Monday and oodles of work

Yep, they told me today in class that we had presentations on Wednesday. Not Friday like we were assured earlier. So I will be here a long time working in this cafe. Yesterday and today were pretty great, I will tell you about them later…Not the goal right now. Just thought it would be nice for you to know that I appreciate you.

Cartago is way better than San Jose. Hands down.

Boatswain’s Log. October 4^th.  

Okay, so this morning didn’t happen at 4AM like I thought it might. I ended up sleeping for a good while. However, my morning was incredibly irritating. My host mom is one of the most nagging women I have ever met. More so than my real mother. I didn’t make any real plans (I had plans to go to the zoo with Nikki, but I decided to go hang out with Andres in Cartago and she didn’t want to go all the way out there again. We’ll call this one a friendship in progress.) and so when I called people to see if they wanted to come to Cartago they had already made plans or weren’t doing anything besides working on their essays (which I am on the home stretch of BTW).

When Liliana heard this she got very irritating. She kept saying that I “wasn’t getting to know the country” and all sorts of ridiculously pushy statements about how I should live my life here in Costa Rica and how I should plan to go experience things with people from my program. She repeatedly insisted that if I had planned ahead I could have been spending time with people from the program going somewhere. I wanted to tell her that that was enough. That I didn’t need to hear her advice in a manner that kept me sitting for 20 minutes having conversation for the sake of not being rude, while letting her be ridiculously in-my-face for no good reason. I wanted to get out of the house as fast as I could. So an hour and a half after I woke up, I was on my way to Cartago.

 

These are my thoughts on the matter of pushy host-mom:

 

 A) the part of Costa Rica that I desire to experience most is the PEOPLE of Costa Rica. Honestly, if I don’t leave San Jose but I make two good friends who are not from the US I will count this journey worth it. Costa Rica is a beautiful place and I will experience more of it as time goes by. I will see the pacific coast, I will go to another volcano, I will see the rainforest. However, I am not worried about it. I want to develop relationships here. That is what is most important to me. End of story.

 

B) I find it incredibly frustrating when I am bound by the desire to be polite and have no outlet for my true feelings on the matter. Honesty is the best policy, but you don’t really want to offend Costa Rican mothers.

 

C) She needs to stop comparing me to other students she has already had. I am not Steve or Scott and as such I will do things however the hell I please. Not in an effort to be like the other Americans that she has already had (Steve and Scott), but in an effort to be me. The thing I value most apart from Jesus is time with people…and the ocean. So pardon me, but I don’t care if I don’t “get to know” the pretty parts of Costa Rica. The people are better than those things…and I will see the ocean in due time.

 

D) I “got to know” more of Costa Rica today while hanging out with Costa Ricans WITHOUT people from my program. I really don’t want to spend my entire trip here speaking English with people who want to feel comfortable. I was glad to not be around them all day. It was refreshing. I will continue to do things this way whenever I want. Best experiences here have thus far been the ones where there were no gringos involved…other than me.

 

E) As I end my time here in this house in Sabanilla I am glad to be going. I’m sorry. I love my host family and they’re wonderful, but the last couple of weeks really makes me want a family that wants to go play soccer instead of go to church all the time and is okay with me hanging out in the city on the weekend.  I need some frikkin’ space.

 

Okay that’s all on that subject. As you can tell, it pissed me off. When I got to Cartago I told Andres about it and he said, “It’s the culture.” Well balls.

 

Andres showed me around his province. Let me tell you, it is awesome. Weather is less muggy than San Jose, there is countryside around you, the air is cleaner (noticeably), and there are some great people. His family is cool. I met his brothers and parents and some of his friends. PS: Andres’ dad is retired, but he used to be a huge deal in the Costa Rican version of the FBI.

 

The adventure started out waiting for him to get a haircut and talking about life and the sweet-awesome opportunities he has to study abroad elsewhere in the world. I read Cosmo in Spanish while he got his hair cut and talked with this precious Costa Rican child named “chalon”…Still dunno why that is a popular name, second one I have met. Aside from the 99 secrets of sex that I didn’t read, I noticed that hillary duff stopped being blonde. She should have stayed that way.

