Thinking I´d Been Cured of My Arachnophobia

Day 48 and I didn´t think spiders this enormous lived in houses. Not without paying rent. I was standing before the toilet, watching a suspiciously large centipede on the far wall, and I just had a hunch. Sure enough, I saw a fierce looking leg, then another, extend from just below my showerhead. When the 8 (or perhaps it was 16?) legger and I made eye contact, my reaction was first one of interest. That interest was soon followed by bloodthirst. I grabbed a mop from the bordering hallway, approached, but my enemy in his gargantuousness must also have had an abnormally acute sense of foreknowledge. He fled! Quickly, through a whole in the wall impossibly smaller than he. Just as he approached the entrance to what must have been his inconceivably intricate layer, I was sure I had a clean shot at his hind legs. My mop was thick and I lunged. Crack! I pulled the mop back, hurriedly flipped it over to view the results, and stared disbelieving at the clean red cloth. When I looked up, I guess I shouldn´t have been surprisded I broke a soccer ball sized hole in the double sided wall.

I returned to my room, annoyed and feeling the initial self doubts that accompany defeat. I decided that I would seek to enhance my one sure human advantage in preparation for an almost certain second encounter: My ability to acquire knowledge. A brief skim through Lonely Planet´s Staying Healthy in Central America, a small book which would be more aptly titled The Hypochondriac´s Guide to Central America, revealed that my new roommate demonstrated more or less every physical criteria of a black widow. Although I was rather confident that I hadn´t spotted the trademark red scar across the belly, my imagination assured me that of course, I had not seen the belly side of the beast. A black widow.

Thus, he was a she. The females of the species get their name from consuming the much smaller males immediately after mating. Upon branding, she had now acquired a previously unasummed potential, namely, her ability to kill me.

I slept for the next 3 days in a state of unusual paranoia, covered from forehead to toenail in a sweater, pants, and only one blanket. I had removed all other layers of bed cloth in the off chance that they could serve as a hideout for the Widow and her supporting army. I showered every morning with my eyes open, enduring the pain of of a steady and cold Head and Shoulders stream across my retinas. Having not encountered her again for four days, at dusk, around the 96th hour, I found her dead and partially consumed by little black ants, her massive and crippled black corpse lying pathetically still on the red floor below my toilet. A sad, and mysterious ending indeed, she appeared to have fallen victim of some sort of shoe swatting or perhaps a stomping. Later that night, I inquired with the host mom, and sure enough, the bruha had come through, showing once again that she stomps the life out from any creature that crosses her path.

And for one shining moment in my stay at a house where, to my relief, now lived only one widow, I loved her.

Teaching.

It´s so easy to get frustrated with my students when they show no interest in learning. But to do so offers a path with no solutions. To solve their problem of apathy, I first have to identify that the that the only person I can change is me. I´ve learned not to blame them, but rather, to ask what I can do to prepare differently, and to subsequently engage them. They can learn anything. There is always a way. My job as a teacher is to find it.

On the brevity of time remaining.

In 15 days I´ll be sleeping in my own bed, this one of my various lives in different places having gently put to an end. Sometimes it seems like the minutes crawl by, but before I know it, I´m going to be at home with a cell phone and internet and comfort and nothingness, no surprises, no unexpected challenges, no predators lurking between the doubled sided walls in my shower, feeling slightly displaced but stronger for knowing what I now know. How crazy are those slightly awkward moments when I just pop over to Lourdes´, Maximillion (yes), and Nicole´s house, hoping for companionship and maybe even food, like a Gringo dog who has walked through the rain to scratch gingerly at the front door. Isn´t the awful fear of getting into the shower with a black widow or maybe one day a tarantula (saw a dead one in the street the other day) better than the warm shower and sportscenter I know at home? Aren´t the smiles on the faces of my two little apprentices, Nicole and Paola, EXACTLY the reason I came to Costa Rica. I´m not in the least romanticizing it when I say that those girls and little Favri who you´ll have to see pictures of to believe really only have 2 or 3 outfits, are thrilled by learning simply new tricks like sticking a finger into your mouth, making a fishhook, and pulling outward to make a popping sound, and are A-tentive when I sit on the couch, NIcole on my left, angled toward me, pensive, Paola on the right with her left arm resting on my right leg and learning decidedly slower than Nicole, teaching them a word or a phrase at a time in English, smiling as they mispronounce everyword in an increasingly predictable way. Ai, Teecher/ Jess (yes)/ Geeb mee ai... kees /Eet ees...Tursdai. All pronounced by slightly altering your speech as to pronounce everything like you are simultaneously trying to say it and swallow it.

