As the end of my time in Costa Rica approaches (less than a week to go!), I want to have a snapshot in time of what a normal week has looked like here. I’ve already talked about the fact that this job has been very intense, without a lot of free time, but that’s not necessarily to say that I haven’t enjoyed it. I love the kids at the daycare that we work with and our two evening classes are definitely highlights. One thing that I have really liked is the variety throughout the week, between teaching the kids, teaching adults, helping with construction and working in a community park. I also wanted to write this blog as my second ever bilingual blog! I did this with my last blog from France because I figured that my French would be at its peak right as I was leaving. I’m thinking the same thing right now as my Spanish is only going to get worse (although hopefully not that much) after I leave.
Monday
Our working week actually runs from Tuesday to Saturday so our weekend is Sunday and Monday. Monday usually involves a bit of life admin for me, probably taking advantage of there being water to do a wash (our water gets cut between 12pm and 5pm every day), maybe cleaning and tidying my room. Often it involves finishing up a blog as well because, at least at the minute, I’m posting one every other Monday. The highlight is that in the evening, I have water polo training. The pool is about a twenty minute drive out of Cartago, heading into the mountains, but luckily I discovered very early on that the coach lives five minutes from me so I get a lift there. The session on Monday is usually quieter and is only an hour, usually split into 30-40 minutes swimming and the rest passing the ball around.
Tuesday
Tuesday marks the start of the working week for us. From Tuesday morning to Saturday morning we have all our meals (apart from breakfast on Thursday) cooked by Alicia. You can see the kind of things we typically eat as well as some classic Costa Rican dishes on this blog. One of my daily tasks as Education Coordinator is doing all the printing we need for our classes that day. We leave the house at 8am because even though our first class is at 9am and the project is only 11km, the traffic to get out of Cartago towards San José is notoriously bad. They’ve been building these passover bridges that should make it easier but I think they’ve been working on it for almost two years and have one full bridge and two half bridges finished. I don’t really mind that much because I use the commute there and back as time to decompress and read, a lot! In the morning it can take anywhere from 30-45 minutes (our record is 70 minutes meaning we missed our first class) and in the evening it’s more like 45-60 minutes (the return journey record is close to two hours!).
Our first class on a Tuesday is Tesoro. Most of the kids in this class are three years old so they’re the youngest age that we teach. They can be a bit of a handful, especially as the class has 25 students in it and I don’t envy they’re teachers, Daisy and Carol. That’s a lot of little ones! Last year (before Christmas) they were a bit more manageable because we had Tesoro 1 and Tesoro 2. The lesson plan with this class is usually quite formulaic. Because they’re so young, their attention span is quite short so we’ve found that having a routine helps. We always start with the same warm up song, ‘Walking Walking’, and get them all up and following the lyrics. We go through flashcards with whatever the current topic’s words are, watch some on-topic songs or videos and do a colouring sheet. God, those kids love to colour! Or at least scribble on the page… Through all the screaming and crying that often accompanies our attempts to teach them English, it’s been really satisfying to see their progress.
Our morning classes are only half an hour (honestly, more than enough with Tesoro) so we quickly move to our second class, Exploradores 3 with their teacher Katherine. The Exploradores groups are the pre-Kinder and Kindergarten age kids so 4-6 years old. Exploradores 3 is a bit of an exception though as it tends to be a bit of an overflow class so it always has a mix of ages. Last year, it was filled with the more challenging children from the other Exploradores and Tesoro but this year it’s mostly Tesoro overflow. There’s only a handful of kids who are actually the right age for the group. Considering that most of them are still very young, their attention span is a bit better. There are some real characters in this class!
The morning is short in terms of teaching, we’re finished by 10.30. After a little break, we do some lesson planning in our ‘office’ (an empty storage space at the back of the playground) until it’s time to eat lunch at midday. We take it into the canteen where the kids are finishing their lunches. The school was built and is completely funded on donations which is really impressive. The only thing that the government contributes a little bit towards is the food. If the kids are there all day, they get breakfast, lunch and snacks throughout the day. They don’t pay anything to be at the school in the first place and they don’t pay anything for the food either.
After lunch we have a couple more hours of lesson planning time and then we’re back in classes at 3pm. By this time, the older kids have arrived after primary school has finished. School in Costa Rica starts around 7am and finishes at 1 or 2pm. Our first class in the afternoon is with Investigadores 1. The Investigadores classes basically coincide with the grades so Investigadores 1 is first grade. I love this group, they’re really enthusiastic about English, maybe a little overenthusiastic at times! Noise is something we struggle with a little with this class but usually it comes from participation rather than the other way around. This class has two instructors, Maribeth and Gretchen, and Maribeth really values English so can be helpful in controlling their noise but sometimes gets a bit over-involved. They love to colour, like many of our younger classes, and really rise to the occasion when we push them. Up until this age, we focus more on vocabulary but when we’ve thrown a few bits of grammar at this group, they pick it up well. This group also loves to listen to songs and will learn all the lyrics if we listen to the same one enough times!
