San Gerardo de General, Week two

As we reach the end to our second week in San Gerardo, it’s becoming more comfortable. The first week was a mix of planning classes, meeting with Jenny, the Director of Proyecto San Gerardo and becoming accustomed to our new waking hours of the day. In Costa Rica, the sun shines for about 12 hours, year-round, from 5:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Therefore, all of the daily activities begin earlier than we’re accustomed to. Breakfast is at 6:30, where we sit at the counter in the kitchen sleepily drinking delicious coffee that was grown in the back yard. Breakfast varies from grilled plantains (also grown in the back yard), to other fruits or breads, to beans and rice, which meals are centered around about 80 percent of the time. We’re incredibly lucky to have a great host family, with a wonderful cook as the matriarch. She worked as a cook on Chirripo, the nearby mountain, (the tallest in Costa Rica) which San Gerardo provides the access to. The Fonseca’s also owned a small hotel where Dona Fonseca did all of the cooking and cleaning. Each meal she comes through the curtain, which serves as the kitchen door with a plate of food fit for a king. Granted, we usually have a few minutes of explanation of what vegetable it is, because more often than not, it doesn’t exist outside of this region. I never knew plantains could be cooked in salt water and then mixed with anything from tomatoes, to spinach, to beets with mayonnaise. It’s all quite delicious. Needless to say, we’re not going hungry. Most is grown on the family farm, and the only time we’ve had chicken, it was walking around earlier on the neighbor’s property.

Rafa Fonseca, the father, is 65 years old and an avid mountaineer and runner. Yesterday morning he ran further than half way up Mount Chirripo to meet his daughter, a guide, who was descending from a trekking trip. The trip takes a ‘normal’ person about 6 hours to walk up the steep incline, Rafa ran up and was back down in 3 hours, in time for lunch and a nice afternoon siesta. On non-rainy afternoons (good luck finding one of those during this time of year) he runs to the nearby city, and by nearby, I mean 15 miles on a steep, rocky, dirt road. Kevin mentioned last night that there must be something in the vegetables!

We’ve started teaching this week and all is going well. We have everything from people that can’t speak a word, to children with American parents. The education system has really shifted in the last 10 years, because everyone before that basically finished elementary school and went to work on the farm. Most families in the previous generation had at least 6 or 8 kids, all who now have family houses on large farm plots where they all work. They work hard, hence the 7 p.m. bedtime most days.

I’m really enjoying the time here, and I think over the next 6 weeks, (we’ll be here for 8 weeks total) we’ll continue to not only teach, but also learn a lot.