Classroom Costa Rica

When I pictured the people of Costa Rica, especially the children, I had always gone by the pictures that all those magazines plant in your head: starving children dressed in rags, playing soccer outside a ramshackle cottage. Of course, I should have known better, but I was still surprised at how normal these people seemed, how like us. Yes, many of them were way beyond us in the world of soccer, and yes, some of the houses were not as large as ours, but is that really a bad thing? It did make me wonder though, just how different is life for children in Costa Rica than in the U.S?

As we drove up the steep, dusty road to Monteverde, we encountered fewer and fewer houses. However, there was still the occasional child walking along the road, or playing outside the house. As we went by, we waved and took pictures. They smiled and waved back, then went back to whatever they had happened to be doing. Maybe kids in the U.S. would have done the same, but they seemed so unsurprised to see a giant blue bus full of gringos go rumbling past, with cameras pointed at them from every open window. Tourism is just such a bigger part of life there.
Later, at our homestay, I got to know the two girls there, particularly Natalia ( age 8 ) who attempted to communicate with us while her mother made dinner. I learned that she liked to dance, and took classes at the local school, which she described as “muy linda” (very nice). There was one thing though, that the whole family disliked about the school: English was not offered as a subject there. And, if you want a good job in Costa Rica, you want to be able to speak English. Unfortunately, the nearest school that did offer English as a subject was a far way away and the mother figured her daughter would spend more time on the bus then in school. Therefore, none of the family knew any English. It wasn’t really this that surprised me, more the need to know English. Yes, we do learn Spanish in school, but what are we going to use it for? They use it to make a good life for themselves.

But really, they aren’t that different from the rest of us. They do speak a different language, and some have slightly different colored skin. It’s surprising though, the differences of skin color in Costa Rica. Although there are some that fit our idea of dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes, there are also many who don’t. There was one boy we met, around two years old, who had skin almost as white as mine along with blond hair to match. Then there are the cultural things, such as the importance of family, the amount of rice and beans everyone eats, and simply the different relationship between them and the land. Many of the children seem much closer to the earth simply because much of their life revolves around it. Many of their parents work on the land, making it a crucial part of life. However, all this is outweighed by the fact that we are all human. Costa Ricans play sports, read books, take dance lessons, and eat with forks and knives at tables in houses. And the innocence of children is always the same, wherever in this world you might be.

-Ferne

    Walking through the Cloud Forest Reserve was mystical and amazing, the mist weighing down on you from the low hanging cloud, droplets of water rolling off every leaf and bromeliad as you passed by, a strange feeling of being isolated and all alone with only the company of the bird calls. This was the perfect example of a Cloud Forest, a generally tropical forest characterized by its low hanging cloud cover, usually starting at the canopy level

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Expecting all of these things I was surprised to enter the Cloud Forest Reserve when we actually visited it. The air was as clear as could be, no sign of even the slightest amount of mist. The trees looked green and healthy but there was not one droplet of water coming from any of the leaves. Also, everything was as clear as a bell not muffled by the cloud cover. While walking through the Cloud Forest Reserve I was wondering to myself how it could have gone through so much change in just twenty years time.
I did a little studying to find out. What is happening to the Cloud Forest? I read up on it and found out that global warming and deforestation are the two main threats to the cloud forest. When the trees are cut down to create farm land moisture is no longer trapped in the canopy, this leads the clouds to climb higher and higher. This also means that the moisture is no longer as prominent as it used to be. Not only are the naturalists fretting, but many of the animal species are dying off because of their quickly changing habitats. Many of the animals living in the cloud forest have very specific needs with their living conditions and if the forest changes any more they could all be in very big danger. The quetzal, a rare bird we were lucky to see four or five times in the Cloud Forest Reserve, is loosing its home in the clouds as they lift higher and higher up the mountain. The golden toad has already died off for a combination of reasons, one of them being that it could not survive in its rapidly changing surroundings.

I was surprised to see all of the change that had happened and just shocked that something so huge could happen in such a short amount of time. It’s not just the loggers in Costa Rica that are destroying the cloud forest, we have all contributed to this. Every time you start your car, turn on the lights, take a shower, power your computer, waste paper, another tree goes down, another quetzal dies, the clouds lift. It’s not just one country’s fault, we have all contributed to this and if we work together we can turn this around.

-Emma

I have always been fascinated with volcanoes and going to Costa Rica allowed me to actually see one. I learned a lot about Arenal when I was in Costa Rica, even though I didn’t see it except from extremely far away. Everywhere we went there was always something to do with Arenal. The experience I had in Costa Rica was like experiencing the adventure without seeing it. The feeling was like going to Arenal without going to it. Everyone I met there had something to say about it. That’s when I learned you don’t need to see something to experience it. I do wish that I could have seen it in person. That would have rocked. But even though I didn’t, I still learned a lot, a lot more than I would have just sitting at a computer and reading about it.

