Orphanage Donation

Well I´ve got 3 more days left working at the orphanage. I really can´t believe that it´s gone by so fast. There have been highs and lows over the month for sure but right now, if I didn´t have grad school applications due very shortly after I get back, I would extend my stay here for another month. I don´t know what I´m gonna do when I have to leave those kids. I really hope that they are used to having old volunteers leave and new ones come in because I really don´t want it to be upsetting for anyone but me when I leave.

This morning I went shopping for some things for the orphanage. I spent $80 American on colouring books for everyone, a bunch of childrens books in Spanish, packs of diapers, wipes, shampoo and baby creams. The rest of the money ($290) I am giving to the orphanage this afternoon and asking that it be spent towards diapers (which believe me, make life a lot easier for the Tia´s and free up a lot of time for them to spend with the kids) and towards the purchase of a new high chair which they have been saving up for. I mentioned before that I was going to buy new clothes for the kids but after speaking with one of the Tia´s I reconsidered. The kids all have a bunch of sets of clothes already and I´ve never heard any of them complain that their clothes are old. Actually last week, everyone got a new set of pajamas anyways.

I hope that everyone who sent some money for the orphanage will be happy with that. The money is mainly going towards neccessities, and the kids don´t lack in toys to play with. Also, I fully trust the orphanage staff so no worries about the money being spent inappropriately. It´s a private orphanage run by the woman whom I´m giving the money to and she is a real fierce protector of those kids.

Well, I have about a hundred things to do to wrap up my time here, including taking about 100 photos of the town and the kids and my family which I don´t know why I put off till the last week. I have bought a photo album to give to Gina because she mentioned that she wanted to buy a photo album one day for the photos of all the volunteers who stay with her family. So I need to take some good photos of all of us so I can get a few developed for her album before I leave on Saturday morning. I am also hammering out the last details for the next week which I will be spending travelling around Guatemala. So I am really excited, busy and sad all at the same time. Ciaou.

Monteverde

This weekend I am in Monteverde, a tiny little mountain town with great nature reserves and about all things eco that you could possibly think of. Yesterday I caught the 6:30 bus out of San Jose and took the 4.5 hour bus ride up here. I checked into Pension Santa Elena which is a recommended budget hotel by Lonely planet but really only because it has a communal vibe and the best tourist info in town. Last night I stayed in the dorm, which was fine (and $5 a night) and today I upgraded to a single room...with a private bathroom! I have not had a private bathroom with a hot (yes hot, not warm, not cold) shower the entire time I have been in Costa Rica. It´s a serious luxury for me right now.

The day I arrived, I browsed some of the local craft stores and coffee shops, and visited the Serpentarium. The serpentarium is what it sounds like... it has snakes. I took a tour in Spanish (which was helpful because the guide pointed out the snakes even if I couldn´t understand what he was saying). There are some pretty cool snakes in Costa Rica and they´re kind of fascinating in their own cold, shiny way. I even held one at the end of the tour.

Today I took an early guided tour at Santa Elena nature reserve at 7:30. I was in a group with 3 other nice, smart girls about my age, one of whom I had met on the bus last weekend, go figure. The forest is really lush, and the foliage is so dense. It also has that fresh, crisp feeling that belongs in a forest and everything was dripping wet because it is, after all, the cloud forest and it´s always wet even when it´s not raining. During the tour, I stopped to take a picture and got a bit seperated from the group when a Pecary (a small wild boar) walked right out on the path and started to scratch his head on my leg. It was wild, and only later did I find out when the Pecary found the rest of the group, that they also like to bite the things that they rub their head up against... No harm, no foul I guess. We didn´t see much other wildlife except for birds, but the guide had lots of interesting things to say about the plants and their various uses so it was a great 3 hour hike.

