I WILL ADD PICTURES SOON- am having technical difficulties at the moment and have to run teach the 3rd graders.

Monday, January 26
Our first day at the school, and it has finally stopped raining for a few minutes. The 15-minute walk up the mountain is really hard- the road is thin and made of dirt and rocks, but the hardest part is the incline. It has to be between 40 and 45 degrees. I'm serious- it is REALLY steep. Pat came with us to see the place, and we had to stop at least once along the way as all three of us were out of breath.

The view from the school is fabulous when it is not raining. Five minutes after I remarked that the weather was often sunny and rainy at the same time and I was surprised never to have seen a rainbow, someone pointed one out right above the biodiesel shack where the high school students make biodiesel fuel for the school buses.

At 10:00, the school secretary had to take a cab down the hill to the bank to make a deposit and to the post office to retrieve the mail (there is no mail delivery in this area). She took Pat and me along and we stopped at two houses available for rent. The first house was as much of a dump as the house we are living in now. We could not look at the other one because no one was home. She went to the bank, the post office, and the store, then back up the mountain to the school. She apparently does this every day at least once.

My office consists of a child’s desk in a corner of Dolly’s office. Dolly brings her own laptop each day and so do I. The school does not provide computers for us. We do not have a printer, either. Anytime Dolly wants to print something, she saves it to a flash drive, then walks outside and up a small hill to another building where she can use the one printer that serves the entire school.


So, my first request is that y’all take up a collection, send the money to the next person who is coming down for a visit (Kamila?) and have him or her buy us a printer and bring it down.

Other observations- Dolly has no classroom of her own. She teaches in her office, outside, or in a shared space way across the campus. She does have a storage room next to her office, but it has no shelves, just has bins of stuff all over the floor. Shelves would be a godsend; buying them and getting them here is an issue. "Organization is a real issue here," Dolly just said as she rifled through her crate full of file folders looking for a list of students for a field trip.

We met today with a scientist who works at one of the local research stations that is studying the rain forest. We talked about getting some of their daily temperature and rainfall data that goes back to 1977 for the kids to evaluate. She described for us seven “interns” from a program they host for American undergraduates who will be doing projects with us for four weeks this spring.

The school was buzzing with activity all day. There are 240 students plus all the teachers, administrators, bus drivers, maintenance people, interns and volunteers running around. You’ve heard of Mary and her little lamb? Well, here they have a dog named Baxter who follows his owners (three children and a teacher) up the hill when they miss the bus. I first met Baxter in the front office today. The front office has no actual door. I saw Baxter several times later at various locations. Seeing Baxter running around reminded me that when we visited the school back in September, the horses had gotten loose and were running through the grassy area in the middle of the campus. Word has it the environmental stewardship and greenhouse coordinator is buying a goat and some chickens for the school. Never a dull moment...


January 25
Neither wanted to go, but I dragged Kaz and Pat with me on a 2 ½ hour tour of a local family farm that grows coffee and sugar cane. The farm also is experimenting with raising tilapia (the fish). We got to see and learn about how coffee and sugar cane are grown and processed, including seeing up close how all the machines work. In the U.S., they would never let visitors get so close to all the dangerous equipment and boiling sugar. We all LOVED the farm, and now Kaz wants to volunteer there on weekends. The son in the family asked Kaz to call him later to make final arrangements to do that. Now, all we need is a phone. We have been promised a phone, but none has materialized.


Sunday night, we were invited to dinner at the home of Dolly, the woman with whom I will be working for the next four and a half months. She directs the environmental science program for the school and teaches environmental science from Pre-K to 11th grade (there is no 12th grade in Costa Rica). Dolly also invited another teacher and her three sons. The boys got to know Kaz and Dolly and the other teacher tried to bring me up to speed on what is happening at the school. They also told me I was being ripped off after they heard about our house and how much we were paying for it. I will definitely have to do something about that.


Saturday, January 24
You know, it RAINS a lot in the rain forest. I could barely sleep last night (Friday) between the neighbor dog barking his head off as each of their guests arrived, the guests shouting and laughing drunkenly, and the rain pelting the tin roof all night. I was also cold- the house is quite drafty and it is very windy up here on the mountain. I had on a short sleeve shirt, long sleeve shirt, fleece, cotton sweatshirt, pants, socks, and two blankets, but still awoke freezing at 1:10am.


Kaz’s first words when he awoke were, “Mom, someone parked their bicycle in our tree.” Sure enough, there is a rusty child’s bike up in a tree behind the house. In another tree, there is a washing machine. Then Kaz called me an “Ugly American” because I complained that our supposedly furnished house has no forks, no cooking utensils, no usable pots or pans, no decent furniture, a few rags we believe are a sorry excuse for sheets, no pillows, no towels, no phone, no closets, bare light fixtures (no light bulbs), no hot water anywhere, and a toilet that does not flush. I repeat- no phone, no hot water anywhere, and a toilet that does not flush.
I can accept that we do not have a toaster, a microwave, a TV, a dishwasher or a dryer. But forks? You gotta have forks. My colleague, Pat Foster, arrived and helped us drag what looked like an overturned outhouse out of the woods and onto the front porch to use as a table. She tried to change the time on the one clock in the house, but could not do it, so we are trying to remember that it is 42 minutes fast.
At some point, we realized we could either continue to boil water to wash our faces and fill a bucket before using the toilet (to pour in and “force” a flush) and call this an adventure, or we could ask someone to fix everything and actually furnish the place. Pat says, “This is going to get old fast.” Instead of making any big decisions, we walked into town, grabbed a bite to eat, and bought forks and food and other stuff which we then lugged back up the mountain.
In the evening, we went to the local Community Center, where a large group of people were taking turns playing instruments and singing Beatles songs. The event was a fundraiser for the school with an entry fee of 1200 colones (around $2.50) for Kaz and me and 2500 colones ($5) for Pat. The concert went on for over two hours, and nearly everyone was dancing by the end. The musicians and singers were absolutely wonderful. At one point, there were ten performers on the stage playing two violins, a cello, a piano, keyboard, a bass, drums, guitar, an electric piano, and a vocalist. Dave, you would have absolutely LOVED this. Apparently, the lead guitarist was part of a quite famous British band called “Japan” back in the day, but gave it all up to move to Costa Rica and become a biological illustrator. He has just finished illustrating an entire book of birds.
Kaz had fun reconnecting with a bunch of kids from the local Quaker school whom he met when we were here for a short “reconnaissance” visit back in September. I reconnected with many of the school’s staff members, and Pat got to see what a hippie sort of place this is. You really get the feeling you are back in the 1960’s here. Everything is “behind” in various ways.
The original settlers of this area were 11 American Quakers who brought their families here after serving jail terms in the U.S. for refusing to fight in the Korean War. They sold their homes in Alabama, drove to the middle of the rain forest, bought some land from the Costa Rican government, built a Quaker Meeting House and an attached Quaker School, and began to settle down. This end of the dirt road is now called Monteverde. Eventually, native Costa Ricans found them and settled nearby along the dirt road that is the main thoroughfare here along a stretch of the road now called Cerro Plano. A little further from there, the road forms a triangle with a bank, store, church, and some restaurants lining it. That part of the road is the “town” of Santa Elena. It takes roughly 45 minutes to walk from the Quaker Meeting House in Monteverde to the market in Santa Elena, and yes, people do this. Going the other way takes longer due to some amazingly steep hills.