Crazy Times

Hey there loyal readers! This week has been quite interesting to say the least. Definitely experienced some of those Peace Corps highs and lows that they talk so much about. Seriously, it kind of makes you feel like an unstable crazy person. Well, I guess sometimes when you deal with crazy situations, the most natural feeling would be to feel a little bit crazy I suppose. I normally write about my experiences in chronological order, but I figure today I will write with however flows best. Sorry if it seems a bit jumpy!

So last week I mentioned how there was a school shooting at the high school. I later learned that in the town of San Ramon on the same day, a bunch of high school students also died. However, while the shooting in my town was an act of violence, this was an act of complete stupidity or insanity. Possibly both. So, these kids decided to lay in the middle of the street side-by-side and were soon after run over. Yep, that’s about it. They decided to lay out in the middle of the street. Knowing how Costa Ricans drive, I consider that stupid, insane, and suicidal. Seriously, I get nervous crossing the street. I’ve almost lost my toes many times, and my life too often to count. Drivers here are CRAZY. Maybe there was a suicide pact…I guess we will never know.

Going back to the subject of the school shooting, the fallout has been pretty intense and slightly fascinating. The funeral took place three days after the shooting and I heard that so many people went that not only did they overflow the church, but the entire street and the park across the way. I wouldn’t know because I was in an all-day meeting/workshop, which I will get back to later. For the entire week, this event had seemed to be all that the community could focus on. I can’t blame them. It was quite shocking and it happened within the community. It was all people could talk about. It freaked out everyone.

The weird thing is that all of a sudden, people have stopped talking about it and life has gone back to normal. If it is mentioned in passing, it is brushed off like it happened years ago as opposed to a week ago. People have moved on. It’s quite astounding really. My host-brother Luis, who lives with his dad, was visiting over the weekend and we got to talking about the shooting. I had forgotten that he also goes to that school. I guess he was a friend of the victim. I didn’t really know what to say because there really isn’t anything one can say that would feel right in that situation. I’ve been to my fair share of funerals lately and know that one of the only things worse than feeling miserable is having someone trying to say something nice and making you feel more miserable. Sometimes saying nothing is best for all parties.

Anyway, so he started talking about the parents and seemed pretty upset about it. I think that he felt that the situation was preventable, and in retrospect it seems that it probably was. There were the classic signs that the shooter was troubled. His room was like a shrine to death and the things that he posted on his facebook page were indicators of his intentions. However, nobody did anything. I can see where surviving friends would be upset about this. I would want to know why nobody did anything either. All of a sudden, my host-mom starts scolding him about how a parent should love their kid no matter what. While true, I’m thinking this was probably not the best time to talk about that and the tone was probably not a great way to handle a grieving kid who is seeking to understand what happened in the midst of tragedy.

So, the high school is currently having therapists lead workshops and talks about what happened and are trying to support the students. However, there isn’t really hasn’t been an opportunity for the school kids to express their feelings about what happened and discuss warning signs and what to do if they come across red flags in the future. So, I decided that I would go class-to-class, and with the help of their English teacher, lead discussions about what happened.

These discussions went really well and I’m super happy about how the kids responded to the topic, but at the same time it was also slightly depressing. Every time I entered a classroom and explained why I was there and gave them space to express their feelings, the students didn’t know what to do with the open floor. I think that the loose nature of the discussion and the fact that it was focused on them and how they were feeling was so foreign that they didn’t know how to react. However, after asking a few questions and making sure they understood that the classroom was safe space for them, they really opened up. They wanted to share their thoughts and opinions to adults who were willing to listen. Sometimes the topic would turn to violence in general and some of the stories they had were just heartbreaking. It’s really hard to know what to tell a kid who deals with abuse at home or who has siblings with violent friends or boyfriends. It is also very obvious that they don’t trust adults. I can’t blame them. Adults don’t take most of them seriously. It was nice to see them expressing themselves and being completely respectful of each other’s ideas and feelings. I do hope that they got something out of the discussions because I know I sure did.