After the hike I headed down the road to Selvatura to take a canopy tour. A canopy tour is where they stick you in a harness, attach you to cables that run through the tree tops and you zip through the forest with only a gloved hand to slow yourself down. It was a really amazing experience. There were 16 different stretches of cable that we got to do including a tarzan swing. To go on the tarzan swing you climb up this huge platform, get attached to a rope which is tied up in a tree and they open a gate and push you out. You free fall for a second or two and then swing back and forth through the trees like, well, Tarzan. I got to go twice because I agreed to jump off the platform backwards the second time. Very exhilerating once you feel the rope catch you. After the canopy tour I visited the hummingbird garden, which is just a bunch of hummingbird feeders and I could have got in free if I´d just done a little snooping. I got some amazing photos there, you can just walk right up to the feeders and they buzz all around you. Very cool.

I got tired of waiting for the shuttle bus to come pick me up so I started to walk back into town (it´s about 7km). I was planning to flag down a shuttle when they drove by but none came. I got about 3km before I managed to flag down a taxi just before the rain started. Now I´m back at the hostel and about to join a communal dinner which has been organized. It sounds like a bunch of people are going to the supermarket and then going to cook in the hostel kitchen. It sounds cheap so I´m in.
Also, I´m reading an extremely good book. If you ever get a chance, pick up "a very long engagement". It´s an extremely horrific, yet moving story about seperated lovers during world war II.

I head out of Monteverde at 6:30 tomorrow morning and will head straight to the orphanage when I get back. I can´t believe it´s my last week there. I´m gonna miss those kids so much. I´m making a poster with a bunch of spanish phrases and their english conversions to help future non-spanish speaking volunteers. I wish I could take one of the kids home with me instead but I guess that I´ll always have a chance to come back in the future. Anyways, enjoy the rest of your weekends!

Life at the Orphanage

Life is going very well at the orphanage. I´ve got the hang of the routine around there and know at least a few tricks to stop some of the temper tantrums that go on there. The Tias seem to like having me around and I´m thinking about staying over there one night to help with the night routine and also see what goes on in the morning. I´m not so exhausted when I go home at night now so I think I could handle it.

Fabian is as cute as ever and protests whenever I don´t wear my glasses (he wears glasses too). Pamela has actually warmed up, which I never thought would happen. Last week she punched me in the nose when I was feeding one of the babies. That smarted a little but worse was that I couldn´t do anything about it since I was holding a teeny baby so I had to just ignore it. This week though she´ll play and talk to me, and even give me a good hug when I go for the night.

I started staying longer at night so that I could help put the littlest kids to bed. So after dinner I brush teeth and then put the kids down in the their cribs for the night. Two of the kids actually have to have a sheet tied over the tops of their cribs to stop them from escaping in the middle of the night. And they do escape too! One afternoon when the kids were supposed to be down for their nap, I heard screaming from upstairs and went to see what was going on. Well, Jacqlean had escaped from her crib, gotten into the dresser and thrown all the clothes on the floor, and then crawled into the crib of the other girl who has the sheet over her cirb, and was jumping on her and hitting her! Jacqlean is seriously the cutest little terror you´ve ever seen. If I was her size, I would be scared to death she´s such a little bully.

I´ve spent 3 weeks at the orphanage and have a pretty good idea of what to buy with the money that was raised. The kids could all use a new set of clothes. Especially little things like socks and underwear which there never seem to be enough of. As well, this week when the food came in, the Tias were complaining that there was no rice or potatoes so I think I´ll bring some of that over. The kids all have a lot of toys and I never notice them playing with them so I think I´m gonna stick with essentials. As well, they are perpetually out of plastic diapers there and the cloth ones are a lot of work both for people putting them on and the Tias in charge of washing them every day so I think so of the money will go towards buying disposable diapers in a bunch of different sizes for the house. Additionally they are saving to buy 2 new high chairs so the money left over should really help out with that. I´m planning to get the clothes shopping done early next week so I´ll keep you posted on how the money was spent in the end.

That´s all for now. Ciaou.

