When it rains, it pours!

This is a video I took while walking home with my friend Marie from the day care center. This is what the streets look like here when it rains, because when it rains, it pours. Good thing the drains are so large!

More children

This is me in front of the day care center:




Here are some more pictures of some of the kids:

This is a video of the tail end of the kids leaving the classroom singing (or trying to sing) El Tren de Caramelo- The Caramel Train. I hope you enjoy because I think it´s the best thing ever when I watch them do it every day!

Ths Kiddies!

Here are some pictures of the children that I have in my English group. We squeeze together onto a small carpet right outside the classroom. The other kids in the class are constantly running out of the classroom to try to join us. The truth is they don´t have much to do in the classroom and they want to do something. You can see form the cpitures I have been photocopying lots of pages from the workbooks you all sent. So far we have studied colors and numbers. In the next few weeks we will focus on animals, body parts, and people.

Here is a video of one child reading a counting book (sent here by one of you kind people!). He is 6 years old and has been overjoyed by the opportunity to work with me. His brain is sucking up all the information and he wants to sit with me for more than an hour hearing me talk in English and read him books. I just feel bad that when I leave, his English lessons will be over.

AMAZING FAMILY AND FRIENDS!

Who knew my family and friends and even strangers could be so amazing! After beginning work at the day care center and realizing that between 50 and 60 children pass through each day and must share 11 books and a few puzzles, I asked for help. I realized how much we take for granted in other places- things like just having enough paper and crayons. I sent out an email to my family and friends asking for school supplies and books for the children at the day care center. I ahve now been receiving package after package after package and it really warms my heart! I knew that when you give people a chance to help they will more than rise to the occassion. I have brought almot all the stuff I have gotten so far to the day care and the teacher was floored! They have never had so many supplies! And to think, it is all from people who have never even met the children. I took a picture of all the stuff from the most recent packages. A VERY special thank you to my mom and dad, Penny and Mitch Kaplan, Audra and Dennis Frazier, Hortence and Charles Black, Lana Nagata-Hart, Dushane Ramsay, and many others! I have even gotten packages from people I do not know just because friends have passed along the email. I couldn´t have made as much of a difference without all your help. Here is a picture of some of the stuff you have all sent! I will take pictures of the kids soon.

Poas Volcano

Finally it stopped raining last Thursday night. So Friday me and 4 other girls gathered our stuff together and went to Alajuela, a town that´s only 45 minutes away from Atenas. We still didn´t want to risk geting stuck anywhere even though the rain had stopped. We went to the mall and to the movies and I got a manicure! It was very nice. Saturday morning we woke up and went to the Poas volcano. You need to get there very early in order to see anything. If you arrive in the afternoon the clouds will already have rolled in and you can´t see anything. But we got there and had a perfect view. Enjoy these pictures.

After seeing the crater we took a hike to a lagoon. Here are the pictures from the hike and the lagoon.

Pictures from my weekend!

Red Alert, Boa Constrictors, and Wet Clothes

Some of the volunteers wanted to go toward the Pacific Coast this weekend to the beaches in Guanacaste. Well, that whole town is covered in water right now. So some of us decided to go the other way toward the Carribbean Coast. We had all the plans set and knew where we would stay and how we would get there. But we woke up today to find it gushing rain for the 5th straight day in a row. We wached the news and found out that the whole country has been put on red alert and there are landslides happing all around. So there is no way we can catch a bus to get out of the Central Valley of Costa Rica. They even closed the Pan-American highway because the roads are just too dangerous. But I guess it´s better safe than sorry. We wouldn´t want to try to get somewhere and get stuck on a bus on a flooded highway eating crackers and drinking rainwater for 3 days! So, we are either stuck in this teeny town or we may try to catch a bus to Alajuela, 30 minutes away, so we can go to the mall and see a movie (or 2 movies since they only cost 3 dollars!) It´s not like I came to Central America to go to the mall and movies, but what can you do when it´s hurricane season?

I also found out something very interesting yesterday. One of the other volunteers was walking and saw a real live boa constrictor curled up in one of the drains. Now, remember, this whole town (and really, whole country) has 2 foot wide and 2 foot deep drains around every single curb. You have to jump when you are crossing the street. And everyone carries their children around here because it´s impossible to push a stroller on these awful streets (I haven´t seen a single stroller in 3 weeks!). So, the drains are very large, and there was a boat constrictor in one. The girl asked her host family about it and apparently it´s not that uncommon. During awful rainstorms like this, the boa constrictors come down from the mountains because they need to dry their skin out a little in order to survive. It´s not that much more dry here, but I guess the mountains are ever wetter. So anyway, I walked around today with my eyes on the drains to try to spot a boa constrictor, but I think maybe it´s better if I just don´t look!

Last but not least, the rain is also affecting my sense of fashion. To put it plainly, I have no clothes to wear! My host mom took a bag of my laundry on Monday and by Tuesday it was hanging on the line... outside! Remember now, it has been raining for 5 days straight. She must have hung it up when there was 30 minutes of no rain. But it is all still there. There is no other way to dry it here besides hanging it up (this town doesn´t have a laundrymat that I can go to either if I want to just pay to have it done again!). So now I have had allllll my clothes hanging in the rain for 3 days. Not only is it not going to dry (ever!) but it is also going to smell to high heavens! Even my towel is out there! Luckily my host mom gave me my underwear to hang dry in my room- so at least I have clean underwear until the hurricane passes!

PS. You know thats not really a picture of my laundry, right?

Here are some examples of animals I saw last week at the Manuel Antonio National Park. I can´t get my pictures onto the computer yet so these images are from the Internet but the animals are very similar to those I saw. This is a squirrel monkey. We saw about 20 of them and we fed them bananas from our hands! they are as small as squirrels. Here they also call them Titi monkeys.

This is the kind of sloth we saw. we were lucky enough to actually see one climbing up a tree! Lucky because they sleep for about 17 hours a day so it´s very hard to find them in motion!

This is the Jesus Christ Lizard- called that because they walk on water. These lizards, along with gecko lizards are seriously everywhere! But, we watched for a while and even got to see what run across the water! It´s actually more like they are flying across the water because they move so fast! The picture on bottom is what they looking like running on water.

Flooding

I don´t know if anyone has heard about the tropical storms surrounding Costa Rica and other Central American countries right now. It has been raining now for 4 days straight, and when I say raining I mean pouring down buckets of rain. I was at the Manuel Antonio National Park last weekend with 7 other volunteers. We took a bus into a town called Quepos to catch the bus back to Atenas and we took the 4 hour bus ride back. Now we are all watching the news about how Quepos totally flooded about 2 hours after we left. One man died in the flood. the water came all the way up to this bridge that we had just crossed. Peoples homes are being destroyed and they are evacuating certain parts of the country. Thank god we were able to catch the bus when we did because if we had left an hour later, we would literally still be in Quepos probably sitting on someone´s roof.
So anyway, don´t worry... I am safe!

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I will only add to this for the next 6 weeks while I am still in Costa Rica. I created this blog at the suggestion of a family friend (thanks Penny!) so I do not need to keep remembering to add people´s names to my email list. If you want to read about my Costa Rican living, feel free!

I do not yet know if I will be able to post pictures because I have not tried to upload my pictures onto the computers at this internet cafe. If I cannot then I will post all pictures after I get home in January.

I hope this works!