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.