Planting Seedlings

The first and second graders plant seedlings they started from seeds just outside their classroom.

First and second graders plant cilantro, radishes, and carrots in the school's vegetable garden.

Los Traficos

These two pictures show Kaz and Kamila at Kamila's new digs. Notice how windy it is.

Los Traficos
Yesterday, a transplanted American man whom I’ll call Jim because that is actually his name, offered to show Dolly and me how to use a GPS. Instead of doing that, he decided to pick a fight with Dolly and me about what people like us, who come here for a short time, can really do for the school. He assumed I had recently graduated from college, that I knew nothing about schools or THIS school in particular, and that I was just one of the “thousands of people who come through here with what they think are brilliant ideas, but their ideas are actually “stupid.” Dolly excused herself after a point and left me to dodge his verbal projectiles for another couple of hours by myself, after which he showed me how to use a GPS in about ten minutes.
I later found out he had been on the Board of the School until two years ago, when the Board fired him because they couldn’t stand him anymore. He was a most paternalistic and sour man with about the worst social skills I’d seen in a long time. Several people, both transients and locals alike, have suggested that some of the Americans who settle here leave the States because they can’t find a way to fit in there. I could see how Jim might fall into that category.
The funniest thing about my time with Jim was that, four times during our “meeting,” people hunted him down to tell him the “traficos” (traffic cops) were in town. At first, I thought this must be some popular band, then realized that “traficos” are in fact traffic police.
Normally, there are no traffic police here. In fact, I rarely see any police of any kind anywhere, and apparently, those that do exist mainly give directions to tourists and let the locals police each other. However, the traficos come into town periodically from Lord-knows-where to check up on everyone. Since there is only one main road, it is easy for them to stake out spots along it and stop people who are not wearing seatbelts or who have expired plates. A lot of people apparently do not have up-to-date licenses, registration papers, etc. and almost no one wears a seat.
Jim’s registration had expired, so his wife called four times to make sure he would get the message not to drive home. He would surely be pulled over, and the penalty for any transgression is serious- the traficos take the license plates off your car. Jim took a cab home and said he would come back for his car in a couple of days.
All day, our campus was abuzz. “The traficos are in town, the traficos are in town.” When Dolly called for a cab to take one of our classes to a stream site where the kids have been collecting water quality data every month, no cabs were available. There are usually plenty of cabs eagerly awaiting a phone call, but for the rest of the day, most of the fleet was in hiding due to the traficos being in town.

Staff Work Day
The high school students were given the day off today so their teachers could work on some important projects together. This was not a regularly scheduled staff work day, but one that the staff decided it desperately needed. The school simply sent letters home saying that, although grades Pre-K to 6th would meet as usual, all high school students would have the day off.

The projects we worked on today came out of what the high school teachers considered the most pressing challenges facing their work and students. We divided into three groups. One tackled the job of designing a new schedule of classes to replace the problematic schedule currently in place. (See the first picture). A second group wrote policies the school sorely needed and brainstormed a list of basic policies that still need to be written. My group worked on developing an Environmental Science curriculum that will be integrated with the existing Science and Geography classes. (See second picture)
Dolly and I were very pleased with the work of our group. We were able to ascertain what the Science and Civics classes were teaching at every grade level. Then, unexpectedly, we helped the Science teacher to re-design the Science curriculum to be more up-to-date based on research and best practices, better scaffolded and coherent, and more in parallel with the themes taught in Civics.
Finally, we aligned the Environmental Science objectives with the rest, and came away with a preliminary framework for a curriculum that really makes sense for grades 7-11. We have a lot more work to do to integrate what is taught in the Land Stewardship classes and to polish up the curriculum, but we were very pleased with our progress.
It struck me that, before today, the Science and Civics teachers had never talked about what they were teaching, and didn’t even seem to know each other very well. Since the entire high school faculty consists of six teachers, this really surprised me. By the end of the four-hour meeting, they were teasing each other and putting their arms around each other like they had been friends forever.
As an example of the alignment we were able to accomplish, we agreed to teach different aspects of hunger during a particular quarter in 8th grade. The Civics teacher will introduce the concept of hunger, its definition, its causes, its distribution in Costa Rica, and some of the problems hunger causes society. The Science teacher will teach nutrition and show students how hunger manifests itself in the human body, and the Environmental Science teacher will cover potential solutions to the problem of hunger, from agricultural and other perspectives.
We convened with the other two groups halfway through the morning to report on our progress and inform each other’s work. At noon, we were supposed to finish and share a potluck lunch, but one group kept on working and I was I was the only one who had brought a dish to share, so Dolly and I moved on to a meeting we had scheduled with the Head of the School and the Director of Land Stewardship (Milton) and we shared my salad with them.
After that, we had another meeting with Milton and the first grade teacher (Jean) about how to prepare ourselves to incubate and raise chicks. Milton is building a chicken coop for them, Jean advised the process and offered to supply fertilized eggs from her own farm, and Dolly was charged with finding funding to support the project.
I was pleased with the work we did today and with my contribution to it. It felt good.