El Caribe

Last weekend I went to the carribean side of Costa Rica with 2 friends from my Spanish classes, Paul and Julia. We went to this little town called Cahuita which had a very laidback, Carribean feel to it that was very different from the rest of Costa Rica. Nobody was in a hurry to do much of anything. The town wasn´t even awake when we arrived at 11:00 in the morning. It was also VERY hot and humid. We found this really nice hotel right by the entrance to Cahuita national park (which is basically a forest trail beside a spectacular beach. When we arrived it was raining and my travel companions were tired so I went for a walk down to Playa Negra, the black sand beach. The beach was empty when I got there so I had this strip of black sand beach all to myself, albeit in a light rain. Later, the weather cleared up and we all went swimming for a while at Playa Blanca right by our hotel which had the most powerful waves ever. If you weren´t careful to jump at the right time, you ended up with a nose full of salt unsure of which way was up.

The day we woke up early to do a tour that cost us $20 each and included a boat ride out to snorkle at the coral reef, and a guided hike back through the national park. We went with quite a large group in our boat. There were the 3 of us, a girl from Oregon who was working in San Jose and had come up for the weekend by herself, and 8 people from Spain. I was the only one who didn´t speak fluent Spanish so I had a good chance to soak up the experience instead of putting on my concentrating face and trying to understand what was being said. Snorkeling was amazing. I´ve snorkled before and was never able to get over the mental block of breathing while my face was in the water but there was just too much to see to worry about that. There were huge fish of all different colors as well as little ones flitting all around through the coral. Coral looks a lot different than I thought it would too, it was more like big colored rocks with very intricate patterns on it than the lichens and moving plants that you see on tv. After people tired themselves out snorkeling, the tour operator took us to a nearby beach where he sliced up fresh pineapple and watermelon for us before we started the hike. Then we started on the hike with our guide pointing out animals in Spanish (the girl from Oregon translated for me, how nice). Going with a guide was a really good idea because we saw so many different things. There were 2 kinds of monkeys, tons of sloths, crazy-coloured crabs of purple and blue and red, birds, and a really big spider that our guide held in his hand. (You would´ve loved it mom.)

After the tour, we had dinner with the girl from Oregon and then caught a bus into Puerto Viajo, the typical tourist destination of the Carribean coast. It has a reputation for partying and abundant drugs and it didn´t disappoint. It was actually really horrible, dirty and well, sketchy. The town was also full when we got there so we ended up in this horrible, horrible room of this suedo hotel that had an enormous spider in the bathroom. At least the room was cheap at $12 a night and we did meet some other travellors there, including a man who had run away from life in Vancouver, who had some interesting things to say about the town. Mercifully we were only there for the night so we had dinner as a really nice restaurant with authentic carribean food and a live band playing a good carribean beat with marimbas and the like. Then we forced ourselves to get some sleep under the mosquitos net in room and caught the bus back to Atenas early in the morning.

We had a bad scare a few days after we got back. Paul got very sick and everyone thought that he had Dengue fever, which is transmitted by mosquito, has no cure and is basically a horrible flu that you have to weather out in extreme pain for about a week and stays with you for 3-5 months. My organization sent him to the private hospital in San Jose where they tested him for Dengue and found out he was just extremely dehydrated, and now he can´t eat anything except beans, rice and veggies for the next few days. So all´s well I guess but I am never forgetting my mosquito repellant.

Cuteness

There is a two year named Jacqlean in the orphanage. She is a very stout, determined and sometimes pushy little thing who storms around the orphanage with a cute little waddle. Her favorite thing in the world is shoes (zapatoes). She says "zapatos" all the time.

Me: Jacqlean, usted gusta zapatos mucho? (you like shoes a lot don´t you?)
Jacqlean: Si (yes)
Me: Porque? (why?)
Jacqlean: Zapatos!!! (shoes!!)

And off she went, hilarious.

Academia

Good news from the outside world... I submitted an academic paper with Dr. Suelfeld from UBC and it looks like it´s going to be published! The editors got back to us and said that so far it all looks good, whohoo!

