SYNOPSIS: Rescuing kitties and puppies and monkeys and mermaids and children and in the process each of us finds ourselves.
Thou rememb'rest
Since once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music.
- William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Oberon at II, i)
THE METEOR SHOWER
I am sitting on the roof of the house in Costa Rica, carefully and gently negotiating the roof tiles. Kassidy is in the crook of my arm and I hear her gasp quietly as she sees the first meteor fall from the sky.
I want to shake the package of her future to see what’s inside and to see how much of her is made of memories made at 2am while the earth spins past shattered fragments of heaven.
FINDING GOLD AT PLAYA PANAMA ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
This week a 3rd grader I had never met walked up to my waist without tilting her head to see who I was and wrapped her arms around me and stayed while I rubbed her back. This week I tried to be a quiet bystander on the outskirts of the elementary school here, but the desire to be who I am bubbled out of me like passion. I took the kids not directly involved with the arts and crafts Christmas project who were milling about aimlessly waiting for the bus and made them stand up and sit down about 75 consecutive times. Kassidy, familiar with this process, was writing the words I was teaching on the white board behind me. I am so remarkably, staggeringly out of my element teaching elementary age kids instead of high schoolers or adults, but it was still so much fun. The teachers were amenable to my returning and teaching English when the school year starts next February.
My Spanish teacher friends, I got gold. I asked the kids to talk about their school, their favorite classes, their friends, their families. They sat two at a time on a chair and spoke slowly and smiled. Then I asked them to show me their classroom. They were instinctively comprehensible. They walked around pointing and saying, “This is the chalkboard where the teacher writes. This is the other chalkboard where the teacher writes.” It was very cute and very perfect. My Christmas project is to figure out how to load them up so that they can be used.
PUPPIES AND KITTIES AND FLEAS, OH MY!
Kassidy volunteered at the CARE spay and neuter clinic on Saturday, while I made a terrible faux paux. She picked up a flea-ridden stray puppy and nuzzled it to her chest and pet it. I told her not to because the fleas were crawling all over it. The woman who runs the clinic regarded me with nothing short of disdain while telling me, basically, to get over it. They were all covered with fleas and she had been here all day already. No cure for it but a hot shower. There’s something in my daughter that I did not put there, and there is a tolerance in her that I lack. It’s really amazing to watch how generous and gentle she is with tick-ridden, fluid seeping animals. She captured two of the three kittens from the grounds that are cared for by the day guard and brought them in to be spayed and neutered. When we brought them home so drugged they appeared to be dead, she nursed them in a kennel overnight and returned them to the guard in the morning. Her eyes were puffy and red and swollen in spite of the Benadryl.
FINDING A MERMAID
So Saturday, as I was driving back
(Okay… seriously… it’s a REALLY good story but, and I’m not kidding… a congo aullador (howler monkey) just fell from an electric cable by the guard’s station. We have already returned the rental car so we’re going to walk down in the dark and see if there’s anything we can do. You just can’t make these things up.)
So Saturday, as I was driving back from Playa del Coco for the third time, feeling like a soccer mom whose kid’s sport is collecting stray cats, the traffic began to slow because there was a barely dressed woman crying on the side of the road. The truck in front of me stopped and the drivers got out. I pulled over and got out. She was not hurt, but she was sobbing and she was in a bikini. Deciphering Spanish through choking sobs is not a skill I’ve practiced and it was actually the drivers who interpreted what she said for me. What did not require much cross-cultural understanding is that you don’t put a naked woman in a truck with men. So, a minute later she was in my car. She and her boyfriend had had a fight and she was scared so she told him to let her out of the car. I told her I felt like I had found a mermaid on the side of the road. She spent the ride back to her hotel screaming into the phone at her boyfriend about being fed up with his drugs and hitting her in the face and saying mean things, but she later told me he never hit her, he just said mean things about how no one has ever loved her and he’s the only one who doesn’t abandon her. Their next conversation was her assuring him that the people at the hotel would not know what had happened and think badly of him. By the time I dropped her off at the Hilton by the airport in Liberia, I was sure she would have dinner with him and that she probably wouldn’t kick him out of her hotel room tonight. Mermaids have to want to swim away before they can really be free.
