Is it hot, pleeeeeeease??

Alli and Reese asked me a question I'm surprised more of you hadn't:  is it hot?  I'll bet a lot of you were possibly dreaming of warm beaches at that time. Your letters are dated January 21, and many of you told me how cold it was at that time.

The short answer?  YES!  It is hot.  Costa Rica is a tropical country.  What does that mean?  What other countries are in the tropics?

From a living standpoint, it means that the weather doesn't change quite as drastically as they do in countries further away from the equator, like the U.S.   Just like in Guinea, there are only two seasons:  dry season and rainy season.  We're in dry season right now, but that still means it can rain.  During rainy season it can rain almost every day of the month!  In Guinea the difference between the seasons was even more drastic.  Conakry, the capital of Guinea, is the rainiest world capital, and it receives all of its 10 feet of water in about three months.  During the other months it's so dry that all the grass dies completely and the earth is taken over  by the colors red and brown.  As soon as the first week of rains return there's an explosion of green as all the trees and plants wake up.  Here, the rain is much more constant, but we still notice a difference between the two seasons.

Have you ever noticed that the days are getting longer right now?  Up until June 21 that will keep happening. (Why so?)  Well, it's true here too, but again it's not nearly as dramatic.  The sun is going down a little later at night, but we barely notice.  All year round you can count on the sun coming up around six in the morning and going down at six. 

A beautiful Pacific sunset, just before 6 p.m.

With all that we know so far about the climate, what can you conclude about the temperatures in Costa Rica?  Take a look at this chart with Mrs. Stonecipher.  It shows the average temperature every month in Puerto Limon, the closest city to where I live.  Does the temperature change much from month to month?

Que Rico!

Small restaurants in Costa Rica are called sodas, which I find interesting because they don’t even call soda (as in soda pop) soda; they call it gaseosa or refresco.  If you walk into a soda and ask for a typical plate of food, they’ll serve you a casado (which literally means ‘married’).  Casados consist of rice, beans, a little bit of salad, a piece of meat, platano maduro (which is almost exactly like a banana but it has to be fried up), picadillo (diced up potatoes), and a fruit drink.  Meat of all kinds is used, but you will be served chicken, beef, or pork.  The fruit drinks are delicious.  Sometimes you get pineapple juice, or watermelon juice.  There are also some fruits that aren’t very common in the U.S. like guava, papaya, tamarind, and soursop.  They sure sound funny, but the juice tastes delicious!  

A Costa Rican Casado with beef

The soda in our school

In fact, the fruit is my favorite part of the food here in Costa Rica.  When I go on hikes with the Scouts, the neighbors will sometimes give us bananas that they’ve picked in their backyards as a snack.  Have you ever heard of guayaba?  It’s a type of passion fruit that’s often made into jelly for toast, but you can also pick the fruit right from the tree and suck out the pulp on the inside.  Pipas, or young coconuts, are my absolute favorite.  If you’re lucky enough to have one, you chop off the top with a machete (or just bust it on a rock if no).  Then you can drink the juice from it as if it were a cup!   

Guayaba Fruit with bars of guayaba candy

Pipas still on the tree

Rice and beans are very common here.  The typical breakfast dish is called pinto gallo, which literally means ‘speckled hen’.  The leftover rice and beans from last night are fried up in a pan and served on a plate with scrambled eggs.  I live by myself now in my own house, so I cook for myself, but when I lived with my host family I was sometimes served rice and beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!  Ketchup is usually available, but most people spring for the chile panameño, which is a jar of pickled hot peppers.  You take a spoon and scoop out the juice (or one of the peppers if you’re brave) to spice up your meal a little.

