Finally a volunteen

I can finally say that I am a Peace Corps Volunteer, up until Swear-In day on May 29th I was considered an “aspirante” or trainee in English. For those of you who aren’t up to date on who the PeaceCorps functions or have been wondering what the hell I have been doing in Costa Rica, I’ll give a little summary of to what has gone on.

March 10th I flew to Washington DC, where I met the 51 other volunteers in my training class “Tico 19”

March 11th I arrived in Costa Rica and spent one week in a retreat center outside San Jose. This is where we met the Staff and got to know each other a little better. The center is a beautiful complex with sport courts, fields and sits on top of a large hill to overlook a town called Tres Rios. The trees where also home to hundreds of Parrots which I happily listened to every morning.

March 15th I traveled to my training community San Juan Sur. Here my community was in a cluster of 4 training communities separated by level of Spanish and also by program, mine being Rural Community Development. It was in this town that I had Spanish training 3 days a week with the other 3 volunteers (was 4 but one decided to go back to the States). We also traveled one day a week to a neighboring town Jerico for technical training with the other 3 communities. And every Friday we got the painful experience of going to San Jose for Safety and Security training. This on a packed hour and half bus ride usually standing up. In San Jose we learned about earthquakes, floods, diseases, more earthquakes, and diseases. Oh, and sometimes we were lucky enough to get vaccinations during lunch. I would say that I got a good one-hour of useful information each 8 hour day there. During the 11 weeks of training I also visited to current volunteers at their rural sites (neither of which are even close to as rural or small as mine). It was these site visits that I enjoyed most during training, not that there wasn’t good information giving to us during training I just enjoyed being in rural Costa Rica, that’s why I’m here.

May 14th I met my counter-part for my community who happens to be the President of the development association that I will be working with and went to the town for a week. I enjoyed it, went back to my training town for a week to swear-in and now I’m back!

Ok, that should have got you caught up on what the hell I have been doing, basically a lot of BS mixed in with some good training, lol. And now for the next 2 years I will be living in the community of San Luis, Peréz Zeledón. I will be working with the Development Association on a variety of projects and teaching English as well.

As you should be able to see from my photos, I lucked out on the beauty of my site. I definitely have the best view that I have seen in Costa Rica just 20 yards from my house. My town’s name is San Luis outside of San Isidro on the way to Dominical. There’s a 300 ft waterfall that we can see just a couple kilometer walk from my house or I have gotten in the habit of running to it every morning, it takes about 20 minutes. There is also a river on the way to the beach that is good for fishing, or I can go fishing in the Talapia pond a 3 minute walk from my house. My family is super nice, sometimes I go working in the family’s banana or coffee farm. The father is teaching me the guitar, so hopefully in 2 years I will be able to play because, right now I suck… Oh yeah, the town let me on their soccer team. Some of the weekends we go to neighboring towns for town parties and soccer games. They set up a kitchen and bar and all the neighboring towns come to socialize, play soccer and it’s actually a pretty fun time.

So other than that I am just trying to get to know everybody in town before I can really start doing anything. I have a community assessment project to do in my first 3 months here, I have to interview basically everybody in town and go to town meetings to figure out what they want to improve in their community. The only bummer in my town is its size. To have a development association you need 100 members and to get any government funds or to receive a PeaceCorps Volunteer you need the association. Well, my town has it but in order to receive it they formed an association with 2 neighboring towns, which sucks for me! In my town I have counted 11 families so far, so the nice thing is I will be able to get to know everybody in my town easily. The bummer is the walk to the other towns, Ceibo and Morete. Ceibo is actually bigger than my town and want me to work with their school as well but I hope to wait till a get a horse or something to make the walk easier. Also the climate is changing to the raining season. So every morning it is beautiful and sunny, by the afternoon I can’t see 20 yards in front of me because the fog is so thick and the evening is filled with strong thunder showers along with the heaviest downpours I have ever seen. It’s actually relaxing and I enjoy the storms, assuming I am inside…


Now that I am done with training, I can finally start the real process of being a PeaceCorps Volunteer. Its something that I have wanted to do for well over a year and now I can make it happen. This comes as a bitter sweet feeling, although this has been a dream of mine, the reality of isolation starts to set in. Up intil this point I have been surrounded around some people that I now call close friends. We`ve had some good times together and for the majority of these volunteers, I probably wont see but a couple times a year. However I am sure when we do meet up it will be filled with more good times.
Well, until next time,

Tenga un buen día

Pura Vida, Leif