THE SHOCKING STORY OF THE CONGO AULLADOR (HOWLER MONKEY)
We are leaving for San Jose in 14 hours. We should be finishing packing and going to bed early. Instead Kassidy is hurrying with such drive her feet remind me of when she was little and we would spontaneously drop everything to seek whatever adventure her imagination was captured by that moment. We are walking to the guard station in the dark with a camera and a head lamp and a cell phone, to try to figure out what you do with an electrocuted monkey. The congo aullador fell from a branch and grabbed the live wire on his way down. Our friend Heather pulled up with her three small children and we all quietly marveled at him. He was moaning and trying to get up. He looked exactly as one might imagine a drunk monkey. Confused and disoriented and compelled to get in his car even though someone had taken his keys already. One of the three kittens that lives down there, too, was apparently curious and sat a meter away from him, staring calmly. The congo would get up and stagger and occasionally notice her, but no matter how close he came, the kitten wouldn’t move. He tried to climb the rake propped against the guard house, thinking it was a tree. The guard caught it on its way down. Hmm… that’s not a tree. Are you a tree? We called a neighbor who said she would call the monkey rescue place, but he was already responding to the deep howl that was calling him home. Since we had been there, we had been hearing the howler monkey in the tree. It’s the alpha who hollers so that everyone can stay together. Once they lost this one, they stopped and waiting and howled. He took several breaks on his way to the tree. He would stagger and then stumble and rest on his chin for a few seconds and then try again. He never appeared to be even peripherally aware of us watching. He climbed the tree and rested on the lowest branch. Hurt as he was, he would make his way back to that howl and the howler family would sit and wait and howl until he did.
It’s funny that this week tidied itself up so nicely in a little theme. In the process of rescuing, each of us had been led to our passion. Me in an environment with fleas and ticks and mange – nyuh uh. But Kassidy seems entirely comfortable there and also driven to capture and care for them. Her compassion leaks from her face and reaches from her hands. I didn’t even know how much teaching was a part of me until I was in front of kids who were telling me that they knew their numbers up to 60 and they knew how to say all of the animals in English. She’s an artist and a writer and singer and an actress. But she was also the kid who dissected a dead garter snake in our backyard a couple of years ago. So… maybe she’ll be an artist / veterinarian.
We are on our way back to Colorado for Christmas. Thank you for keeping up the howling all this time.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Sunday, December 6, 2009
CR 12.06.09
Only the present moment is real.
Every morning I wake up and look out the window first. If the ocean is still there, then I am still in this paradise and it is not a dream.
On the morning that I woke up and sat bolt upright in bed and looked out the small bedroom window in my mom’s guest room in Colorado, there was no ocean. There was no paradise. Sigh. Time to make lemonade.
It was still early, so I drove over to my sister’s house and knocked on the door at about 7:30am. My brother-in-law opened the door and my niece, Devyn, was at the end of the hallway staring. Her mouth hung open and then she ran toward me and gave me a squeezy hug.
Lemonade.
A few days later we all took Veteran’s Day off and went to the park. Devyn, Dylan, Kassidy and her cousin from the other side, Sarah. All we did was play. No cell phone. No computer. No other adults. We played on the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. 13 year-old Sarah was swinging next to me and said, “I feel like a little kid.”
