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Today Costa Rica celebrates the anniversary of the annexation of Nicoya, part of a region called Guanacaste in the northwest corner of the country. I have celebrated well the annexation all weekend at Dominical, a rural beach town on the Central Pacific coast.

The long weekend has been great, but I feel homesick for the United States and my family and friends there.

On Thursday, two of my friends from Nashville came to Potrero Grande for a visit. They'd been doing mission work in the north-central region of the country and rented a car to drive south to see me and my town and then go with me to the beach.

My friend, Rebecca, from Nashville

When they left me at the beach on Saturday, I felt a little deflated. I skipped out on an afternoon of swimming with fellow volunteers to hide in my dark little hotel room and read a depressing novel about Canadian Indians fighting in World War I.

Then someone died in the ocean's fierce riptides yesterday, and I know I'll never swim at that beach again.

And since I clearly I am no mood for telling stories and jokes, here's one from my friend Kevin, a fellow volunteer living down the highway and up the mountain from me. The story makes me laugh, even on these days that sort of suck.

Somewhere in Boruca a stock pile of Fart Bombs have been located and a street battle has broken out. The little plastic packages look harmless enough and are easy to conceal. However, when you hear the loud pop of a fart bomb that has been smacked onto the ground and the devilish chuckle of a Borucan, fading into the distance as they run away, you know that things are about to get unpleasant.

The aroma of the fart bombs is a mixture of rotten eggs and a saint bernard with serious digestive problems. The smell waifs through houses and lingers... and lingers.

Today I was in the pulperia (corner store) buying a few things for a class party. Kids were on break and filled the tiny store shouting the names of their favorite brands of fried fat-chunk snacks and sugar-coated sugar-cube treats. Suddenly there was a loud pop and everything was silent. People looked around for the source of the sound and discovered a small broken bag on the ground. Then the smell hit.

Kids started screaming and flooded into the street in a panic. The owners of the store left their counter and ran out the back door. There was a first grader in the corner dry heaving. I ran out the door with my goods. I didn’t bother waiting for my change. In the streets people gasped for air. Contorted faces stared blankly into the
mountains trying to understand what had just entered their nose.

Now one may think that adolescents are the perpetrators of these olfactory crimes. Bored teenagers looking to harrass anyone for enjoyment. One would think wrong. Middle-age men in Boruca are running into each others homes, work places, and ranchos leaving a wake of burning noses. No one knows how it started and I fear for how it is going to end. May God have mercy on our noses.

See, I feel better already. This place really is hilarious. Thanks, Kevin.

Cursed

One of my fourth-graders came to me yesterday and asked what "Welcome back," means. Apparently he'd seen it in some movie and was curious. Once he got the answer to that one, he was confident to ask another question.

"Teacher, how do you say bad words in English?"

I smiled and told him I wasn't here to teach him those kinds of things.

He replied with, "I know some already. Son of a bitch. Eat shit."

I couldn't help but laugh. And he just roared when I told him what "eat shit" means in Spanish.

Yep, I'm changing the world, one child at a time.

Round two

Remember back in May when something stung me? Whatever it was stung me again yesterday. Now I have a cartoon hand and am in Buenos Aires, where I have received medical attention.

It went like this: I walked into the pharmacy, placed both hands on the glass counter and said, in Spanish, "Do you have something for my hand?"

Then the doctor (they have doctors at the pharmacies here) asked what happened and started mashing around on my fat little hand.

"Ouch! I don't know what happened by I think something stung me."

"Where's the bite?"

"I don't know. There's not one. It was there yesterday, but it's gone today."

"Ah, yesterday. Do you want pills or an injection?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Okay, that'll be (the equivilent of eight dollars). Come around to the side door."

So I enter the side door, sprawled out on a little examining table behind a curtain and let her inject me with a vial of some unknown medicine. Then I hopped down and went on my way.

"Gracias."

"Con gusto."

No more than four minutes passed from the time I walked through the front door of the pharmacy to the time I walked out the side door.

I love this place.

As sure as the sun will shine

After my parents and I made our tearful goodbyes at the international airport, I skipped downstairs, exhausted from one week of vacation yet jazzed for another, to pick up my friends Linsley and Dave, who were set to arrive in country any minute.

