I forgot to post the monkey. There are families of monkeys that roam around my town. They are pretty cool to stop and watch.

In the higher parts of my town there are actually a lot of pine trees. Then you go down a few hundred yards there are a lot more banana trees and more tropical plants.

Some more pictures.

Another view from my town. These pictures look a lot more spectacular in person.
This is the road out of my town. The only thing that separates my bus from a deadly drop is a foot-high pile of dirt.

Hanging out in front of the store. Its corn season.

Dinner! It´s kinds funny, people here are afraid of toads. They think that they bite or something and find them to be particulary grotesque animals. When i showed this picture to some friends here they started gaging and almost threw up.

This is how you cook food here. Burning little pieces of firewook under big metal pans on top of clay or concrete things.

Martín and Alejandro pretending like they understand what I am trying to teach them.

Alejandro practicing the colors.

"This lunch is brought to you by the color yellow"

A couple of my best friends. My phone and dictionary.

Walking home from English class in the rain.

My 18 year old host sister Mylene and here 24 year old fiancè Dennis. She is 4 months pregnent.

My 12 year old host sister, Lilibeth. I think I forgot to post a picture of here before.

Me at a birthday party. The guy behind me is wearing a t-shirt that says "Grandpa Rocks" (he is not a grandpa) There is this large woman in my town who likes to wear a shirt that says "naughty girls need lovin`too" I don´t know where they find them.

A pretty cool bird that was was right next to my house.

That´s it for now. In a week a bunch of us are meeting up in San Jose to watch the election. The following 3 days we have an All Volunteer Conference where we will be camping in the mountains, the day after the conference my mom and Jim get here and the vacation begins!

Keep posted for more.

Hola amigos y amigas. Some of you have told me you would like to see more on my blog. I will do my best to post more, more often. Here is a long one for you. You might want to read it in several sittings so you don’t get too bored….seriously.

Well what’s new? Lets see…I went on a field trip with the 7th and 12th graders of my high school the other week to El Rincón de la Vieja. It’s a volcanic mountain range located about an hour north of the city of Liberia, and a little over 3 hours from my town. It was pretty cool, there were all kinds of geysers and hot springs. The water was boiling and way to hot to touch. There was even a really big waterfall we could get right up close too. The animals weren’t afraid of us and the trees we like none I have seen so far.

We basically just walked around the hiking trails for a few hours, had some lunch on the picnic tables, and headed back home. It was kinda like a Thatcher Park type of thing. We stopped at the mall in Liberia for a half hour. It was pretty exciting for some of the kids from my town who don’t get out much. The whole ride home I sat between two 7th grade boys who found it necessary to teach me every bad word and vulgar phrase they could think of at the time.

I am getting into the habit, when the weather seems nice, of going on long walks in different directions away from my town to get new views and figure out what’s on the other side of the mountains. I have found out (as I already knew from my map) that to the north there are more mountain, and the city of Santa Cruz, to the east is the city of Nicoya, el Rio Tempisque and the Golf of Nicoya, to the south are more mountains until Playa Samara and to the west, once you get over this one mountain you can see pretty much up and down the entire coastline of the northwestern side of the Nicoya Peninsula.

Last time I went for a walk I was trying to find a town called Vista al Mar (View of the Sea) but I ended up talking a wrong turn (or not taking the right turn I think might be more appropriate) and just kept walking further and further into the middle of nowhere. Then out of nowhere it started raining unnecessarily hard. I put on my rain jacked but within half an hour I was soaked through anyway, my cell phone included. After about 5 hours of walking (which included an hour walking down a dead end road and then an hour backtracking) I came upon an abandoned house. There I decided to strip down and ring out my clothes, dump the water out of my Gortex and supposedly waterproof boots and sit and waited for the rain to stop.

