July 21-27: Sending my Parents Off & Starting the Second Semester

My parents dropped me off back at site from our vacation down South last Sunday, and I had less than 24 hours there before school resumed on Monday . Fortunately, I didn’t have any classes planned for those first few days as my counterparts knew students, teachers, and parents would forget if we scheduled them before the break. However, Monday was a particularly fun day at school, because although I was working, I got to show my parents the centros educativos I spend my days at. It was cool to see worlds collide as my parents met my counterparts and host family for the first time. Additionally, some curious students, upon seeing other gringos, figured out my parents were in the building, and waved hi. After they got a chance to see my daily life a bit more, we took a quick detour to the regional city of Desamparados before I said my goodbyes to my parents and they took off for the beach in Guanacaste.


The rest of the week was a little weird with several interruptions to the typical class schedule despite just coming off a 2-week hiatus. On Tuesday, I primarily had to do some planning and scheduling: coordinating all my Peace Corps workshops with teachers can be quite a puzzle. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, classes were suspended due to a community-wide power outage for maintenance on the town’s electrical systems. I finally got to teach some of my typical classes on Thursday, but then Friday was off for a federal holiday. (Costa Ricans celebrate the Annexation of Nicoya on July 25th). In reality, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world that this week wasn’t the most productive in class, because I was battling some cold-like symptoms all week. Accordingly, most of my time outside of class was also spent recovering from that, although I did get some social runs in too when I was feeling up to it. 

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