Volcanic View

Evidence that I drove around here on Saturday. No, I didn't just sit in the truck and have someone take my picture.



Check out the view at the end of the walkathon. The volcano in the background is called Arenal. Monteverde isn't always shown on maps of Costa Rica, but Arenal often is. It is an active volcano and, when it is not surrounded by clouds and fog, you can see the lava flows and see the steam rising from its top.



Benito arriving on stilts. I cannot fathom how or why he would walk on those things up and down these mountain roads for 13 kilometers! Unbelievable.

Driving Myself? Crazy!

The Monteverde Friends School had a walkathon fundraiser yesterday. I guess I have become integrated enough into the community of Friends here that I was asked to help out. Since I was feeling like an experienced and "very responsible" person after managing a water station and the collapse of a runner for a similar fundraiser last month for the Cloud Forest School, I volunteered to manage Station #3, a water, snacks, and first aid station. Station #3 is right at the gates of the Cloud Forest School, and I live a short walk from there.

Being the efficient person I am, I figured manning this station would allow me to sleep in and just trudge up the hill right before the walkers arrived. Unfortunately, I was also asked, then begged, to come to the Friends School first (a 40-minute walk at 7:00 on Saturday morning), drive a truck from the Friends School to Station #3, then to Station #4, and then to the end of the 13-kilometer walk to bring walkers back to the Friends School since it was a one-way walk, not a loop.

I put up a fair amount of resistance to the idea of driving a truck around here. The roads are SO rocky and steep and thin and dangerous and I haven't driven at all since I arrived and... "Can you drive a stick shift?" they asked. I was tempted to lie, but admitted that yes, I can. That is when the begging began. "We REALLY need someone to do this- please." "Okay, okay, but if I crash the truck, you'll have to put Kaz and my body on a plane to the States and tell my family that I am really, really sorry I agreed to do this."

I walked to Monteverde, they gave me the keys, loaded the truck with jugs of water, containers of home-made cookies and a first aid kit, gave me a map, and sent me on my way. I did fine until I reached the bottom of the Cloud Forest School hill. This is the hill I have lived on since our arrival, and the hill we climb daily to reach the school. I have been searching for a way to describe the incline and the horrible state of the road, but it just defies description. In lieu of that, I have included below a surveyer's graph of the hill and some information about it. It is less than half a mile long, but rises over 300 feet in elevation in that short span. Long story short, I stalled out in the first 30 meters of the hill and had to roll back down and start over. Ay vay. The driving was really challenging, and I had other minor mishaps, but the worst damage I did was actually caused by leaving the back window open and allowing half an inch of dust from the road to bury everything in the back of the car. Unbelievable.

I'll include a picture of me driving in my next posting.



Below you can see some of the walkers at my station at the top of the hill at the entrance to the Cloud Forest School (locally referred to as the Centro de Educacion Creativa, hence the CEC painted on the sign). Nearly everyone was exhausted when they reached me, and the water and cookies went fast. There were 180 walkers of all ages, including Benito Guindon on stilts. He was NOT carrying his baby sloth with him on the stilts, thank heavens. I'll include a picture of that in the next post, too.

More Outdoor Education

We now have traps that catch nocturnal animals. The kids love checking them in the morning. I found a great little snake one day when I took the Kindergartners out. At first, we thought it was a worm, but then it wrapped itself around my finger and stuck out its forked tongue.



Here, Michael shows the kids how to measure trees using trigonometry.



Other teachers sometimes teach outside, too. Here, Jesse, the sixth grade teacher, teaches his class on the front lawn. You might be able to make out the kids in the tree to the right. They were participating quite well.



Walking into the woods- something we do nearly every day.

Outdoor Education

So much of our time with students is spent outside. I think this has to do with Dolly's and my contention that students should experience the environment and observe it as much as possible. In addition, it is not raining constantly anymore and we CAN be outside. Finally, Dolly does not have a classroom, so she has adopted all 106 acres of the campus as her makeshift classroom.

Farm Farewell

This is just another picture of our visitors from Wisconsin teaching the kids how to use routing equipment to carve signs for our campus. We are working on signs for our Hummingbird Garden, Bat Garden, and the entrance to our hiking trails, for example.