The School

The porch at the school.

Apologies if I have posted this first picture already. It shows the view from the porch at the school. This is what I see when I eat lunch there, which I do on most days. I could, of course, sit on the other side of a picnic table and look at the wall of the Director's office, but I cannot understand why anyone would ever do that when the view is so inferior (see above).

I had to laugh today when a group of students from Mercersburg Academy arrived and were standing on the porch and one of the teachers with them said to one of the kids, "Your eyes are really pretty." After I laughed, I shared my observation that everyone's eyes are beautiful here. They added one more possible reason for this- in natural sunlight, pupils shrink more, revealing more of the iris, the colorful part of the eye.

Windy, Rainy and Cold
Dolly is lucky. Her house has a wood stove, and she has been using it lately. The locals shake their heads and tell us the weather we are having is unusual. November weather has persisted through February and now into March, they tell us. It is supposed to be drier and warmer at this time of year, but it is not. It has been raining a lot and has been very cold at night, which would be fine if homes and buildings had heat and clothes dryers. Everyone promises us it will get better.

This picture shows the school (center) from a kiosk on a part of the campus up the mountain from the school buildings.

Shoes

The kids normally leave their shoes outside their classrooms so as not to drag dirt and mud inside.

Here, the first and second graders retrieve plants from the greenhouse that they planted several weeks ago. They planted them right outside their classroom and are now caring for them.

Slide and Butterfly Trap

This must be the longest slide in Central America. It is right outside my office, and the kids love it, especially on wet days when it has rain and mud on it and is especially slippery. To the right, Dolly is showing a class the butterfly trap she set up.

Bye Bye Birdie

Bye Bye Birdie
When we returned from Nicaragua, I called Birdie’s owners as soon as I had access to a phone. They had been caring for her while we were gone. Bad news, I was told. You can’t have her back. Birdie had become so confused her first couple of days back with them that she got lost in the forest. They think she was looking for us and our house. Sometime the next day, a local farmer found her wandering around and managed to return her to her owners. But, the incident had disturbed and frightened them enough to suggest that maybe their “experiment” to have someone else take care of her for awhile had failed. While they acknowledged that Birdie seemed very happy living with us, they suggested it might be better for her to remain with them. Going back and forth from one house to another seemed too stressful for her, and part of our original agreement included our leaving her again during our April break.
It is really strange coming home and not seeing Birdie. We really miss her, but we are resigned at this point, and will see if we can visit her. She lives a 75-minute walk from our house, so I can’t imagine we will see her very often.

Bedtime
I may have mentioned before that we find ourselves going to bed really early down here. The sun goes down right around 6:00, there is no TV to watch, no internet connection at the house, and we are just more tired, maybe from the altitude, the rain, the wind, and the walking up and down hills. Nevertheless, I was pretty surprised tonight after dinner when both Kaz and Kamila said they were completely exhausted and needed to go straight to bed. Kamila had been yawning all through dinner and her eyes said, “We need sleep.” Kaz could not even muster the energy to take a badly needed shower, and instead went straight to bed. Kamila left for her room down the hill, and I was a little worried she wouldn’t make it without collapsing on her way down. I looked at the clock just after she left. It was 6:45.

Bye Bye Kamila
Upon our return to Monteverde, Kamila stayed with us one more night and then moved out. She couldn’t stand the bugs in our house. We tried spraying her room with really toxic bug repellant, tried to convince her that it wasn’t that bad (there only seem to be bugs around when she is home), tried to explain to her that there are bugs everywhere in this town, and tried to convince her the bugs would not bother her. Nothing worked, and she is now settled in a room at a kind of hostel at the bottom of our hill. A lot of her stuff is still here, though, and we still get together every day, but she just couldn’t sleep here anymore.