After an hour or so of awkwardly standing around cold and naked the rain started to slow down a little. I thought it a good time to put on my damp, cold clothes and start the three hour trek back to my town. After about an hour a car came by (the only car I had seen all day) and the driver was nice enough to stop and offer me a ride, which of course I accepted. He was a surveyor working somewhere out there in the middle of nowhere and on his way back to Santa Cruz, which meant he had to pas right through my town. Qué suerte verdad? Next time I’ll bring my umbrella. I’m looking forward to summer (the winter in the US) because it almost never rain. I notice I fell a little more depressed on the rainy days and happier on the sunny day, which I think is completely normal. Starting the middle of November we should have nothing but sunny days for a few months.

I have received the books for my community English and have had 3 official classes so far with 20 students, mas or menos depend on the weather. They have gone surprising well and I enjoy teaching more than I thought I would. I think mainly because it is my time to be the language expert and their time to struggle and sound silly (99 percent of the time it is the other way around). The Peace Corps ran out of the teacher’s edition of the book that has the lesson plans and activities so I have to make them all up on my own. It’s kinda hard to keep a three-hour class exciting and interactive but I’m doing my best.
I have already bought the books and started the class and people keep coming up to me asking to join. I have to tell them no and they are not very happy. Its their own fault though. I had the class advertised for 2 weeks and they had plenty of time to let me know. Oh well, maybe I will start another class in a few months if there are enough new people.

My program director came to visit my town and talk with my community counterpart a few days ago. It went pretty well, my counterpart (Carlos, the ADI president) made me sound like a much better volunteer than I think I am. I rode with my program director to my friend Matt’s town where he met with his counterpart. After he left I went to Matt’s English class, then we watched the finale of Latin-American Idol (like American idol but in Latin America) with his host family. It was really exciting because there were only two participants left, one girl from Panama and the other from COSTA RICA, Maria Jose. After a very suspenseful show the Panamanian ended up getting the most votes (all done through text message of course) and went home in victory. It was a shocking defeat and very sad night for the Republic of Costa Rica.

The reason I spent the night in Matt’s town was because we were both going to a regional volunteer conference about 4 hours northeast of where we live. So the next day we got up early, missed the bus to Santa Cruz and got a ride in the back of an old Land Cruiser. We fought each other in Age of Empires in an internet Café for a few hours and the got the bus to Liberia. We ate lunch at Burger King then got the bus to Bagaces. Then we got a Taxi to this cool hot springs and cabins type place called Thermo Mania. (what a name) we met up with about 8 or so other volunteers from the are, discussed some peace corps stuff and had a fun night in the hot springs. I left Bagaces on the 8am (too early) bus and eventually got back to my town at 2:30 or so. That was 2 days ago. Yesterday I had a good English class but there was a lot of rain and only about 12 out of 20 showed up.

Oh by the way, I got a new camera since my old one decided to stop working (thanks mom!), so expect some new pictures soon.

As always, thanks for reading.




Warning: There is no overwhelming need to read any further unless, of course, you are extremely bored and interested in staying that way for 10 more minutes, or if for some reason you have a peculiar interest in reading a poorly written and uninteresting analysis of my physical state, or if you are my mother or grandmother, in which case such interest would be normal and whom I know will probably read it anyway.

