Not so bad

What a day already. It started out all fine and good with the ever-soothing sounds of roosters crowing outside the window of my hotel room. Somehow the crow of a cock is less annoying than the sound of my host mom trying to keep the baby from crying.

"Mire, mire, un bicho. Donde esta el bicho?" over and over again, as loud as she can talk without actually screaming at the top of her lungs.

That's "Look, look, a bug. Where's the bug?"

I always know from underneath my T-shirt sheet (graciously left for me by some former volunteer) that the bug she speaks of is a cockroach. We have quite an infestation. And that's why I decided to sleep in a hotel in Buenos Aires last night. My host mom promised to fumigate my room.

A few years ago a cockroach crawled into the ear of a volunteer living in my house and wrapped its little serrated legs around the volunteer's eardrum. He had to take the bus six hours to a doctor in San Jose, all the while hearing the nasty little critter scratch graffiti into the wall of his ear.

But that's a different story that has very little to do with my current frustrations. Like I said already, everything started out swell. I watched two movies in English last night while enjoying a picnic dinner - prepackaged refried red beans in Lizano sauce, corn tortillas, three processed-cheese slices, two beers and a can of spicy-hot tomato juice.

I slept well in the spacious double bed, although the non-T-shirt-style sheet left something to be desired. By the way, did you know that the word "T-shirt" sounds an awful lot like the word "teacher"?

"What do you wear to sleep?"

"I wear teacher to sleep."

"No, no, no, you wear a T-shirt to sleep."

"Yeah, that's what I said."

Anyway, for breakfast, I went to my favorite bakery where they know to go ahead and fix me a coffee with milk, no sugar. I drank my coffee and ate my strawberry-filled pastry and skimmed the newspaper, not finding any news too horrible.

I went to the ATM to discover I’ve been paid and am not as dead broke as I thought. Then I ran some errands and finally made my way to the Internet café.

And this is where things got frustrating, but you know, for the life of me, I can’t remember what was so frustrating about it, other than it took more than an hour and a half to open my Gmail account. I was really fired up about it when I started this post, but after listing all the good things that have occurred this weekend – cockroach-free living, movies in English, beer, double bed, coffee and pastries, money – well, now it seems that other than the fact that the space bar sticks on this keyboard, I have nothing to complain about.

More Independence

Corina, Corina

The youngest member of the Potrero Grande cheerleading squad:

Baile Tipico

Here are my fifth graders competing in a regional talent competition. They didn't win, but they sure were cute.

Free day

Today is Sunday. A man just drove up on a four-wheeler and parked right in my line of sight. I've been lying around in the outside hammock all weekend reading The Poisonwood Bible for the third time. When the guy got off the four-wheeler, I saw that it has the name “The Ozark” emblazoned across the side, with little hilltops forming a logo above the name. If only the Ozarks really had just pulled right up to my front door!

Today is Independence Day. We had a parade this morning, which was actually very good. There were no floats or anything, just people marching and banging drums and whatnot, but it was festive. Apparently all the other teachers had decided to wear white shirts with red bandanas today, but no one ever told me, so I walked around in a brown - of all colors - shirt looking once again like the dufus gringa. Oh, well, I told myself, this isn't my country anyway. No need to be patriotic.

The cheerleaders also cheered in the parade. I had been wondering what they would be cheering for. For all I knew, the parade would end with a soccer match, and the girls would be rooting for one team or the other as cheerleaders usually do. But there was no game or teams or rooting for one or the other at all. The cheerleaders were cheering for - get this - peace!

Give me a V!
V!
Give me an I!
I!
Give mean a V!
V!
Give me an A!
A!
Give me an L!
L!
Give me an A!
A!
Give me a P!
P!
Give me an A!
A!
Give me a Z!
Z!

Three cheers for peace!!

What a strange concept.

The Independence Day events started yesterday morning, with a school assembly at 9 a.m. The kids got to skip mass, but they had to put their school uniforms on and stand in single-file line according to grade and height and listen to some boooooring (then again, how would I know? I don't understand a word anyone says) explanation of Costa Rican independence.

Someone asked me what we Americans from the United States do to celebrate our independence. We sure don't have school assemblies on Sunday mornings. Mostly there are beer and bodies of water involved. That or we don't do much of anything. I was always working on the Fourth of July.

