Here are the traditional in-front-of-the-spiral pictures taken after the last two courses… the first one is in July and the second in August, where I was working as a Trainer.
I just have a moment to write a few lines about what I’ve been up to lately, actually it is a moment I really do not have but I will try to take it anyway! The last course—the one month SIT TESOL Certificate intensive month course—was quite the challenge, complete with 12 (and even 14) hour days and looming deadlines and much else. My responsibility was running workshops, looking over lesson plans, observing teaching sessions and taking notes, responding to participants' papers, leading post-teaching Feedback meetings, and a few other things here and there as well.
It got off to a rather slow start though, or at least a slow lead-up. After the previous course ended I was invited to go fishing with Mark and his host family, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica who was a participant in that course. I passed up the opportunity to take life but was going to go anywhere for the walk and the nature until fatigue combined with downpours set in. So I still managed to make it to their home that night, where they ate the fresh fish, and I was then invited to come to their mother’s farm (everybody’s family seems to live just around the corner in El Invu!) in the morning. It was here I milked a cow for the first time and also drank fresh cow milk as well. For someone who is not too into dairy it was absolutely delicious! As we walked around the farm a large green parrot followed us from branch to branch and tree to tree, and then back at the house (where we drank the warm milk and put it into our coffees) the parrot flew inside and around the house, until I realized it actually belonged to the old woman, and it began to eat angrily by the sink. Another Gabriel Garcia Marquez moment here… Oh, check out the starfruit litter outside her house on the ground!
The next course started up and I went to the San Jose Airport (an exhausting all d
ay trip to start out an intensive 6-day first week with the eccentric Pipa as driver) to pick them up, 3 Americans and 2 Latinos who won grants from the US Embassy to be able to come here. It was a very busy month and so much happened that as I sit calmly (or not so calmly as I am thinking about my present work ahead) here at the computer I kind of come up blank about what to write about! Ron and Ellen, the supervisors I had in
We did get a lot of use out of the river this course, it was a great cooling-off mechanism. Sometimes Anna and I (the other trainer) took a brief swim before a Sunday meeting at Mary’s house to dive into work, and once we even decided to all play hooky for an hour and rearrange the workshop schedule to plan in some more swim time during a very intense and muggy week!
Another party at Mary’s house featured a couple of birthdays to celebrate, and we all g
ot to experience the Costa Rican style of piñatas. They tie the piñata on a string and blindfold someone who then tries to swing at it—up till now, pretty much the same thing in either hemisphere. The difference is that they have another person who pulls on the string to make the piñata swing up and down as well as to either side, so the blindfolded one has little idea of not only where he is standing in relation to the piñata, but even when he manages to make contact, it surely won’t be there the second swing… it could be above the head or at the feet, eliciting big laughs from the crowd as the stick goes flinging in all directions.
And so the month ended, and we cleaned El Centro Espiral Mana and I locked my cabin and joined the crew heading back to
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