Kassidy said, “I have an epiphany.” (Seriously.) She ran to the top of a hill in Bear Creek Park and rolled down it. Devyn followed her. Dylan watched. At 2… this was a new experience, and his little brain was absorbing. “Do you want to roll down the hill?” “Yes.” So Kassidy helped him. He rolled. Sideways. No up. No down. Just sideways, straight across the relatively flat hill, when viewed from that perspective. Kassidy began a hands on tutorial and Dylan was a willing student. Sarah decided to roll. And then I put down the camera and rolled. Soon after, the new game became covering each other with armloads of leaves. The weather was mild and autumny. We played volleyball and took pictures of each other. When we noticed Dylan tearing apart the contents of the diaper bag looking for animal crackers, we realized it must be time for lunch.
We spent the whole day making a memory for when we grow up. One day we will say, “Remember when we were little and rolled down the hill at the park and everyone’s pants fell down? Remember that day? That was a perfect day.”
We left to get lunch and then stopped at another park to eat it. That afternoon we went to a third park because we were having so much fun we could imagine nothing more perfect. If sliding and swinging and rolling down hills and chasing ducks (yeah… duck chasing…. It’s a Colorado past time invented by Kassidy when she was about Dylan’s age.) is your version of paradise then, after a short lunch break, all you want is more of the same.
After two weeks in Colorado teaching Fluency Fast Spanish classes and visiting my family and friends and a week in California at ACTFL with some of my favorite teacher people, a took a red-eye from LAX to Liberia. It wasn’t, though, until I saw the billboards on the highway leading to the airport as we were landing that I believed that this had not all been a dream.
The first morning I woke up and looked out the window and saw the familiar vista from my window I said, “yes!” and leaned back against my pillow, perfectly content.
Yesterday my dad, Shannon, Kassidy and I went to Borinquen. Kassidy went on the first zip line with a guide. They were clipped together and she didn’t have to do anything at all. She looked terrified, but she wanted to do it. (I love this kid!) Shannon and my dad went. I… went with a guide, too. Clipped in. Didn’t have to do anything. The guides call it going “en taxi.”
When I landed on the second platform Kassidy was beaming and saying, “I want to go by myself now.” And she did. At each platform she counted the remaining ones, “Only 8 more left.” By the last one she had watched the guides who were monkeying around and decided to go upside down like they did.
It took me three times “en taxi” to decide to go alone, and then I did the rest of them myself. The lines covered jungle, waterfalls, breathtaking views of the volcano and mountains.
I am not… the person I thought I was.
CR06-12-09.
Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything counts. – Sogyal Rinpoche
Ticht Naht Hahn is my morning replacement for my missing Sangha, and tells me today that I must look deeply into my desire and deeply at my intentions. The way I use money is important. It can be used to relieve suffering and feed the hungry. Am I motivated by compassionate ideals? Or am I motivated by greed or revenge?
The weight of that question falls between us and everything we do like armloads of books clumsily thunking the floor.
Whereas the poverty in Mexico reveals itself nakedly on street corners in the form of the limbless elderly and shoeless children selling gum, it is hidden in Costa Rica. It is possible to be here, to swim in the ocean, to walk on the beach, to shop like a tourist and never be awakened from the dream that this is paradise. The main roads are lined with houses and Pulperías (very small neighborhood convenience stores) and the occasional shack. These main roads have unpaved off-shoots. As most of the people who live down those side roads don’t have cars, sometimes they are just trails. The trails lead into the belly of Costa Rica. Here there are many shacks. Here there is very little rice.
And here is where Kassidy and I will naturally divide between what guides our individual souls. On Saturday we have been invited to join the Secret Santa committee we’ve been working with to deliver food to one of these communities. We accepted. And then last night we learned that, because of the holidays, the vet clinic has been changed to this Saturday. Last week Kassidy de-ticked a dog at a restaurant while we were waiting for our food. This is something she is good at. She feels compassion for them. She is bold enough that she will tackle random dogs to remove the suffering caused by the ticks. This is a girl whose lap was created to exactly accommodate a lap dog. They crawl into her arms and make themselves comfortable and she pets and snuggles and scratches them. Once they get there, there isn’t anything that will motivate them to leave.
