to do, has been thinking "This is water." every day.


The late David Foster Wallace in a graduation speech in 2005 at Kenyon College said, "

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"   

 The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

I love his entire speech, and this part in particular, because I have tried to keep the entire year in my mind as I struggle against the day to day grind here.  While there are moments I will remember forever, both good and bad, more than anything this year has been a marathon, not a series of sprints.  It is a marathon in which I did not run a good time, when I did not know if I could make it, when I watched friends drop out along the way, and yet I still kept going for some unknown reason. Throughout it all, I have tried to at least once every day look up from whatever I am doing, whatever I am worried about, and just appreciate where I am and what I am doing.

I am now past the 26th mile. While I at times have faltered, I have made it.  I will stop pushing the marathon metaphor since it is stretched as it is.  To return to the story from David Foster Wallace, as long as I lived in the US and only left for short amounts of time, it was very hard to see the water.  That is one thing which living abroad has taught me, what I like about the US and what I don't miss at all, while at the same time giving me an appreciation and at least a superficial understanding of a new culture. This has com over time, in fits and starts.

There have been no eureka moments, but rather gradual realizations. A couple of times I have appreciated a specific moment, but I can't honestly say there were many moments where I was overjoyed that I was here right now doing this above all the other things I could have been doing.  However, I am glad that I made it this far.  I have successfully navigated living abroad and working in a foreign country as a teacher, both things I had never done before.  Becoming an adult abroad has been trying, but as rewarding as people kept telling me it would be in April and May in my lowest moments.

I am excited to return home in three weeks.  I miss my friends and family (not to mention the library).  Still, I would not have wished I was doing anything else this past year. As I say good bye to friends, both Costa Rican and with World Teach, and my students over the next couple of weeks, I remember so much about this crazy year.  The importance of saying "This is water," is one of thing I will remember.

Costa Rica, I can't say I loved every moment, but I love this country and I will be back.

Preparing to return

Blame NaNoWriMo for the blog silence. I am on pace to finish with over 10,000 words written so far, but it has been taking up most of my free time. It's really odd having to remember that for both the student and teachers we are approaching the beginning of June in the States in terms of focus and attention span. That is making teaching interesting. I am as susceptible to it as anyone else. I have to focus extra hard on bringing the same energy, since I know I am leaving soon and only have a lesson or two more with each group.

In thinking about coming home its odd how some of the things I have not done in almost a year. Most of them are things which I have not done because I am a volunteer on a volunteer's stipend (read quite small), not because I am in Costa Rica. I chose Costa Rica because of how developed it is and I have not been disappointed (as the fact that I am posting this at my favorite café with fast wireless internet attests to).

1. Cell phone: I have not had a cell phone since I left in the beginning of January. While it turns out that getting a cell phone here is not nearly as hard as it used to be (thanks CAFTA-DR, I think), I still did not have much need for it nor could I justify the cost. I've liked not having it most of the time, but I am looking forward to having one when I get back.

2. Driving a car: I've barely even ridden in cars at all, at times going weeks with going everywhere either by bus or by walking. I will have to be careful the first time I go to drive. At least I won't have to unlearn the norms of the road here in CR, which are quite different than in the States.

3. Having internet where I live: Sadly, but not surprisingly, this is probably what I have missed the most on this list. Having to strategically plan my internet usage has been something I have had trouble adjusting to. I have not watched a single episode of this season of the Guild, which is a testament to how having the internet for on average an hour a day has changed my habits. Though, I hope to be more reasonable about how much time I spend on the internet. If I spend 8 hours in one day on the internet, I at least hope that I will have done something useful for some of that time.

4. Wearing a sweatshirt: This is one which I did have to do in Orosi the first month and will probably have to again when I go back to Orosi for Thanksgiving, but here in Fortuna it never gets cold enough. A few days ago I was too cold to wear shorts for the first time. Normally I decide between shorts and pants based on whats clean, not on the weather. I forgot until about a month ago that I had even brought my Colby ultimate frisbee sweatshirt, since its sat in my suitcase unused for the entire year.

I'm sure other things will come to me. I definitely plan on having a follow up post when I am back in the States, seeing what takes the most getting used to.  

Being Trained

I am well on my way to finishing up my TESOL certification.  I mainly just have to do an one-on-one lesson with someone in Fortuna, which should not be too difficult.  A few people have asked me to help them with their English, so they should be willing to take the time.

Yesterday I team taught with another of the teachers here and it went really well.  I was pretty nervous beforehand between teaching with someone I don't know that well and teaching adults for the first time. However, once I started teaching, I felt so confident.  The prep work we had done really paid off and while we certainly made mistakes, none were glaringly obvious and they are all very fixable.

While I have a lot of work to do to become the teacher I can be, yesterday was such a ray of hope.  I understand why so many teachers end up burned out with the day to day struggle of teaching and those lessons where it just works are how I survive and even thrive.  I can take the successes of this week back to La Fortuna for my final month and then on into the future as I continue teaching.