Last night every town, big and small, in Costa Rica, marched with lanterns. I think they called them faroles, not sure, but the kids made them out of cardboard boxes and plastic, colored paper. Some were painted to look like houses or churches; others were just symmetrical designs or nothing at all. I didn't have one, because, I of course, had no idea why the little cardboard houses were piling up in the classrooms, and no one bothered to tell me I should make one of my own so as to march with it with the whole rest of the country on the night before the anniversary of independence. Once again, not my country, not my tradition, not my fault.

There was another school assembly just before the lantern display, which was mostly the kids mumbling along to the recording of the national anthem that blasted, way too loud, from the speaker of the town's ambulance, which is an old four-by-four SUV with lights -- and speakers apparently -- planted on top.

The lantern march culminated with a talent show that, in my honest opinion, was one big disaster. The first act was fine. The fifth graders danced a traditional dance in their colorful, billowy skirts and embroidered lace tops. But then the kindergartners got up there in their adorable little outfits and the whole auditorium was on their feet for a better look. By the time the third group started, the place was a riot and I went home.

Graciously there were two chopped up fish -- eyes and mouths and tails and scales and all -- sitting on a cutting board in my kitchen just waiting to be thrown into the frying pan. All that celebrating had made me hungry. Viva la paz!

Keeper of the trees

During a backyard photo shoot, the results of which you will see in the next couple of posts, I noticed this guy staring down at me. Yikes!

Strange Fruit

Just look at all this fruit right in my backyard. We've got yellow pipas and green pipas -- the local cure for hangovers. We've got enough oranges, in two trees, to keep me full of fresh-squeezed juice three meals a day. We've got papayas, which I really don't care for but are said to be a good cure for constipation, so I eat them every so often. And we've got cacao, which grows off the trunk of the tree, like deflated balloons the day after a birthday party. Not to mention the plantain tree that happened to not be bearing fruit during this particular photo shoot and the avocado tree that gave me all those delicous avocados a few months back.

Time

Time is flying. I've only got three months left of teaching, minus the two weeks of classes I'll miss while I'm getting my Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate. A few weeks ago, when I was homesick, three months seemed like an eternity, but now it seems like not nearly enough time. I still have lots to teach these kids, and there's the Internet cafe to set up, world map to paint on the wall of the school, and so much Spanish left to learn. How can three months possibly be enough?

It won't be, but I guess there’s no use in panicking. When I first started teaching, I sort of hated the kids. They were always tugging at me and and blabbing away in a language I couldn't understand. Now I can barely stand the thought of leaving them.

They grow and change so fast, and I want to be around to see more of it. Of course, some are moving more slowly than others. Cristofer still cries when I ask him to copy pictures from the board to his notebook. He tears holes in the paper with all the furious erasing and re-erasing he does before melting into a fountain of tears at his desk. Kendal still spontaneously jumps up from his desk during class to wrap his little arms around my waist in a loving but disruptive hug. Yesterday Jean Carlos (pronounced Yan-Carlos, or Yanka, for short) spit casually onto the floor beside his desk.

Others are too smart for first grade. Keilor now rushes ahead and shouts out in perfect English the words to the songs I sing before I get a chance to sing them. I'll still be singing, "Teasing Mister Alligator...." and he'll already be wagging his finger and saying tauntingly, "Can't catch me."

And where I used to lead the alphabet with hand motions, Leo now says the letters before I do, so I just follow along with the rest of the class. The other day on the bus, when I didn't understand what Carlitos was saying in Spanish and asked him to repeat it, he said, "Casi llegamos a mi house," swapping in the English word to make it easier for me to follow.

Just imagine what they'll be like with a few more years of English classes. I hate to think I won't be around to see it.

Ready. OK.

My school has a cheerleading squad now made up of a few girls from each grade. A sixth-grader leads the practices, and they have been working hard all week, along with a group of marchers and flag bearers, in preparation for a big Independence Day celebration tomorrow and Monday.

The cheerleaders have been practicing with pom poms made out of shredded newspaper, but yesterday I helped a mom cut white plastic sacks into strips for more professional-looking ones. I remember one embarrassing year when I was a cheerleader and how we ordered pom poms from a cheerleading catalogue. They were big and fluffy, and we kept them in laundry bags decorated with puff paint. These girls wouldn't even know what to think about that.

I wish I hadn't been such a horrible cheerleader; I might be able to teach these girls how to cheer. They hop and tumble around in the most pitiful disarray I've ever seen. I can't wait to see them in the parade with their homemade red-and-white gingham dresses and caps and the plastic-bag pom poms. I wish I had a video camera.

