AdvSpanishGSLCostaRica

Hello amazing families! We just want to thank you for entrusting us with your incredible young people. This group has been super inclusive, kind, and participatory despite some of the expected challenges along the way. They have written reflections (including a letter to themself that Profe Mara will send to them in 6 months) and have new ways of seeing the world and what they are capable of. It’s fair to say that they have processed much and will continue to process more even after this trip is behind them. They may not be able to remember all 3-week stretches of school this year, but they will remember their time in Costa Rica.   In case it’s helpful, here are a few prompts specific to our trip to help you all go deeper into conversations, or maybe spark a flood of details.   Pura vida, Trip Leaders Jay, Mara, Debby   Prompts for Discussion:   Who were the people in your home stay family? What was their relation to the other families? What did you all ta...

The day has finally come. In 8 hours, we will finally be heading home after a long, exciting, and fulfilling adventure. Back in San Jose, our waking up to the sounds of cars honking and alarms beeping instead of the crow of a rooster was quite a change after our stay with the Bri Bri people, but we awoke ready for our last full day in Costa Rica.   After another typical breakfast of rice, beans, and eggs, we followed our guide, Matt, on another walk through San Jose. We passed some familiar sights, but the standout destination was the Museum of Gold.   From the bottom floor up, the Museum of Gold was a self-guided tour through the culture and artifacts of past indigenous peoples, including those of the Bri Bri people, and other details of Costa Rican history, including the evolution of their currency. It was interesting to see the similarities and differences between the way the worldview was presented in museum exhibits and the stories told to us by Miriam and our host fam...

Lasts Sooner than I had anticipated, our trip was coming to an end. Our last morning in our host community, we worked our final service: gardening in the hot sun while listening to music being blasted from my house, which conveniently lay next to the greenhouses. Kids from the neighborhood joined in, planting seeds and dancing alongside us.   Back at Stibrawpa, our gathering space for the past three weeks, we sat for lunch and enjoyed a yummy dessert, jello. During our card game, a five-year-old named Jaylen borrowed the blog iPod to take photos of us and his brother.   Within an hour, we were told we were going to be given the opportunity to perform something for our families, and the consensus wasn’t to sing, but we did so anyways. Our rendition of “Mamma Mia” changed lyrics to both Spanish and BriBri, now a song called “Miā Miā”. At the farewell event, we all gave our performance, and after that fun part, we were called up in turns to say goodbyes to our families. The...

Free Time with Friends   One of the things I didn’t think about with GSL was all the free time. I always heard about the service, but a lot of our time was ours. At the start, I think we really didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We were out of practice. At home, we have such little free time that it seems necessary to fill it with the most easily accessible fun (usually something on a screen). We don’t have those here, but even if we did I don’t think we’d be using them very much. We actually have time, so we can do the fulfilling task instead of the fast one.   For a lot of us, reading was the easy task; you just sit down, grab a book, and get to it. Now don’t get me wrong, we’re burning through books like it’s the Library of Alexandria, but when there’s another option we tend to pick something else.   Different people are naturally drawn to different things, but everything we pick is in some way social. Of course there’s just plain conversation (a classic), bu...

Today was the first day of our final service project — planting. We planted banana trees with Miriam, Wayland’s host mom, as our guide and teacher.   I has assumed we would be getting a little bag of seeds, but we headed into the forest with nothing but shovels and a wheelbarrow. We started by collecting the “seeds,” which were actually just other banana plants. We looked for small banana plants that were close together or in the shade of bigger trees and dug them out. These plants, being in non-ideal locations, would likely never produce very much fruit or would be difficult for the community to harvest. Miriam used a machete to cut off the majority of the stem and leaves, leaving us with the root ball which would serve as the seed for the new plant.   With our seeds in tow, we then searched for a place to plant. We came across an open space in the sun and started to dig. We dug holes and then fit the seeds into the ground, being careful to make sure the seed (root ball) ...

Title: Sugar & Chocolate Between rain showers, we spent this morning participating in the chocolate making process and extracting juice from sugar canes. Both of these plants grow abundantly in our host community. We learned that there are countless varieties of cacao tress, with fruit ranging from orange, to pink, to red. There are also at least 8 types of sugar canes, each used for unique purposes because of their different levels of sweetness, fibers, and juiciness.   Chocolate My first introduction to the cacao fruit happened earlier this trip. Under the instruction of two young cousins (Yenani and Keili), I twisted the football-shaped fruit off of a low hanging branch. After bashing it open against a rock, the fruit opened up to reveal dozens of white, goop-covered, beans. We took turns plucking the beans out of the thick shell, sucking the almost mango-tasting pulp off, and spitting out the hard middle. In our class today, we learned the steps of how this bitter bean...