My week was unexciting other than teaching.  I watched some of the World Series, failed to find a way to watch the Celtics-Heat game and other than that just hung out when I wasn't working on stuff for TEFL.  I head back to La Fortuna tomorrow and am there until Thanksgiving.  Then I go back to where this all started in Orosi where we had orientation in January for our final goodbye before my last week.  A week later I fly back to the US.

Awareness

I'll have a real post up in the next couple of days, but please go read this post by John Scalzi.  I thought about doing my own list, but since in so many ways John Scalzi and I are similar in what we don't have to think about, just go read what he wrote. Also a bonus is that many of the comments are excellent, too.

The only one I would add is the following.

I don't have to think about how to keep a roof over my head or my family's head or how to feed myself or my family when my current job ends,

but today I will.  

Culture Day

This past Tuesday was Culture Day at school. There are all sorts of days here such as day of the arts and day of the tree. To celebrate Culture Day, the teachers split into three groups with each in charge of a country: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the US. Each group prepared a performance, some food and some decorations about each country.

This was probably my favorite one of these civic days so far this year. Independence Day was interesting, but yesterday was much shorter and sweeter. I was put with the group for the US, obviously. I was told I needed to show up in traditional dress for the US. Needless to say, I was stumped by that request. Not only do I only have the regular clothes I brought from the US and I packed light, but what would I have worn? Thankfully in the end it did not matter. I wore normal clothes and no one seemed to mind.

The performance for the US was a country dance sung. Being from Boston I'm certainly no expert on country music or dancing to it, but I thought the two teachers and two students did an excellent job of it. I don't know what country song they danced to, but it was very representative with good lines about hanging out by the river in Georgia somewhere. The dancers all wore cowboy boots and hats and all around it was really good.

Another performance (I think Nicaraguan but I missed the opening explanation) was a fascinating dance/drama where a boy and girl dressed nicely danced together. Then the boy split off, and one by one 4 other students came out dressed as vagabonds with dirty clothes. The girl continued dancing in the middle and from the side the vagabonds came out dancing with her one by one.

Each of the vagabonds had a different temptation. The first had money, the second alcohol, the third cigarettes, and the fourth a knife. She rejected all the temptations and then the boy came back and they together fought off the vagabonds.

All in all a good message. It was really interesting how the younger students enjoyed it because of the slapstick humor involved, while the older students laughed some but also understood what was being said. Hopefully they took it to heart as they go onto high school.

Then a small skit with a teacher narrating was performed in remembrance of the landing of Columbus in 1502 on the coast of what would become Costa Rica. While a little bit of the noble savage stereotype came out, it was certainly a better description of both the negatives and positives than I learned at the same age, which was good. Maybe too many positives, but it was at least not a celebration of Columbus "discovering" the New World.

After that I served the hot dogs and soda which were the US foods. The Nicaraguan food was a figurón, which is a yucca and meat dish. The Costa Rican food was rice pudding, chicken and rice, and empanadas. A good day was had and it was a lot of fun and hopefully the students learned something about all 3 countries and to respect and appreciate the differences.

The only annoyance was the students dressed in indigenous clothing making the standard "Indian war cries," which I did my best to put an end to. Some listened, some did not, but other than that, the day was pretty good.

Couple of things

So I asked my friend about how to say awkward in Spanish and he said "raro" is the word. Depends on the context because it can also mean weird, but yeah, I might be saying que raro a lot more often.   That is definitely one thing I am going to miss when I leave here. The ability to ask people about various things in Spanish and just speaking Spanish in general.

I am going to have to figure out how to keep my Spanish up when I get back to Boston.  I don't want to lose my Spanish. Well, hopefully I can find some people to speak with, maybe I'll just make time to call my Costa Rican friends and work to stay in touch with them.

In other news, teaching about animals and plants is so much easier in English than the human body or energy and matter.  The kids find it more interesting and they already know a lot of words, like for photosynthesis they knew sunlight, air, water, and oxygen, so it was pretty easy to explain.

2 months

I have just about 2 months left here in Costa Rica.  At times it feels like I'll be leaving too soon and there's so much more I still want to do here.  Other times, two months seems like it will last forever.  My main focus for the next couple of months is to make sure that my teaching is as good as it can be.  As the year winds down, I end up not teaching nearly as much as I expect.

As I've started to find my feet here, its slowly becoming more frustrating that I don't actually teach my students.  I'm working on taking each class individually and not letting a given canceled class or bad class throw me off.  I need to remember the moments when my students understand me exactly, not only when they are hopelessly lost and I'm teaching in Spanish.

In other news, I did get sick yesterday and missed a class.  Very frustrating. The silver lining is this is only the second time I've gotten sick and the last time happened 4 months ago.  Knock on wood I'll be healthy the rest of my time here, since I really can't afford to miss any more classes, given that I'm missing the last week of October to finish my TESOL certification.

Other than that, October has been playing games with my head by not raining, but I'm still waiting.  This is supposed to be the rainy season.  I just hope I find the time to run every day.  Tomorrow I hope to wake up early and run, because it rarely rains in the morning here.