That's All, Folks!

Howling winds and single digit temps -- nothing else serves as quite the slap-in-the-face reminder that your month in Costa Rica is over. Man, it's almost surreal being back in the NY Metro area (more on that later). It's been a while since I've posted any substantial updates, so let me do that, then try to wrap a neat little Hollywood blockbuster ribbon around this whole puppy.

Last Wednesday was our last day with the boys at the orphanage, and it was by far our best. Our relationship with them had really been strengthening and picking up steam in the last week or so, and it seemed to really all peak on Wednesday. We got there a little earlier than usual to spend a bit more time with them and were rewarded with an hour of quiet conversation with a couple of our favorite boys, Daniel and Omar. We talked about the usual stuff -- American pop culture, our favorite adult beverages, and how poor our Spanish was.

Shortly thereafter, the rest of the troops arrived. They must have seen the huge bag full of sporting equipment we bought for them because they all came in arms extended, expressing some heartfelt "thank you's". We let them know that, yet again, these weren't presents from us,
but gifts from all the people back in The States who wanted to do something nice for them. That set a great tone for the day, which was spent outside playing sports and having some great conversations. I got Chépe, who usually passed the days watching music videos and old American television shows (Zena Warrior Princess, MacGyver, Walker Texas Ranger, etc) to play a game of 2-on-2 American Football. It took a bit to explain how to hold and throw a football on the laces, but he eventually loved the challenge of throwing a tight spiral. Kandi had a great chat with Juan Carlos, a pretty tough cookie who smiled like a little boy when she told him he had great potential. I played soccer (for the 10th consecutive day) with my buddy Diego who, once he realized I could tend goal, jumped at every chance to test me in the net. I'm not gonna admit to letting him score on me, but I think a lot more balls got through me than usual that day.

Thanks to your generosity, we were also able to order a ton of pies and breadsticks from Pizza Hut (which, remarkably, tastes exactly like the Pizza Hut in The States), a huge dulce-de-leche cake, and a bunch of soda. It was a nice break for them from their usual lunch of buttered bread and coffee.

Leaving was tough. Like I said, we felt like our relationship was peaking and we were really making strides with them, and then it was time to leave. There were a lot of hugs and thanks back and forth, and almost every one of them asked us when we were coming back. We were honest and told them we didn't know but that if it were at all possible, we'd be back. Kandi got a "you're a really good person" from Daniel, Diego finally called me his friend, and Omar told us that if we didn't come back he'd kick our asses. And that's about as much of a compliment as you'll get from Omar.

One tangible gift we'll take from the boys came in the form of a signed t-shirt with messages like "Goodbye friends," "Best friends 4 ever," "Tank you," and "Te quiero" (I love you). I have a feeling this incredible memento will find its way to a wall in our next home. (Click on the pic below for a close up of the tee).

The intangible gifts we take from these kids, however, are innumerable. These boys were constant reminders of what it means to be resilient, and living testaments to the strength of the human spirit. I'm sure that the next time I'm feeling a little wronged or like something hasn't turned out exactly how I planned it, I'll take some inspiration from the ever-present smile on Juan Gabriel's face and what he's gone through to get to that point.

We also learned a lot about ourselves simply from being outside of our comfort zones, and for me, being in an orphanage for abused and neglected teenage boys in Costa Rica is pretty far outside of my comfort zone. Almost every day, we were brought to that boundary of what we're comfortable with, and then had to decide if we wanted to cross it or not. That process alone shed a very bright light on where our strengths and weaknesses lie.

For example, I personally learned that in the face of chaos I tend to have a calming influence on others -- something I was able to learn because there was a lot of chaos there, and because I chose to do what I could to soothe it. I also saw how my own fears (in this case, fears of being physically hurt by these kids) acted as an impediment to forming strong bonds. When I was able to ease my own fears, a process that took a couple of weeks, my relationships with the boys grew by leaps and bounds. There are so many other examples of us expanding our awareness of what we're capable of and what we're not, and we're so grateful for all of them.

