"If my eyes could take photos..."

I feel like I'm in a groove where I keep seeing things I hope I never forget. Holy Week in Costa Rica keeps throwing picture perfect moments in my face, and the trick is to have my camera with me and turned on. There's only so many times a day I can say, “I'll remember this forever!” and mean it. Better to have the camera with me. I'm writing this at home, and when I post it I'll see if the internet is highly functioning – if so, I'll definitely post my favorite pictures from this week.

Holy Week is a weird combo of faith and vacation. A lot of people I've talked to say that Holy Week should be for prayer, contemplation and piety. Most people I've seen, though, take off for the beach or some other beautiful destination. That makes me feel like I can legitimately claim that my Holy Week began yesterday, sitting in a bar after class let out and enjoying the Barcelona/Madrid fútbol game. It's not officially on the bill of events released by the church, but I felt like my spirit was nourished just the same. After drinking a cafecito with my girls in one of their homes and a mini dance party, I stayed up until 11:30 pm (WHOA – party animal) watching another Barbie movie with my sisters. I am an awesome, tolerant older sister. It also helps to fall asleep in the first half hour.

This morning there was a group of fellow gringos that rolled through my town and we went on a hike to a nearby bridge. It was supposed to take from 7:00 to 10:00 am, however I did not get home until 12:30 pm. I'd like to blame hora tica, the inevitable time delay in Costa Rica that people refer to in alternating loving and frustrated tones. But in reality, it was probably more due to the paralysis I experienced when it came time to climb our way out from the river we were swimming in. Steep rock faces and I do not agree, it turns out. But anyway, I made it with a lot of encouragement.

Since then, this afternoon has just been a massive fiesta of eating and watching religious movies on T.V. (they're the only programming offered during Holy Week.) I'm not sure if all of them are really that holy. Supposedly they'll be showing Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, and Spartacus later this weekend. I'll still watch 'em...it's like a Spanish Mystery Science Theater 3000 viewing these movies with the whole familia, everyone squished into my parent's bed.

Yup – I've made the leap. I watch T.V. like a true tica, next to six other people on a queen-sized bed.

Seriously, though, this week is fascinating. Today and tomorrow all the stores are shut down. No buses are running at all, in the whole country. You can't buy alcohol. Bathing is discouraged (you'll turn into a mermaid. But actually, would that be terrible?). A huge statue of Jesus is carried from town to town on the shoulders of the devout. There are people who enact the walk of Jesus to his death, making a circuit of the towns and ending at Mass. No meat, just fish. And no beans – this, out of everything, is what distresses me the most. Today I did not get my gallo pinto, the standard breakfast food. Made from last night's rice and beans, mixed together and refried with some salsa lizano, gallo pinto is what makes me get up out of bed some days. Boo. Definitely looking forward to 6:00 am Saturday morning.

But all the other eating! Today my family went all out and made fruit salad and served it with vanilla ice cream. I almost died from happiness, but settled for a three hour nap.

These are the days to enjoy, too. It seems like relatively little time is left in training and soon I'll have to leave my family. As excited as I am to find out where I'm going (this coming Monday!), as eager as I am to begin my service, my training town feels like home. It'll be hard to leave friends and family. So for now, I'm just soaking it all in.

Pura. Vida.

End scene.

Ok, so I haven't listened to Shakira seriously since I was in middle school.  I was a Spanish class “Superestrella” and the CD that was my prize and compensation for being a total nerd had “Estoy Aquí” and “Ojos Así” as two of its tracks.  Certainly those were the two tracks I listened to the most, learning words by heart that were beyond the emotional comprehension of my twelve year-old self.  I'm not sure what ever happened, why I stopped seeking out Shakira's music.  I just rediscovered Shakira in a big way a few weeks ago and guau...that woman lets loose a sound that pours into my ears and heart and paralyzes my overactive brain.

And of course my brain is overactive again.  I say “again” because for awhile here it was really easy to block out the things that I was trying to leave behind in the U.S.  Being overly scheduled, overly stimulated, and overly tired is a great cure for heartbreak and one that I've tried and found true once before.  But it just takes one moment to change – some small memory surfaces because I see a guy wearing dress socks and sneakers.  Bam.

Soon other accidental observations haul more memories out of the dark corners they've been creeping in.  Like yesterday, I was on a bus listening to Shakira sing, “Cada día pienso en ti.  Pienso un poco más en ti...” and yelling at myself inside my head, “I do not want to think about this!”  In a panicked motion, I clicked on the next track which happens to have the chorus, “...bruta, ciega, sordomuda, torpe, traste, testaruda es todo que he sido...no sé como olvidarte...”  Well...eff.  So I searched out “La Tortura” because it's one of my favorites and I though it was safe.  God damn.  “...Me duele tanto que tu fueras sin decir adonde.”