Sometimes I get bored and start writing and this is the kind of stuff that comes out:
Even though I am eating considerably healthy and getting plenty natural exercise and sleep (9-10 hours a night) I can’t help but feel that my body is in a constant state of degeneration. For example, I can walk around mountain roads for hours without getting tired but this morning I just tried doing pushups for the first time in many months and the results were disastrous.
I remember intense pushup competitions with my buddies years ago when I could easily pump out 60-70 with pride. Even when I wasn’t in the best of shape I could do at least 40 or so. How many can I do now? Well, I got to fifteen and I had to stop because it felt like my chest was going to rip apart! Unbelievable right!? Well its true. And of course this change can be discerned both visually and tactilely in my muscle tone. What were once rock-hard muscles I now find somewhat softer, and might dare even to say, with noticeable sagginess.
“What is the cause of this?” one my ask themselves. Well I will tell you. The problem is twofold. First off, the exercise I’m getting is almost purely cardio, and completely lower body. Therefore the overdeveloped tissue of my upper body is naturally reducing in denseness and size due to its newfound vestigiality (my computer tells me that “vestigiality” isn’t a real word but I will use it anyway because I don’t believe it, and because its supposed definition makes complete sense in this situation). Also, my diet consists largely of rice, beans, eggs, chicken (sometimes) and the occasional corn or flower tortilla. Although this is obviously healthy, natural food the protein level is drastically lower than what my body has been accustomed to for years. This diminished protein intake necessitates a supplemental source i.e. the unused and therefore unnecessary tissue of my overdeveloped upper body.
I’m not exactly sure how much weight I have lost, the last time I had a medical check in San José (5 months ago I think) I weighed 163lbs. I know I weighed about 185 when I graduated from college and at one point during my senior year I was pushing 200 with a full stomach. This is all with below 10% body fat of course. I currently have a 30 inch waist, making my old 32 inch pants pretty loose and requiring the constant use of a belt for reasons of practicality rather than mere fashion. I also find that the tightest holes on my belts don’t seem to be as tight as I would like them to be.
Even though this is all quite disturbing, mainly due to the amount of hard work and money I had invested into my physique over the last 5 years, I guess it should be expected.
The fact is that although I haven’t touched a weight in seven and a half months there are plenty of other ways to accomplish anaerobic exercise. My town is not suffering from a lack of tree branches that could be used for doing pull-ups nor is there a lack of 1x2 meter open places that could be used as pushup sites. Of course, I am also a certified personal trainer (though I think my certification runs out soon) and therefore am familiar with a plethora of strength training techniques which do not require the use of a gym, so I am certainly capable of implementing some sort of creative exercise program. So why have I let myself go? Well I have thought about this and I guess the truth is that I just don’t really care right now, I’m in the Peace Corps for goodness sake! Right?
Or does the fact that I’m writing this show that I obviously do care? I haven’t quite figured it out yet.
I’m sure much of what I am saying has been embellished do to the existence of an innocent, self-discerning paranoia that undoubtedly has been generated as a result of me having too much free time to think about such foolish things. I know that none of this is very interesting to anybody other than myself so if you are still reading this I apologize, you should have headed the warning. I am well aware that it is the goal of most good writers to provoke a certain amount of stimulation to the readers five senses, mainly visual, to relocate them to another place and experience. But who said I was a good writer? The fact is I’m just trying to get some stuff out of my head and down on paper(or cyberspace) for mental health reason.
Anyways, I guess I’ve decided that I should try to start some kind of regular exercise program, even if just pushups, pull-ups and sit-ups. It would also be nice to start jogging again and I world love to be able to go on long explorative bike rides like my fellow volunteers. The sad truth is the geography of my town is not very conducive to any form of exercise other than walking. The Peace Corps even issues volunteers mountain bikes for the duration of their service but I declined mine because I knew I would be pushing it more than riding it, and it would end up being more of a liability than an asset. It looks like my hiking boots and the mountainous terrain will continue to be my gym and at the same time will serve to satiate my explorative nature.

Also this blurb was an attempt to write something a little more linguistically rich than usual. If you found the result to be more annoying than enriching I’m sorry. I’m not really sure if I should be writing purely factual and informative pieces or more thoughtful and intuitive works. Maybe I should just post pictures and include nothing more than a short description of each one when necessary. Either way, as always thanks for taking the time to read this and keep checking for updates.

A lil´somethin

As I sit at a little table in front of my friend Alonso’s house trying to explain to him the conjugations of the verb “to be” we decide to take a break from studying and enjoy the peaceful pacific sunset in the distance. The light blue sky radiating with every shade or orange, red and purple imaginable.

Alonso, who is in his early 20s and has never been very far from our little mountain town of 350 people explains to me that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life working in the fields with a machete making $6 a day like the rest of his friends. He tells me about the luxury hotels and resorts, and multimillion dollar homes he knows are located just out of sight on the other side of the mountains and how if he spoke English he could easily get a decent paying job anywhere along the coast. This, he believes, with bring him the more exiting and fulfilling life he is looking for.

