TEFL Con Ticos

Out here in the country, Kevin and I don’t have many opportunities to get dressed up. Kevin’s nice collard shirts are safely stored away in Ziplock bags in our suitcase (to keep the mold out), and my nicest dresses hang out in the back of the closet just waiting for their moment in the sun. Within the last week, however, we’ve been able to attend two formal affairs deserving of some of our nicest attire. First, a wedding. Ever since we arrived in Costa Rica, we’ve been working hard to integrate, integrate, integrate, into our two host families and communities. It seems that all of that work paid off in the form of invitations to the wedding of a local friend. Eliza, an English teacher from our community, married a man from England, last Saturday in the nearby town of Horquetas. While the two novios communicate easily, their families struggle to understand one another. This is where I came in; I was asked to be the official translator for the ceremony, up front with the priest repeat...

If there are any similarities between Costa Rica and Alaska, it’s got to be their abundance of volcanoes. In Southcentral Alaska, we have Spur, Iliamna, and Redoubt that tower over the Cook Inlet. In Sarapiquí, the big ones that surround us are Turrialba, Irazú, Poás and Arenal, all of which form an east to northwest chain. Megon and I woke up at 4 a.m. Saturday morning to catch the earliest bus to San Jose and visit our host family’s daughter, Lucy, and her husband Fernando, who live outside of the capital city in a little town called El Roble. After picking us up from the bus station, they gave us a tour of their beautiful farm, fed us breakfast and loaded their car for a trip to Poás , the country’s third tallest volcano at 2,709 meters. Poás separates two extremely different climates: the dry central valley and the humid Caribbean coast, which means cloudless days are few and far between. “ Tuvimos mucha suerte, ” according to Fernando, because we had ourselves a blue-bird ...