After our work was over, we had a full day's journey to the beautiful Nicoya Peninsula, followed by 3 days of relaxing in the laid back surfer town of Santa Teresa. That meant lots of time to mellow out, drink some wine, cook, surf, and take showers without the threat of electrocution. It also meant finally having time to process the past month a bit, and in doing so, we kept coming back to a few reoccurring themes.

One of those was definitely family. We had the fortune of staying with probably the sweetest family in all of Costa Rica, and to see how happy and content they all were living fairly simple lives together. They treated us like members of their family, which was such a gift. That, contrasted with how rough the boys at the orphanage had it with their own upbringing, and the importance of having a loving family was just so apparent. It made us appreciate our own families even more, and further strengthened our desire to be loving parents ourselves someday soon.

But probably the biggest theme that kept popping up throughout the trip was accepting what is. You can also call it going with the flow, taking what life gives you, or turning lemons into lemonade, but what it boils down to is that sometimes stuff happens, and then it's up to each of us to deal with it with dignity and find the positive. There were so many instances on this trip where things didn't go as planned but then turned out amazing, that we couldn't help but get the message. A small example was when the hotel screwed up our white water rafting trip on Saturday (our entire reason for traveling 6 sweaty hours by bus) and had to reschedule it for Sunday. Saturday, as it turned out, saw some of the heaviest rains of the year while Sunday was 86 and sunny. And there were those god-awful roosters that kept us up that first crazy night. Of course, they sucked at the time, but ended up serving as the catalyst for us meeting our eventual Costa Rican host family, who we now consider our second family.

In fact, even the two biggest factors that allowed us to even go on this trip could be seen as "negative" events -- us being forced to sell our condo in a terrible market and move in with my parents, and Kandi not landing a full-time job after graduating. We fought the hell out of these things, but in hindsight, they were two of the most important factors that allowed us to go and have this amazing experience.

Oddly enough, I just did my daily Facebook perusal and one of my friends had this status update, which pretty much sums up my above rant in a much more succinct fashion:

"Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures." -Joseph Addison

In the few days that we've been back home, Kandi and I have both said we just feel oddly different, even though we can't exactly place how just yet. It feels like it's going to take a while for all of this to settle, and I think we're both excited for that process. Part of what's making us feel different, I think, is how rich of an experience we've had. It's hard to put it into words much beyond that, but we just feel like we've stretched and tested ourselves every day of this trip. And just about every day we were exposed to something new. A perfect example: on our last day in Santa Teresa, I took my first surfing lesson. Then, completely exhausted and exhilarated on the walk back from the beach, for the first time in my life, I saw a cat with no tail.

And to think some of you doubted I could deliver the Hollywood ending!

Thank you so much for reading and for being a part of this.

FOLLOW-UP: I´m hilarious again.

All it took was some red wine, a festive atmosphere, and one gutsy shot at glory, and just like that, the drought was over!

Here´s the scene:

A birthday celebration for Kandi in the common courtyard, featuring a delicious brisket, some typical Costa Rican gallo pinto (rice and beans), and one of the best homemade birthday cakes ever made. The whole family is in attendance, as are the ladies from the neighborhood. It´s a packed house, the wine is flowing, and the conversation is lively -- everything from how certain indigenous fruits make men impotent to slang words that we probably shouldn´t be discussing in front of the children (ie, large breasts = pechugas).

Somehow the conversation switches over to the horrendous roads and driving conditions here and I´m pretty sure I hear 18-year old Rolando say something about ¨el culo del camion¨(TRANSLATION: The truck´s ass). He´s mid-sentence but I cut him off.

¨I´m sorry, but did you just say ´the truck´s ass?´¨I ask.

¨Yes,¨he replies.

¨Truck´s here have asses?¨I inquire, expecting the usual crickets.

¨Yes,¨says Rolando.