I learned some really cool things about volcanoes them selves from reading books. One thing would be that all volcanoes exist in the ring of fire. The ring of fire is a chain of volcanoes around the world. When I read that, I thought to myself. It’s probably really cool to be able to live near part of the ring of fire. Arenal is not the only Volcano in Costa Rica. There are actually ten other volcanoes in Costa Rica, two of which are active. Arenal is the most active though. It’s one of the ten most active volcanoes in the world. In the year of 1968 Arenal had its most disastrous eruption. It blew off the entire west side of the volcano, destroying two towns at the base of the volcano.
Just by talking with tourists and Costa Ricans I learned that Arenal is a huge volcano and a bigger tourist attraction than most things in Costa Rica. A woman that I interviewed said “You can feel the rumbling of the volcano during the night, it shakes everything and it is always erupting.” Most of the people I interviewed in Costa Rica remembered the terrible incident in 1968. Even the couple I spent my home stay with remembered that incident; they said it was the most horrible eruption that had ever happened in Costa Rica.
There were many other things I could have studied in Costa Rica but I really enjoyed studying Arenal even if I didn’t get to see it up close. One of the most important things I learned was that you don’t need to see something to experience the adventure.

- Colby

Costa Rica has one of the best public school education systems in Central America. Even though we didn’t get to go to a public school we did visit a private school called the Monteverde Friends School. It was a great school with lots of students. Almost all the students spoke fluent English. The reason was because in elementary school all students are required to take the class. All the teachers know English because a lot of them came from the U.S. to teach there.

Their school day is a little different than ours. School starts at 7:00 am. That means they probably have to get up really early, but the roosters help with that. The school goes from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Each classroom has two grades and about 15 students. Real young students come three days a week and the older students come each day. The classes that the students have to take consist of math, science, language, social studies, English, and Spanish. All the regular classes.

In private and public schools, students have to wear a uniform. At the Monteverde Friends School they wear dark blue jeans or a skirt (for the girls) and a white button down shirt. The kids looked uncomfortable when we were playing soccer, that was the first thing we did when we got to the school.

At first I thought that we were doing really well, but then the students started to make goal after goal after goal. We made one goal, they made about seven. Their field was challenging. There were ditches, bumps and sand spots. There were red ant hills in the field too. Because of the field the game was a lot more interesting, and because of the red ant hills we had to be very careful where we stepped.

When the game was over the students came up to us and almost everyone was talking to someone. It was cool to see us connecting with the students. It was also convenient that all the kids spoke English very well. I noticed that some kids had a gringo accent. I didn’t expect that at all. We did speak some Espanol around them, but only because the teachers wanted us to.

We performed our play that we had worked so hard on to get ready. Because the play is bilingual and the audience was bilingual it made it easier to perform. The audience laughed so much I think it inspired us to perform better than ever. I noticed everyone acting more and really getting into their parts. We worked hard on making the play appropriate for the age group we were trying to reach. By the end of the play I had seen some of the kids laugh, look angry, and look sad. So I think they liked the play, a lot, and they understood the problem at hand and what we were trying to say.

It was a great experience for us to meet the kids at the Monteverde Friends School and to share our ideas through our play.

-Alex

We just saw a blue crested mot-mot. It had a blue cap with a black bandit mask around its eyes. It’s stomach was yellow-green and its back was blue-green. We saw this while we were writing in our journals at 3 o’clock-ish.
-Mandy

(editors note: this picture is not related to this post, but look at the concentration on those faces!)

As predicted, there hasn’t been one day, or even one meal, without rice and beans. The water at the waterfall in San Luis is so cold your lungs might collapse if you stay underwater too long.
-Zoe

I loved the really cold water! It was very exciting not being able to feel your body, even though it was not as bad as glacier water. Carrying the logs for the community service kind of made me nervous because I am now realizing that I might have a phobia of ants!
-Maddie

There are so many different animals in Monteverde. So far I’ve seen coatis (Central American raccoons), quetzals, tarantulas, leafcutter ants; there are still so many its hard to name them all. I think this is the best way to learn about something rather than sit at a computer all day and jog down notes. This is fun and exciting and you can actually interview people. Plus you get to see this beautiful country.
-Colby

We got to Costa Rica and holy guacamole it’s hot as Hades. It’s so cool here. Costa Rica is: cool, sweet, radical, gnarly, awesome, amazing, or whatever you want to call it.
-Jackson

Our tour guide at Monteverde Reserve was Maria, and she knew her stuff. I saw three quetzals that were so, so beautiful. A snake, which I took lots of pictures of for my mom!! Howler monkeys (LOUD) and…a tarantula! Got it was awesome but super scary! Very hairy legs! I also saw the footprint of a puma, which was very cool! The cloud forest is really amazing in general. Just green everywhere and huge trees with epiphytes and vines…it was so amazing and I immediately understood why clear-cutting is so bad. We did a rainforest study, but you can never really know what to think of the cloud forest until you go there. I am so unbelievably baffled at how lucky I am that I got to experience it…in Costa Rica.
-Audrey