 

After this we went back to the house where I watched some of a Muse concert with Andres’ brother Daniel. Soon thereafter Andres’ friend Pablo showed up. Pablo is pretty awesome. He is some kind of engineer who works with water systems, he is from Argentina, and he is good people. He drives a 4WD truck, which anyone who is serious about driving in Costa Rica ought to drive. He also is really easy to be around and tells funny stories.

 

We got in Pablo’s truck and drove up to Juan Pablo’s house in the boondocks of Cartago. Boondocks of Cartago = almost jungle. JP (as I will call him for short) is about 25 and is really cool. He and Pablo play rugby with Andres and his parents are incredibly kind people who went to college in Oregon. His mom made us food (I drank coffee again and liked it again…bad signs) and talked to me about Washington while we admired the view from their deck and listened to Pablo tell funny stories. That deck view would have been epic if it weren’t for the stupid mist that owns all of Cartago whenever it feels like showing up.

 

JP’s family has a sweet piece of property with fruit trees, a herd of sheep, some chickens, and some geese. They use all these things for food. Word on the street is that next weekend they’re going to eat a sheep. Cool. I tried Guyava again and this time it was ripe. Here’s the thing about guyava. It is good, but one needs to make sure that it is ripe first and then realize that the inside is the best part. Keep digging, there’s delicious gold in there.

 

After cool time at JP’s house we drove back to Andres’ place. I talked with Pablo in the cab about life and whatnot. I realized that coming back to the US will be really easy for me in comparison to other people. By that I mean that I will be used to talking in Spanish and I will be coming back home to a house where my dad speaks fluent Spanish and to a church that just started a new Spanish service…Convenient and super great.

 

Andres, JP, and I then hung out for about 3 hours playing a rugby video game (rugby is hard to play as a video game, but the rules are easy to get and it seems fun…aside from the bleeding), watching TV, playing medal of honor and generally having a good time. It was really needed to just have a day in which I could bum around with Costa Rican people and feel like a human being again. I also got to use Andres’ internet for free. JP and I showed each other photos on our facebook accounts. That was nice.

 

We watched this show on the discovery channel about people in Sumatra looking for Bigfoot or some such nonsense. Obviously those people had no idea how to track animals. They tromped around in the jungle with orange jackets on a regular basis and hoped that their cameras would catch something in a few days. Amateurs. We also caught the tail end of this show called the “big bang effect”, wicked funny.

 

Then we caught a bus from Cartago back to San Jose. We got on the bus at about 9:30. That means that I hung out with just Costa Ricans for about 10 hours straight by the time I got home (after eating dinner at McDonald’s. I know. I am ashamed. I supported an ugly food chain that I mock at home. But it was the only food place open so late that wasn’t a bar). JP and Andres were going dancing with girls from the program, some of which are quite foxy. I decided that I don’t really like dancing here anyway and that going just to spend time with attractive girls at a very intimate distance is a stupid reason to do something…so I came home. Somewhat lame perhaps, but I find it to be a good choice.

 

JP told me about a sweet national park on the pacific coast that I plan to go to over our four day fall break. Sounds money. Hopefully I can talk him and Andres into coming too. Those guys are smooth. I was blessed to be able to spend time with them. It made me like it here way more than obnoxious nagging via Liliana and was easier to talk to them as well. I guess that might mean I don’t feel entirely comfortable in my home here. Not that I would feel entirely comfortable anywhere here, but still.

 

New vocab as of today’s journey. Not all of it is appropriate, but I am learning to be a real native speaker. As such it is necessary.

Culo: Ass.

Aguila: girl, typically a foxy one.

Bicha: male genitalia. More of a silly way of saying it than an anatomically correct term. For example “carabicha” = penis face.

Suave: Costa Rican slang for stop/slow down.

Machuco: Costa Rican rural slang for huge/buff people.