We had a farewell party last week for some of the interns at the school who are leaving at the end of the month. the party took place at the family farm of one of our students. This picture shows the wall of tools displayed in the dining room where they served us dinner.
Also at the farm farewell, they took us on a tour of the entire farm and let us eat some of the sugar cane they grow.

Making Maps and Being Trees

Here we see first and second graders pretending to be seeds and then growing into trees. This is actually their part in a musical called, "Monteverde Memories" that was written by the 6th grade teacher. The show includes students from the Friends School as well as the Cloud Forest School and will have two performances this week. Kaz is the King of the ants. The ants are all the fourth graders.


This picture shows a student routing letters into wood using the equipment and training he received moments before from some visitors from the Madison, Wisconsin Kiwanis Club. We made great progress this week on a number of signs that will be placed around the campus. I have been responsible for working with the kids to map all the trails on campus and transfer the necessary information to a sign that will be placed at the entrance to the trails.

Busy Town

Safety
Safety is defined differently here. People generally do not wear seat belts, kids climb dangerously high trees and everyone walks in the road due to the lack of sidewalks. When we were in Nicaragua, we stuffed 20 people into a van that seated 16 and drove on highways for a couple of hours.
I often see children sitting on their parents’ laps in cars, even in the driver’s seat. One gentleman told me his 4 year-old son steers the last leg of their daily trip home from work and school on their four-wheeled motorcycle. Dad obviously has his feet on the gas and brake and the road is rural, but I still shudder at the thought of their hitting a large hole or a rock, of which there are no shortages, and the little boy flying over the handlebars. At least this guy and his son wear helmets. Most people do not. I have seen two adults riding a motorcycle, each with a child in his or her lap, zipping along the narrow, rocky roads with none of the four wearing a helmet.
Fortunately, the school requires students to wear seatbelts and the buses move very slowly over the roads, particularly on the steep uphill sections. I do worry about the brakes going out while a bus is making a controlled descent down one of the many, steep downhill runs.
Fire Fighting
One night recently, another teacher told me that, back in December, her son lit a candle in his bedroom and threw the smoldering match in the trash can. The match lit some paper, and before anyone could do anything, it grew into a fire that destroyed all his clothes and belongings and created smoke damage throughout the rest of the house. I went home that evening and, finding our power still out, lit candles and began to think about what would happen if we had a fire in the house. Homes do not typically have smoke detectors or fire extinguishers. There is no fire department.
Last night, my questions were answered when there was a fire in a local hotel. Apparently, a central person in a town about an hour away was notified of the fire. This person started a phone tree to businesses and homes near the fire to alert them of the fire in their area. Local hotels and restaurants DO have fire extinguishers, and they were instructed to take them to the scene. Dozens of citizens were drawn to the fire and they helped drag out people and items from the building. No one died or was seriously injured, but there was significant damage to one section of the hotel.
Monkey Business
A couple of students and I were taking Dolly’s latest group of visitors (from the Kiwanis Club in Madison, Wisconsin) on a hike up to the kiosk on the school grounds when I heard something rustling in the treetops. I asked the group if we could stop and listen, and soon enough, a troop of howler monkeys paraded by above us. One was a mother with a baby on her back- so cute. One of the students knew how to “call” to them, and the howlers howled back at us. Howler monkeys are known to throw things at humans, but this group just stopped and stared at us one at a time and then moved on. The other student, who moved here from Nicaragua four years ago, said he had never seen a howler monkey before. They were quite a sight.

I spent today talking with a group of college student interns Dolly is hosting for four weeks, each of whom is working on an individual project on our campus. I also spent time with two Cloud Forest School volunteers who just needed some attention, and then I helped Dolly’s current visitors prepare some big, old, metal recycling bins for repairs and repainting. I took some visitors with me while I retrieved animal collection buckets from the woods that needed drainage holes drilled in them. I then guided several students through the last steps of mapping the trails on the campus, and we put the finishing touches on our draft of a map that will be transferred onto a wooden sign tomorrow.

It was Grand Central Station in our office, and at one point I just had to make everyone stop and look so I could take a picture. It is amazing how many simultaneous projects we are working on and how many people are working with us.

Who Needs Power?

