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.