Con gusto

Con gusto is how they say "you´re welcome" here. It literally means "with pleasure" and they seem to really mean it here. This week at the orphanage there are only 2 volunteers. Myself and an English woman about 45 named Heather. Heather started at the same time as me and now that the experienced volunteers are gone I am really understanding that we are responsible for these kids. We´re not helping the Tias do things. We are taking care of the kids basic needs so that the Tias can take care of more complicated things like preparing food, washing and sorting the massive amounts of laundry, and the individual requirements of each child´s particular situation. So basically, while we volunteers are there we wake the kids, change them, feed them and then play with them until dinner and bedtime. And during playtime those kids are our responsability. There are a lot of them so they can be hard to keep track of all the time. Heather doesn´t seem to grasp that the kids all have to be watched an accounted for so I did a lot of running around and coralling of children yesterday. As well, Heather does not seem to like, or be very good at changing diapers and the volunteers do a lot of that. So these next few weeks could be interesting. However, at the end of the day yesterday, Connie (one of the Tias) said "Gracias" and gave me a hug and I have a chance to say "con gusto" and really mean it.

Manuel Antonio

This past weekend I went to Manuel Antonio with some other volunteers from my program. Manuel Antonio was not my choice since it is the most visited tourist attraction in Costa Rica and was bound to be full of tourists. However, I think no matter where you visit in Costa Rica it´s bound to be beautiful. I was travelling with 2 women who are in my spanish classes, Kendall and Jamie. They are both school counsellors from Seattle and are about 45 and 30 respectively. They´re both very nice and we get along well despite the age difference. Our spanish speaker of the trip was Paul, a student in the intermediate class. He is an English teacher living in Spain but originally from Wales. The four of us hired a car to drive us for the 3 hour trip to Manuel Antonio. The driver was really great and stopped the car at all these cool places along the way. We stopped at a bridge with all these crocodiles in the water below, and he took us to a nice beach along the way as well. When we got to Manuel Antonio we split up. The 2 school counsellors are only here for 2 weeks total and were looking to pamper themselves a little so they stayed in an expensive hotel with a pool and ocean view. Paul and I found this great hostel pretty close to the others hotel which also had an amazing view and a great long porch with hammocks so you could just hang out and enjoy. It was $15 a night to stay there too so it was great. Oh and they had warm showers! I´d say the only downside of hostels is fighting for the bathroom in the morning. That night, we all went out for dinner at the Aeroplane restaurant which is literally built around an old nicaraguan airplane that crashed years ago. It had a really nice open-air atmosphere and good American food which was a nice change after rice and beans for a week. That night, two other girls, Julia and Vanessa, joined us in Mauel Antonio at the hostel and we all shared a room (yay bunk beds).

The next morning the four of us staying at the hostel got a super cheap pancake breakfast (yum) before we took the bus to Manuel Antonio national park. The park is so beautiful and full of these tropical beaches with really warm water. I wasn´t expecting it to be so small though. Compared to Canadian park standards it´s really just dinky. The two girls who joined us the night before were only staying until 2:00 that day because one was catching a flight home later that night. They wanted to just hang out the beach until they had to leave so we swam and tanned for a while. It is really hot on the beaches. Wow. Swimming was not optional, you would roast if you didn´t. The waves were just unreal. I haven´t really swam in the ocean much so swimming in big, salty waves was pretty new to me. After an hour or two the 2 school counsellors managed to leave their pampered existence at their hotel and joined us at the beach. Julia and Vanessa decided to stay at the beach while the rest of us went to explore the park. We hiked up this trail called the Mirador (the view) through the jungle. It was kind of a steep trail and was about 1Km long so there were less people on it which was nice. We saw lizards and weird bugs and monkeys! We came across this big group of people taking pictures and Paul, who was a bit ahead of us, calls out loudly, "oh look, monkeys!" That was embarrasing and of course the monkeys went farther into the trees for a while but they did come back out so I got some good photos. The trail ended with this platform high in the trees with an amazing view of the Pacific coast.

