"Rural" is on my mind in a big way, especially now that we've been given our site assignments and visited our future communities. I won't try to build suspense for the big reveal, mostly because I know that it's pretty much only family reading and I'll be surprised (erm, I mean, proud of) Mom if she's been able to keep a lid on this.
So I am bound for a small town (300-400 people) about an hour outside of Nicoya, Guanacaste!
Ok, so that's the info and now...let me try to process what happened during my site visit.
But jeez, process it? I'll consider myself lucky if I can just get down a sequence of events, much less make sense of it right now. When we first got assigned our sites, I was like, “Damn. Guanacaste really kicked my ass when I went on the volunteer visit.” So I was...numb, a little, you know? I was so pumped to know my site and then the news just froze it up, that crazy emotional high I'd been feeling. If you refer to previous blogs, I'm pretty sure I mention just how HOT, dry and dusty Guanacaste is. It was slightly disappointing to be assigned somewhere that I'd visited and thought, “I could never be happy here because of the physical conditions.”
Could I express that without bringing down the mood of the group or that of my friends? Nah, it was easier not to say anything. So I decided to let the glass rest at half-full at least until I got to visit my site that same week. I'd get to get out of San Jose, see a different part of the country, meet some new people, etc. “I'm sure that if I get to a place where I know I can settle in, it will be different than the volunteer visit.”
And it was.
How can I ever describe the feeling of getting off the bus in Las Pozas? Actually, getting off the bus wasn't when it hit. It was when the bus pulled away and I was in cloud of dust standing in front of a poorly kept soccer field that I thought, “Ok. I am going to call this home.” I was really grateful that my host sister had met me in San Jose at a Peace Corps workshop and had traveled back with me, because...dang. Without someone there to start tugging my suitcase across the dirt road to an opening in a fence, I think I would have stayed there all day. I was on as much sensory overload as I've experienced in places like New York City or Las Vegas.
Sensory overload didn't stop the whole five days I was in my town. My host mom seems like the example of everything that I've come to appreciate about people in the rural areas of Costa Rica. First, she didn't stop trying to feed me the whole time I was in her presence. Second, and more importantly, she works so hard to keep house and take care of her family. I cannot wait to learn from her and become part of her family.
The houses where my family lives are all grouped together, and I have my own house to sleep and shower in (kitchen and area to wash clothes are over at my host mom's place, right next door). I have my own patio. It's excellent for entertaining the mass of curious small children that I swear were tagging out with others in the community to maintain a minimum threshold of noise. And occasionally, I found out, I will be called upon to shoo chickens out of my house, including my bedroom. They just kind of wander where they please and, I didn't know until this past week, are panicky as all get out.
I'll get used to the chickens, I think. Maybe I'll get used to the steers that wander into the yard and eat up all the fallen green mangoes. Soon I'll be receiving my Stetson in the mail and after two years I'll finally have a chance to wear it in – Guanacaste is big cattle country and with that comes horses. It'll be difficult to wear a helmet (a Peace Corps mandate) and my hat, but I'll figure something out. There are supposedly big horse parades called topes in which everyone with a horse gets dressed up to show off themselves and their ride.
I have yet to see one of the howler monkeys that I hear at night and in the early morning. And I could keep writing, but the truth is I just don't know how to stop talking about something this huge that's happened. So I'll just leave it at the howler monkeys, haha. I know it's probably uber unsatisfying, there's no moral to this story. It just is, and it's awesome.
No comments:
Post a Comment