Back to where it all began…

(9/5/09)

I just returned from 5 days of In-Service Training, a Peace Corps sponsored event with all the Tico 19ers after our first three months in our sites. We all met up at the Peace Corps office on Monday afternoon, and a bunch of people went in early to stay with their old host families from training, but Monday morning I had agreed to meet up with some women on the recycling committee to organize an area next to the school cafeteria where we are going to keep our recycling. I don’t know how to describe it other than that it was a BIG mess with dusty old desks, random pieces of metal and glass, rotting wood, etc. I didn’t really see how we were going to make it work for our needs but I showed up at 7am and soon enough six moms showed up in their rubber boots and gloves and we got to work. And these ladies went at it! They were moving heavy, dirty stuff and chopping away at weeds and building walls out of the random pieces of metal and we were done within an hour. I was very impressed and happy with the first group effort of the recycling committee and left Quebradas feeling good about things, which has made it easier to come back after a fun week with good friends and good food.
So we all met up Monday afternoon and it was like seeing your high school friends after summer break. Some guys had big bushy beards, various people have lost or gained weight from eating too many rice and beans or refusing to eat them, and a lot of girls had new Tica haircuts, some of whom claim something was lost in translation. But it was really fun to see all the people I haven’t seen in three months after spending almost every day together during training, and I think everyone was relieved to be out of their sites for a while. But for the most part people are seeming upbeat though not without frustrations, which was comforting to hear because of course I have been feeling the same way.
We spent four nights at Tres Rios in Cartago, the retreat center where we spent our first four days in country in March. We played soccer every morning at 6am and then had classes/activities from 8 to 5:30, which was super exhausting but there were plenty of coffee/pastry breaks. And because we knew it was only four days instead of three months like before, the training was more bearable and also felt a lot more pertinent now that we have all been at our sites so had questions to ask and much more of an idea of why what we were learning was important and how we could use it.
Friday afternoon we went into San Jose for our last training and then Peace Corps put us up in a hotel downtown which was pretty nice, so we got to enjoy one night out together before heading in our various directions Saturday morning. We went for sushi and sake, which was fun while it lasted but the feeling the following morning while driving back to Quebradas over the Mountain of Death on the back of the bus was another story…

9/6/09

I just returned from the rosario of one of my neighbors whose father died last week. For those of you who are as clueless as I was about Latin American Catholic tradition, this happens for nine evenings straight after someone dies and consists of about half an hour of praying followed by food and coffee for everyone who shows up. And unlike my previous experiences sitting Shiva, it is not just close friends and family who show up. It is the WHOLE community. Well maybe that wasn’t worded correctly since in my community and most small rural communities down here almost everyone is somehow related.
Anyways this whole thing is incredibly sad, because the grandma died only three weeks ago and now the father died pretty unexpectedly, so it has been really rough on this family. But they were both clearly very known and loved by the community, judging by the overflowing church for both funerals and the masses of neighbors that show up every single night to pray for this family.
I have the good fortune of not having too much experience with funerals and mourning, and I know that every family in the US has its own way of going about this, but it is generally a relatively private affair (though most Ticos don’t believe this since their exposure to US funerals is the raffling of tickets for Michael Jackson’s). People understandably don’t want to talk about or share their grief with too many others. But there is something really beautiful and healthy to me about the communal mourning process and openness to discuss the recently deceased here.

In lighter news, today was day three of a four day “turno” in Quebradas that the development association holds twice a year to raise money for community projects. They had karaoke and a dance on Friday and Saturday, and today was indoor soccer all morning and then a talent show in the afternoon. It basically consisted of 4th to 6th grade girls wearing entirely inappropriate clothes and dancing to American songs such as Poker Face, which they have no idea what the words mean. There was a lot of bootie-shaking and hair-flipping and it reminded me very much of some of my elementary school dances to classics such as Ace of Base’s I Saw the Sign, which to this day I don’t know what the words mean. Anyways all I have to say about that is to mom, dad, Lynne, and all my friends’ parents who we used to make sit and watch us perform these moves (and sometimes even charge 10 cents for a ticket) – I’m really sorry.