All these pictures looked better in person, but...

Baile típico at the Feria de Agua

Up in the Air

Composing my victory haiku

Chirripo is just around the bend!

View of Los Crestones (still looking for a direct English translation)

That was just celebrating getting to base camp...

Making progress on the 4R's...

!

It has been way too long not to blog for such an exciting few weeks. The biggest highlight of course was my dad’s visit. We spent the first weekend up in Monteverde, the quintessential Costa Rican rainforest. And although it was the dry season, it stayed true to its name with a constant refreshing mist. We stayed at a treehouse hotel up in the clouds that included delicious breakfast and 5 o’clock tea to watch the sunset. And we met some interesting characters, including a nature guide who had a fondness for potty jokes and spent more time talking about porcupines pooping and bird indigestion than about all the beautiful plants and animals we saw.

On Monday we headed back to Quebradas with a stop in San José for my Junior Achievement training, a course I am starting with high school aged kids in Quebradas that teaches them how to start their own business. And since I’ve never started my own business, I may need more than a three hour training to be qualified to teach the course, but it’s a start. In Quebradas, dad got to come to an English class, help out with building some planting boxes at the school for our greenhouse, observe a chaotic artisan group meeting and went on his own adventures in San Isidro where he learned the names of lots of new tools in the hardware store in order to construct a screen door for my bedroom. Not exactly a relaxing visit, but he did great.

And just to make sure he left good and tired, we decided to climb the highest mountain in Costa Rica for his last few days in town. Brigitte came down all the way from Bijagua and we picked up Adrienne in Canaan and made our way up 3820 meters and back in two days and one night, plus some side trips to some cool rock formations and a beautiful lake. It was an incredible hike. We walked through various microclimates: rainforest, desert, burnt trees, and up a trail called the “Hill of the Repentants,” right before we got to the lodge on the first day. So it was tough, but well worth it. Meals consisted of PB&J, granola, trail mix, and pasta with bagged tomato sauce for dinner, cooked over a portable burner that took a good 45 minutes to boil water. The second morning we got up super early to summit Chirripo, and it was as awesome as every says it is. We were above all the clouds and it was gorgeous and peaceful and totally exhausting, especially since we had to go all the way back down that same day. But we all made it more or less in one piece, and it was such a wonderful experience to share with my dad and my friends and I have a feeling I will be up there again before I go.

Although it was sad saying goodbye to dad on Sunday, I have hardly had time to miss him as last week was crazy with preparations for the Feria de Agua at FUDEBIOL, their big annual event. I was coordinating a lot of the activities, publicity and transportation (you may have heard me on Thursday’s San Isidro Catholic radio broadcast), and on top of all that preparing for my PCT visit. For those who have been following my adventures from the beginning, you may recall that a year ago, I headed off wide-eyed and clueless to visit a seasoned Peace Corps Volunteer in her site. Now I get to play that role and host a fresh-off-the-boat Peace Corps Trainee, and of course the visit was planned for the craziest weekend in Quebradas, but it ended up working out great because a bunch of the other volunteers near me who are hosting trainees all came to Quebradas on Saturday night and we had a campfire and slept up at FUDEBIOL and then they were all there for the activities on Sunday and lent some extra creativity and resourcefulness to the last minute activity planning. Not that I should be surprised at this point, but on Friday I was not feeling terribly optimistic about the event, and of course everything came together and there was a HUGE turnout (the bus I had begged FUDEBIOL to contract but they were skeptical of whether it would fill up ended up having to make extra trips and fit about double its capacity each time) and the scavenger hunt, traditional dance performance and soccer games I helped organize were all a big hit. So my visitor, Liz, definitely got to see one of the more eventful Sundays ever in Quebradas and we both left drenched from playing soccer in the rain and socially overstimulated, which means it was a good day in my book…

Party Time (3/4/10)

Computers!

Getting silly with the girls...

Most flattering uniforms ever

Last weekend was full of parties near and far, in some cases a little too near. Every near during the summer, the Quebradas Development Association puts on a big three-day “turno” right across from the soccer field, which also happens to be right next to my apartment. It is three days and nights of non stop music, karaoke, food, drink and all the noise, trash and good times that generally entail. A local band called Los Talibanes (which I later learned acquired their name soon after 9/11 because the lead singer’s name is Bin – they’re not so concerned about political correctness here…) played every night and the majority of the community showed up even though it rained in the afternoons.

Anyways it was pretty fun and funny how all the adults bring their kids and get drunk while the kids run around and play tag on the soccer field and nobody seems to mind. Unfortunately for me, though, my general routine of passing out by 10pm was disrupted for three nights straight, which was particularly tough because on Saturday morning, I woke up at 4:30am to head with the new volunteers in Quebradas to San Gerardo de Rivas to watch 250 crazy people race up Chirripo, the highest mountain in Costa Rica and second highest in Central America. It is a big all-weekend festival as well, but super inspiring and amazing to see these people without an ounce of fat on their bones leave the starting line at 7am and show up before 10:30am, accomplishing what takes most people two full days in less than 3 and a half hours. It definitely made me want to at least hike up the mountain, though not quite as quickly…

Sunday morning was the highlight, a Quebradas women’s soccer game versus a neighboring community, Miravalles. My friend had told me about the game about a week before, and we trained three times last week, with about five people showing up each time and about two of us actually knowing how to play. But incredibly enough, 20 women arrived the day of the game ready to play, including my friend Adrienne, a ringer we brought in from Canaan. We had a pretty big audience since the turno was still going on, and everyone was worried because Miravalles is supposed to be pretty good, and it turned out they were. We ended up coming back from losing 3-1 to tie the game 3-3, much help from Adrienne and me, and we had the whole crowd pretty riled up and I had big hopes of making my name in Quebradas history, until I missed my penalty shot and we ended up losing. Big bummer. However, all the girls seemed really pumped after the game and impressed by how Adrienne and I played and how fit we were (although we had both been complaining before about how out of shape we felt…it’s all relative) and enthusiastic about continuing with the team. So that would be a really fun thing to get going, and it was great to see women from the community running around outside of the house and having fun.

Monday was a bit of a downer, as my new cell phone was stolen out of my pocket on the bus. It was a big ordeal to get the phone and it is going to be a big ordeal to get another and I was pretty upset and frustrated with myself for not being very aware. But that evening, the great news arrived that the government computers I had solicited in October would be delivered to FUDEBIOL the next day. And sure enough, they showed up and were entirely installed, equipped with cameras, headphones, all the most recent software, and desks and chairs. Pretty exciting and should be a great resource for the biological reserve and people who work/volunteer there as well as the nearby community members. So that is just one example of how fast my life can go from up to down to up again in the Peace Corps.

Other than that, we are still moving forward with the school garden and recycling, working on the next community newspaper and potentially getting and “intern” from a nearby university to support the project, and I met with a guy today who recently moved here and is interested in starting a rural tourism project by building super low-cost suspended bamboo huts on family fincas. And most excitingly, my dad is coming tomorrow to visit for a week! So we will both have our work cut out for us…