There’s a lot of food that we eat in the U.S. that is common here too, only it’s eaten differently.  For example, have you ever eaten a plate of spaghetti piled atop a mound of rice?  I doubt it.  Pancakes?  How about we serve them with sour cream instead of syrup? Does any of you like the taste of sour milk?  My host mom, Doña Ivonne, saves the crusty stuff on top of the milk as her favorite part!  I’ve never gotten used to the taste, nor have I gotten used to the taste of salt sprinkled on top of my fruit.  The pineapple here is absolutely delicious.  Just hold the salt, please.

I live in a part of the country that’s quite different from the rest of Costa Rica, named Limón.  Here the food is also quite distinct.  Rice and beans are still very popular, but it’s cooked with coconut milk and spices to make the dish a lot richer.    On the side are served patacones, or fried plantains.  They taste a lot like french fries.  

Patacones, photo courtesy of Flickr user Beth M

And I’m sure you want to know about candy!  Well, the fruit here is so sweet that kids are usually happy buying a bag of cut-up mangos or pineapple to munch on.  A lot of neighbors in Limón 2000 make homemade ice cream.  It’s a little more liquidy than regular ice cream and is typically sold in little plastic bags.  To eat, you just bite off a corner of the bag and push the ice cream out.  Kids like chocolate, but it’s expensive here so they don’t buy it very often.  There’s one similar treat that kids just love, if they can get their hands on it:  cocoa fruit.  Chocolate is made from cocoa seeds, which come from the fruit of the cocoa tree.  The seeds grow in pods about the size of a football.  You can crack these pods open and you’ll find inside the seeds mixed together with the fruit—kind of like a pumpkin, but with bigger seeds.  You pick out the seeds and suck the fruit off of them, and then spit them out.  They taste nothing like chocolate but are still very delicious.  

Cocoa fruit, photo courtesy of Flickr user Slipkjohn2

Letters!

The following series of posts are responses to the letters I received from Mrs. Stonecipher's 4th grade class. Enjoy!

¡Hola muchachos!  I absolutely loved reading the letters you sent me.  Every single one was written very well, and I learned a lot about you, your families, and your interests.   You’re a talented bunch, with so many athletes and culture aficionados (you sure love music and movies).  And you come from some big families, I see too!  Would you believe that a family with four kids is considered average size, or even small here?  These days the families are smaller than in the past, but they still can be quite big.  The librarian from our school comes from a family of twenty kids!  Can you believe that?  OK, most families aren’t that big, but it’s pretty normal for a husband and wife to have five or six kids.

I was also happy to see so much curiosity among you.  You asked some great questions, and I hope to get around to all of them.  Guess which question was asked the most times among all of you.  “What’s it like sleeping under a mosquito net?”  Well, it actually does feel a little like sleeping under a tent.   I actually go to bed sometimes with a flashlight so I can read before going to sleep!  Sometimes it gets annoying, because if you don’t tuck it in under the mattress on every side, the mosquitoes will surely find a way in.  It makes my bedroom feel a lot smaller too.  

Oh, and one quick note.  I'll be putting some photos up to help explain things a little better, so I hope you get to see them; and hopefully we can fix the photos that you currently can't see on my blog.  

Pura vida, 

Kevin

Pen Pals - Round 1

The following note is a message to the MS224 Mott Haven students who were kind and energetic enough to strike up a pen pal program with students from Limon 2000.  Scroll down to see a video of our first session:

¡Saludos Nueva Yorkers!

Primero me gustaría agradecerles el montón de cartas recibimos de Uds.  A los estudiantes les encantó aprender de sus vidas y gustos, además de responder a sus preguntas.

Igual que Señor Johnson, yo hice una presentación pequeña sobre The Bronx, enseñándoles donde queda en la ciudad de Nueva York y en el país.  Además, vieron fotos de su barrio que Señor Johnson me había mandado.  Les gustó ver una foto del número de casa escrito en vitrales encima de la puerta de un apartamento.  Aquí en Costa Rica la mayoría de las casas y edificios no tiene dirección.  Para recibir un correo hay que dar direcciones y descripciones (por ejemplo, del Banco Nacional, 100m al norte, 25m al este, casa amarilla con verjas verdes).  Otro dato interesante:  ¡hay bastantes costarricenses que viven alrededor de Nueva York!  Muchas aquí en el país me han contado de su familia en Brooklyn, en Boston y en Nueva Jersey.

