This is Cindy, reporting live from costa rica (yes, I still live).
I´m currently in Costa Rica, in a small rural town called San Carlos. I´ve been here for about 12 days and counting (12 down, 44 days to go). Things have been good here - I volunteer at 3 different places, Monday and Wednesday I volunteer at an elementary school for the physically and mentally disabled children. Tuesday and Thursday I volunteer at a day care centre for the elderly, and Friday I volunteer at a medical clinic. I have my afternoons free and also weekends free, although my day starts at 6am and often doesn´t end until 10pm the earliest.
The special education school is interesting, given that I have never worked with physically or mentally disabled people before. I got to learn many different techniques and exercise many parts of my creativity I never knew existed. I learned to do physical therapy on kids, lead a blind child around the block, feed an polio and epiletic girl food, play games with blind children, wheel children in wheelchairs, and in general just amazed everyday at how much I do not know. Oh by the way, I have forgotten all my Spanish so it´s extremely difficult to communicate with anybody, let alone children who is so severely disabled they can´t pronounce half of the things they want to say to me. The most rewarding thing so far has been when the epiletic girl let me feed her lunch. The teachers told me that she generally wouldn´t let anybody feed her. Not even the teachers have successfully fed her - only her mom could do it. But little Yalile let me feed her and when I was told that afterwards I was so happy.
The seniors day care centre is also quite an experience in itself. I have limited experience working with the elderly and this is definitely very eyeopening. The seniors are so, so adorable and so eager for company it makes me feel appreciated, which doesn´t happen very often. I learned a couple of arts and crafts, played bingo, human monopoly, and do physical exercises with them. It´s only been my third time visiting there today since last Thursday was Costa Rica´s independence day and everything was closed. But it is good. My lack of Spanish still hurts me, and since we are in a rural community they use a lot of local slangs that I cannot find in the dictionary as well.
I have not gone to the medical clinic yet, tomorrow is my first day. According to another guy who goes to teh clinic regularly, he gets to help in surgeries and operations, so I am looking forward to getting my hands on some patients as well (haha, it sounds so wrong). I will also get to compare different cultures and medical systems and that shall be muy interesante.
In the afternoon and at night, the CCS organization has arranged for us to have all sorts of different experiences. For instance, Mondays we have cooking class, sign language class, and guest speakers. Tuesdays we have Spanish classes. Wednesday we have fieldtrips to local places. Thrusdays we have Spanish classes and dance lessons. And Friday and the weekend is free for us to do anything we want, and we usually go on weekend trips to other parts of Costa Rica. Being a keen learner, I obviously attend all of those availabile classes, so I can in fact cook some Costa Rica food, sign in Spanish, tell you a little bit about the history of Costa Rica, speak better Spanish than I first got here. I have also swam in the local hotspring (among rain forest - it was the coolest experience ever to be in the hotspring while it pours cold water. Amazing, AMAZING.), visited the local volcano, and dance Salsa and Cumbia (Next week - marangue - sp?). Last weekend the 17 of us visited Montezuma beach, and it was pretty but the trip sucked because we missed the ferry both on the way there and coming home. In fact the return trip took 11 hours instead of the original 5 hours, since we waited 6 hours for the ferry. We missed 2 ferries in a row because they were full. This weekend half of us are going to Parque Nacional de Tortuguero (sp?) and it´s also going to be amazing. We´ll get to catch the last group of turtles mate and migrate away. Man I am hoping to grab onto the shells of the turtles and swim with them! That would be amazing. (ya I sound like I know what I am doing but I actually haven´t done any research into where I am going this weekend or next weekend. My group is pretty good at telling me what is good to do there).
Anyhow, after talking to papie online I killed 90 min of internet. That´s gotta be a littel bit more expensive than I am used to! So I´m gonna run now. Bye guys, keep those posts coming (although it did take me a long time to catch up finally).
