No, not the Amish

Just to be clear...the Quakers are not, in fact, the Amish. Nor are they in any way similar to or related to the Amish. They do not dress in any particularly unusual manner and they do not have any particular objection to electricity. Just to be clear.
We get a surprising number of tourists at our school looking for "The Quakers." One visiting Italian tourist actually laughed at my boss when he said he was a Quaker (he IS a Quaker) because she thought he was kidding. She said, "No! You're not a Quaker! I mean the REAL Quakers, in the black clothes? And the bonnets?" Apparently this poor woman came all the way up the mountain to Monteverde for the sole purpose of catching a glimpse of some Quakers.
I believe she might have been disappointed.
There are plenty of Quakers here. But they wear hiking pants and rubber pants and rain slickers just like any 21rst century person living in a farming community on a rainy mountain.
It is very, very odd to teach in a school that is also a tourist attraction. Tourists sometimes simply ignore that we are clearly an actual school trying to go about it's school business. Plus people stand in our recess yard and take pictures. They also take pictures of our students, which I find quite creepy. The kids are used to it, but the North American in me wants to call the police.
One tourist came into our staff office the other day and announced, "I am here to learn about your school! Can someone give me a tour?" What made this particularly odd is five of us were sitting in the office around a speaker phone CLEARLY looking like we were planning on doing something important. My boss explained that we were about to do a phone interview so now was not the best time. The man simply ignored this and walked further into the office. He continued asking questions about the school, about its history, all the while the clock is ticking away and we are waiting to begin our phone interview. My boss asked again if he could excuse us because we were doing something important at the moment and he then wanted to know when could be come back and take the tour.
See, the thing is, we are actually a school. Not a tourist site.
This guy was actually not so out of the ordinary. I am often stopped as I am rushing from one class to the other, arms full of books and rulers and paper and scissors and string and other assorted supplies, by some tourist who would like to ask me a few questions. I have been asked by tourists, "Are YOU a Quaker?" as if they are wondering, perhaps, why I am not wearing a bonnet. (Reminds me of when I used to be a tour guide at Sarah Lawrence College where at least once a day I was asked by some parent, "Are YOU a lesbian?")
You don't really want to be rude to the visitors, but you do feel a little perturbed. And I feel that kicking said tourist would not truly reflect the Quaker values of our institution.
So- folks- if you ever are visiting another country and wish to see a cute little school, please don't forget they are also a normal school just trying to do normal school stuff. If you choose to ask a million questions and times that are clearly inconvient, please don't be upset if you get kicked. You've been warned.
On that note, if you ask extremely personal questions of your college tour guide, you should perhaps also be kicked.

Water, or lack there of

So we spent last weekend without water again! Ah, the adventures of life in Costa Rica! It was okay living without showering and having to "go" outside...but the lack of water for cooking was a bit ridiculous. It's funny how you realize that practically everything one can cook requires water. Without water we were unable to make any of our stand-by dinner dishes, such as pasta or rice and beans or lentils or soup. We ended up eating grilled cheese and popcorn. But then, of course, we couldn't wash the pans afterwards so the dishes sat for quite some time in the sink!
There was also no water at school on Monday, which meant we had to tell all the students to use the outhouse and not the regular bathrooms. Yet another occurance that seems unlikely to have happened at my old school in Philadelphia...
Speaking of which, I also stubbed my toe in class on Friday and pointed out to my students how odd it is to teach barefoot. They laughed because to them, that is just the way one IS in a classroom. One always must take off his or her shoes before entering a classroom! It does mean that I have to be extra careful when choosing socks to make sure they don't have holes in the toes... and I have to attempt to make my socks match...

We found a teeny, tiny baby scorpion in the house. It was a perfect little minature scorpion. We caught it in a jar and then gave it a little flea to see if it would eat it. The scorpion chased the little flea for some time, pinching it with its front pinchers, but then lost interest. I guess scorpions don't eat fleas.
Next week I am going on an overnight hiking/camping trip with my students. We are hiking to San Luis where we will stay for two nights. Should be fun! I'll post some photos after the trip.

Another monkey picture...

More Monkeys...

While sipping our Monteverde coffee this morning, we saw a small troop of capuchin monkeys in the trees directly next to our house. They were the closest they've ever been to the house! We watched them jump around for a while, eating bromelieds and climbing the branches. I managed to snap a few pictures of them...sorry they're blurry, but these guys are hard to photograph. They move quickly!

Amos and his solar hot dog cooker

Lalo and Nacho with their solar hot dog cooker

"Eduardo" and "Ignacio" are their given names. Folks are big on nicknames here.

Isabel and her solar hot-dog cooker

Solar Hot Boxes

Today in science class we made solar hot boxes to cook hot dogs...and it actually worked! It's always thrilling when a science lesson goes as planned. The hot dogs actually cooked all the way through, and they only had to sit in the sun for three hours! Hardly the way one would want to make a quick snack, but pretty amazing none-the-less. Here's a picture of some of my students building their hot dog cookers.

Science class and more...

So our unit on Energy is progressing nicely, and I am finding that I enjoy teaching this topic enormously. We finished our homemade roller coasters (built to demonstrate kinetic and potential energy) and are now in the process of building little solar ovens. These very simple boxes will be used to, hopefully, cook some hot dogs on Friday. I say ¨hopefully¨ because the weather here is somewhat unpredicatable and if there is no sun on Friday, there will be no hot dogs. So, everyone hope for sun!
Interestingly in the course of my research for this class I´ve learned that Costa Rica gets 85% of its power from hydroelectric plants and the rest from geothermal plants and wind farms. That must be why the air here seems so clean!
Looks like next year I´ll be taking on an additional science class at the high school level. Who would have guessed that after all these years of thinking of myself as a Humanities person I would end up loving teaching science most of all...
Today the sun is shining and it is chilly, but pretty, outside. Yesterday I went for a run in the rain, which is actually kind of fun. The cold, wet air makes you run faster because you want to hurry up and get in from the rain!
I am also the assistant teacher for a running mini-course this semester. I ran with them last week and the high school boys in the class were a little bit faster than me (I am being sarcastic. They were A LOT faster than me.) I was pleased that I did manage to keep within sight of them, though. Even if they were teeny-tiny dots off in the distance.
On an unrelated note- it´s funny when the grocery store runs out of stuff here. A few weeks ago, the store had no butter for days on end. How on earth do you run out of butter? Particularly in a place with so many cows running around?? It´s not surprising when the store runs out of things like Coca Light (Diet coke)...but butter?? Let me tell you- it was pretty exciting when the butter came back. Since the return of the butter, we make sure to buy TONS of it whenever we go to the store. Because you never know when another butter draught might hit!