I Love My Little Brother

August 21, 2009

Hi party people, sorry for the delay in posts…I promise it’s not that I don’t think of you all often, it’s just that I live in the jungle (‘cept not really).

I am currently in my host sister’s house, where I’ve been sleeping the past couple of nights while her husband gets some tests done in the nearest hospital (which is an hour and a half away). She has a baby and a 5 year old son, and like many Ticos she does not like to be alone, so I’m keeping her company at night. She and her 2 sons are sleeping in her bed and I’m sleeping in the 5-year-old’s bed, which is, umm…let’s say…different. My feet just stay on at the end, so the fit is just fine, but the mattress is definitely just for show, because it doesn’t do anything. If sleeping on hard surfaces is as good as they say it is for one’s back, this kid is going to have the healthiest back there ever was. In any case, I’m happy that I can be here for my host sister, and I hope they can find out what’s going on with my host brother-in-law and get him home feeling better very soon. We definitely miss him around here. Also, I think his bed had bedbugs, which is disgusting, but I definitely woke up with, uhh, problems (I’ll leave it at that).

I cannot believe that I haven’t written in a month! A lot has happened since then of course, the highlight being my little brother’s visit, which sadly ended last week. After 5 months without seeing each other, neither one of us could believe that we were actually together. On the day of his arrival I went to San Jose to meet him at the airport, and my bus was making extremely good time (we were going to arrive in 4 rather than 5 hours). That is, until it smashed into a pickup truck that pulled out in front of us. After seeing glass fly everywhere outside of the bus (we were all fine, hardly even felt it), I heard about 5 or 6 more vehicles smashing into each other behind us, which was pretty scary. After hearing that everyone was miraculously okay, I boarded another bus and carried on to San Jose, thankfully still getting to the airport on time. It was so wonderful to see my favorite boy in the whole world, and his Irish-Catholic whiteness was beyond blinding. I mean, this boy is W-H-I-T-E! I have never felt so tan in my life as I did during his trip. It was fabulous.

So as not to waste any time in the miserable city of San Jose, we immediately set off for a beach located about 2 hours from where I live. This came as a surprise to my brother, who thought we were only going to my site and San Jose (I’m so sneaky). Although it rained our entire full day at the beach, we still had a good time catching up and just being together. During one downpour I decided I wanted to try running (which I haven’t been able to do since January due to an injury), so we set out into the rainy jungle to see how it would go. The scenery was so beautiful that it wasn’t until we were a couple of miles in that I realized I was not, in fact, ready to run yet.

The next day we set off to my site, which was certainly the best part of his stay in my opinion (and I think he would agree). I loved introducing him to my friends and family here. Everyone was quite impressed by his Spanish, and it was nice to see how happy he was to be putting it into practice. My host mom was thrilled to have someone who could eat an entire table full of food (so she proceeded to fill the entire table for him at every meal). She nearly died of embarrassment when my brother insisted on helping wash the dishes, but it was a good opportunity to show the anti-machismo ways of my family in the States.

We stayed in my site for 6 days and 5 nights, and my brother got to experience my daily life to the fullest. He took my exercise classes in the Baptist church and in the community center, attended meetings in the high school and with various community members, helped paint traditional masks with a group of kids in the elementary school, entertained the younger kids who showed up to my meeting for adolescents in the shantytown, sipped cafecito, and ate lots and lots of traditional Tico foods. The pic at the top of this post is from the hike we went on with my mentorship program from the high school. My brother is the large white one.

His last week here was unfortunately consumed by a conference that I had in San Jose. The conference was about service learning and solitary volunteerism, and how to introduce these concepts to our communities.

Community service is generally a good thing, but its impact is much more profound when 1) the project idea comes from the people who will benefit 2) the volunteers and community are informed about the project, including its origins, consequences, and future steps to maintain or improve its effects. These are the kinds of components that separate “community service” projects (e.g. taking a science class to a river to pick up trash) from “service learning” projects (asking a science class to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their community, seeing that they identify the dirty river as a primary concern, teaching them about how rivers affect communities and the consequences of contamination, taking those who are interested to the river to clean it, and meeting afterwards to celebrate the project’s success and to form a plan of action to keep the river clean). While community service is something that is valued by many people in the U.S. (so much so that an entire government institution - Peace Corps - is dedicated to its implementation in countries all over the world), it is not a common value here. This is not to say that Ticos are not generous nor that they do not want to help others – they are by far the most generous people I have ever met – but rather that the idea of community service is not something that has not yet infiltrated the culture. Peace Corps Costa Rica has made service learning a primary concern, with the ultimate goal-of-goals being the implementation of a corps of Tico volunteers who work for Ticos (i.e. the equivalent of AmeriCorps in the U.S., but in Costa Rica).

In any case, it was too bad that my brother had to come to the conference with me and my community counterpart (the high school counselor), but the 3 of us had a good time together along with the other 14 volunteers and their counterparts, and I learned a lot about how to work more effectively in my community. It would be awesome to see the creation of a Tico Corps in the coming years.