There is a ghost on her lap now, and she wears those memories on the outside as they march wispily in front of her eyes. Our butt of a dog Kuzco, who we learned in the 6 months before we moved that we were immensely fonder of than we had realized, was hit by a car while participating in the traditional butt-like activities that had earned him the nickname to begin with.
She was torn, but ultimately, she is not the person she thought she was, either. These little dogs climb into the vacated space and absorb her sadness and hear the spaces between her recollections of Kuzco fetching badminton birdies in the back yard and her lap stretches and grows to make room for both a tick-covered dog and the ghost of a dancing butt-like dog.
My dad and Shannon were here last week and went to the rain forest and the National Park. The guide told stories that I am now repeating in my informal guided driving tours of the roads between the airport and home. Sugar cane planting here is staggered. Crops right next to each other will be in various stages of growth. It is ready to be harvested when it has gone to seed and the wind has replanted for the following year. Since each crop is ready at a different time, all of the farmers can help each other harvest one at a time. I said this with much authority, too. Because “look who knows so much.”
The underlying resentment and anger that has been palpable around us since we arrived ambled clunkily away while they were here. It is hard to hold one’s ground in the face of more than one person telling you you are dead wrong. Kassidy experienced daily jumps in the pool and my dad taught her to body surf. She listens to the waves from the balcony now and says, “Do you think they’re big today?”
Kassidy and I have enjoyed the only 3 days we will spend at home alone together between now and February. Really. We started going to the gym together every night. It’s been so much fun to have a work-out partner. We miss Dad and Shannon, though. They email to ask what the sunsets look like. They have not yet noticed that each of them left one pair of unmentionables in the dryer. We think we’ll put them in the guest room in case anyone needs “extras.”
Friday night I arrived at the airport to greet a very late plane. I stood with the shouting taxi drivers and felt the glee and giddiness that the taxi drivers could not have been feeling. Diana Noonan, her son Tony and Tony’s girlfriend Meghan were winding their way through customs. Kassidy and Tony dove for coins thrown in the pool and the winner was the one with the greatest value of piled change, not the greatest number of coins. Diana went to the fundraiser with me and met people from East high school in Denver. Tony and Meghan had dinner in Playa del Coco and I forgot to tell them that the tip was included in the charge, so they triple tipped. (We also did this our first night here.) They were serenaded by a small band and when Tony tipped them, he handed them all the change that remained in his pocket – 300 colones. The musician looked at the change in his hand and said, “Muy poquito.” As they re-told the story that evening and we told them that 300 colones was about 50 cents. Whoops.
Since the very beginning I have said that being here would be more fun if we had someone to share it with. Now we do. I was right.
Information on how to donate to the Secret Santa group was posted just before this note / blog. I’ll have more pictures after Saturday, too. I’m looking for classes / schools that would like to use this as a class project. The schools don’t have internet access, so we can’t do anything live, but I can do audio and video recording, post it and then have classes audio and video record themselves and then go back and play it back for them. Internet access in schools is still a few years away. Let me know if it sounds possible.
My apologies, also, for the anemic availability of blogs. I was in Colorado for two weeks, at ACTFL in San Diego for a week and then back here with my parents. While I was in California, I told my Aunt Judy that it was hard to get enough writing done. “Don’t forget that’s why you’re there,” she said.
I finished Carl and sent it to the publisher and when my dad was here, we talked through the story of José. I was stuck on a plot point that was paralyzing me. This story happened in 2005, and I’ve always been stuck about how to write it. I’m still editing, but the book is done. Actually, two books are done. One is about Isabela, the girl from the first book. The other one is from the perspective of her mother and contains a little bit of unexpected romance. We will use it for our adults classes. Adults can handle a steamy novel, right? I’ll be looking for proofreaders and anyone who wants to pilot the kids book shortly.
¡Pura vida!
Every morning I wake up and look out the window first. If the ocean is still there, then I am still in this paradise and it is not a dream.