Karaoke and Cumbia

Flori, the cook at my school wants to move to Spain. She wants to leave her two teenage children at home with her brother so she can go off and make more money. She asked me today if I knew how much a plane ticket would cost to Madrid. Of course, I had no idea, but I looked it up on the Internet. At least a thousand bucks. I don't think she'll go. I hope she doesn't go. I don't think a mother should leave her children like that, even if she is doing it for them, so they can have a better future. Then again, maybe she should go, so they can have a better future. I don't know.

Flori and three others from my school -- Alejandra, Felix and Karen -- invited me to go out with them last night. We all (including Luis, the 9-year-old son of Alejandra) piled into Alejandra's Geo Tracker and bounced our way more than an hour up a rocky, narrow road to some bar way out in the middle of the nowhere. She kept saying that it was a great place to go even if it was a bit out of the way. I wasn't so sure. We just kept going and going and going, and my body was starting to hurt from all the bouncing. Finally we pulled up to some bar that looked pretty much like all the other bars we had passed along the way, only it had a swimming pool. The swimming pool didn't have any water in it, but still it was a swimming pool. We were the only ones there (because we were the only ones anywhere for miles), so we got free reign over karaoke, but alas, there was only one song in English – My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion. I sang it.

It turned out to be a really fun night, and the ride home didn't seem nearly as long as the ride there. The most exciting part was that my colleagues called me Jennifer instead of Teacher, like I'm a real person. That was nice. And I learned to dance Cumbia finally. Flori, the one who wants to go to Spain, was patient and taught me, and pretty soon we were Cumbia-ing all over the dance floor. I wasn't very good at it, but it was fun.

Yum

Today is Kids' Day in Costa Rica, so after filling myself with celebratory cake and fried chicken, I skipped out on afternoon parties to come to Buenos Aires. I had to make some photocopies, mail a wedding gift and give you a quick ayote update.

Last night my host mom finally cut the black, rotting, fly-covered end of the ayote that's been sitting uncovered on the kitchen counter for a couple of weeks and tossed it into a bucket in the yard. She took the remaining good parts of the ayote, cut them up and cooked them on the stove.


It was so delicious I asked for seconds for the first time all year. Ayote is even better than pumpkin. I just wanted you to know. And to all you kids out there, happy day.

Trick or treat

A couple of weeks ago, my host mom asked me if I'd ever eaten such a thing as the long, orange gourd sitting on the kitchen counter. I looked at it and said, no, not unless I've eaten it here without knowing it. She said, no, she'd never made it for me but that she thought it tasted a little like a vegetable we have in the United States.

"Poo...poo....pooomkin?"

Pumpkin!

Pumpkin is my favorite food. I love carving them at my birthday parties, and I love pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread and pumpkin soup and pumpkin rolls and roasted pumpkin seeds, and pumpkin ice cream, even pureed pumpkin right out of the can.

Finally, one day last week, my host mom cut into the squash called ayote and brought a piece of it to my bedroom to see if I agreed that the inside looks like pumpkin. It's bright orange with flat, white seeds mixed into stringy-looking stuff. Just like pumpkin. My mouth was watering.

She threw chunks of it - skin, seeds and all - into a pot of think, brown, sticky, boiling sugar-cane juice (grown and processed just down the road from my house). After it all simmered together for a while, she put some on a plate for me to try. I could hardly wait for the pumpkiny goodness to hit my tongue.

It was pretty gross. I couldn't even taste the ayote for all the sugar cane. I felt like I needed to pretend to like it, though, after all the fuss I made with taking pictures and all.

There's still three-quarters of the ayote sitting on the kitchen table, which will either sit there until the fruit flies carry it off, or, even worse, until she cooks more. I would ask her if I can cook something with it, something more pumpkin-like, but as you know, my attempts at cooking in Costa Rica haven't gone well so far.

1, 2, 3, English!

Maybe I've posted this picture before, but it's my very favorite picture of my students. These second-graders are yelling "House!" as they pose in front of the house on the school grounds. They did the same with "Playground!", "Lunch room!", "Classroom!", "Office!", "Bathroom!" and "School!" Then I printed out the pictures and used them as flashcards. Now when it's time for lunch, I say, "Let's go to the lunch room," and they actually know what I'm talking about.

Pile

Back on Mother's Day, I tried to make my host mom a cake. It didn't work.