After leaving the park, we had wonderful authentic Mexican food in Costa Rica at this restaurant called Dos Locos, which you could tell was geared towards locals and not tourists. I had chili in a sour dough loaf, yum. Then we caught the tourist bus back to Atenas. It took only about 2.5 hours and really was pretty good.

It's raining babies

I am very, very satisfied right now. My project at the orphanage could not be better. Some of the other volunteers who arrived with me aren't so happy with their projects because there isn't much to do, but there is always a ton to do at the orphanage. (One of the people who volunteer at a daycare actually decided that the kids there were too spoiled to have all the toys she had brought so she took them over to the orphanage today).

Today was the first time I have seen any "tranquilla" at the orphanage, which Ticos always speak of. Today many of the parents came to visit their children at the orphanage. I didn't get to see any of the parent since they went to the other house but watching the kids as they waited was an odd experience. They were so calm, just waiting for their turn to go down to see their parents, I guess hoping that their parents would come. One girl's parents didn't come after all; they changed their plans to come on Monday. She was pretty upset for a while which was very sad.

It was kind of nice having a quieter day today. I did a lot of cleaning windows and dishes. You have no idea how much cleaning goes on there. They do laundry every day and everytime the babies are changed (there are 7 in diapers) the diapers and underthings have to be washed. (yes, they use cloth diapers and they were very difficult to figure out. I still think that the diapers I put on must fall off a few hours later). Those babies are a handful. There is a whole routine in place for waking them up from their nap and changing them all, then changing them again and putting them in their pajamas for dinnertime, feeding them, then taking them all to bed. It's nuts. And yes, all this happens even on a quiet day.

Anyways, the best part of today. I mentioned that I was trying to make Pamela and Fabian feel special. Well Fabian likes me already. He is my special little helper and helps me find things and tells me what words are in Spanish. Yesterday Pamela screamed and screamed when I tried to pick her up and take her back to the house and out of the rain. Today things looked a bit more hopeful. She was coloring by herself and I asked if I could join her. Of course she said no and put her colouring things away. I just took them back and acted very excited to be coloring by myself. It took about 30 seconds for Fabian to come and join me coloring so I left Pamela alone but after a few minutes she came back herself to see what was going on. She didn't stay but she looked like she'd like to sit down and join us but was too stubborn to do so. A bit of psych/ common sense for you... when kids like negative attention you ignore the bad stuff they do and heap praise on them when they're actually doing something right. There aren't too many times when she's doing something right but I think she might be pleased with the kind words when she is. Anyways... I was colouring with Fabian and Brandon(who is 7) came to join me. He is pretty active and hasn't shown any interest in me before but he came to join us really quickly. He was refusing to say anything directly to me (again I know it's because my Spanish is crappy) so Fabian was relaying sentences between the two of us. But I coloured a picture for him and wrote him name on it. At first he said he didn't want it, give it to Fabian, but I insisted it was for him. He said "for me?" with a really sweet look on his face, and later he put it aside and said "this is mine". The kids are just so sweet. I have a feeling I might have to come back here at some point. I really hope that I'll be able to.

Things at my house are going well. Gina and I had a nice simple talk over the breakfast table today. Her cooking is actually very similar to what I eat at home, rice, beans, potatoes, except that here I have that for all meals of the day. It's a little plainer than my food at home, and vegetables seem to be kind of like brussel sprouts here.... no one really eats any. They have something like pickled vegetable in a big jar in the fridge which are ok but not the same. We had some fresh veggies yesterday which was a nice treat. Hah, a treat to eat vegetables! Some things you take forgranted until you can't have any.

I am definetly not of a Tico composition. The heat here is really getting to me. After I leave my house in the morning, I swelter for the rest of the day. And my walk to the orphanage is killing me. It's about a 30 minute walk uphill at 12:30 when everyone else is taking a siesta from the hot sun. I have not figured out how to avoid being completely overheated by the time I get to the orphanage yet. They must think I am very burnt because my face is always beet red. Today I tried walking with an umbrella which made some difference but not much. I'm not sure what to try next though. I'm sure I'll just adapt to the climate eventually. In the evening when I walk home, I walk in the rain. Rain here is very different from in Vancouver. It's not a steady drizzzle, sometimes is nuts. It just pours from the sky in great streaks of water. Yesterday I took a taxi back home to town because it was raining so bad. On nights when the rain isn't so bad though, I kind of enjoy it because it cools me down.