¨If you say so,¨I reply to a chorus of chuckles. And that was it. I had officially broken the spell of fall-flat-on-their-face jokes here in Costa Rica with the simplest of punchlines. So I allowed myself to briefly enjoy the laughs as they started to taper off, but then immediately, something inside me wasn´t satisified. This could be it, I thought. With only a week left here, this may be my best shot at some true laughter. People are drunk, the mood is light, and the cake & brisket crash is at least 10 minutes away. Plus, I´ll never be satisfied with having come to Costa Rica for a month and having gotten only a few chuckles. So with the last of the chuckles dying down, I went for it.

I stood up as though I were leaving and said, ¨Womens´breasts are pechugas and trucks have asses. That´s it...I can go back to The States now.¨

I stood and waited for what felt like hours, thinking, ¨Oh please don´t let this joke fall flat - I´m feakin´STANDING this time.¨ Eventually though, I heard the unmistakable sounds of a well-timed joke. I glanced around, and everyone was in stitches. One of the neighborhood gals slapped at her knees. The kids were practically in tears. I think someone even spewed some frosting across the table at me. Ya know, I gotta´tell you: if there ever was a time when it felt good to be pelted in the cheek by someone else´s half-chewed cake, this was it.

Crickets.

There´ve been quite a few adjustments to make here in Costa Rica: rarely getting a hot shower, living in a very conservative culture, and consuming enough white rice to back up a horse, to name just a few.

But I think the one that´s really starting to get to me is that I just can´t get a damn laugh down here. I know, I´m no Dom Rickles back home, but I at least get a chuckle or two now and then. In Costa Rica, I got nuthin´!

After looking at some of my failed attempts in the past two weeks, I realize there isn´t just one reason why my jokes fall flat here, but rather a number of reasons.

There´s the language barrier and the fact that I simply don´t have a mastery of Spanish just yet. For example, on the morning of Day One (with the family who lived on the farm with the noisy chickens), the señora asked me if we had any problems. I meant to jokingly say ¨Oh, the chickens!¨, which would have been ¨¡Ay, las gallinas!¨ Instead, I used a similar sounding word that I thought meant chickens and said ¨¡Ay, las galletas!¨ TRANSLATION: ¨Oh, the crackers.¨ Except for maybe in the context of this story, ¨Oh, the crackers¨is generally not the best punchline.


And there have definitely been cultural differences that make me less than humorous. Like during our lively New Year´s celebration with the extended family, I told the woman pictured above that one of her brothers, who had been dancing like a maniac and playing the court jester role all night, was crazy. An innocent attempt at levity turned sour quickly. Her face went from jolly to dead serious in a nanosecond and said ¨Crazy?! No. No. He´s not crazy.¨ She even gave me a Dikembe Mutumbo finger wag in my face for emphasis.

And then there´s just inexplicably unfunny material that I would normally expect to kill back home. Just yesterday, we were hanging out at the orphanage with the boys and their sports coordinator, Johhny, watching the Michael Jackson live DVD we bought. MJ pulled off a sick Moonwalk from one side of the stage to the other and I said ¨That´s how Johnny enters the kitchen at home.¨ Absolute crickets. A couple of them looked at me with the dreaded ¨confused dog¨look (head cocked to the side, lip snarled a bit). As I sank down into my chair and quietly watched the rest of ¨Smooth Criminal¨, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn´t give up. And so I vow to you now as I vowed to myself then - I WILL GET A LAUGH IN COSTA RICA.

Leave It To The Ants...

Last weekend, we travelled to Turrialba, a gorgeous area on the Eastern (Caribbean) side of Costa Rica. Luckily, we left 2 days before the active volcano in town erupted (http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Costa-Rican-Volcano-Erupts-80904842.html)! While there, we took a guided tour through some protected rainforest. By far, the most interesting thing we learned about were the leafcutter ants. If you click the picture below, you can see them a little better -- they´re the little guys under the bright green pieces of leaves.