On the morning that I woke up and sat bolt upright in bed and looked out the small bedroom window in my mom’s guest room in Colorado, there was no ocean. There was no paradise. Sigh. Time to make lemonade.
It was still early, so I drove over to my sister’s house and knocked on the door at about 7:30am. My brother-in-law opened the door and my niece, Devyn, was at the end of the hallway staring. Her mouth hung open and then she ran toward me and gave me a squeezy hug.
Lemonade.
A few days later we all took Veteran’s Day off and went to the park. Devyn, Dylan, Kassidy and her cousin from the other side, Sarah. All we did was play. No cell phone. No computer. No other adults. We played on the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. 13 year-old Sarah was swinging next to me and said, “I feel like a little kid.”
Kassidy said, “I have an epiphany.” (Seriously.) She ran to the top of a hill in Bear Creek Park and rolled down it. Devyn followed her. Dylan watched. At 2… this was a new experience, and his little brain was absorbing. “Do you want to roll down the hill?” “Yes.” So Kassidy helped him. He rolled. Sideways. No up. No down. Just sideways, straight across the relatively flat hill, when viewed from that perspective. Kassidy began a hands on tutorial and Dylan was a willing student. Sarah decided to roll. And then I put down the camera and rolled. Soon after, the new game became covering each other with armloads of leaves. The weather was mild and autumny. We played volleyball and took pictures of each other. When we noticed Dylan tearing apart the contents of the diaper bag looking for animal crackers, we realized it must be time for lunch.
We spent the whole day making a memory for when we grow up. One day we will say, “Remember when we were little and rolled down the hill at the park and everyone’s pants fell down? Remember that day? That was a perfect day.”
We left to get lunch and then stopped at another park to eat it. That afternoon we went to a third park because we were having so much fun we could imagine nothing more perfect. If sliding and swinging and rolling down hills and chasing ducks (yeah… duck chasing…. It’s a Colorado past time invented by Kassidy when she was about Dylan’s age.) is your version of paradise then, after a short lunch break, all you want is more of the same.
After two weeks in Colorado teaching Fluency Fast Spanish classes and visiting my family and friends and a week in California at ACTFL with some of my favorite teacher people, a took a red-eye from LAX to Liberia. It wasn’t, though, until I saw the billboards on the highway leading to the airport as we were landing that I believed that this had not all been a dream.
The first morning I woke up and looked out the window and saw the familiar vista from my window I said, “yes!” and leaned back against my pillow, perfectly content.
Yesterday my dad, Shannon, Kassidy and I went to Borinquen. Kassidy went on the first zip line with a guide. They were clipped together and she didn’t have to do anything at all. She looked terrified, but she wanted to do it. (I love this kid!) Shannon and my dad went. I… went with a guide, too. Clipped in. Didn’t have to do anything. The guides call it going “en taxi.”
When I landed on the second platform Kassidy was beaming and saying, “I want to go by myself now.” And she did. At each platform she counted the remaining ones, “Only 8 more left.” By the last one she had watched the guides who were monkeying around and decided to go upside down like they did.
It took me three times “en taxi” to decide to go alone, and then I did the rest of them myself. The lines covered jungle, waterfalls, breathtaking views of the volcano and mountains.
I am not… the person I thought I was.
CR06-12-09.
Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything counts. – Sogyal Rinpoche
Ticht Naht Hahn is my morning replacement for my missing Sangha, and tells me today that I must look deeply into my desire and deeply at my intentions. The way I use money is important. It can be used to relieve suffering and feed the hungry. Am I motivated by compassionate ideals? Or am I motivated by greed or revenge?
The weight of that question falls between us and everything we do like armloads of books clumsily thunking the floor.
Whereas the poverty in Mexico reveals itself nakedly on street corners in the form of the limbless elderly and shoeless children selling gum, it is hidden in Costa Rica. It is possible to be here, to swim in the ocean, to walk on the beach, to shop like a tourist and never be awakened from the dream that this is paradise. The main roads are lined with houses and Pulperías (very small neighborhood convenience stores) and the occasional shack. These main roads have unpaved off-shoots. As most of the people who live down those side roads don’t have cars, sometimes they are just trails. The trails lead into the belly of Costa Rica. Here there are many shacks. Here there is very little rice.