So then I switched to some Mumford and Sons.  “I have other things to fill my time...now let me at the truth which will refresh my broken mind.”  Word.  The truth in this case is that I have so many better things going for me right now than dwelling on what was not possible and is clearly never going to be.  It's an easy conclusion to come to, but difficult to live by.  I'm hoping that by posting this it'll help my resolve – not that there's a world of people reading my blog, but at the very least now it's a massive issue of personal pride that I've made my commitment to move on public.

This isn't a time to drown in fabricated meaning and half-formed truths and maybe-could-have-beens and all the misery that stuff entails.  This is my time to, “Decide what to be and go be it.”  So that's me, shelving the Shakira and letting the wisdom and sound of the Avett Brothers carry me back into this awesome existence that I've been distracted from lately.

“I say it's not that simple, see, but then again it just may be...”

The glory of coffee is not just in the cup.

I've been wanting to write about the coffee fields and how they smell for a solid two weeks now.  Since I started writing that last sentence, I realized there's no way I'll be able to do it justice.  The mountains covered in cafetales with the little white flowers and light citrus scent create an aura of peacefulness around me.  I can't rely on myself to create a peaceful atmosphere – training has been a bit of a roller coaster of events and emotions.  But the novelty of looking out over a field of cafetales and feeling like the goddam luckiest woman alive despite whatever ephemeral tension I'm feeling has not yet worn off.  And I pray it never does.  Or that it can transfer to sugar cane and pineapple fields.

Because I don't think I'm going to a coffee region.  Coffee doesn't thrive in hot and humid areas, and for sure that's where my project manager has indicated I'm going.  Heat and humidity have not historically been my preferred weather conditions, but I figure two years is enough time to...have a really good reason to hate it?  Nah, I'm positive that after a month of super hot weather I'll be donning my cardigan when it hits 75°F just like all the other Ticos.  Besides, I'm positive that personal preferences have absolutely nothing to do with site assignment.  Which is cool with me.  I've gotten to decide so many things for myself in my life that it's nice to hand over control to some other entity.  Let my life be a surprise for once, which of course was a big attraction to Peace Corps in the first place.

Except then you forget things, like how yesterday was your Mom's birthday.  That is the downside to not being responsible for knowing what day of the week it is.  Mom, happy birthday!  I know it's late, but at least I didn't call you asking for money this time?

what is happening right now?!?

“I'm not at all sure what's going on right now.”  I think this ALL DAY about pretty much everything.  I have doubts about what's okay to do and what's not.  When it's okay to say what I'm thinking and when to shut the heck up (which has never been my forte and thus occupies an overwhelming part of my brain activity).  Even stuff like...do I ask for house keys tonight or can I make it back by 9:30 and should I ask one of the guys to walk me back?  Are my friends at home upset because I can't communicate like before?  I am definitely not in Kansas anymore and it accordingly feels uncomfortable sometimes.  I second guess a lot of things that I do now, which I would posit is very different than my behavior in the U.S.

Except swearing in.  Even though my recent exposure to the real Peace Corps Costa Rica lifestyle was comparatively intimidating to life in my training community, I definitely have no doubts that this is something I've gotta do.  I went to Guanacaste this weekend to stay with a current PCV who is approaching the end of her service.  At first, it freaked me the hell out to think of everything that she's accomplished – not just projects, but building relationships and making her community her home.  And I guess it freaked me out because throughout the past couple months I've tried not to think of my service in terms of “two years” and here I am visiting with someone who's at the end of the official in-country process while I'm just at the beginning.  She told me at one point that you can't think of it as two solid years, that there has to be divisions that you make in your mind.  But I didn't wrap my mind around what she was saying in that particular moment.  So yeah, she probably got a weird vibe from me because the whole weekend it was crashing in on my head like waves breaking on a beach what “two years” really means.

I wouldn't want the world to be anything less than surprisingly dynamic.  So for two years, I expect that things at home keep changing and that I keep changing as well.  I'll come back a different person to a situation that is, for good reasons, different than what it was when I left.  I won't list all that this entails, you can use your imagination.  My wild imagination is exactly why I got so freaked out.  And thus this all became another thing that I added to my long list of things to worry about.

But then I got back to my training community.  I got a shower and I got some of my perspective back.  I remembered what my volunteer told me.  I thought about my goals and the reasons why I want to be here.  “Missing stuff at home” was not on the list of reasons why I applied to Peace Corps.  So why was I so worried about it?  Instead of thinking of this as two years out of my real life – as I had begun to do this past weekend – I re-framed my thoughts to reflect again why I'm so excited about Peace Corps:  These are going to be two years that will be more real than most other things I'll ever experience in my life. 

It's really hard for me to second guess swearing in as a volunteer when I think about it like that.