These little suckers are incredible. They spend their entire lives walking a very specific path, carrying pieces of leaves that weigh up to 30 times their body weight (the equivalent of a human carrying a bulldozer!) which they then use to grow a fungus that feeds the queen and the rest of the colony. They work so hard and so non-stop, you can actually see a depression in the land...FROM ANTS! You can see this in the picture at the top. My first reaction to these little guys was one of respect and admiration for their hard work. Then I learned that because they work so hard and so non-stop, they only live about 5-7 days (about a quarter of the life expectancy of other ants)!

When I get home, I´m putting this picture next to my desk.

Shopping, Futbol, & Spiders, Oh My!

As the title of this post implies, this entry wil probably be a little scattered, so my apologies in advance...

First things first, an update on our relationship and work with the boys. We´re definitely developing more trust and mutual respect with them, albeit very slowly. Some of them just seem reluctant to give us much, and so we just have to respect that and leave them be. Others seem genuinely happy to have us around to talk with, play sports with and to answer their questions about American pop culture (ie, ¨What do these Linkin Park lyrics mean in English?¨). As I´ve alluded to in previous posts, they´re pretty much locked into this facility and so they get a little restless being in the same place all the time. It´s a fairly spacious facility (although it´s getting a much-needed makeover in about a month), but any teenage boy would get antsy seeing the same place, playing with the same kids and the same toys every day. Here are some pictures from the outside wall. We can´t take pictures that show the kids´faces so these are a little distant.


To alleviate some of that boredom, we decided to put some of that donation money to use and bring in some things to keep them entertained for a bit. In talking with them the last week, we put together a bit of a wish list which included hip-hop and rap music, live concert DVDs, action movies, soccer balls and pumps, bicycle riding gloves, and the big ticket item...skateboards! We quickly learned that this wasn´t going to be an easy search because most of these things just aren´t for sale in the small town of Atenas (think of trying to buy these things in a sleepy little fishing town in Maine). We were a little disheartened at first and skeptical about ever being able to come through for the boys, but that´s when we learned that just 45 minutes away in the city of Alajuela is a mall.

Now, ask us to cook an authentic Costa Rican meal of gallo pinto and you´ll probably get a plate full of slop, but set two kids from Jersey loose in a shopping mall with lots of money to spend and we´re right at home.

The mall was, well...a mall. In fact, maybe a bit TOO much like our malls?

But it did have pretty much everything we needed and we ended up buying them:

-4 sets of bicycyle gloves
-a soccer ball
-a bike/ball pump
-sports cones
-a Justin Timberlake live DVD
-a Michael Jackson live DVD (he´s like God down here...it´s kinda scary...don´t think they got the memo about the suspected child molestation)
-a hip hop/R&B "Best Of¨2009 cd.
-a Nas CD
-a Linkin Park CD and live DVD
-a JayZ CD
-a CD carrying case
-2 sets of goalie gloves
-3 professional quality skateboards
-3 professional quality helmets and wrist guards

It was quite the spree and I have to tell you, a pretty awesome feeling as we walked out of there with all this loot, knowing how well it would be received. When we did arrive at the orphanage, we were met by one boy who quickly alerted the masses to the bounty of loot. We barely made it past them into the gated office where we took the sports coordinator, Johnny, through it all. He seemed genuinely touched and even asked ¨Do I owe you something for this?¨ I don´t think he could believe that anyone would buy all this stuff and not expect something in return. We let him know that these were gifts from our family and friends back home who wanted to help and I think he was just stunned by that.

The torturous part for the boys, as they clung to the locked cage outside the office, was seeing all the gifts put on the shelf instead of handed out to them. The ¨jefe¨or boss would have to sort through all of it, approve it all, and make a plan for sharing the skateboards before they could dole it out. I saw one of them actually salivating.

