Back in Costa Rica! Above are a picture of my friends and local El Invu English students Elizabeth and Evelyn. In a way it felt like coming to kind of home again, seeing so many friends that I had made during the summer and being in places that were immensely familiar and filled with many prior memories. It was also remarkable to see all the construction that had taken place (and was taking place during that week before the course started). A new classroom was built, along with a second story above the Rancho that consisted of a large porch area and four private rooms. Here is a picture of one of the sessions I led, with three participants in the background...
(On Day 11 of my Vipassana course in Texas, I got a ride from the center to DFW airport and walked rather bewildered around the airport for some time until finally caving into the $10 wireless fee to check email and make sure nothing was too urgent. After making it to San Jose later that night, I was met by Francis Bailey, a professor of mine at SIT, and we were driven in Pipa's van back to Invu. Spent the following week gradually coming back into the householder's world, taking a swim or two and a few drives, and getting all in order for the course)
Ok, it's back to Costa Rica so you know we have to have some bug picture in here again! Here is the first one, this little guy was on a wall... This next course starting was going to be huge: 15 participants, and 12 of them Latinos coming on US Embassy scholarships (actually, to be fair one was an Italian who has been living for some time in CR). I'd be working in a rather peculiar team with Annie (an American living in Croatia) and Elias (an Ecuadorian living in Ecuador), who were both Trainers-In-Training, and Ellen, who was the first Trainer involved in my own training in Chicago, and who would be working more to train these two than actually with the participants. So there were a lot of roles to figure out, of who does what in what way and where responsibility is laid. During the four weeks we found we did work pretty smooth together. We got along well, all worked hard, and everything was smooth. The only tricky thing was this sense of a lot of different roles going on, so sometimes it was a little confusing to tell how the negotiation should work out. Here is a picture of Ellen, Annie and I with one of the participants in the nearby hot springs town of La Fortuna: (oh, we were lucky enough to see lava coming off the volcano as we were soaking... later we heard the little specks we saw were actually boulders of lava the size of an automobile!)
It was nice to step into a course where I was in a role of increased responsibility from before. With my experiences getting used to the course, and especially getting used to the schedule in the Costa Rican style, I was able to anticipate the rhythm and help guide the participants accordingly. It was so nice to see a small payoff for all the rough spots of learning the course, and it is such a very, very steep learning curve! I still have quite a bit of growth left ahead of me though, that is for certain. This I can tell just by the fact that my meditation sittings usually end with me having the faintest ideas that there happens to be some vague sort of respiration or sensations coursing through me. It is an exhausting experience, and sometimes I feel there are only so many strategies to save and conserve energy. Not just so hard on the trainers too, the participants struggle as well with the workload! Case in point, here is a picture of a Salvadorian participant, Marisol, taking a small breather at her laptop...
Ok, so we have to have another bug shot, eh! This little guy somehow got to the bottom of the cup, how he expected to get out I'm not sure of.... so, the course came to its end, I had my usual 700 collonnes ($1.50) haircut by the woman living across the street from the school and stocked up on bags of coffee and chocolate for gifts when I was to return home. And, here is the group photo... a little nontraditional compared to what I used to in the summer courses... it was taken during the middle of the course and was by the dining room area, since the spiral scene had been turned into a classroom. Still, nice to have us all together:
I got back to Colorado and soon had to adjust myself to an enormous change in seasons! Actually, this second time in Costa Rica the temps were cooler than before. In the "summer" (they don't really use these words in the tropics) it was so continuously hot that I can't remember a single time in El Invu that I ever wore socks, shoes, or a long sleeve shirt. I had to limit my hot tea in the morning because as the noon hour approached the sweat would come in. Well, the week I spent in Boulder brought in the storm of the century. I don't know if the pictures do it justice, but most of Boulder/Denver seemed pretty well shut down. Here is a picture outside Paul and Vidya's house, and the last one is when the blizzard reached Salida. So it was some huddling around and eating good home cooked Nepali food!
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