And here is where Kassidy and I will naturally divide between what guides our individual souls. On Saturday we have been invited to join the Secret Santa committee we’ve been working with to deliver food to one of these communities. We accepted. And then last night we learned that, because of the holidays, the vet clinic has been changed to this Saturday. Last week Kassidy de-ticked a dog at a restaurant while we were waiting for our food. This is something she is good at. She feels compassion for them. She is bold enough that she will tackle random dogs to remove the suffering caused by the ticks. This is a girl whose lap was created to exactly accommodate a lap dog. They crawl into her arms and make themselves comfortable and she pets and snuggles and scratches them. Once they get there, there isn’t anything that will motivate them to leave.
There is a ghost on her lap now, and she wears those memories on the outside as they march wispily in front of her eyes. Our butt of a dog Kuzco, who we learned in the 6 months before we moved that we were immensely fonder of than we had realized, was hit by a car while participating in the traditional butt-like activities that had earned him the nickname to begin with.
She was torn, but ultimately, she is not the person she thought she was, either. These little dogs climb into the vacated space and absorb her sadness and hear the spaces between her recollections of Kuzco fetching badminton birdies in the back yard and her lap stretches and grows to make room for both a tick-covered dog and the ghost of a dancing butt-like dog.
My dad and Shannon were here last week and went to the rain forest and the National Park. The guide told stories that I am now repeating in my informal guided driving tours of the roads between the airport and home. Sugar cane planting here is staggered. Crops right next to each other will be in various stages of growth. It is ready to be harvested when it has gone to seed and the wind has replanted for the following year. Since each crop is ready at a different time, all of the farmers can help each other harvest one at a time. I said this with much authority, too. Because “look who knows so much.”
The underlying resentment and anger that has been palpable around us since we arrived ambled clunkily away while they were here. It is hard to hold one’s ground in the face of more than one person telling you you are dead wrong. Kassidy experienced daily jumps in the pool and my dad taught her to body surf. She listens to the waves from the balcony now and says, “Do you think they’re big today?”
Kassidy and I have enjoyed the only 3 days we will spend at home alone together between now and February. Really. We started going to the gym together every night. It’s been so much fun to have a work-out partner. We miss Dad and Shannon, though. They email to ask what the sunsets look like. They have not yet noticed that each of them left one pair of unmentionables in the dryer. We think we’ll put them in the guest room in case anyone needs “extras.”
Friday night I arrived at the airport to greet a very late plane. I stood with the shouting taxi drivers and felt the glee and giddiness that the taxi drivers could not have been feeling. Diana Noonan, her son Tony and Tony’s girlfriend Meghan were winding their way through customs. Kassidy and Tony dove for coins thrown in the pool and the winner was the one with the greatest value of piled change, not the greatest number of coins. Diana went to the fundraiser with me and met people from East high school in Denver. Tony and Meghan had dinner in Playa del Coco and I forgot to tell them that the tip was included in the charge, so they triple tipped. (We also did this our first night here.) They were serenaded by a small band and when Tony tipped them, he handed them all the change that remained in his pocket – 300 colones. The musician looked at the change in his hand and said, “Muy poquito.” As they re-told the story that evening and we told them that 300 colones was about 50 cents. Whoops.
Since the very beginning I have said that being here would be more fun if we had someone to share it with. Now we do. I was right.
Information on how to donate to the Secret Santa group was posted just before this note / blog. I’ll have more pictures after Saturday, too. I’m looking for classes / schools that would like to use this as a class project. The schools don’t have internet access, so we can’t do anything live, but I can do audio and video recording, post it and then have classes audio and video record themselves and then go back and play it back for them. Internet access in schools is still a few years away. Let me know if it sounds possible.