This first picture shows our power box. The second picture shows our neighbor's power box, complete with meter and bird's nest. Keep reading...

Sunday, March 23
I nearly burned myself just now washing my hands in the bathroom. I haven’t been anywhere here in Monteverde that has a sink with hot water. Our hotel bathroom does.
Yes, Kaz and I packed up ten days’ worth of belongings and dragged our suitcases and bags just a little way down the hill to a little, new hotel called Viandante. What a difference 30 yards makes! Electricity, a toilet that flushes, hot water in the sink, comfortable, ant-free mattresses, a TV, internet access, and it’s a lot quieter because there is an actual ceiling and no tin roof.

Saturday, March 22
Not quite homeless, but…
Our housing situation has hit a new, intolerable low. Friday morning, Deb headed up to the school for a Professional Day, but Kaz and his classmates had the day off. Sometime after Kaz left the house to enjoy his day, someone stole our power meter. That’s right- someone shut off the main power source for the house, cut the wires, and took the meter box with that little spinny thing that tells the meter reader how much power we have used.
I might be able to reconnect the wires, but there are three of them and they are thick, so I might need a special tool, and I think they really need to be connected to the meter in order to function. I would also be running the risk of electrocuting myself, blowing up or burning down the house. So, I think it best to leave the wires alone.
Meanwhile, we have not had electricity for two days. Can’t cook, anything, do laundry, or even see after six o’clock at night. I put a candle in a drinking glass thinking that would help. It didn’t give off very much light and the heat of the flame shattered the glass. I stuck the next candle in the top of an empty wine bottle. Even with two candles, it is really hard to see anything.
We did not notice until today that the box had been vandalized. A local friend (Birdie’s owner) looked it over, shook her head and said, “MOVE. You are never going to have power in this house again.” It is not a simple matter of calling the power company, having them replace the meter and fix the wires and putting the charges on your next bill. Oh, no, she told me. You will have to buy a new meter yourselves, have the owner of the house sign a work order (as if- she lives at least three hours away), and then get onto the list for service that the power company keeps.
So, this afternoon, I took all the food from the refrigerator and freezer to a neighbor and looked high and low for a reasonable place to go for the next ten days until we can move into our “new” house at the bottom of the hill.

Some places wanted $80 a night for a hotel room. That doesn’t sound too high by US standards, but $800 for ten nights would be a BIG hit. Ouch.

The last place I asked was the cute, little brand new hotel 30 yards down from our house. The Chinese-American owner, Grace, offered us a great deal on a two-room suite. Fifteen dollars each, including a full, hot breakfast every day. We’ll have a bedroom with two beds and a sitting room with a TV. Plus, the place has wireless internet access. The breakfast room has a great view of the Gulf of Nicoya. We will move in tomorrow afternoon.
Dolly observed today that our house has bad karma. I guess that says it all.

Baby Sloth

Benito Guindon rescued a baby sloth a few days ago when it was being attacked by another animal. He is nursing it back to health, though he has heard that adopted sloths often do not do well; they develop respiratory problems from being around humans. The sloth sustained damage to her face, and her nose and both eyes became infected. She is taking a bottle now, but no solid food. Benito takes her everywhere with him, like you would any baby, so we got to meet her at Meeting on Sunday. In one of the pictures below, you can see Lucky and Wolf Guindon on the far right in the background. I had fun teasing Lucky about her new "granddaughter."

Ouch

When Rachel was visiting, we followed Michael on hike to see the rare, Resplendant Quetzal birds in a place where Michael had seen them feeding all week. We did see them, too- a male and a female, and they are truly gorgeous. At one point during the hike, Rachel exclaimed, "Oh, look at this!" Without even turning around, Michael shot back, "DON"T TOUCH IT!" How he knew what Rachel was about to touch, I'll never know. Unfortunately, it was too late and Rachel had dozens of fine, cactus-like spines in her fingers. The first picture shows Michael using his pocket knife to remove them.

The second picture shows me at a well-known strangler fig that grows in the woods behind the "Other" Rachel's cabin.

Finally, you will see 11th grader, Joe, heading out with a GPS to track the trails on the school campus. The hat has a flat antenna that helps acquire stronger signals from the sattelites the GPS uses to map locations. After a second trip around the trails- remember the campus has 106 acres- the kids were able to make a good map of the trails.

