TEFL Con Ticos

About three weeks ago, Kevin and I went to San José to pick up a long-awaited special shipment from Alaska. We waited in line at the post office, with passports and customs papers in hand, for just long enough to be glad we’d taken the whole day off for the task. We were ushered from one window to the next, signing this and dating that, writing my passport number here and answering questions there. It was well worth the wait though, because the busy man at window six pushed us out a cart piled high with four huge boxes of books! The books were all donated by Government Hill Elementary in Anchorage. But they couldn’t have arrived without the help of the group of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers in Anchorage, who secured $600 to pay for the shipping costs. The books were more amazing than we had expected. The first box alone held exactly 200 books — no doubt thanks to my Dad’s expert packing skills. Kevin and I oohed and aahhed over each one as we pulled them from the boxes. All of ...

One of the places on our Costa Rican must-see list has been la Zona Sur, the southern region of Costa Rica. Despite all the traveling we did during December and January when Megon’s family came to visit, it’s the one region we had yet to explore. That’s until last week when we were invited to participate in an English conference led by Kyle Kaminski, a fellow Tico 21 TEFL volunteer. The conference was held last Friday in Ciudad Neily, which is Kyle’s site and one of the largest cities near the Panama border. We thought it would be great to mix a little education with adventure. Little did we know that the adventure would come first. If all went as planned, we initially figured the trip would take all day: A 45-minute walk from our house to the main road, catch the hour an a half bus to San José, catch another seven hour bus to Ciudad Neily, meet Kyle at the station, catch another bus to his road and walk 20 minutes down a dirt road to his house. No problem, right? Well, w...