 

Irene Faulks made a good comment yesterday that I will end with. She said that no matter how long you are outside of your country you never entirely belong. She said she had been here in CR for 53 years and she still considered herself a hybrid. She said you are that your whole life, your kids too if they grow up here. I guess that this idea makes me feel better about this experience. I am not going to become Costa Rican or stay as an American just the way I am…I am going to be something in between.

still October 3rd.

Boatswain’s Log,  

Oh yes. It is still today. Let’s see now, where did we leave off? Ah yes, I was in the internet café. Well. After that I had to leave pretty early. This girl from my program made me draw her a map and wanted me to meet her at this place in Sabanilla so that she could learn how to get to the place where we were going to be asking questions to the lovely Dr. Irene Faulks. Well, I got to the place (having had to cut my time short to be on time) and she didn’t show. Well bother. So I went to the place and what do you know? There she was. She apologized, and I accepted it, but I feel like that is the last time I allow the “So…you’re just going to go solo?” with pathetic “I don’t even know where Sabanilla is” face to convince me to let someone “tag along”. Okay, maybe that’s not true…but still. Very frustrating.

 

At the place we heard Irene talk to the four of us about lots of things. Oscar Romero, machismo, missions stresses and history in context of Latin America. She had great things to say as usual and also said that Mennonite Central Committee was the best missions organization that existed. That made me smile. That woman is wonderful. I sat and listened to her talk about things that didn’t even apply to my topic and was interested most of the time until I started to get hungry and lose focus. She talked with us for about 1.5 hours.

 

After our chat, I had to catch a taxi home in the rain. It took about 20 minutes for one to show, then when I got in the guy said something about the door (I either didn’t hear him or failed to understand him) which I shut again for emphasis. As he dropped me off in Sabanilla I realized that he was probably telling me to not slam the door the first time. So when I shut it again for emphasis I became a jackass. Sigh. Oh well.

 

When I got home my host mom was making more pizza tartlets. She has been making those things non-stop for a long time. She goes and sells them often. I think that since I got here she got more contracts for them, thus she has had to make more. It’s a bit of a give and take. I dunno if she really likes doing it. I strongly doubt I would. 

 

It was a no go on the movie with Andrew Ryan and his little brother. His host dad is having prostate problems and was in the hospital. Another time perhaps. The result of all this is that I worked on my paper more on Friday night. It was a good use of time, but made me feel like a silly child in Costa Rica wasting my time on a paper.

 

Dinner was at about 8:45 because of the tartlets, I dislike eating so late…but what can one do. It’s the same thing with eating rice all the time. I don’t really like rice that much, but I eat it every single day. It doesn’t get better, but I don’t have oodles of options.

 

I am not really sure right now if my mom intends to wake me up before 5AM to help get groceries at the Market. At dinner it seemed like she might. If she does I am going to be hurting and waste most of my Saturday sleeping afterwards. Cross your fingers.

 

That brings us to other things now that I told you about my day. I looked at classes for winter quarter online and figured a few things out. 1) I am almost done with college. 2) I have 3 classes that are required for me to take, but they exist in different quarters so there’s no way to graduate early (not that I really desire to anyway) 3) I have lots of open room to take whatever classes or not classes that I want.

 

My thoughts for right now make my schedule look like this: 18 Credits. Why so many credits you ask? I know it’s a lot. But they are all classes that I want to take. There’s a microfinance one that seems totally cool, a couple that I have to take (the last required bible course and a Spanish class), and a theology class that I have wanted to take since I was a preview student. What is great about these classes is that it means that I will have 2 of my 4 classes with Dave Nienhuis and I won’t have to start class until 11 on MWF and 3 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think it will be a lot of work, but it’s my senior year and I want to get my money’s worth in education, it’s the cold bitter evil of winter quarter when no one likes being outside, all the classes seem like fun, and none of them start before 11 AM, making room for work on Tuesday and Thursday before class…Not too shabby.

 

If you’re worried about me, don’t be. I can always drop one in the first week if things get too rough with regards to the schedule. The next challenge is to figure out a job…you can pray for that.