The fact that he was never exposed to English in his rural elementary school and unable to attended high school due to family work obligations makes English learning a particularly daunting task. Never the less he is undeterred and probably one of the hardest working students in my community English class. I gladly take some time to work with him one-on-one to make sure he keeps up with the others.

We stare in silence when suddenly a flock of squawking chickens streak past. I look up to see Alonso’s mom in hot pursuit with a broom in here hand cursing something about hell and damnation at the animals which have invaded her door-less kitchen for the umpteenth time that evening. She nicely smiles at me, lights the lantern on our table and goes back to sweeping the dirt floor of their humble little house.

After finishing the generous dinner of rice, beans, eggs and homemade corn tortillas, I give Alonso a little extra homework and say my goodbyes to his parents and 5 brothers and sisters. Taking out my flashlight I turn to start the hour and a half walk back to my house when Alonso’s dad yells from the doorway, like always reminding me that I should buy a horse or mule, instead of always walking everywhere.

I chuckle and wave goodbye, inside knowing he makes a valid point. Since most of the roads (trails) are too steep, rutty, rocky and/or muddy for a bicycle, it makes complete since to invest in a horse. What is hard for them to understand is that in a lot of way I enjoy the long quiet walks, especially at night. Aside from passing no more than a handful of sleeping house and the occasional pasted-out drunk, it is just me and the stars, the cool breeze, the crickets, and the howler monkeys that make it their job to scares the crap out of me when I get too close to their trees. In a countryside as beautiful as this why hurry?

This is a fairly typical evening for me here in rural Costa Rica and the story of Alonso is similar to many others in my town. Although I was not sent here specifically to teach English, I do find that teaching takes up a surprising portion of my time. In a rural town located only about 12 miles from some of the country’s most popular beaches, in a country who’s economy depends largely on tourism revenue from North Americans and Europeans, the locals understand more than anyone the benefits of learning English. Though most people I meet here are happy with life the way it is, there is a surprising amount of people, mostly the youth, who have a strong urge to make a different life for themselves.

For me, as I knows many of my fellow PCV friends here will attest too, living for so long with a host family can make life a little more...lets say…“interesting.” For instance, I’m getting to the point now where I can tune out the roosters that start crowing furiously outside my bedroom window everyday at 4:00am but I still have to wake up at 6:00 with visions of buffalo soldiers dancing through my head because my host-brother finds it necessary to blast the same Bob Marley CD every morning while getting ready for school.

Also for some reason it still disturbed me a little when I’m sitting in my room reading just before dinner and watch through the window as my 12-year-old host sister runs out the backdoor and brutally kills an unsuspecting hen with whatever object happens to be laying around at the time. Then 20 minutes later there it is sitting on the table with the usual dish of rice and beans. Of course I have more gruesome accounts involving pigs and cows, not that I hesitate to eat any of them.

Due to the numerous tourists here it is fairly easy, especially in the more developed parts of the country, to be just another gringo (American) walking down the street. Most people are friendly and fairly patient with my stumbling Spanish, and some thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to practice their English. This is usually little more them the yelling out of random words or phrases as I walk by them on the street. I hear “hello my friend” call out from from random people all the time but if I stop and respond in English they are suddenly silent and embarrassed. A also remember one instance standing at a bus stop when a boy I had never seen before ran up, look me in the eye and said “thank you very much.” When I simply replied with a “you’re welcome” his face lit up and he ran away grinning, obviously content with his conversation skills.

I guess in some ways Costa Rica might be a little different from the traditional Peace Corps country. I have even heard it referred to by some as the “Posh Corps” due to the existing luxuries that are very rare in other Peace Corps location. I can agree when I think of a few of my fellow volunteers who I know live in homes with wireless internet and are a short bike ride form malls, Burger Kings and movie theater. Even the more “isolated” volunteers like myself don’t live much further than a couple hour bus ride from places with internet, restaurants and bars. Most of us here also have cell phones which also makes life that much easier. Considering the beauty and popularity of the country and the considerable luxury that many volunteers live in, one might be confused to learn that the dropout rate here is among the highest in the region. Although the reasons for this are debatable I think I have a pretty good idea. Keep posted for more.

Pura Vida

Heath