Yep, just any minute.

Any minute now.

The waiting area of the airport is nothing more than a parking lot. There are no seats, no benches, no TVs, no newspaper stands, no little shops selling bottled water and candy. There are only teams of tour guides holding signs bearing American names and hundreds of gringos pouring out of the airport exit in their quick-dry pants and Hi-Tek sandals.

With the help of a payphone and a friend who was sitting in front of a computer, I discovered L and D had missed their flight and wouldn't be getting in until 8:30 p.m. With more than six hours to kill, I took the bus back to San Jose to visit some friends. I was back milling around the airport exit doors by 8 p.m., just to discover the flight had been delayed two hours. But finally, my terminal-weary friends arrived and we made our way to the hotel for some much-needed rest. So that was the first day.

The next day it was off to Manuel Antonio, a touristy beach town about 122 kilometers from San Jose. Rather than waste (I say waste, my friends may have said invest) money on a chartered bus, I opted we ride the public bus. And, oh, what a ride it was. There were two lines of people standing in the aisle, it was hot, and our window wouldn’t open. Just a few seats ahead of us, a woman lost her breakfast all over herself (her window wouldn’t open either), and halfway through the four-hour trip, the cargo doors below the bus opened, and all of the suitcases went bouncing through the overgrown highway-side ditch. Luckily, we had our bags in our laps.

We arrived in Manuel Antonio unscathed and happy to be at the beach. Our bungalow (which we shared the first night with a couple from Kansas) was fine -- a little small and with a funny smell, but we were too hungry to look for something else. We made it to the closest restaurant just in time to get out of the first major downpour of the week.

By the next night, the Kansas couple had left, but the smell in our bungalow had really started to bother us. It smelled like it was coming from the sink or the toilet or the shower. D surmised it was the smell of backed-up sewage and set out to fix the problem. And because the sewage pipes emptied not into a septic system but out of a pipe that stuck out from the front of the bungalow, we were able to watch the progress right from our deck chairs. D turned on all the faucets and let them run for a couple of hours or so while L and I played double solitaire and relaxed amid the gentle sounds of sewage water trickling down the side of a mountain.

The smell dissapated some and we went to bed quite satisfied with ourselves for solving the sewage problem. Of course, we felt a bit sheepish when we awoke to find out the hotel had no water. It was time to move on, we decided.

So, it was off to Dominical, a remote beach village with its fair share of tourists, but not so many that you don’t notice you’re in a remote beach village. We splurged on a hotel with air conditioning and headed to the beach. By the next night, we were finally getting into the vacation groove. We all commented on how relaxed we were, how nice it was to have a few days to just do nothing. Yep, this vacation was going to be alright.

Then my back went out. One minute I was standing there with a ping-pong paddle in one hand, and the next minute I couldn’t stand, sit, move, lie down, nothing. We had to find a taxi to drive me the 250 yards back to the hotel. I had toe-curling muscle spasms all night. It took me at least an hour to get from my bed to the toilet and back to bed each time I had to get up to go to the bathroom. It was horrible. I've never in my life been in such pain. Seriously.

At 5 a.m., I’d had enough and decided it was time to bring L and D into my misery. Sobbing, I knocked on their door and blurted out that I needed a doctor and ya. Bleary-eyed, they dragged themselves out of bed. A few moments later a maintenance man at the hotel informed us there was no doctor, no pharmacy, no Red Cross, no nothing in this surfer's town with dangerous rip tides. We’d have to make the hour-long trip to San Isidro.

Considering I was having a hard time getting to and from the bathroom, a trip to San Isidro seemed out of the question to me. But what else could we do? We decided to think it over over breakfast. And that’s when we met Brandon.

"You guys looking for a doctor?" came a nice, gentle American voice from the table next to us.

Turns out our savior Brandon was in town with his wife, who is a doctor, who was at that very moment working with a local doctor. So there was a doctor in town! In fact, there were two! After breakfast, Dave walked down to find the local doctor and surmise if he was up to the job at hand. He came back to report that Dr. Gonzalez, God bless him, spoke English and would see me in 30 minutes.

