Pura Vida

Last week on the walk home from school through the forest, Jude ran on ahead and spotted a margay peering at him from behind the leaves. At the end of last semester, we packed up the colegio (high school) campus and moved back to the MFS campus. Now for the first time, the boys and I are truly attending the same school, on the same cozy campus. Ethan still does some drop offs and pick ups in order to get some social interaction before logging in to work, or when I have meetings, but it’s been sweet to see the boys on campus, and share a commute through the woods. The boys’ backpacks are full of the treasures they find. And now we all walk quietly: looking for margays.

While some Covid restrictions have relaxed, like distancing requirements inside the classroom — hence the move back to the main campus for colegio — this past week, we began to experience the Omicron disruptions that we knew were coming. With only one full time sub, the teaching staff and administration is working hard to make it work, giving up prep periods and covering for one another when needed (last week I co-taught a P.E. class with our sub-directora) in order to remain learning in person. Sol’s class went to virtual learning all last week. The entire school was required to close for sanitation on Wednesday. And each day there are new absences among our faculty and students. It’s a familiar Covid roller coaster that is mostly fine, but also echoes all of the loss and disruption that we’ve experienced over the past two years. When walking around in a pandemic induced daze, sunshine helps. Here are some pictures from after school hours on the playground, and local weekend adventures to nearby San Luis. Last weekend, we spent about three hours hanging out at this river.

I started the semester with a high school wide project: profile writing, adapted from the New York Times Learning Network resources. Colegio students are busy identifying “subjects” from the community and interviewing them. It’s the first time I’m teaching profile writing and it’s definitely a unit I will return to in the future. It’s fascinating to hear the stories about the people in this community that students want to share and know more about. Many are doing several interviews because they can’t decide who they want to focus on. The side effect and hidden agenda is a forced exit from their Covid bubbles. Some are writing about their teachers, others have selected nature guides, professional athletes, business owners, purveyors of peanut butter–one student is interviewing a bank teller who lived through a much discussed bank robbery in Monteverde almost twenty years ago while eight months pregnant.

Since I last posted on the blog, we’ve had so many adventures and many visitors. We traveled to the carribean side of the country for our October break, checked out the arribada (turtle nesting) and Rio Celeste during a visit with the grandparents over Thanksgiving, and after traveling back to the US for a first round of vaccines for the boys and boosters for Ethan and me, we spent two weeks exploring the pacific coast from the Osa peninsula to Matapalo, Santa Teresa, and Montezuma with Auntie Cass. Returning to Monteverde after our travels, we are now in the dry (summer) season with reliable rainbows each morning, clear skies every day, and much more time spent outdoors. Here are some highlights from our two weeks of Christmas break travel.

After twenty-four hours of panic having lost our passports in a Rite Aid that was closed on Christmas, we pushed back our flight by one day and left on the 27th to fly back to San Jose. (The passports were right where Ethan had left them — in his coat draped on the pharmacy chair where we had gotten our shots two days prior). That evening we retrieved our car from the hotel where we had paid to park it, and drove about three hours away to our hotel near the trailhead to one of Costa Rica’s most famous waterfalls, Nauyaca. We woke up the next morning, had breakfast, and hiked in 2.5 miles or so on the humid trail, adjusting our bodies back into the CR heat. The falls at the end of the trail were a perfect first destination. We swam, sunned on the rocks, and shortly after we arrived some guys set up a an assisted climb up the falls to what must have been a thirty foot jump. Jumpers waited in line, clinging to the rope. Ethan had to finagle his way to the very top because Sol had insisted on wearing the adhesive yellow bracelet that showed we had paid admission.

From there, we drove four hours down the coast, eventually crossing three rivers until we got to the Osa Peninsula, and our final destination for the next four days, Rincon San Josecito, the last beach accessible by car before you reach the Corcovado National Park. Here, we stayed at a fabulous pension, spent several days exploring the beaches and snorkeling, and eventually clambered aboard a lancha in the crashing waves to motor to Corcovado for a guided tour. This area is very remote because it’s so hard to get to. Most folks fly in on puddle jumpers to Drake Bay. The wildlife was incredible. In addition to the many birds we saw, we had the opportunity to sneak up on a napping Baird’s Tapir. Most days consisted of wave jumping, reading, and tracking hermit crabs. The night before we left, Ethan and I woke up to the sound of heavy rain. Thankfully, it only took a few hours of waiting the next day for the rivers to lower so we could cross. From there we made our way back up through the peninsula and on to Matapalo.

Cassie joined us in Matapalo after a few days, and from there we spent a week exploring Montezuma, Santa Teresa and the surrounding beaches and falls. Jude and Ethan surfed in Matapalo; we went on a whale tour where we listened to whales singing through the gunnels of the boat (Ethan plunged under to hear them in the water); we were visited by more wildlife: monkeys and sloths; we walked the whale’s tail on the beach at Cahuita along with other sunset pilgrims; we ate well in Montezuma and Santa Teresa. We visited the piedras coloradas and made our own beach cairns; and we got to know a little community on the outskirts of Montezuma where we stayed in Costa Rica’s largest treehouse, complete with thatched roofs, circular beds, and free outdoor HITT classes taught by a server at the adjacent farm to table restaurant (with zipline and soccer field) we visited the night before. I’ll save Rio Celeste and the Carribean for another backlogged post.