Sunday, 4 minutes after my first dose of Chloroquine

My Site Info came 2 nights ago! For the next 10 weeks (9 weeks, the first week of Orientation is held in a small valley outside of San Jose called Orosi) I'll be living with a family of 4 in the mountains southeast of San Jose, right in the heart of coffee territory. The village (town?) is called Llano Bonito, population 2600, and is spread out across the ridge of a mountain. My family consists of a single mother named Zeneida, and 3 children (hers, I'm assuming): Christian - 26, Hellen - 18, and Asley - 12. Allegedly, I'll have a room to myself with a cold shower all my own. WorldTeach sent me two pages of information regarding the town, the bus schedule (or lack of), local resources (scarce), ideas for community projects, my host family, and details about the school where I'll be teaching (which they tell me is a new building with 4 classrooms, overlooking a "beautiful valley." I had been holding out remote hopes for a beach-side placement, but all expectations aside I couldn't be happier.

Important: While my host family does have a phone, my town has no internet access! I'm hoping to make it into San Marcos once a week to check email, update this site, and check the news. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not that's a realistic expectation. Nonetheless, it would sure be nice to have a few notes from friends and family waiting for me when I do make it into town :-)

Expectations: I'm generally weary of pre-departure orientation materials (they're the densest source of cliche's per capita), but given the uncertainty of my upcoming experience, I figured I'd give the WorldTeach materials due diligence. Low and behold, they've proven useful beyond my most rudimentary expectations!

In the spirit of the following paragraph, from pg. 26 of my volunteer handbook, I'm going to flesh out some expectations for myself, for you, and for us. This promises to be the post I re-read most often in the coming weeks.

"Living and working overseas requires being flexible because rarely does anything go according to plan. For Americans who are used to being "in control" of their lives there is the sudden shock of being in a country where the ethics, pace, goals, and perspective are not what they are used to. It is essentail that we try to bring our expectations to the surface ahead of time, to assess what is the "lens" through which we will evaluate daily life."

Fair enough.

1) What images have you been building in your mind over the past months?
3 months ago I imagined homes with dirt floors and no electricity, and people who lived with much less material wealth but much greater appreciation for life, family, and community. Research has reformed the images of desititute poverty that I'd originally pictured. I expect a simpler life, but one of relative comfort. My mind is filled with images of coffee farmers, genuine smiles, intense curiousity, hospitality and community above all else, magnificent wildlife, lush green hills, grinning children, horrible roads and lunatic bus drivers, American tourists (who I hope not to meet), rice and beans, mosquito nets (I don't think I'll need one at a high elevation), embarassment as I struggle to improve my Spanish, joy as I struggle to improve my Spanish, small and minimally decorated concrete classrooms, the Miami airport (?), the possibility of getting sick or ill, the remote fear of being lost in a foreign country, loneliness, excuberating salsa lessons, and hopefully, after some time, life injected with a sense of community unparalleled by anything I've experienced here at home.

2) What do you expect your living arrangement, work situation, school, community, endurace level, and reaction to poverty will be?
I envision a modest tin house along a dirt road, 2 stories, the back of the home facing southeast over a vast and expansive valley. Green for miles around. Coffee plants along the side of the road. Men walking to work with, t-shirts permanently dirty, the smell of coffee in the morning, the smell of fresh baked cakes with a hint of cinnamon (this is totally unfounded). A cold shower, very little time alone, much time in front of the TV watching telenovelas, ideally a lot of time in the living room with the TV off speaking Spanish with my family, sitting down at the family room table with Hellen teaching her English in exchange for Spanish. Working in a four-room building off a similar dirt road, also facing southeast over an even more beautiful and luscious part of the village, perhaps only a 5-10 minute walk from home, open air windows with a warm breeze, Costa Rican kids in uniforms, an eager director (her name is Roxy, she must be eager). I expect difficulty in formulating my lesson plans, I expect creative road blocks, I expect frustration and doubt, I expect this will all pass, I expect of myself a much greater level of patience than I demonstrated with kids at DHCC both internally and externally, I expect to chastise myself for using too much Spanglish in class, I expect to sing out of key, to make up games nobody has ever heard of, to free myself of any fears or inhibitions about acting foolish or singing out of key for the sake of laughs, learning, and love - for if I share those three L's with this community, this experience will be a success.

3) What do you expect of the WorldTeach program
Grant me independence, be there for support 24/7, visit me in my village at least once, facilitate sharing of experiences between volunteers, get me the hell out of there if there's an emergency, help generate creative ideas for lesson plans, palsmanship.

4)How will you adjust if these things aren't what you expected?
A lot of pouting and even more sulking. Just kidding. I need to write, daily. I need to reflect, to refocus by coming back to these expectations, and remember that the whole idea of this life adventure, this unique opportunity that would never ever have come about for me and can never come about for most people my age, in this world, without the love, support, financial sacrifice, and trust of my family, is to put myself in a situation that is unnerving, unpredictable, uncomfortable, and foreign, so that I may better understand and one day work to solve the challenges, injustices, and preventable hardships faced by 5/6 of this world's population. Read The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs, and you'll understand why I'm doing this.

5)How do you find out what expectations others may have of you?
Guessing and assuming won't lead far. I imagine there will be various expectations placed upon me; expectations of me as the sole native English speaker in the village, and within this subsect, expectations from adults, children, students, non-students, men, women, my host-family (will they expect me to devote most of my free time to them and their activities? will they want me to meet their family and friends, and be exclusive with that group?), the school-director Roxy...There will be expectations of me from WorldTeach, expectations as an American, as a Bucknell Alum (jesus, I haven't written that before!), expectations from friends and family. The more I make myself available for questions, the more questions I ask, the more and various ways I attempt to establish communication and receive feedback, the clearer picture I will have of what expectations people have of me, which ones I can and should attempt to meet, which I cannot, and which should be given priority. What expectations do you, as a friend, family member, former professor (friend) of mine have of me?

6)What are your expectations of your free time and how you will spend it?
Reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, Learning spanish, making friends, talking, talking, talking.