Oct 6-12: My Students and I "Return" to Costa Rica

After a whirlwind weekend trip to the States, I was back in Costa Rica for a full week in my community. As mentioned in my prior blog, although I had a great time traveling back to Tennessee, I was ill pretty much my entire trip. Fortunately, on Monday, the schools had another congreso, (teacher’s union) so classes were out. I took advantage of this (and Peace Corps’ great medical care) to go to the Doctor’s and ensure everything was okay. They were pretty confident I had some variation of gripe (flu), and by the time of writing this blog about a week later, I feel much better. But, you never know what kind of bug you might’ve picked up, especially living away from home, so I’m glad that the Peace Corps’ medical team gave me the peace of mind to get it checked out.

Classes resumed on Tuesday, and the rest of the week was pretty standard thankfully. Sadly, my Amigos sin Fronteras International Club came to an end on Tuesday. To wrap up their “world tour", students returned “home” to Costa Rica, where they took on more of a role in co-teaching about their own country, explained some of their favorite parts about being Ticos and Ticas, and created a mock travel itinerary for their favorite destination in Costa Rica. Later in the week, for Costa Rica’s Dia de la Diversidad, these same students joined me on stage for an assembly to explain what the club was and some of the highlights of the experience. This was perhaps my favorite project I’ve done at site, and although I’m sad it’s over for the year, I’m excited to fine-tune some things and to bring it back next year to a (hopefully) even larger group of students. 


Closing out Amigos Sin Fronteras was probably the most-noteworthy thing that happened at site, although I stayed busy on other activities too. Highlights of the week included continuing American Football sessions in my PE classes at the escuela, helping students and teachers practice English at the colegio, and heading into San Jose Friday night to hang out at the trendy food hall El Jardin de Lolita. It was a good week, and I’m thankful I readjusted to my life here after going back to the States without any issues.

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