Investigadores 2 are probably my favourite class (but don’t tell anyone I said that!). I’ve really enjoyed seeing them mature from last year to this year. When I arrived and they were in Investigadores 1, they were much more immature. There was a group of troublemakers that influenced the energy of the class but they had such a turnaround since last year that they’re now some of the most motivated in the class. Many of this class are very special, bright students. They all take such pride in their colouring, using their own, very decked out pencil cases. They’re one of a few classes that we try to purposefully run out of time with and leave them doing the colouring sheet so they can take their time with it (it also keeps them busy for another half hour for the sake of the teacher, Leo!). They are also obsessed with four corners and would happily play it for the full 40 minute class if we let them, one student in particular who employs the best puppy dog eyes ever to ask if he can be the one to count first.
Our final class of the day on Tuesdays is Investigadores 3. By the time we get to them at 4.20pm, there’s usually no more than eight students left. As the ‘school’ as I tend to call it is actually more of a daycare, the kids can get picked up at any point throughout the day, whenever their parents are available to come and get them. There are also a series of minibuses that take kids back to their neighbourhoods. Many of these come around the time we start this last class so it’s quiet. Because it’s the end of the day and this age group have already done their proper classes at school, they can be very tired and uninterested in English class. We have a policy that the kids don’t have to participate if they don’t want to, as long as they aren’t disruptive for those that do want to participate. Despite this, there are some shining stars in this class and many of them are usually there for this class so it still feels worthwhile. Their favourite thing to do is play Hangman or Orcado in Spanish. Their teacher Fran is also one of my favourites (not that I have them!).
With that Tuesday is over. It’s our longest day on project but thankfully once we’re done, we’re done. No evening classes today. After fighting the traffic to get home, where Alicia has dinner waiting for us, the evening is for our volunteers (and us) to do with as they please.
Wednesday
We leave at 8am again on Wednesdays to start at 9am. Our first class should be half of Exploradores 1. This group is in their Kinder transition year and there’s a government Kinder teacher that comes in to do those classes. Half the class goes before lunch and the other half after lunch but there’s a lot of disruption so we often don’t end up seeing them in the morning and then having them all in the afternoon. This is possibly the most adorable group in the whole place but also the most chaotic one! Their wee faces are so cute and usually have a smile on them as they run riot. When we see them in the afternoon, I think a lot of this is to do with them being tired. This class is funny because sometimes they’ll really latch onto a word like ‘chicken’ for example but cannot for the life of them remember ‘cow’. We have a little monkey called Paula who is our classroom assistant and this class loves it when Paula comes out to play. In this class, the instructors are Lucy and Sele and it’s my favourite thing when Sele pulls out her whistle instead of shouting!
After Exploradores 1 in the morning (if we see them), we go into Tesoro and then Exploradores 3 again. We finish our morning classes at 10.30, like on Tuesdays, and then have lunch at 12. We start our afternoon classes earlier, at 2.30 and only see two groups so we’re done earlier as well. The first group is the other half of Exploradores 1 (or more likely the whole group) and then we see Exploradores 2. These kids are also in Kinder and are mostly five or six years old. There is such a range of characters in the class, from the one kid who always looks so sad but is great at English, the sassiest girl alive, an adorable love triangle as well as two of my favourite teachers, Lila and Ligia. This class also loves to play Passing Paula (like hot potato but with a monkey) although we have had to talk about treating Paula with respect and not spanking her…
Now, there’s also some other work that we do in the school. If we have a big group, we split them up so there’s a maximum of three volunteers teaching at a time. In the mornings, the rest of the group can go to help on the construction site of the new office building for the Bethany Project. This is a project, founded by the same church that founded the daycare, that supports single mothers through their higher education by providing them housing, food, academic support and social support. They are currently building a new space for the administration and we do whatever they need us to. Obviously none of us are construction workers (except Andrés in a past life) so we do things like sanding doors or walls, cleaning, moving and levelling dirt or carrying cement blocks. In the afternoons when we have a big group, those that aren’t teaching assist the teachers, again with whatever they need. That involves a lot of arts and crafts for various class projects or wall displays, a lot of cutting and sticking and at the start of the year we covered endless folders in sticky-back plastic.
