Stories and Stolen Photos

I realize I´ve been slacking when it comes to blogging so I´ll update you on the last month or so. (Sorry for the lack of pictures...the camera battery that my parents sent me was apparently stolen from the mail so I still don´t have a working camera. I ¨stole¨these pictures from some other WorldTeach volunteers.)

I finished all of the coursework for the TEFL certification in Manuel Antonio and just have to have my WorldTeach director observe me teach a lesson when she comes to visit in June to get my certificate. I went to Manuel Antonio National Park and saw lots of:

Monkeys! (This is a mom and baby that walked right by us.) The next day, I woke up in the middle of the night and turned on the light to see what time it was. On the floor right next to the bed was a huge warty toad staring at me. I spent a good half hour trying to ¨shoo¨it out of my room with a mop, then finally decided to wake up the other WorldTeach volunteer, Bridget, who was staying with the same host family. We attempted for another 15 minutes or so before giving up for the night and I went to sleep in Bridget´s room. The next morning, it was waiting for me outside the door to Bridget´s room. This time, I only succeeded in moving it to behind the refridgerator with a mop. Eslin, our host mom, was horrified when I told her and said that toads secrete a milk that can blind you and she would call one of the neighbor boys to come get it.

When I got back from Manuel Antonio, I started feeling sick. I had a fever and upset stomach, but both went away within a few days. But about a week later, the fever came back and I was feeling extremely tired. That same day, I got an email from the WorldTeach office saying that two volunteers had been diagnosed with mono and that if we felt fatigued or had a fever, we should seek medical care. So the next morning, I headed to San Jose to go to Clinica Biblica. Albertina couldn´t understand why I didn´t just go to Turrialba but I felt more comfortable going to the hospital that had English speaking doctors. Even with waiting for the results of my blood test, the whole thing only took 3 hours. Not bad for an emergency room! The lab gave my blood test results directly to me, which of course I couldn´t read because it was medical jargon in Spanish. The one thing I could see was the word ¨positivo¨...postive. But it didn´t say what I was positive for! Mono, dengue fever, malaria...I was tested for all of these. It was a pretty tense half hour waitning for the doctor to come tell me the results...I was so relieved when he told me I was önly¨ positive for an intestinal infection! Another good thing was this all happened before the swine flu hit Costa Rica...three days later and I would have been in the midst of the hundreds of suspected cases that were in the San Jose hospitals!

School has been going well. One day last week was ¨vaccine day.¨ In Costa Rica, the kids don´t just get the eyes and hearing checked in school, they also get all of their shots. I was unlucky enough to have 1st grade when they started calling kids into a classroom to get their shot. They would call a child´s name and half the class would burst into tears in anticipation. Then that kid would come back crying and the others would start again. At first, I attempted to teach but finally decided it was pointless in front of a bunch of sobbing 6 and 7 year olds so we colored for the rest of the class period. When I had the pre-kinder and kinder class (who weren´t getting shots) one little girl started crying every time the man giving the shots even walked into the room, then hid behind my desk. I tried to explain that she didn´t have to get a shot this year but she just kept saying that she wasn´t sick. I finally got her to come out and taught the rest of class with her sitting on my lap. It wasn´t the most productive day :)

Outside of school, things have gotten busier. I started doing extra classes for the 6th grade after school on Tuesdays to help them get ready for English classes in colegio (high school) and help them pass the English exam that the bilingual school requires for entry. On Wednesdays I go to Spanish classes, and I think Christen (a volunteer who lives near me) and I are going to start taking dance classes soon. So I´ve managed to fill up some of my massive amounts of free time!

Last weekend was Labor Day weekend in Costa Rica and most of the other volunteers came to Turrialba to go white water rafting. The Rio Pacuare is supposed to be the 5th best river for rafting in the world...I believe it! It was so much fun and I managed to stay in the raft the whole time...and still end up soaked! We did end up stuck on some rocks a few times and the guide had to get out and push us off. We camped on bank of the river that night, which was almost as fun as the rafting itself with this crazy group of volunteers! The next day we rafted again; we ended up going almost 20 miles. Here´s some pictures from the weekend:

Hopefully my next post will be more timely!