On the weekend I'm travelling to Manuel Antonio, the most trafficked tourist destination in Costa Rica. It was chosen my by travel companions so I thought what the heck. Anyways, I'll updat you on Monday about how the trip went. Adios!

Bienvenida a la pura vida (Welcome to the Pura Life)

It´s my third day here in Costa Rica and it´s wonderful. I´ve been so busy the last few days that I haven´t had a chance to write and now I´m not sure where to start. I guess I´ll start at the beginning but this might end up a long post.

Okay, so my flight into Costa Rica was kinda hellish. I woke up at 4 in the morning to get through customs in time to catch my 7:45am flight. It was a really nice flight actually, decent breakfast (muffin and cereal) and they were playing Next as the movie although I just slept through it. Then I arrived at the George Bush airport in Houston. George Bush really deserves that airport since it is the worst airport I can imagine. There was absolutely nothing to do, everything was dirty and smelled like oil, and there were no quiet places to sit. The healthiest food I managed to find (ie. from a restaurant that didn´t give off the stench of fried foods from 10 ft away) was pasta salad coated in mayonnaise and there was a hair in it. I didn´t eat much. By the time my flight to Costa Rica got in (it was a bit delayed) I was so tired! I ended up sitting in a window seat with no one in the middle seat and a nice quiet girl in the aisle seat so I got a good nap in on that flight too.

When I arrived in Alajeula, Costa Rica I made my way through customs and immigration pretty easily thankfully. Then, I was supposed to find my name on a sign outside a glass window and find the person who would take me to Atenas. Well I found the window easily enough but there was no sign with my name on it! So I went outside anyways, which was very crowded with waiting families, taxi drivers and people with signs. I looked around for a while but I was sure I looked like an idiot or maybe a possible victim wandering around so I tried to call the woman who was supposed to pick me up. I did find some phones, but couldn´t figure out how to use them at all! Thankfully when I went back to the queue of people waiting, there were a few more people with signs including Hannia, who was picking me up.

I think my first mistake with her was to say hello in English. She smiled, motioned for me to follow her into a taxi and then she talked to the taxi driver in Spanish the whole way to Atenas. I began to have some serious doubts because I couldn´t understand a single word they said. Spanish is a very fast language and I was calculating the worst case scenario and how to manage it on the way to my host family´s. We arrived in the dark at my host family´s. (It gets dark here at about 7:30). After a quick demonstration that I speak terrible Spanish as I tried to ask her if I should take my shoes off inside, I was motioned into a cute little room dressed up with ruffly yellow pillows and I went to bed. First impressions were not good and all I could think was maybe I had made a big, big mistake.

I woke up the next morning at about 4am to the sounds of rooster crowing and about an hour later big trucks began driving down the street in front of my house. I finally got up at 6am to find everyone already awake and going about the day. The day was really overwhelming and I went to bed at 7:30 that night but it went much better than expected. At breakfast I met a French couple staying in the house who are here to learn Spanish and also speak some English. Since I speak some French as well, we have some very interesting tri-lingual conversations at the breakfast table trying to make ourselves understood. My host mom is very, very nice and after 2 days with her I understand her mas o menos (more or less). She is also trying to teach me Spanish words and does her best to speak simply with me. By dinner the first day she was calling me her daughter and patting my hair at the dinner table so I think we´re going to get along fine. Her husband Ulises and her son Estaban are also nice although I haven´t see them around as much.

Through my Spanish lessons in the morning I´ve met some other very nice Gringos and we´ve started making plans for weekend travel which is nice. The first trip will be to Manuel Antonio, which is a national park very close to the beach so I´m looking forward to it! There were 6 girls and a guy with varying levels of Spanish who arrived at the same time as me so it´s nice to have them around to talk to.