October 3rd

Didn’t do much work on that paper last night. I wasn’t in the mood. It’s going to be finished on Sunday. Tonight the plan is to go to Andrew Ryan’s house and watch a movie with his kid brother. Not too big of a deal, but a cool low-key night hanging out with cool costa rican lad sounds fun.

I learned a lot in Spanish class this week. I am sad that we only have another week of class. Carry on.

2nd Day of October.

Boatswain’s Log.

 

This morning I woke up after a thorough sleep. I think exercise improves sleep. Actually I am sure that it does. Upon exiting the room my mom told me that I might as well keep sleeping because there was no running water in the house. It seems that the man who had come to fix the leak in our bathroom had turned off all the H2O in the process. Well shucks.

 

This meant that I had to go to the Banco Nacional to use the bathroom. I also changed money. They always play the discovery channel in the Banco Nacional. It’s always very interesting, often to the point that I forget where I am and watch the animals do amusing things. Today they were eating other animals. Somewhat ominous, but fascinating.

 

Since there was no water I was told that I should grab something to drink for breakfast. I bought milk. A gallon of milk. I had finally had it with having no milk to drink and I bought a gallon of milk to fill that deep-seated desire for dairy products that I have. Javier told me that I get to work in a dairy farm somewhere for my service project. I hope that means I get lots of milk.

 

After breakfast I forged ahead on my Oscar Romero research paper and found myself at the ten page limit with just having readied myself for the real thrust of my paper. I asked my advisor if it could be longer and she informed me that it could. I am trying to figure out if I want to work on it or watch the vice-presidential debates…I guess I could do both.

 

Since we had no water I traveled to my friend Matt’s house and used his shower before we had class. It was nice to have a shower, although those late afternoon showers aren’t as good.

 

Then I went to class, we had a test (which I think I did okay on, I wasn’t worried either way), then we had process group. I thought it was pretty fun today, we got to throw out our complaints with regards to our experience here and just chatted for awhile. I like my family a lot, but I am also excited to get out of this city and meet some new Costa Rican friends/family.

 

Our speaker today was a woman from Nicaragua. She had some great things to say. Nicaragua apparently used to be really really nice, until about 1909 when the US meddled about there. Then it became exploited for monetary gain. She made this point about what armies are for. She said they should be used to protect the people, not the government or the wealthy, but the people. She asked where our army was on September 11^th. Why was it that with all our military might we couldn’t protect the people? That was a good question.

 

She mentioned the fact that the Somoza government was really shady. FYI, the Somozas were the ruling family in Nicaragua backed by our government. Basically we paid for them to do awful things to their people. Like drag people out of their homes and execute them because they didn’t support the Somoza government. Eventually the Nicaraguans rose up and overthrew the dictator and installed a socialist government to benefit the people. The problem was that as soon as that happened the US, Honduras, and Costa Rica started paying, training, and equipping contra-revolutionary armies, which invaded the recently war-torn Nicaragua and forced them to draft young people to defend their nation.

 

She had lots of great things to say about her country “the land of lakes and volcanoes”. I get to go there in a week and a bit. I am pretty pumped to meet the people. I find that the idea of maintaining a non-violent stance in a situation like she mentioned to be very challenging. It is clear that Oscar Romero had to have a whole lot of character and Jesus to keep struggling to help his people find peace in El Salvador.

 

After class I went to “hacer spinning” yet again. Joel wanted to go again, and I find that I really like getting exercise. It was good to feel like I was doing something physical again, and I paid with loose-change from my desk drawer. I think I am getting pretty trim these days, still today I felt more full than I had in awhile. I think that having some delicious milk in my tummy helped out quite a bit.

 

The Costa Rican participant in Latin American Idol is one of the finalists. That was a big deal with my family here. I wished they would have let the really foxy Peruvian girl win.

 

Well. That’s about it I am afraid. I am going to work on my paper for a time and then watch the debate.

Happy October 1st

Boatswain’s Log.  

Well, it is now October. This month is marked in Costa Rica by massive rainfall. My mom told me that the rain I have seen up until now is nothing compared to what is coming. Looks like someone we know is getting wet.