Others.

That little four year old girl with a curly black ponytail stood there in the basement singing ´tiene gripe´(in the classic playground taunting tone) and pointing at me for more than 30 seconds.

I judged a Costa Rican science fair last week. I judged a Costa Rican science fair last week, in Spanish. I didn´t know I would be judging a science fair last week, though I knew if I were to ever judge a science fair in Costa Rica, it would be in Spanish. Knowing of the possibility of judging a science fair in Spanish, but not knowing I would be judging a science fair last week, I was asked to judge a science fair last week. I did so in Spanish.

I´ve developed a subtle pride for the American Soccer team. I mean, C´mon! Did anyone else watch the Gold Cup Championships last weekend!?

I´m mid-stride in front of the churchyard, white t-shirt and jeans, chasing Costa Rican children in a game of tag.

I´m riding upright, standing in a truckbed of a vehicle that is bumping downhill, a dirtroad with switchbacks, through coffee fields and past the occasional banana tree.

I´m wondering if this úncover what culture you can´adventure of mine, this life in this town, feels full to those who live here daily? TO me it´s a passing stage whit a definite end. If permanency were to set in here, I´m sure I´d run away. I drank a turtle egg in a bar today, assuming Huevos de Tortuga was just a cute name for the spicy shooter. And why do they put ice in their beer, and moreso, mustn´t it taste awful? It´s one thing I haven´t tried and maybe I should. U.S.A culture is adapted here, but here´s how. Music loses all its conetextual and cultural significance, gone with the language barrier. Girls wear t-shirts with bratty one-liners in English, apparently only concerned about the appearance, obviously unaware of the significance of those cute and glittery letters.

Emily made another great observation, this time about the influx of Gringos to the pacific beaches in this country, and the impending American Colonization of Costa Rica (just wait), and the displacement of locals in Marbella, a town that has been purchased in its entirety by one Gringo entrepreneur. He has hired the locals to ´clear the land´for one dollar an hour. They take the jobs, and sell the land, because the price in the short run is (for them) impossible to resist. This land comes to this entrepreneur with no capital gains tax. He will one day soon sell this land to Giant American hotels, restaurants, Condo Builders, the like. The jobs that will be available in that town will be at the future Ritz Carlton, and the like. Americans will come to live and to work. Don´t think that youll find too many of Marbella´s life long citizens working in high class service jobs that require fluid english, when they´ve worked the land their whole lives. If you think this is not a probelm for Costa Rica, tell me where all the displaced citizens like those of Marbella are going to go to live and to work.

Nicaragua seems like a fair guess. Maybe theyll find some good sweatshop labor, now that CAFTA has passed. Jeffrey Sachs points out that sweatshop labor is a step in the right direction for extremely impoverished developing countries. But what for those who will (potentially, I´m speculating here), find that work to be a step down, after a comfortable but modest life in the fields?

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To end, a quick experiment in writing.

Adam Yukelson is a volunteer English teacher standing at a crowded Catholic Mass in Central Costa Rica. He is Jewish, but at the moment, is keeping that to himself. His friend Alex stands to his left, speaking to him in broken English. Eet ees hOngree. No No No, listen Alex: I AM hungry. The 400 or so people await instruction, staring forward. One woman´s breast has flopped out into the mouth of her chubby son. Public breast feeding hardly catches his attention anymore, he sees it everywhere. He watches as the girl in the mint green pants walks with her child towards an open pew in front of the mint green walls. He wonders whether the legs or the wall or hidden by a thicker material. The Church band knows only one song, and amusingly, it is cumbia, played in the same key repeatedly during the service, except at the end when it is not played in the same key. Fascinated for 30 minutes, his mind wanders soon thereafter, and is far away, apartment shopping in Brooklyn.