My apologies, also, for the anemic availability of blogs. I was in Colorado for two weeks, at ACTFL in San Diego for a week and then back here with my parents. While I was in California, I told my Aunt Judy that it was hard to get enough writing done. “Don’t forget that’s why you’re there,” she said.
I finished Carl and sent it to the publisher and when my dad was here, we talked through the story of José. I was stuck on a plot point that was paralyzing me. This story happened in 2005, and I’ve always been stuck about how to write it. I’m still editing, but the book is done. Actually, two books are done. One is about Isabela, the girl from the first book. The other one is from the perspective of her mother and contains a little bit of unexpected romance. We will use it for our adults classes. Adults can handle a steamy novel, right? I’ll be looking for proofreaders and anyone who wants to pilot the kids book shortly.
¡Pura vida!
HOW TO DONATE TO KIDS IN COSTA RICA
Today I was driving home from the gym and passed hitchhikers. I shouldn’t have stopped. I knew I shouldn’t have stopped. But I did anyway. It was a Nicaraguan woman with two children coming across the border. She said her husband had died 22 days before in an accident and the “patron” had asked them to leave afterward. She had two older children in León, so they were travelling on foot and by hitchhiking. They had left Nicaragua 8 days ago. The little boy, Nicolás, asked me if I had any food. They hadn’t eaten, they said, in two days. I had almost an entire energy bar and the kids split it. On the way, I stopped to drop off the recycling, and while mom and daughter got out to help me unload it from the trunk, the little boy stayed in the car. I should have known better. When I got back in the car and realized that I had left him alone I surreptitiously checked to be sure my belongings were still on the front seat. My gym bag contained some credit cards, the camera, my Ipod and some cash. I dropped them off with a little bus money. They stole nothing. I felt guilty I even checked. I felt guilty that I even had an Ipod. I felt bad that I didn’t have more food in the car that day.
The depth of the poverty here is unbearable. When we asked the school to make a wish list, toilet paper was at the top. There is a community nearby where the poverty is so severe their cupboards are literally bare of even rice. A fellow volunteer said that she had been there once and couldn’t go back. There were people who can stomach seeing starvation and people who can’t, and she knows she’s in the group that can’t.
Below is the priority list from one of the four schools that the Secret Santa group here supports. Ultimately, though, once I visit this rice-less community on the 12th, I don’t think it will surprise me to learn that most of the donated money this year will go there. I’m already fantasizing about filling the car with food and driving there.
Here’s the information on how to donate to Secret Santa. The fundraiser is THIS Saturday. I’d love to get donations in time for that.
USD WIRE TRANSFERS INSTRUCTION
The customer must instruct his/ her bank to transfer funds as follows:
The Bank of New York
New York, New York, U.S.A.
ABA: 021000018
SWIFT: IRVTUS3N
For credit to account number:
803-338-3577
Scotiabank CR
San José, Costa Rica
SWIFT: NOSCCRSJ
For final credit to account number: #_$13000054505____________________
No Problema Property Management Secret Santa
San José, Costa Rica
In all cases No Problema must be notified of the transfer along with the dollar amount, transfer number and the date of the transfer to ensure that you are credited for the transfer. noproblemapm@yahoo.com Also please ensure your bank includes your name on the transfer.