 

I awoke this morning and went to Spanish. Again, Xinia is making me better at speaking Spanish. She makes me say things correctly, even if I have to try multiple times. We get to learn lots of good things to know how to say in Spanish. There has been this ripening bunch of bananas in Spanish class for the past 5 weeks and as of Monday they became ripe. Free bananas. Free fresh and delicious bananas. I am jealous of all these Costa Rican yahoos that can grow their own wonderful and tropical produce. Sigh.

 

Class went well, but then I got my test back. I didn’t do poorly. I got an 85%. Which is a solid B. However, the manner in which it was graded pissed me off. I didn’t have all the time in the world. Usually tests at school merit the entire class time (2 hours) and require us to have a specific set of information (not necessarily via a study guide) that we are tested on. This test was an hour long and we had a huge book of articles to “study” we had two large essay questions too. I felt like we were set up to suck on that test and then it was graded by people who are at times (mostly) very subjective in their grading. Anyhow, it put me in a bad mood.

 

I went home and then proceeded to be more frustrated. I began to seriously wonder if I had wasted my time here. I came with all sorts of expectations about how much Spanish I would learn and how many friendships with Costa Ricans I would make, but in reality I don’t feel like I have done what I had hoped to. I have done homework, sat and listened, and generally wished that our assignments involved us spending time with Costa Ricans because the student in me is a tenacious doer of assignments. I suppose I may have exaggerated a tad because I have learned valuable things here, but I feel at times that this program tries to be too many things at once to the detriment of our development as students. Also, despite the Christian emphasis, I feel like our development as followers of Christ (in the eyes of the people on staff) as been relegated to learning about the social applications of the gospel. Great stuff, but I don’t think that just doing the right things is all that we need to be concerned about. People are more than the things they do.

 

In my frustration I went to the UCR to unwind a tad. I will admit that I was strongly tempted to break the thing I signed and just buy a beer. I held back because I like making choices I feel good about, but a beer would have been wonderful. I ended up buying a fanta instead. I wanted to find the “museo de insectos” (insect museum) because there was a sign that told me it was somewhere nearby. On the way I sat in the music building for awhile and listened to this guy play classical guitar. He had skills. It was like getting to hear a show, but he was just practicing. Eventually I found what I was looking for. I had to pay about 2 dollars to go and look at dead bugs, but it was cool. To be honest I wish I had brought someone else to come look as well…that would have made it more fun.

 

There were lots of bugs there. All dead with pins through them of course, but lots. Huge spiders and grasshoppers, shiny beetles, butterflies that are bigger than my hand, and of course evil wasps. The sort that lay their eggs in tarantulas so that their larva can hatch and eat their way out. That was the creepy part of the museum. I hate wasps, and being around so many of them without being able to punch them was unnerving. It was still pretty cool though. Did you know that Costa Rica has a poisonous ant? Me neither. They’re huge. FYI: It’s a good idea to not get bitten by this ant. Also, killer bees are described as “nervous” rather than “angry” which is what I tend to think of them as.

 

I was in the subterranean chamber with lights that they call the insect museum for about an hour, but at that point I got bored. You can only look at dead bugs for so long. If they were alive…now that would be cool. Except for when they escape and mix with chemicals and then grow really big and eat people. Then you have to convince the town (somehow old man sheffelfield doubts you until the last second before he gets eaten by a giant spider), get guns, and hole up somewhere. Mostly that’s that movie 8-legged freaks. But I think that might be what would happen.

 

I also went to the UCR bookstore which was way less marketed than our local bookstore at SPU. The UCR one wasn’t jam-packed with useless crap and shiny pendants. They had a solid 8 sweatshirts for sale, a few mugs, and a whole lot of books. The place wasn’t huge and none of the titles really interested me, but still. It was a bookstore. I came home and puttered about for awhile until 5:50ish when I left to “hacer spinning” again with my friend Joel from the program.

 

Same thing as last time. Funny guy with tight pants who leads the class by shouting things that are somewhat more intelligible now, sweat, and techno. The techno today was a tad off-color. There were some uncomfortable noises that were happening in one song.