Bueno chicos, espero que las cartas lleguen salvas y sanas y que Uds nos puedan escribir pronto.  Casi termina el año escolar en Costa Rica, y los estudiantes están esperando su respuesta antes de que se vayan.  ¡Les quieren escribir de nuevo!

Atentamente,
Kevin

 

Connect: Reconnect

It's amazing how time flies when you're speaking Spanish!

Though I'm still in the same spot, a lot has changed with my correspondences back in the States. First off, I'd like to welcome a trio of new groups of readers to this page: Mrs. Stonecipher's 4th graders at Clark Elementary (near Indianapolis), Ms. Hoglund's new batch of 8th graders from Howe in Chicago, and the Mr. Johnson's 6th-8th graders from Mott Haven in the Bronx. I'm looking forward to hearing your questions and learning about all of you.

To Mr. Johnson and Ms. Hoglund: feel free to supplement any correspondences with my more advanced writing on my Guineagogy blog. I'll also post some links to some of the blogs of my favorite co-volunteer writers in my 'For the Bored' section.

For now, let me tell you all a little more about Limón 2000:

It's amazing how time flies when you're speaking Spanish!

Though I'm still in the same spot, a lot has changed with my correspondences back in the States. First off, I'd like to welcome a trio of new groups of readers to this page: Mrs. Stonecipher's 4th graders at Clark Elementary (near Indianapolis), Ms. Hoglund's new batch of 8th graders from Howe in Chicago, and the Mr. Johnson's 6th-8th graders from Mott Haven in the Bronx. I'm looking forward to hearing your questions and learning about all of you.

To Mr. Johnson and Ms. Hoglund: feel free to supplement any correspondences with my more advanced writing on my Guineagogy blog. I'll also post some links to some of the blogs of my favorite co-volunteer writers in my 'For the Bored' section.

For now, let me tell you all a little more about Limón 2000:
-The neighborhood is about three hours from the San José (the capital of Costa Rica) and a half hour by bus from Limón (the capital of Limón province). Limón is right on the Atlantic Ocean and houses the country’s largest port on the Atlantic side.
-Roughly 3,000 people live in Limón 2000
-The neighborhood turned 20-years-old this year. Beforehand it was private property.
-Some common jobs people have are truck drivers, house workers, office workers or retail sales in Limón, and construction workers.
-The grade school and high school take place in the same building. There are plans to build a new high school, but construction has not yet started.
-I work closely with the equipo interdisciplinario, which is a lot like a counselor’s office in the U.S.
-For being the most diverse province in Costa Rica, Limón is often called el cresol de cultura, or the melting pot of culture. There are strong populations of people of Costa Rican, Afro-Caribbean, Nicaraguan, indigenous, and Chinese descent. In the beach communities on the coast you can even find large groups of Americans who years ago escaped the U.S. for the slow Caribbean life. The most celebrated of these cultures is Afro-Caribbean. To date there are festivals and parades celebrating the region’s African roots. Still, there is a healthy mix, and it’s not uncommon to see a person with a mix of any/all of these cultures in her blood.
-Like in Guinea, I sleep with a mosquito net to protect against critters.  Mosquitos here carry malaria and dengue fever, two tropical diseases that can be quite nasty.  The malaria here isn't as bad as in Guinea (nor as common), but it's better to be safe than sorry! 

Here are some photos that might do a better job of telling the tale:

My Limón host parents, Don Carlos (64) and Doña Ivonne (67)

Kindergarten students on their way to the cafeteria

In front of my host family's house

My bed and mosquito net

Until next time!  Pura Vida, Kevin