Like I mentioned previously, last week I went to an all day workshop with a bunch of people from the various social institutions. It was a day dedicated to children’s rights and the various ways that those rights are being violated in the country. I listened to presentations about violence, sexual exploitation, and child labor. It was incredibly enlightening. It is incredible how many people still believe in and use corporal punishment. The reasons children fall into child prostitution is incredibly sad on their own, then you add the things that happen to them while they are prostitutes. It’s awful. The amount of kids who are forced to leave school and work is astounding, and I can only feel for the kids who have to go to school and then work on their free time. It’s just so sad that people take advantage of kids in so many different ways. The only thing about this workshop that I didn’t like was that it didn’t really propose any solutions to these many problems. Sure it’s good to know that these things exist, but I’d also like to know how people are battling them, or at least that they have a plan to fight them. I don’t know. I do know that the meeting left me slightly depressed.

On a lighter note, this Friday there was an acto civico at the school which is basically their version of a school rally, but is normally focused on some kind of governmental holiday. I’ve seen a few before and thought them a good break from the normal school day, but this one was pretty cool. They were celebrating the annexation of Guanacaste into Costa Rica. All I know about the annexation is that there is a lot of debate as to whether Costa Rica stole Guanacaste from Nicaragua or if Guanacaste decided to leave Nicaragua and be part of Costa Rica. Really, the answer depends on if you ask a Nicaraguan or a Costa Rican. Either way, it is celebrated here. I’m glad because Guanacaste really is a fun region of the country and has some cultural things that are interesting. So, for the acto civico, the kids came to school wearing traditional outfits from the Guanacaste region, danced a bit, and created their own bombas. What’s a bomba? Well, it’s basically this thing that they do in Guanacaste where they shout and then say a really clever rhyme really quickly and then shout some more. It’s actually kind of fun at first, but then gets kind of annoying after a bit. Anyway, it was just a fun day in general. I got absolutely no work done, but I did eat a lot of traditional food. So that goes down as a good day in my book.


This is my counterpart, Don Carlos, aka: the principal of the school. He's watching the acto civico and looking very serious. He's normally smiling and joking around.


A bunch of the kids getting ready for the acto civico in their costumes. The kid in the middle with the hat is my host-brother, Dennis.


So, I know you’re all dying to know how my housing situation is after reading about my rat situation. Well, I must say that I think our rodent problem isn’t quite so problematic. I haven’t seen one in days, but I have heard that others have seen one a couple of times. Either way, it’s not quite the problem it was a couple of weeks ago. WIN!

However, the other night while everyone was sleeping, at around one in the morning, the whole house was awakened to a loud crash. Because my host-family can keep strange hours, I just figured it was my host-mom in the kitchen. Why did I think that she would be doing stuff in the kitchen at one in the morning? I don’t know. It’s probably because I’ve woken up at odd hours to people getting up and getting ready for work. I was also probably too tired to do the math and realize that 1 am is much too early for anyone to be getting ready for work. Well, in the morning I quickly discovered the cause of the startling noise. As I open the door to the bathroom I see that the bathroom sink is in pieces all over the floor. Yes, that’s right, our bathroom sink tore itself off the wall and it’s piping and committed suicide in the middle of the night. This happened mid-week last week. Guess what? We still haven’t replaced it. It doesn’t seem like people have much motivation to replace it anytime soon. I mean the sink was lying on the floor for days before anyone decided to do anything about it. So, I now have to wash my hands and brush my teeth either in the kitchen or outside. Annoying, yes. Surprising, no. At this point, I feel like nothing can surprise me. FAIL! 20 points rewarded to my mom’s theory about the shed.

