Settling in

What a busy week! Monday was a fourteen hour day to San Jose and back. We picked up a couple more teachers who just arrived in Costa Rica and we went to the police headquarters for our fingerprints to be registered. If the paperwork for a work visa is not processed by October, I will need to leave Costa Rica for three days and re-enter as a tourist.

Tuesday was the first gathering of the entire school staff. We met at a retreat center and enjoyed team-building activities. Before supper together, we had a dance class with two young instructors (students of MFS) who taught us marengue, salsa, and. . . ooops, I forgot the other name. . . it’s a bouncy dance.

Wednesday we began with meeting for worship. Some members of the wider Monteverde community regularly attend mid-week meeting, too. We were at the school all day with meetings about the schedule, discussions on integrating Quakerism in our curriculum, and working in our classrooms. That evening the Bank Street teachers (NYC) hosted a dinner at a local restaurant for all the teachers in town. The five large tables were integrated with teachers from the local public school, teachers from Creativa (Cloud Forest School), teachers from MFS, and the visiting teachers from New York.

Thursday was another school day for teachers. Then we gathered at the home of two of the teachers and prepared a very delicious meal together. I enjoyed making tortillas and all of the laughter in the kitchen. We carried the food up to the next house and ate with Annika and her family. We finished our meal with a traditional rice pudding and Annika’s birthday cake.

After a full day at school on Friday, I was very happy to be home alone. I washed some clothes and hung them to dry on my retractable clothes line, from the bedroom to the kitchen. While filling my cabina with the wonderful smell of baked bread, I learned some of the quirks of my oven.

I walked to the home of friends with a fresh loaf of bread on Saturday morning and borrowed their vacuum cleaner. Then, I gathered with others for a nature walk with Frank, the biologist. From the small waterfall, we scampered up a steep muddy slope, using the roots of a huge fig tree for hand-holds and foot-holds. Hundreds of years ago, this fig tree took root and grew over a large tree that grew out from the bank and reached over the waterfall that splashed far below. The original host tree is long gone. So, we took turns crawling up through the fig tree several meters. It was a wooden tunnel with plenty of windows and the first two people awakened the bats from their fig tree home. We were happily drenched in the rain as we bushwhacked to a trail and followed trails back to town.
It took me an hour to rinse mud from my jacket, pants, socks, and boots. I hung up everything to dry and turned my attention to housecleaning.

In the sixty years that my cabina has been standing, it has never seen a vacuum cleaner before. The wooden walls rise high overhead with exposed horizontal, vertical, and diagonal two-by-fours. I used my precarious stool taped to a chair which I perched up on the kitchen table to reach the high crevices. I wore my headlamp to see the dirty cobwebs and dead insect bodies high overhead. The balancing and re-stacking of furniture and shop-vac occupied the rest of Saturday evening.

My neighbor, Micki, used the shop-vac in her cabina Sunday morning while I made both of us breakfast. A blue morpho fluttered by the open kitchen shutters as we ate. Then, we returned the vacuum cleaner on the way to meeting for worship. After meeting, I went to someone’s house to buy peanutbutter. We worked on a jigsaw puzzle until I left to walk two miles in the rain back to the MFS to use the computer. I never got the phone line to work. Instead, I went off with my umbrella to the cheese factory for milk and butter on my way home.