We Wish You a Merry Christmas

After two months of intermittent training I was finally ready to bury my Christmas Chorus. I had just come back from a week of training in San Jose, graduation was in 3 days and I was sure not only that my students had forgotten the song, but also that the principal, who had never been too interested, had forgotten about the Chorus' existence. I was surprised when I walked into her office that morning and was informed that my choir was the only thing anyone had prepared for graduation, that we were performing in three days, and that I needed to call everyone immediately and have a practice in an hour and a half.
Such was my brusque welcome to the little discussed dark side of the 'pura vida' atmosphere: the sudden virulent panic that sets in before anything important happens. I threw myself in with gusto, making this week of school parties and graduations the busiest week of school I've had in months. One night I spent four hours inflating balloons, I helped my host mother clean the school kitchen, and we practiced. Different groups of students showed up every day, and I was not told a definite time for the graduation until the day before.
It was raining hard the day of the ceremony, and I was surprised that when I got to school a swarm of ready chorus members surrounded me as I pulled off my rain clothes. I started to get more and more nervous as the time came for my students to perform. As the ceremony wore on parents started grumbling in the back, the song was the last thing on the schedule. When the time came I sprang up with my songsters, organized them quickly, turned on the music, and they started singing.



I could not be more proud of them.

Merry Christmas, Everyone.

News from Nowhere

Whenever I arrive at my most distant school after a long bike ride I like to go to the little store nearby for a cup of coffee to re-energize me before class starts. While I was gingerly sipping the from the steaming cup, one of my student's grandfather approached me cautiously and asked permission to ask me a question. He pressed a coin into my palm and asked me what country it was from. I studied the engraved animal on the front and the writing on the back and told him about a magical place where pizza flows like water and video-arcades make children into the very zombies they are so desperately killing. The coin was from Chucky Cheese.



A little while ago our neighbor broke the glass part of the coffee machine again. This time it wasn't her two year old crawling over the top of the sofa, it was the 12 year-old smashing it down on the counter after filling his thermos for the afternoon shift of his construction job. The neighbor promised to pay for it, but it would take her a few months to save up the money. In the interval we introduced a new form of making coffee, not the traditional way of pouring it through a hanging filter (because boiling the water means spending money on gas, or taking the effort of lighting the wood stove), instead we first poured the water into a pot that fit under the coffee maker. Next we transferred the water to an aluminum pitcher, so that we could pour it into the coffee machine without spilling. Then the normal coffee process took place. Once all the coffee was in the pot, we poured it back into the pitcher to transfer it into the thermos so that it wouldn't get cold. Once it got 'stale' (after 3 hours) the process would start anew. In October I spent the majority of my time outside of school making coffee.



My host uncle was trying to become a real estate agent. He somehow made a connection with a lawyer in San Jose who wanted to buy land for a hotel, and desperately trying to get him interested in buying a plot of land above my neighborhood. "In order to seal the deal I just need to send him some pictures, especially of the ocean view" he complained. I agreed to help him send the pictures he took with his cellphone, but the quality was too low for the lawyer. Since I was already involved I soon found myself riding my bike up past the creek with my camera to take pictures that the lawyer could actually use. The owner, a very sweet man whose family hosted Peace Corps volunteers in the 1970s, walked me all around the property. He took me to see some surreal insects that have only been documented inside the National Park, and we walked around to where his friend had placed some butterflies in chrysalis. We happened to be there when several of them were hatching out and spreading their wings. Then, on the way back we ran into a group of Squirrel Monkeys (the cutest monkeys). I had no idea that so much of what I had most loved about Corcovado was only about 20 minutes from my house. The lawyer was unimpressed. It turned out he was looking for property in an entirely different part of the country. More fool him.