Drawing the map was not easy. We could not print it out from any computer or printer, so they had to project the GPS images from my computer onto a large piece of paper they had secured to the wall in Dolly's storage room (using velcro because nothing else would hold the paper to the wall) and then trace the image. If all that weren't awkward enough, they had to wade through mounds of "stuff" on the floor of the storage room since it still does not have any shelves (but we are going to buy some soon).

There's a Ladder in the Bathroom

Doesn't every bathroom have a rickety, home-made, wooden ladder in it? I just had to share this picture of the 4th grade bathroom.

The second picture shows a map at the Children's Eternal Rainforest. The red area defines the Monteverde Reserve and the Santa Elena Reserve. The green area is the Children's Eternal Rainforest, and the yellow areas are privately owned lands that they are trying to purchase. I can't remember what the purple chunk is. Maybe someone out there knows?

The final picture shows Erik Enbody giving a birding lesson. Erik is one of the best young birders in the world, and the school was very lucky to have him here while he helped with Patricia Townsend's research project on our campus. Erik used his iPod to play bird sounds to attract birds he heard in the area. It wasn't the best day for bird watching, as it was quite cold and rainy and the birds were staying low. Yes, that it Kaz at front left.

More Critters

Identifying critters from the stream and looking at pictures of them as adults.

Collecting Critters

The three pictures below show the kids collecting critters from the stream on campus. Some of them turned over rocks while others held the net downstream. We found lots of caddis fly and dragon fly larvae and took them back to the classroom to identify them better and to look at pictures on the computer that show them as adults.

Birdie Strikes Again and Again
So, Birdie came to our house for the night on Sunday. We did not have any dog food since we gave our extra bag to her “real” owners when we found out they would not be returning Birdie after our vacation. So, I gave her what I had- chili. It had some nice meat and beans in it and she wolfed it down, so I gave her a second bowl. Big mistake. We discovered a couple of days later she had barfed it up onto Kamila’s empty suitcase.
Birdie came to school with us for the day on Monday, and her “real” owner walked her home at day’s end. Her house is an hour and 15 minutes from the school. Our house is only five minutes from the school. Remember, that was Monday.
Today, Thursday, I was accompanying the first and second graders on a field trip to the Frog and Butterfly gardens in town. We were walking down the school hill and I was telling the kids to watch for the “orange castle” I live in. As we passed the house, they cried, “What’s that?” Wouldn’t you know, it was Birdie, standing in front of the house, waiting for us. When she saw me, she ran over wagging her tail happily, jumped on me, and licked me as if to say, “Hi! You can’t get rid of me that easily. See? I found my way back!”
Birdie’s owner admitted that she hadn’t seen Birdie in a couple of days. She was relieved to know she was healthy and safe. We took Birdie on the field trip with us and, afterward, her owner walked her home again. I wonder if Birdie will be back every couple of days, and I worry what will happen to her after we move to a new home in less than two weeks. Poor Birdie.

Field Day
The high school students had a sort of field day today. No classes; just fun and games, including some team-building exercises. I was otherwise engaged all day, but people kept coming to me with the news from the front.
The first big report was that Kaz had scored a miraculous touchdown while they were playing American football by catching a rushed pass from between the hands of two defenders. His team picked him up and paraded him and cheered him. Everyone seemed stunned by his amazing catch. Then, at the end of the day, his Science teacher came up to me and said, “You have GOT to see this.” She had a video of Kaz dancing impromptu to a song while everyone else watched. He was just blazing across the patio, and looked great. She said it was incredible and that no one knew he had such talent.

Living Conditions
I looked at another house today, but despite its ample square footage, it did not have ANY actual bedrooms, just a bed stuck in the living room. I didn’t think that would work for Kaz and me.
Fortunately, there is a small house near Kamila’s new digs that looks like a good possibility for us, and we can move in if we can help relocate the person living there now. I showed her the bedroom-less house and she liked it a lot. I’ve got my fingers crossed that this will all work out. Our housing situation stinks, but being homeless would certainly be worse.