Luckily they had another activity planned for the day in a trip to a nearby indoor soccer stadium for a friendly match. I was the 8th man, which meant no sitting on the sidelines to spare the embarrassment of being shown up by 14 year olds. Naturally, after about 5 minutes in the field, I had lost about 12 pounds of water weight and my breathing sounded like a small prop plane running out of fuel. One of the boys took mercy on me and let me play goaltender, and as they say, it was like riding a bike. These kids fired rocket after rocket in my general direction (I suspect they were aiming FOR me in most cases, not around me) and I felt like I was back in goal at Gettysburg College. I got comments like ¨Buenisimo!¨(¨Excellent!¨) and ¨Que portero tenemos!¨(¨What a goalie we have!¨). I let up just one goal in about 45 minutes, and when it was all said and done, I think I had proven myself to these kids in a different way.

The game stopped when two of the boys got into a fight, but something truly amazing happened. As soon as the fight stopped, all of the boys just walked off the field and put their street shoes on. They did this because they knew that the game would be more about fighting and cheap shots from there on out and less about soccer. The fight had marred the purity of the game, and they were no longer interested. It was amazing. These kids aren´t much for authority or respecting rules or decorum, but on that soccer field they played by the rules beautifully. Once that went out the window with the fist fight, they lost interest in playing.

Today, we´re having pizzas delivered to the orphanage for a little pizza party, also thanks to many of you. And when we arrive later, we hope to see them using their new skateboards, listening to their new music, watching their new DVDs, playing with their new soccer ball, and riding their well-inflated bikes with their new riding gloves all because of the support of so many of you. We´ll no doubt think of all of you when we see it.

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As a random aside, we came home the other night to see the largest spider we´ve ever seen, crawling on the wall by the gated entrance to our home. It was one of those thick, meaty ones you see on The National Geographic Channel -- not the thin, whispy ones we have back home. We told Anna, our 70-something grandmother of the house, that we had just seen a tarantula. Without blinking, she walks outside, picks up a stick and flings the thing onto the ground. It made an audible ¨thud¨as it hit the dirt. She then whacks away at the thing and pushes it into the sewer and says ¨You don´t need to worry about him anymore.¨ I told her, ¨Anna, usted es mi heroe.¨ (¨Anna, you´re my hero¨).

A Tale of Two Baños

Please notice the pictures of these two different showerheads. The first is a picture of the showerhead from the hotel we stayed at this weekend, which caters to Americans, Europeans, and generally anyone accustomed to taking a shower with a steady stream of hot water which doesn´t pose the constant threat of electrocution.

The second is our showerhead at home here in Atenas. Notice the exposed wires dangling ominously overhead. I´m thinking maybe they didn´t do the ¨Water And Electricity Don´t Mix¨PSA here. (And, commence snobbish American rant.)

I think we could probably look past the ever-present danger of being electrocuted if the damn thing actually worked. But I think the purpose of this hot water ¨heater¨here is to raise the water temperature to just above freezing. What it means for us is that showering is certainly not the pampered experience it is in The States, and there´s definitely no lingering. Instead, showers are much less frequent and when we do bite the bullet and decide to get clean, only key body parts are tended to. We´ve started calling them ¨A.F.A.C¨showers (Armpits, Feet, Ass & Crotch). My back hasn´t been washed in 8 days and counting.

But the bathroom fun doesn´t stop in the shower. Due to poor plumbing infrastructure in certain parts of town and a fairly dry climate here in Atenas, running water usually stops in our house at about noon and doesn´t return until the following morning. That means tooth brushing and face washing using the 2-litre Fanta bottle (pictured below), and well-planned, uh, ¨movements.¨ I think I´m starting to get a reputation in town as ¨the Gringo who buys a soda so he can use your shitter.¨

New Year´s Eve With The Fam

We got our first taste of Costa Rican family life in a big way on New Year´s Eve, in the form of a 40 person, food and drink and dance-filled fiesta until the wee hours of the morning. OK, maybe WE didn´t make it till the wee hours of the morning, but the other 38 sounded like they did. There´s not much more we can say about it that the pictures can´t tell, so I´ll just post a bunch below. Enjoy these shots of us generally making asses of ourselves...