This was the priority list from the school:
Material que se ocupa
Papel higénico (toilet paper)
Desinfectante
Palo de pisos (mop)
Escobas (broom)
Machas (mop head)
Machetes
Rastrillo (metal rake)
Palas (shovels)
Macanas (6 ft crow bar)
Arañas (rake)
Hojas blancas (blank white paper)
Utensilios de cocina (cooking utensils)
Basureros (trash cans)
Pilot (White board markers)
Material didáctico (colored paper, erasers, glue, scissors)
Libros de cuento (story books)
CDs de música infantil (music for the pre-schoolers)
Paños para secarse manos (hand towels)
A corto plazo
Abanicos (fans)
Aceras (cement / concrete apron)
Piletas (sink for mopping)
Lavamanos (sink for handwashing)
Cerrar espacio kinder (fence for the pre-school / Kinder play area)
Chapiadoras (Lawn mower / gas)
Escritorios (teacher’s desk)
Cerámicas (tile)
Armarios (closets or bookshelves with locks)
Grabadoras (CD Players)
Telefax – fax machine
Proyecciones a Futuro
Salón de Actos – covered roof
Aula de Informática – computer classroom
Aula para Profesor de I y II ciclo – classroom for one more teacher (would create the opportunity for all day school)
Aula para Biblioteca - library
Requirements to have a computer in a school:
Seguridad de las aulas (Secure classroom / bars on window)
Mobilario para los equipos (Computer desk)
Extintor (Fire extinguisher)
Un ventilador de pie por cada dos computadoras (One fan for every two Computers)
The depth of the poverty here is unbearable. When we asked the school to make a wish list, toilet paper was at the top. There is a community nearby where the poverty is so severe their cupboards are literally bare of even rice. A fellow volunteer said that she had been there once and couldn’t go back. There were people who can stomach seeing starvation and people who can’t, and she knows she’s in the group that can’t.
Below is the priority list from one of the four schools that the Secret Santa group here supports. Ultimately, though, once I visit this rice-less community on the 12th, I don’t think it will surprise me to learn that most of the donated money this year will go there. I’m already fantasizing about filling the car with food and driving there.
Here’s the information on how to donate to Secret Santa. The fundraiser is THIS Saturday. I’d love to get donations in time for that.
USD WIRE TRANSFERS INSTRUCTION
The customer must instruct his/ her bank to transfer funds as follows:
The Bank of New York
New York, New York, U.S.A.
ABA: 021000018
SWIFT: IRVTUS3N
For credit to account number:
803-338-3577
Scotiabank CR
San José, Costa Rica
SWIFT: NOSCCRSJ
For final credit to account number: #_$13000054505____________________
No Problema Property Management Secret Santa
San José, Costa Rica
In all cases No Problema must be notified of the transfer along with the dollar amount, transfer number and the date of the transfer to ensure that you are credited for the transfer. noproblemapm@yahoo.com Also please ensure your bank includes your name on the transfer.
This was the priority list from the school:
Material que se ocupa
Papel higénico (toilet paper)
Desinfectante
Palo de pisos (mop)
Escobas (broom)
Machas (mop head)
Machetes
Rastrillo (metal rake)
Palas (shovels)
Macanas (6 ft crow bar)
Arañas (rake)
Hojas blancas (blank white paper)
Utensilios de cocina (cooking utensils)
Basureros (trash cans)
Pilot (White board markers)
Material didáctico (colored paper, erasers, glue, scissors)
Libros de cuento (story books)
CDs de música infantil (music for the pre-schoolers)
Paños para secarse manos (hand towels)
A corto plazo
Abanicos (fans)
Aceras (cement / concrete apron)
Piletas (sink for mopping)
Lavamanos (sink for handwashing)
Cerrar espacio kinder (fence for the pre-school / Kinder play area)
Chapiadoras (Lawn mower / gas)
Escritorios (teacher’s desk)
Cerámicas (tile)
Armarios (closets or bookshelves with locks)
Grabadoras (CD Players)
Telefax – fax machine
Proyecciones a Futuro
Salón de Actos – covered roof
Aula de Informática – computer classroom
Aula para Profesor de I y II ciclo – classroom for one more teacher (would create the opportunity for all day school)
Aula para Biblioteca - library
Requirements to have a computer in a school:
Seguridad de las aulas (Secure classroom / bars on window)
Mobilario para los equipos (Computer desk)
Extintor (Fire extinguisher)
Un ventilador de pie por cada dos computadoras (One fan for every two Computers)
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