My colleague Michael came over and made dinner for us tonight. I was telling him how little stress I feel here, no matter what the circumstances. There’s just something about the place and the culture that says, “Tranquilo- everything is going to be okay, and most of it doesn’t really matter in the greater scheme of life. Think about it. Tranquilo.”

Thanks to Rachel and Rachel

Thanks to my friend Rachel who was visiting, I now have a few pictures of ME to prove I am here! The picture of me below was taken near the local waterfall. The other picture is of Rachel's friend Rachel's cabin in the woods in Monteverde. Did you follow that? Isn't the cabin adorable? No frills, but the place epitomizes the word quaint.

I taught three classes today- two evolution simulations, including collecting and graphing data, an introduction to evolution, and great discussions in both classes. The kids were fabulous, and seemed to "get" everything I was teaching. I had 3 adult visitors in the first class and about seven in the second class. Several told me later that the lesson was "awesome," which really made me feel good.

The third class I "taught" consisted of making a map of the walking trails on the campus using a GPS. The lack of technology here impeded us many times, but we got around every blockade, despite the kids rightly observing every five minutes that, "This just wasn't meant to be today." In the end, however, we had a decent map drawn on a huge piece of paper!

All three classes were enormously satisfying for me. I think the kids and all the visitors enjoyed them, too.

Staff meeting today consisted of the following discussions:

1. A volunteer group of high school students last week constructed a new Guard House for the school and repaired 130 meters of fence.
2. The Board of the school's U.S.-based Foundation (major fundraisers) will be here next week.
3. Computer Lab use
4. Upcoming Professional Day activities
5. Crafting a meaningful Advisory period once a week for all students- to be implemented next year.
6. Entering Grades
7. Prioritizing Parent-Teacher Meetings- parents of kids who are in academic trouble will be seen first, other parents later in the day.
8. A parent apparently slapped an out-of-line kid on the bus last week. There was a major miscommunication between the two of them and the language barrier has been implicated.
9. Kids are visiting a very unsafe Tarzan swing somewhere in the forest on school property.
10. Bad Behavior- what to do with students who are bullying others and being direspectful to teachers and school property?

Armadillo

I gave Alvaro my camera one day to take pictures from the kiosk on the school grounds. He got lost going up to the kiosk, but came back with this amazing picture of an armadillo he saw along the way. The other picture is from our ongoing stream study.

Never a Dull Moment

I asked these kids if their train was full or if I could join them. "It's a bus!" they corrected. Oops. In retrospect, I should have known it was a bus. There are no trains around here so I'll bet none of these preschoolers has ever seen one.

The second picture shows students collecting data on a local stream for the international "Adopt-A-Stream" program. They collect the data at least once a month. The funniest part is when they determine how fast the water is running by timing how fast a ping pong ball moves from the beginning to the end of a meter stick. One person drops the ball at the beginning of the meter stick and another catches it at the end. One day, the "catcher" missed the ball and another kid had to jump into the stream and chase after it-not an easy feat.

Finally, I've posted a picture showing kids planting vegetables. This was a few weeks ago, and the plants are coming up really well. I had the 7th graders pick some of the cilantro today to try it. We also ate little bits of the greenery sprouting from the onion, carrot, and celery plants just to ascertain what they were. Sometimes a tast test is the easiest way to identify something...

Dogknapping and Housechanging

Expect the Unexpected

I guess things were getting too quiet and routine for us, because within about 20 minutes tonight, two unexpected, lifestyle-altering events took place at our house.
First, Kaz showed up carrying Birdie. He found her wandering around Santa Elena quite far from her house, so he called her owner and got permission to bring her back to our house for the night. Kaz is convinced Birdie’s owner is negligent and that Birdie is better off with us because she gets more attention and gets to stay inside out of the cold and rain. He is not inclined to return her tomorrow. Ay vay.

Next, the owner of our house showed up after traveling three hours from Heredia to introduce herself and then say she wants to move back to Monteverde- to the house we are living in. She requested that we move out of her house, “the most soon as possible.” Ay vay. At least she didn’t react negatively when she saw Birdie in the house and she was amenable to giving us two weeks to move.

Guess I’ll have to spend part of tomorrow negotiating a semi-kidnapped dog and finding a new house.