Another interesting thing that happened last week was that I put my laundry out to be washed one morning as requested by the lady who is helping out around our house (I’m still confused about that situation) and when I got my laundry back, I was missing my navy blue bandanna. So, I decided to ask her if she’s seen it and she replied that she had not. I asked my host-mom who sometimes still folds my clothes, and she also denied seeing it. Well, I’m positive that it was in the laundry because I have become a crazy anal person about the comings and goings of my clothing since the now infamous bra-incident. Yes, it is famous. I have met a few volunteers along the way and been greeted with the, “Oh I heard about you!” Haha. Peace Corps gossip spreads quite fast in these parts. Anyway, knowing that I put it with the laundry and that it never came back really pushed my buttons. I mean it really pissed me off. (Sorry Megan, you have a half hulked-out letter coming your way) Firstly, I’m pissed that something of mine has gone missing. Whether it was stolen or lost, neither really looks that good. If it was stolen, it just means that I can’t trust people with stuff ever! If it was lost, then I still can’t trust people to take care of my stuff. Also, it was a gift from my sister that my aunt brought with her when she came to visit. Being a sentimentalist, I now cling onto gifts from home. To lose a token of someone’s love, is just not acceptable. I am aware that I sound like an OCD lunatic and that it is a bandanna and not something more important like a toe or an arm, but I must remind you of my opening paragraph. Sometimes I just turn into a crazy person. Plus, I think the other problems concerning my living situation added to the aggravation and I really just lost it. Well, I lost it to myself anyway. I still have enough sense to not go bonkers on people here even if it is in English. So, I locked myself away in my room and stewed about it all night. There was a lot of muttering and cursing to myself. Then I calmed down and started to feel depressed about being such a crazy person. The battle for sanity continues.

The weirdest part about the whole bandanna situation was that all of a sudden my host-mom was giving me the cold shoulder after I asked about having seen my bandanna. This was super confusing. I was frozen out for days. I started questioning whether asking about it was offensive, but I’ve decided that it cannot be offensive to ask if someone has seen something. That’s just part of interacting with people. So, then yesterday she went to town with her boyfriend and son and when they came back, the son gave me a new bandanna. After that, all was normal. Um, nice gesture I guess, but it doesn’t really fix my feelings or my paranoia does it? Gotta move on, just gotta move on. At least that’s what I tell myself.

And to leave off with the best part of my week, on Sunday I went to Playa Herradura to meet up with my Tico 22 friends, Tom and Melissa J. It was AWESOME. They called me up on Saturday wanting to know if I wanted to go to the beach, but they wanted to find a new beach. So, I asked my good Tica friend Rocío if she knew of any, and she suggested Herradura. Great suggestion! It was really nice. The water was mellow, it wasn’t rocky and there were palm trees and other tropical plants providing shade and awesome scenery. Not only was it amazing to be on the beach and swimming in the ocean, but it was sooooo good to be with friends. We compared stories and laughed at each other’s problems. We laughed not because we’re mean people, but because our problems are exactly the same. For the most part anyway. Nobody else’s high school had a shooting the past week. It felt so good to talk about frustrations with people who know exactly what you’re talking about without the slightest chance of offending anyone. It was also fun and cathartic to talk about where our heads are at in terms of our service. We’ve all decided that at the rate we’re going, we will have come into Peace Corps as bleeding heart liberals and leaving it cold-hearted Republicans (sorry Nicole, and I don’t actually believe all republicans are cold-hearted). Hahaha. To be honest, sometimes our frustrations have led us to view the world with a more conservative lens. I’m not sure if this is a normal part of the journey, but I’m hoping it just a phase. Maybe we still haven’t reached a level of understanding with the culture and the struggles of the people. We have only been at site for 2 and a half months. Maybe we’re viewing the world too simply and haven’t taken in the complexities of the culture. Maybe this is still just culture shock. I hope so. Either way, it was still an amazing day and the break from life that we all needed.

Until next time!


This is Playa Herradura. It was nice and mellow and the perfect place to go if your a PCV looking to regain some sanity with a few friends.


This would be Melissa making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Oh yeah, peanut butter is a rare treat for us. It's expensive here. I hadn't had a PB&J since the States. It was so amazing I had 2.