Settling In…

We have been in Costa Rica for about 2 months now. In many ways it feels longer than that as we have settled in with work and school. Yet in other ways it still feels very fresh because we have so much to learn. 

I have found that my grief was at bay for a while. The prepping to move in Philly and the resettling here in Costa Rica was a very busy time. Now that we have calmed down, I find myself getting spurts of deep sadness. I have to hold back tears because it hits in the middle of conversations, in the middle of meetings at work, or while I’m teaching a class. 

For example, last week we had to get our fingerprints taken at a police station in the administrative capital of our region (Puntarenas), a 1.5 hour drive away. The officer requested some basic information which included the question “who is your mother?” I almost lost it right there. I had a lump in my throat throughout the rest of the questioning, on the edge of full blown sobbing. Today we visited the Monteverde Friends Library, a cute little library attached to the school, made available for the public with a wide collection of musty books donated over the years by visitors from around the world. I found the book PEOPLE, a picture book we had growing up published in 1980. I remember the pictures so clearly. My mom loved this book. I can hear her voice reading it to me. I miss her voice more than I’ve ever missed anything. 

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Despite my grief sneaking up on me more often, we are having an amazing time here. The boys are walking to school in the morning with Symeon everyday and walking home on their own in the afternoon. Symeon is working from home and uses his lunch breaks to do the family errands like food shopping. I am walking and hitching rides to my campus because it is a grueling hour or more hike with a very steep hill. It takes just as long on the way home because you have to walk very slowly down the hill so you don’t fall (I already fell twice in the rain on this hill). My phone health app keeps alerting me that I am walking more steps than I did this time last year. No shit Sherlock, we were in lock down and I was with my children all day, everyday. My school campus is extremely beautiful and has frequent pizote and howler monkey visitors. We often pause classes when there is a large group of pizotes eating right outside the classroom. Last week we even saw some babies. So cute! 

On Saturdays there is a community frisbee game. Usually the age range of players is 5-60+. It has been a great way to meet more families and get exercise. The game happens rain or shine and some of the long-time players, many of whom are my high school students, are insanely good. I have bruises from attempting to catch or block their throws. It is so fun to watch them make epic plays. The kids are now getting very good too and play at school during recess. It is so cute hearing the kids call out the names of their teammates and try out some Spanish. Next month soccer starts and both boys have signed up. The coach is our neighbor. The kids here are amazing at soccer so it will be interesting to see how the boys do. 

We celebrated Independence Day on September 15th. Costa Rica shares Independence Day with El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. A torch is lit and carried through all of Central America marking their freedom from Spain. Some of the students participated in the torch run by waking up at 3am and running from another town all the way to our town and up to the school. We passed a lit torch from person to person and let it burn during the school day. Poems were read, songs were sung, and students dressed in traditional clothes or red, white and blue. In my classes we played Costa Rican Jeopardy, had discussions about the meaning of citizenship, and read about Independence Day traditions around the world. 

Because of the holiday we had a three day weekend and we ventured off the mountain to the beach town of Samara with friends. Samara is a 3 hour drive from Monteverde, 1 hour is just to get down the winding mountain road. We rode in a taxi van and we all got a little carsick on the way there. We stayed at a cute, casual hotel that is owned by a family in Monteverde. Their son is in my class. We could walk around the corner to the beach and to very good restaurants and bakeries. The kids played all day in and out of the water while the grownups chatted. We had great seafood and I saw huge wild iguanas. I loved seeing another part of the country and I now know why so many people move here from around the world to settle on the Pacific Coast.

Samson and I got up early one morning and walked the beach and talked about BaBa. We sent her some messages in the sand. 

My Spanish vocabulary is expanding but I am still way behind. Symeon is doing a great job and tries his best to speak Spanish everywhere. The boys are learning so quickly. Desmond is in immersion classes and he says his Spanish teacher doesn’t know English. He has his classmates do all the translation, especially his desk-mate Dorothy. Samson is in SSL classes (Spanish Second Language) because he is older so he gets pulled out with two other English speaking students for special lessons. Every night the boys are asking how to say certain words and they even made up a silly game where you lose if you speak English. Desmond loves saying “Hola ¿Cómo estás?” while walking past people on the street and “Buenas Noches” to taxi drivers. Twice, a man in a red pickup truck has seen me walking to work and he stopped to give me a ride. On the way he talks and talks and I can only understand every 5th word. I just smile, say Gracias, and get out and head into work. I want to say he’s my friend but honestly I have no clue what’s going on. 

Everyone here uses WhatsApp to text and call. They also use it for group messages. I am now in a dozen group chats- one for all staff, one for just high school staff, one for Arts & Culture activities in town, one for a community center in town that has rock climbing, yoga and pottery classes, one for community discussions, and so on. These are 99% in Spanish so I’m using Google Translate all day long to stay up to date on what’s going on in this community. My favorite text was a picture of a bull and a message about the bull running away and has anyone seen it. The next morning I asked my homeroom students what their rose and thorn was about the weekend. A student responded that his thorn was that his family’s brand new bull ran away and he spent the whole weekend searching and then ultimately, after he found the bull, getting it back to the farm. I laughed and said, “OMG! I heard about your bull on the community group chat” and pulled up the picture on my phone.  Even funnier is that the bull ran so far away that it was in a neighborhood where my colleague, the new science teacher from Seattle, lives. His husband was home that afternoon and saw the bull walking in the yard so he got out his phone to take a video. When the family found the bull, they tried to push it into the cart to be brought back home, but he wouldn’t go, so they brought a cow to talk to him and convince him to go home. No electric shockers or other cruel tools. The drama took up my student’s whole weekend and he was quite salty about it. I will never forget this bull story. 

We are living in a very different environment but some things have stayed exactly the same:

– Teaching is the hardest job ever. You work long hours and often do overtime without pay. Some students are a%#holes and there is never enough time in the day to plan out every class perfectly. School politics are consistently annoying. Every night I have big plans to stay up late and make the best lesson plans ever, and almost every night I fall asleep in pure exhaustion. 

– My kids still want screen time all the time and fight with us about it. We have to work hard everyday to get them into other things when we are at home and idle. The good thing is that this is a paradise of nature adventure and as soon as we go outside it’s easy to play and explore. 

– Symeon still makes me coffee every morning and a cocktail on weekend nights. Nothing tastes as good when I make it myself. I love every sip. 

– I still hate doing the dishes, but maybe even more so now because we don’t have a dishwasher and the soap doesn’t get grease off very well. Just thinking about doing dishes makes me depressed. 

– I miss my mom everyday.