 

We got down with the class, Joel bought a month pass, and we headed back to the journey’s start at my house. Now I am putting off working on that paper again. Sigh.

Big fun day. Currently taking a break from writing a research paper.

Boatswain’s Log September 30^th.  

I awoke this morning wicked early at 6AM after having been denied sleep at bedtime for about a half-hour, courtesy of the jackasses outside who revv their engines for no reason or talk loudly in the street. I ate breakfast after my shower and talked with my mom about poverty in Latin America. She seems to be getting more and more concerned and nervous about the results of the financial crisis in the US. Our conversations have become more and more difficult for me, since I lack the mastery of Spanish or English to adequately voice my feelings on the matter of the poverty that our government’s encouragement of greed has caused. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion, it’s mostly that we keep talking about it and I don’t know what else to say. I can only voice my disgust so many times.

 

This morning we talked about it again, last night I had asked what I should be doing as a citizen of the country where Latin-America’s current problems come. She said that I might consider forming some sort of group to help collect money for the poor in Latin America or even the poor in the US. I guess that’s a good idea, but I still feel a general sense of estrangement for some reason. Firstly, I’m not absolutely sure that this is really the best way to do it. I need to think and pray. Secondly, I feel a bit helpless in the face of huge-normous problems on a global scale. I guess I keep coming back to the fact that I keep thinking about the issue from a position where I am only one person. I don’t tend to take into account the fact that these are things God cares about too, He cares about the way His people live, and wants people to participate in making His will be done “on earth as it is in heaven”. I think the problems we face would become smaller if we (by that I mean I) were to look at them as people who are concerned with the same things that concern the Father. We are putting ourselves in line with the will of God. God is with us. With His love we are truly unstoppable. Oscar Romero has this thing where he says something like “Let us not assume that the realities of man make the will of God impossible.” I think this tendency shows that I am more often ready to think about problems as a member of society instead of myself as a servant of the Lord who desires to do the will of the Master.

 

I think there’s a danger of leaning too far towards social and political activism that is divorced from Jesus. I think I (and perhaps other Christians too) need to think and see and act through the lens of our relationship with Christ first. We need to raise our children with this as the manner in which they interact with the world so they can have more of a holistic view on humanity from a young age.

 

Anyhow, after breakfast I went to LASP so we could go on a field trip to an organic farm. This was the best part of the day. The organic farm was incredible. The man who owned the place (I think his name was Rodrigo) was a farmer by trade and 10 years ago he left off using any chemicals. He is the only one who works his farm, almost 12 hours a day…7 days a week. Serious work, but at the same time he has so much passion for his farm. He makes his own composted-fertilizer from poop (which stops smelling after worms get in it), grows coffee in the shade, has big comfortable spaces for his animals (which make tastier food without stress), and has a green house filled with tasty vegetables.

 

 Tangent. Shade-grown coffee by the way is way better for the coffee and the people who pick it, shade grown coffee is pretty awesome. You can feel the difference when you walk through the plantation, and you can taste the difference when you drink the organic coffee. Seriously, I drank 3 cups. I usually hate coffee, but for real…this was great coffee. I put sugar in it too, brown sugar that is less processed. See Pops? Other people agree with you too.

 

Rodrigo grows his vegetables (outside the greenhouse) with the grass and short weeds around them to encourage micro-organisms to help the plants grow. He says that growing stuff this way gains a person about 9 pounds of soil a year, whereas with the usual methods someone loses a pound of soil a year. Furthermore, apparently an organic coffee plant can make coffee for 25 years, but a commercial coffee plant only lasts for 7. He’s totally pumped about bugs around his plants and feels that they represent a healthy ecosystem of which his farm is a part.

 

Basically I was really impressed with the whole thing. The man grows his own food without chemicals and knows what goes into his body in the process. He sells his stuff in an organic market, gets to eat what he makes, and really emphasizes the fact that he gets time to spend with his family and that not using chemical compounds makes him feel better as a person. He tried out school for agronomy, but found that people were being encouraged to use chemicals to raise crops, which he didn’t want to do. He and his family are Christians that view God’s focus on love being about loving the land God gave you as well by not killing it.

