May 5-May 11: Un Papa Gringo and a Trail Race in Tronadora

Apologies to anyone anticipating a Sunday post - I got a bit delayed with my travel schedule over the weekend. This was a fairly typical school week, just with a slightly higher workload.

In the colegio, I continued to tutor students in their Servicio Comunal Estudiantil service projects. Sadly, I’m having to scrap one of my projects (creating a school mascot) because the group simply doesn’t have enough people to do that kind of project justice. However, it should be pretty easy to fold those students into other projects I'm leading so I’m not too worried. 

At the escuela, things were particularly busy. I had roughly 4 classes per day including both PE and some team-building exercises. On Thursday, I joined several educators from the school in the teacher’s lounge to watch the announcement of a new Pope. Once the white smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel, church bells started ringing throughout my town. That was a reminder of Costa Rica's strong Catholic tradition and made for a cool cultural moment. And when it was revealed that the new leader of the Vatican would be an American for the first time, many students and teachers congratulated me on “Papa Gringo”, or the Gringo Pope. On Friday, the escuela put on a bingo fundraiser. I was in charge of making iced tea, or fresco, and serving it to all the attendees. I guess I’ve done an okay job at it in the past, because I keep on getting thrust into similar roles at these public-facing service events. 


Over the weekend, I traveled about 5 hours northwest from San Jose. A fellow Peace Corps volunteer's community in Guanacaste hosted a trail race, so that felt like a good excuse to go and see a new part of the country. I stayed in an airbnb in the town of Tronadora alongside 8 other volunteers who also did the run. I raced a distance of 24 kilometers (15 miles) while some other volunteers ran 12km, and a brave trio actually ran 45km, which is technically an ultramarathon. This was a true “cross-country” style race and one of the hardest runs I’ve ever done. In the 15 miles I ran, we climbed an elevation of over 2,600 ft through mud, rocks, and rain. It was so steep at some points that there was no choice other than to walk. To make matters worse, the race got super strung out, and they didn’t have obvious trail markers in some places, so I took a wrong turn near the finish and ended up having to travel a few extra miles. However chaotic and challenging the race was, it was fun to do it with friends, and the views of nearby Lake Arenal at the summit made it worth it.

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