It’s ridiculous how much better the traffic is when we leave the school an hour earlier on Wednesdays. Again, we arrive home to dinner on the table and after we eat we have a night class. We teach two students at UNED, a distance learning university. They started in a computing class for retirees who didn’t have the opportunity or means to study when they were younger. When they finished the computing class, they started with our English class. Originally there were more than two students but it dwindled to just Aure and Manuel before I got here. They are very motivated and committed though. It’s rare that they miss a class. Manuel picks things up really quickly, even being in his seventies, and Aure works really hard, especially on her pronunciation which is something she struggles with. This is always a favourite class amongst our volunteers!
Thursday
The schedule on Thursdays is different to the rest of the week. We have the start of the morning off and I usually use it to go to the pool for a swim. It’s nice to take that time to myself and get some exercise during the week. At 10am or 10.30, depending on how much work we have to do, we start some lesson planning for the start of the following week. Instead of taking lunch with us to school, we eat in the house before leaving which usually leads to some delicious meals (check them out here!) and instead we take dinner with us.
We head into the school for around 1pm and our first class is with the Bethany Project mums. Of the eight members of the programme, four choose to come to our classes but the number that we actually see changes every Thursday depending on their other commitments. They’re such a fun group, absolutely hilarious at times and also very hardworking. It has been great to see the massive improvement since I met them, especially in their spoken English and their confidence! We also sometimes run workshops with them, depending on the skills and interests of our Women’s Empowerment volunteers. In my time, we’ve had self defence classes and workshops on sexual and menstrual health, consent and pleasure!
In terms of classes with the kids, Thursday afternoons are when we see the eldest classes. We start with Investigadores 4 who are a class I really enjoy. While not maybe my favourite class as a whole, it has some of my favourite students. Depending on their mood, they can be really easy to teach or quite distracted. When the latter is true, their teacher Raquel is really helpful in keeping everyone on task. They love to play hangman as well and anything that involves writing on the small whiteboards that we bring to class, especially if it’s a competition. This is a class that I love to push a little bit and see how much they can learn. In the younger classes, we don’t do a lot of grammar but starting with Investigadores 3 and 4 we introduce it a bit more. It’s still not explicit, we’re not breaking down all the component parts of English grammatical structure, but once we’ve learnt the vocab, we always put it into full sentences and then little by little change the sentences around until they understand how they work.
Next up is Investigadores 5, probably my least favourite class. Individually, I like them all but when they get together, they’re hard to control at times. Even on a good day, the noise level is always high. When it’s because they’re participating, I’ll take it! There are a few kids who can really influence the class so when they pay attention, their whole crew will or vice versa. Their teacher Nacari is one of the few who I think could successfully handle them. We’ve really leant into the things they like to do to try and engage them as much as possible so there’s always lots of games, especially when we can get them competing against each other!
Our last class of the day is Investigadores 6, the eldest class in the school with their teacher Naty who is super fun. The same thing happens with these guys as with Investigadores 3 on Tuesdays, because it’s the end of the day there’s often not that many of them left. At times we’ve taught one student! (Thankfully he really likes English so he was ok with it). They can at times also be challenging but I also think they are collectively the smartest group in the school. We’ve pushed them (and Investigadores 5) a lot in explicitly teaching them grammar, at times fairly complicated concepts, and they’ve picked them up with ease. There’s a change in my aims with these two classes, I want to only teach them vocabulary as a means to teach them grammar. Vocabulary is obviously very useful but I think having a strong foundation in the basics of grammar is more useful for a future speaking English. It means you can manipulate the language how you want to, substituting in the vocabulary you know or new words that you learn as and when you need them. This class also loves games and things you can compete on, especially a matching memory game (even though they’re terrible at it!).
At the end of our classes on Thursdays, we don’t actually go home. After having eaten lunch in the house, we bring dinner with us to have in the hour’s break we have before we start our conversation club. This is another fan favourite amongst the volunteers. We say it just feels like hanging out with friends! The level of English is a bit higher than in any of our other classes and the goal is just to get them talking so we don’t have to plan anything in depth. We start with small groups mixed between our conversation club and the level below, Nivel 3. There’s no structure to this, just chatting and as much English as possible! We try to have at least one volunteer in each group. After an hour, we split and just have our conversation club group. We always do a round of introductions with a few questions for people to answer like ‘what did you have for breakfast?’ or ‘what would your superpower be?’. Every week we have one or two people do a presentation on the topic of their choice and we fill the rest of the time with fun activities that get people talking as much as possible. Through conversation club, I’ve met some of the loveliest people who have become really good friends outside of class. This class finishes at 8pm and it’s finally time to go home and be done for the day.