Eventually, I made to Dr. Gonzalez's office, where he gave me two shots, a 45-minute massage and two prescriptions. L and D and I had canceled our plans to visit a nearby pre-Columbian stone and instead cabbed it twenty minutes away to the nearest pharmacy to get my meds. By morning, I could walk again!

Later that day, I put L and D, poor things, on another public bus and sent them on their way, alone, to San Jose. They were exhausted, and I think a little curious about whatever happened to that relaxing tropical vacation they had wanted.

Felices Vacaciones

Turner Family (part of it anyway) Vacation 2008

We've seen an active volcano, zip-lined through the jungle, toured a working coffee farm, been taxied all over San Jose and bussed from one side of Costa Rica to the other. We've "roughed it" one night at my host family's house and walked to the tip of the whale's tail at Uvita Beach. Dad even rented a car and fought the rugged terrain and wild Tico drivers for two days.

Besides what are probably a few broken ribs (I'm not even kidding; ask Mom), we all seemed to have survived the trip.

Today I take them to the airport and pick up two friends for another week of traveling and NOT TEACHING. Bring it on.

Not even close

I love tamales, especially the Mexican kind that are a little spicy, made of god only knows what and wrapped in corn husks then stored in a coffee can for fresh keeping. When I was a kid, some guy used to come around selling them. That and shrimp.

They make tamales here, too, usually as a fundraiser – the equivalent of our bake sale. The parents of a particular class will get together, make tamales, then sell them for money to pay for various things at the school.

Note: Because the government has yet to pay me or my host family our monthly stipends, my host mom and I often joke about making tamales to raise money for ourselves.

The other morning when I got to school, I saw apron-clad women in the school’s outside kitchen (which is now also a classroom) and I knew it was a tamale day. And I love tamale days.

The tamales here are made of rice (of course) and filled usually with chicken or pork, then wrapped in palm leaves and cooked in a big pot over an open fire. They aren’t quite as good as the Mexican ones, but with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, they pretty much make my day.

It’s very important here tamales only be eaten with a cup of coffee, either in the afternoon or in the morning. Eating a tamale with a meal is horrible crime of etiquette. I should know. I ate a tamale with my lunch the first week I was here. Later, someone pulled me aside and politely informed me not to let it happen again.

At the time, I didn’t really see the big deal. I mean, the people here serve pasta AND potatoes AND rice all in one meal; talk about bad food etiquette. But now I can’t imagine eating a tamale with a meal. There are some things you just don’t do.

Today I saw a commercial for cold medicine. There was a crowd cheering on a guy who was riding a stationary bicycle outside in a track suit. When he was all hot and sweaty, he jumped off the bike, stripped down to shorts and a T-shirt and sank into a tub of ice water. I didn’t get the connection to cold medicine.

My host sister explained that in Costa Rica, the people believe that going from hot to cold or cold to hot makes a person sick. They would never iron clothes barefooted because a hot iron in one hand mixed with feet touching a cold floor would be a sure recipe for illness.

Seems strange to me, but so once did the tamale rule. This culture and I are becoming buddies, finally, I suppose.

Still, after five months here, I´ve learned that I’ll never, ever, ever really fit in. People will always be suspicious of me, always looking for some way to shove me into their stereotypes of American women – endlessly rich, sexually loose and easily taken advantage of.

Even if I stop taking cold showers after I run and continue to avoid tamales at meal time, I’ll always be just another gringa.

Joke's on you

Back to the chinches, or as in my last post, in the feminine form, chinchas. The last time I posted they were just tiny bugs about which kids tell cute little jokes.

Many times in my life, my dad and I have discussed a certain phenomenon that, as far as we know, is still unnamed. The phenomenon is that when you learn a new word, it suddenly starts to show up in the most unexpected places.

Take chinche, for example. I randomly learned the Spanish word when I caught a kid passing a note in class. I thought the joke was cute, so I posted it on this here blog just for the fun of it.

Then yesterday, at school, one of my first-graders, Carolina, came into class with a bloody stripe running lengthways across her face - from the center of one cheek, across her nose, to the center of another cheek. It looked like something had dug a shallow ditch across her face.

When I asked her what happened, she answered briefly, "Un chinche."

Somehow she didn't seem to think they were all that funny.