 

His wife was also impressive. She had just got done with her medicine degree, she was skeptical of just allopathic medicine (the sort that involves drugs) and had turned to homeopathic medicine (herbs and stuff) to solve problems with her kids’ health. She is from Brazil. Her and Rodrigo have a really cute little boy. In general this woman made me hope to be able to date a Brazilian someday if God is willing and I haven’t met someone else before hand.

 

We got lunch with (what turned out to be vegan and delicious) banana bread with bananas that came from the farm I imagine, fresh fruit and vegetables (organic), and the incredible coffee I mentioned. I haven’t eaten so healthily since I got here and have missed vegetables every day since. I ate a lot of the good food and felt really good. I learned a new phrase which is the equivalent to calling something “tight” in US slang. In Spanish you say “está en todas” to say “tight”. So, that food “estaba en todas”. I also played some friendly soccer, did a few pull ups and had some great conversation with Andrew Ryan about the fact that if I ran for president he would vote for me, but I had to let him come hang out in the oval office. I told him if I ever got there he could come hang out and play Nintendo 64. It was a silly conversation, but it made me excited. Not gonna lie, I am actually considering the idea of doing something with political office. Not because I want power or prestige or fancy dinners, but because I think it would be nice to have another reasonable human being in government. Plus, can you seriously see anyone electing a pacifist Mennonite to be president? “I will not go to war under any circumstances.” Is not an opinion that gets people elected, but maybe it could.

 

Back to the farm. What was ironic about all this organic farm stuff is that it reminded me of my parents. I used to think they were a tad strange and over-excited about their garden, but as of today I will say it: my parents are cool. Yep. It’s true. They are doing everything Rodrigo does on a small scale in our backyard. They grow the majority of the vegetables we eat, buy food at the co-op, sell their organic squash to the co-op, make their own composted fertilizer (tip for Moma: Cow poop+worms=good fertilizer), and are fixin to get a hive of bees come spring time. They also emphasize the use of homeopathic medicine. All of these things make sense. Sometimes they’re a bit pushy with remedies to things (the socks and garlic one is a bit over the line), but generally they have the right frame of mind. They have been right for a long time with regards to lots of things, and I have just now seen it.

 

Now, all that being said, I know my mom reads this regularly so let me make a disclaimer. Moma, this doesn’t mean that I will blindly accept every form of homeopathic medicine from Pops. It does mean that I think you guys are doing something great and I want to help with the bees. You are cool parents.

 

Anyhow, back to my story. After all this I printed an assignment for tomorrow, steam-rollered a friend who was napping, and started working on my paper which I have been avoiding by blogging. I am at about 5 of my ten page limit…I will go over. They will have to deal with it.

 

PS: The lights just went out. Who knows when we will get power back.

Rain, rain go away.

Boatswain’s Log September 29^th.

 

Okay, I know that sometimes the rain in this country impresses me. But there are other times when I wish that it would just stop for a week. Seriously. In the US when it rains I can go outside with a jacket, but here when it gets going I am fighting monstrous rivers that have swallowed the streets in fierce watery rage. I mean that.

 

Today was a long day. I woke up tired and ready for more sleep, but I pressed onward and ate breakfast after my shower (which I can make hot now without burning myself). Then I struck out for Spanish class.

 

We have a new teacher named Xinia. She is really great. She doesn’t let us make little mistakes, so we have to be conscious of exactly what we are saying so we know what we did wrong. I had to make a speech up today in class as though I had received an award for multicultural awareness. People joked that I could make a good comedian or politician…both of which I have thought of as jobs. Xinia decided we wouldn’t talk about Oscar Romero anymore, which the girls greeted with lots of sighs of relief. Well frick. It wasn’t my idea to talk about Oscar Romero all the time. I had to give a presentation on my paper (which is about his perspective on violence…which seems to be as pacifist as a person gets under just war ideology. He was sort of backed into a corner with papal authority in favor of just war stuff.), we watched the movie Romero, and Gabbi seemed to be desirous of talking about it more.