Friday
This day is a little different from the rest of the week. Instead of going to the daycare and teaching, we head to Parque La Libertad. The story of this place is really interesting. Around fifty years ago, this place was a concrete factory. When the company moved to Puntarenas, they donated the land to the government in exchange for a tax break. The government turned it into a public park that now houses a range of governmental and non-governmental services like PANI, the child protection services, a music school, a circus school and more. You can still see remnants of the concrete factory around though! The park covers 32 hectares and while not all of it is open to the public, the parts that are are completely free. The park isn’t in a super safe area but inside the opposite is true. There’s lots of security making their rounds so it’s the perfect place to walk your dog, go for a run, bring your kids, practice parkour or skateboarding, birdwatch or more.
We primarily work with CEGEA, the centre for environmental education and management. They run a lot of community courses and workshops, for adults or schoolchildren, and work with lots of volunteer groups aside from GVI. We work with their gardeners, specifically one called Yhan. He’s lovely and always interacts well with our volunteers, speaking Spanish with them and practising his English. I got on well with him from the beginning and he’s definitely one of my favourite people we work with. We do a range of activities when we’re there depending on what they need and the size of our group. It could be weeding, preparing soil bags for the plant nursery, planting, cleaning, organising the recycling centre (where we take our recycling from the house) or moving covers to kill weeds. We have also worked with R3-CREA which is a programme that reuses material like bottle caps, computer parts, cardboard, literally anything possible to be used in creative workshops with kids!
We leave the house as normal at 8am and start working whenever we get to the park which is ten minutes past the school. There’s also a mountain road you can take which is my favourite. We usually work until around 11.30 when we start tidying up and heat up our lunch that we bring with us. There’s this cute wee pond where we have a picnic lunch with the ducks. There’s also lots of fish and some turtles in the pond and lots of dragonflies. There are usually motmots around, these fabulous vibrant green and blue birds with tails that they groom into points, which are my favourites. Since just after I arrived, there’s also been a group of boat billed herons (pico chocuaco in Costa Rican Spanish) which are pretty rare but have made a home in a tree next to the pond.
Friday is a bit of a half day, we’re back in the house in the afternoon. We encourage the volunteers to use that time to do some cleaning but it’s not mandatory. In the evening, we do have some compulsory activities. First of all, we do Volunteer of the Week. The idea is that throughout the week (or more likely at the last minute) you submit nominations for nice things that people have done for you or others during the week or something that you think should be recognised. The side competition of Staff of the Week is always hotly contested as well! After Volunteer of the Week we have FFF, Forced Friday Fun, which is basically a bonding activity. It can be anything from playing cards, watching a movie, getting the Nintendo Switch out to play Mario Kart, going for ice cream or a drink. If we have interns, they take over the organisation and we’ve had zumba classes or presentation nights which are so funny and my personal favourite.
Saturday
Not the weekend yet but almost. Usually we have classes on Saturday mornings. They’re part of the same programme of courses as our conversation club on Thursdays. There are two classes, one from 8am to 10am and then straight into the second one until 12pm. The first class is for 7-9 year olds and the second one for 10-12 year olds. There’s not usually a lot of overlap between the kids we see during the week and the kids that come on Saturdays but sometimes there is. The classes are two hours which is a long time for students so young so we try to make them as fun as possible and give them a break halfway through when they can run around.
After classes finish, the volunteers are free! A lot of them take advantage of being in Costa Rica and use the weekends to explore the rest of the country a bit. Popular destinations are Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean side, La Fortuna or Monteverde in the mountains or Manuel Antonio and Uvita on the Pacific side. If everyone leaves, Andrés and I are free to do what we want! If even one volunteer stays, one of us has to stay around the house.
Saturdays are also pick up days. New volunteers get picked up from San José every other week by a member of staff. We welcome them with lunch and then an afternoon of training! Andrés handles the introductory presentation and risk assessment and then we settle the new people into the house.
Sunday
If it’s not a pick up weekend, Sundays are usually pretty chill for me. The only fixed plan is a two hour water polo session in the middle of the day which is something I always look forward to. If it is a pick up weekend however, I’m chained to the table giving a full day of teacher training. Because those days are so full, I always start them with a swim so that I can do something for myself. Andrés also has a pick up weekend tradition of making his specialty, super fluffy pancakes on Sundays so I come home to that. I split the training into two parts, the more theoretical bit in the morning , a lunch break and then a more practical session in the afternoon when we plan a lesson for the coming week.
Sara Somewhere 