Apr 27-May 3: New School Clubs and 2 Fun Day Trips

Last week was so busy that I couldn’t even get a blog out on Sunday! I had a full week both in the classroom and outside it. As usual, last week was jamp-packed with PE classes at the escuela, but there were some other breakthroughs too. For PE, I continued rotating through classes with a new activity - handball (aka “balónmano” in Spanish). Although some had heard of it before, handball was a pretty foreign concept to most of my students. However, they quickly caught on and enjoyed it. Additionally, at the escuela, I kicked off two different clubs for students. The first one, Amigos sin Fronteras, is a repeat of a club I co-led with the librarian last year focused on learning about various countries and cultures. This week, we “traveled” to the United States and I more or less recycled the same lesson as last year. The other club, a reading club, was a first. When my Peace Corps boss visited my site a couple months ago, they encouraged the escuela to think about more projects a volunteer could help co-lead so that a future volunteer could potentially work exclusively there and not at the high school too. One idea they came up with was this reading club, which would also be a collaboration with the librarian. On Tuesday, we began the first reading club with “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein, and it was a big success. We had a cohort of around 20 students who were engaged and very interested in reading. 


At the colegio, I continued to be focused on helping out with English (when I can) as well as the community-service Servicio Comunal Estudiantil program. The highlight this week at the colegio was that my new group of 11th grade community service students participated in its first run club. Friday was Labor Day in Costa Rica, so both students and teachers were out of class. The goal is to soon host the run club for the community, but since most of these students lack experience running, we took advantage of the free day to simulate what a run club might look like. I was super pleased with the attendance (over 15 students showed up) and their positive attitude, given that they were willing to come out and run on their holiday. This seems like a really good group of students, so I’m excited to see what they can do with the project in the coming months.



After a busy week in school, things didn’t really slow down over the weekend. My girlfriend, Keily, has been talking about going to Costa Rica’s national theme park, Parque Diversiones, for a long time. After we found a great promotion for tickets online, we decided to finally go on Saturday. It is hard to compare it to anything like Disney or Universal in terms of size or attractions, but for the price and the convenience, Parque Diversiones was quite nice, and we had a really fun day there. On Sunday, we traveled with her family down south to the mountainous Pérez Zeledón region of Costa Rica. Her father is a former professional soccer player and previously played for the Pérez Zeledón team in Costa Rican First Division. They have an official veterans’ team, “Leyendas” that plays games against other teams on occasion, and this Sunday they had a game in the Pérez stadium. I had never been to Pérez Zeledón, so it was a blast seeing a new part of the country and catching a soccer game on the same trip. 

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