While I’d love to say the timing of this blog was meant to coincide with the Super Bowl, it’d hardly be the truth. But for the sake of the greatest day in Fútbol Americano and the life of my buddy Jim, a football freak who by now thinks we’ve dropped off the planet, lets say we did.
So where shall this Super Blog begin? Well, let’s do this in chronological order and start where we left off: the end of October when we introduced our community class to pumpkin carving and Halloween.
A week later Megon and I finished our prep course for students taking the English graduation exam. We began the 10-week course with 13 students and finished with just six, but the good news is all six who dedicated themselves to the class were rewarded with a passing grade. Whoop! Whoop! Though it was a long and sometimes stressful course to teach, we were successful and created a curriculum for it, so we’ll likely do another course next August.
Later that month we traveled to our training community of La Fila to celebrate Thanksgiving with our host families and fellow La Filer Volunteers. But before that we actually had a Thanksgiving meal on Thanksgiving Day thanks to Allegra, one of our TEFL bosses who hosted us and a few other Volunteers. It was an absolutely amazing meal that had all the Thanksgiving fixings – even stuffing, my favorite! Going back to La Fila was so nice. Megon said it best the other day: “When we’re there, we feel like we’re home.” Hopefully one of these years, Mario, Esterlina and the boys can come visit our original home in Alaska.
A busy month of December started with a four-day mid-service training (MST) in San José. It was difficult to believe Megon and I had reached the halfway point of our Peace Corps service. Wasn’t it only yesterday that we stepped off the plane fresh from Washington D.C.? About all I could say in Spanish back then was, “Hola, me llamo Kevin.” Now I can say way cooler stuff like, “Siéntese, por favor; No escuche música en clase; Apague su celular; and No tire cosas en el aula.” ¡Ja, Ja, ja!
The week after MST we celebrated the start of the holiday season and the end of the school year with a pair of community Christmas concerts. The choir, put together by maestra Megon, consisted of 12 students (11 girls, one boy), most of whom had never sung a note or in a group ever — except maybe in church. After weeks and weeks of practice, the choir hosted its first concert at the elementary school in La Rambla where Megon works. The classroom was filled with proud parents and siblings of some super nervous singers. The choir eventually got into the groove, especially once they flipped on their blinking Santa hats and belted out Jingle Bells in English. They followed up the concert with an all-you-can-eat tamales buffet and a Christmas craft workshop where the kids made beautiful origami ornaments.
The second concert, held the next day at the elementary in Otoya where we teach our community English class, didn’t have as big of attendance but the choir did a super job. They really showed some improvement from their first performance. The best part came at the end of the last song when all the choir members bowed except for one girl who remained as stiff as a board. Afterwards one of the choir kids asked the girl why she didn’t join. Her response was, “I couldn’t move! I was like … paralyzed!”
During those two concert days we had an unexpected visitor staying at our apartment. Ken is our closest Peace Corps Volunteer. By foot/bus he lives about an hour and 15 minutes away in Puerto Viejo, a town known to flood about once a year. Well, this year’s flood rose so high that river water entered his house. Our TEFL boss and I just happened to be in Puerto Viejo for a meeting on the day the river flooded. Multiple days of steady rain turned the road — the only road — to Ken’s house into a deep lake. Rafting companies from nearby La Virgen brought in boats to rescue people on the other side, including Ken, who left his home without much of a fight. He was taken to live with us for a few days. By the time we arrived home in La Rambla, the water in his house was knee deep. Yikes!
His visit was just the beginning of a long line of other visitors who I will not blog about. That writing task belongs to Megon.
So let’s fast forward to the end of January. Megon and I were invited to give a workshop at the National Conference for Teachers of English in San José at the North American/Costa Rican Cultural Center. The session we chose to teach was called Jazz Chants, which are poems set to a specific rhythm. It’s a great way for English learners to practice pronunciation and internalize vocabulary. Despite being early in the morning, the session went super well. We had 24 participants ranging from elementary to high school teachers to university professors. Most left feeling wide awake after performing their own Jazz Chants in groups. The highlight of the conference, however, was attending other sessions — most of which were outstanding — and meeting other English educators from around Costa Rica and the world.
While in San José we passed a billboard that said Elton John was coming to town the following week. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity so we bought the cheapest seats available, bussed back to the capital, and met our friend Angela to watch one of the greatest live performances we’ve ever seen. It was Elton’s first concert in Costa Rica and perhaps his last. The concert, held at an outdoor soccer stadium, didn’t sell out.
We laughed after we told our 15-year-old host sister Karen we were going watch Elton John in concert. “Who’s he?” she asked. We thought everyone knew Elton. Speaking of that, I thought everyone knew what the Super Bowl was until this week. I asked one of our friends if he liked American football. “You know the Super Bowl is this Sunday,” I told him. He just shook his head. I’ve got a hunch he’ll be watching soccer today.
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