The first day I was there, lunch time was insane. Gina (my host mom) provides lunch to about 25 kids from the secondary school and college. I still haven´t been able to find much logic in her explanation of why which seems to be that the other families are all spread out... So unknowingly I sat down for lunch in her kitchen and a steady stream of kids entered (all dressed in uniform making it truly impossible to tell there age- they all look young). They mostly laughed and talked amongst themselves while occasionally looking at me. One of the kids who spoke English told me that these 2 girls wanted to take me to the Americano. All I really wanted to do was close my door on the insanity going in the kitchen but I went for the walk. We didn´t understand each other very one but one of the girls used some of her English and repeatedly used the English phrase "beautiful boys" which made me laugh. Then I got back home and got dressed for the orphanage.

Ah, the orphanage. It´s really wonderful there. Actually, it´s a bit of a sanctuary because after a day of attempting Spanish everyone, I feel like I fit in at the orphanage and am able to help out a little. There are a lot of people who speak English there, both the founders of the orphanage, some other volunteers, and members of a mission team here for a week who have come to do some painting on a new house they are building. After a long morning of overwhelming Spanish, it´s nice to be told what to do in English for a change. Of course the Tia´s, who look after the children, are Costa Rican but they are used to English speakers and are pretty good at using simple Spanish phrases with me. I am working in the afternoon shift at the "upstairs house" which is located on a little hill. There are 11 kids in my house from 1 month to about 9 years old, including 2 babies which were born prematurely. The kids are all different but all seem to be in need of some good quality attention. The Tia´s certainly do their best to give each one some individual attention everyday but running a home of that size with so many little ones makes that kind of attention all to brief. That´s where we volunteers come in. We are supposed to help the Tia´s with things that need to be done around the house and also try to single out a child or two to play with or talk to. The older ones are somewhat resistant to people who don´t speak Spanish and I don´t blame them. I think I have already attached myself to 2 kids who I´m going to try to make feel special while I´m here. I do love my underdogs so I was drawn immediately to Pamela, who is having a hard time adjusting at the orphanage and is about 5 years old, and Fabian who is 4 and very quiet and well behaved but often overlooked. Pamela loves negative attention. Everytime I have asked her name, she tells me Nada (Nothing), which is sort of a game now. Also, with the slightest bit of attention, she turns it into an escape trick and runs away from the house and onto their big property. I have seen her become unhappy with one of the Tia´s and start to run away only to stop when she sees they aren´t looking at her. So I have spent 2 days at the orphanage and have chased her about 5 times. I´m gonna have to work out a strategy for her I think. Fabian plays with me very nicely and talks steadily while I nod "si, si" or answer his "Es verdad?" (isn´t that right?) with a "si" as well. I am trying to learn Spanish as quickly as possible for him. I´ll write more about the rest of the kids another day but I think that´s enough for now.

I´m off to explore the town a litte before I head off to the orphange. It´s the first chance I´ve had since I got here. Hasta Leugo!

(Oh, and the title of the post is welcome to the pura vida (the pure life). It´s a common phrase Ticos use to describe their way of life.

Ready for Takeoff

Tomorrow's the day! I feel like I've been planning this trip forever and now that it's here I can't really believe it. I don't think it'll really hit me that I'm leaving for a month until I'm standing at the airport terminal. I have a really early flight tomorrow too and I have to be at the airport at 5:45 in the morning so that's gonna be fun. I've got a 3 hour layover in Houston and then I board a plane which gets my to San Jose at 8:45pm. A woman from IFRE is picking me up at the airport to drive me to my family's home which should be about an hour away. So I figure I'll get to my host family's at maybe 10:15, say my hellos, and collapse into bed. Then bright and early at 8am Monday morning I've got a Spanish language placement exam which determines the level of Spanish lessons I'll be in. (I don't think it'll be a big surprise to anyone when I land myself in beginner's lessons). Then after lunch, I get to meet everyone at the orphanage. Very excited right now! Wish me luck:)