 

I hit a wall in Spanish class today. I think my level of tired got in the way of my ability to use indirect object pronouns well. I think I should have got some coffee as my ears stopped picking up as much Spanish as before, but I don’t like drinking coffee (even though coffee here kicks the crap out of coffee in the US. Seriously, I don’t even like coffee and I can tell the difference.) and so I didn’t. The result was that I got really frustrated as my mind refused to put words together. I got really tired really fast of feeling like a jackass who couldn’t put things together. I left class in a bit of a funk.

 

Small grammar lesson so I can review. The direct object is the thing that receives the action of the verb. For example: I passed the ball. The ball is the indirect object because I passed it. It was passed. Thus the thing passed can be replaced with it as an indirect object pronoun. Right? Good. In Spanish it becomes “lo” or “la” depending on the gender of the noun. Ball=bola becomes la, where as agua becomes lo. Moving on. We are then forced to add another pronoun if the ball is passed to me. “John passed the ball to me.” John is the subject, the ball is still receiving the action so it is the direct object, and I am the indirect object or the one who the action affects. John as subject becomes reflected in the conjugation of the verb (pasó), I become an indirect object pronoun (me), and the ball becomes the direct object pronoun (la). Now we put it all together to say “he passed it to me” we say “Me la pasó” or . The way I remember this is by reading it backwards. Pasó=he passed, la=it, me=me. Put it together and you’ve got it. Fun stuff eh? I think so.

 

I left class and took a nap at home before lunch. It was necessary. Following nap and lunch (with my whole host family) I headed off to a library in a seminary to copy the relevant parts of pastoral letters from Oscar Romero. I took a bus to the UCR, took a cab to the place…and realized I could have just taken a cab from home and got there in a quarter of the time with about 2000 colones more in my pocket. Sigh. I got what I wanted though and in the process met a man from Peru who was studying theology. He had studied in Peru for 6 years, and had lots of interesting things to say. He wants to be a theologian and is fixin to write some kind of huge paper. We exchanged email addresses and I was forced to explain how to pronounce my first name again. It’s harder here than in the US, never thought I would see the day. I go by Diego most of the time to save on the time it takes people to pronounce my first name. Diego is one of my middle names, so no worries. It’s still my name.

 

After that I came home and spent a much needed 45 minutes talking to my buddy Craig. I didn’t know how badly I needed to process with someone until we were halfway through the conversation. It was good to have someone to talk to, I feel like the program is very academically thoughtful, but they mostly suck at helping us develop community. It’s something we do on our own, but I guess that’s okay. I was really grateful to have someone to talk to about things.

 

I realized in the process of discussing with Craig that the religious perspectives that we are faced with here are not exactly balanced. It’s different with the political and economic stuff because I feel like we are learning what I already believed anyway, but just in a more specific sense. At the same time I feel that many people in the program have a really good grasp of where they stand with regards to capitalism and politics. They are being challenged by another perspective from an area that they feel well thought out in. Good, plus it isn’t quite difficult to present business concepts in general fashion to college kids.

 

The theological perspectives, while sometimes great (Irene Folks is awesome) are very onesided. We haven’t heard from a catholic priest yet, but we heard from a lady who talked about liberation theology. I think that it is really easy for people in the program to accept opinions of the people on staff here because of their positions of authority without doing critical thinking about what they’ve said. Perhaps that’s an issue with Christian higher Education. At many schools people are being fed a robotic response and when they think about it, it doesn’t answer their questions so they can jump into pluralist ideas without thinking outside of their emotional response. How do we encourage people to think critically? I think the fact that there are lots of people in the US who still think there are WMDs in Iraq reflect that.

 

After that I wrote my introductory paragraph for my big essay. I think it’s easier to write when you do it every day than it is to start all at once.

 

At dinner Liliana told me that 41% of Costa Rican families can only afford to eat once every day. I am told that this is the result of the financial shenanigans in the US. It’s strange that when we hear on the news that things are bad in the economy, we never hear that the result is more poverty for people in Latin America.