2001 Annual Grant Issue
Meghan Glendinning: Kast Grant Report
Summer Study in Costa Rica

As with any trip to Latin America, there is always a sense of uncertainty because life simply functions differently down there. It is certainly less hectic and frenetic than it is here, the people are generally more laid back, and life is slower. Slower in the sense that when the day is over, there are times when you feel happy just to have gotten through it.

When you travel to Latin America, however, you must be aware that things don't always go as planned. When I set up my trip to Merida, Mexico, it was very easy. I got my flight and signed up for my course and I was actually able to accomplish this in two days. I guess that should have been a sign that something would go wrong. So, when I got a call a week before I was to leave informing me that my intensive course in Merida had been cancelled, I switched into my Latin mode and attempted to regroup. What the agency offered me was the same intensive course in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Well, I'd never been there either and even though there were no pyramids there, there certainly was the cloud forest, animals and lots of critters. A good portion of the sixth grade course is spent studying etymology, but I figured it couldn't hurt to become more acquainted with entomology. It was a bit of a setback but I'd still be able to accomplish my goal of immersing myself into the culture and studying Spanish.

On June 16, I left for San Jose, Costa Rica. It was lucky that I got out that morning because that afternoon apparently the skies opened up and Philadelphia had one of the worst floods it has had in years. I arrived in San Jose with the uncertainty that nobody would be at the airport to meet me. When I got through customs, however, I saw a man standing vigil holding a sign with my name written in bold letters. A sense on relief passed over me. I had made it through the first leg. First glimpses of the country were mountainous and beautiful. They were just coming into their winter, which meant that the rains would be arriving and the country would be getting greener. Hopefully, it wouldn't be a downpour everyday but, Monteverde was at a much higher altitude, and some had told me that the weather might be terrible.

The next morning a van pulled up to the B&B, honked its horn and ten of us piled in for our three-hour ride to Monteverde. I was lucky enough to sit in the front so the driver and I had a nice chat mostly about soccer - an obsession in many of the Latin American countries that I've visited. There were people in the streets, honking their horns, waving Costa Rican flags, singing in groups. It looked somehow, as if they had just been liberated from a war, but my driver friend told me that Costa Rica had just won an important preliminary World Cup match against Mexico, and they had won in Mexico which was practically unheard of. People were waving posters, plastered with the faces of some of the top soccer players. I knew from previous trips to Mexico and Brazil just how famous the top players were. The pride with which the driver explained the match, play by play, was testament enough to his fierce sense of pride for his team.

The ride was actually quite pleasant until he turned into what looked like a driveway. He announced that this was the final ascent to Monteverde. After the first 100 yards of relatively smooth dirt, the road took a serious turn for the worse as we began to swerve to miss, what looked to me like, parts of the road that simply opened up as if to swallow the next unsuspecting car that dared venture up the hill. The ruts and large rocks that littered the road sent our small van, with little if any shocks, bouncing all over the road. It was just about this time that I decided that I needed to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, the jarring and bumping started to become painful. Had I known, I wouldn't have had any coffee that morning and I most certainly would have worn my jog bra. We finally stopped and I hiked up to find a nice tree. When I reentered the van the driver said it would be about thirty minutes more. I thought I would die but when he rounded the next corner, we had climbed so much that the mountains were smack dab in front of us. The valleys below, newly lush with the rains, panned out in front of our eyes. It was really a beautiful sight.

I don't want to go into how long it took us to actually find the house where I had been placed, but it was LONG. The address was: across from the cemetery and behind the pulperia, which is a small little store at the top of the hill. At any rate, I arrived, dropped off my bags and met my family. The family consisted of a mom with two daughters. She was a beautician who painted nails and did hair out of a makeshift room in the back of the house with a black sink, cement floors, and a caddy full of different polishes. The girls immediately hung out with me and started teaching me different counting songs. They were enthralled with my lotions and perfumes and we sat on the bed trying each one out until they had giggled themselves breathless. They thought the tattoo bandages that I had stowed in my toiletries kit were the coolest. After I had unpacked, I arranged to meet one of my "new" friends at the Santa Rosa Cloud Forest Reserve to go hiking.

We had another incredibly bumpy, but thankfully short ride up yet, another mountain. We paid a small fee, got a guide and headed off into the forest. If you have never been to the rain forest, it is very difficult to imagine simply through an explanation. There is an umbrella of trees that shades the forest and protects much of the life under the canopy. The life there is not always easy to see, but if you look very closely you can see brightly colored frogs and interesting bugs and critters. The trees, which are completely covered with a slimy, but very cool moss, just seem to be reaching up endlessly to get to the top of the canopy for more sunlight. It truly is amazing. I also had the opportunity to see the forest at night. There are fluorescent mushrooms and all types of different bugs that have special adaptations for surviving in the dark. Monteverde is world-famous for this cloud forest reserve as hundreds of biologists and environmentalists descend upon it yearly to study the unique life forms that are present here.

A posionous red frog

My coursework consisted of traditional school every morning from 8:00 - 12:00. I was lucky to have only one other student and our teacher in my group although the other student rarely wanted to engage in discussion. This was frustrating for me as well as the teacher. My afternoons were set up with a private tutor. Every day we did a different activity together and spent hours speaking Spanish and trading stories. It is always amazing to me how difficult life is for so many people. Rhonda, my tutor, had been sexually abused by her stepfather, had three children by the time she was nineteen, and was living with a boyfriend, while the grandparents had custody of all of her children.

All of our activities revolved around nature and what this unique environment had to offer. We went to the children's rain forest, which was a series of trails in the woods with beautiful vistas in every direction. We sat at the top of the canopy and watched a family of monkeys playing in the trees, and we also saw an amazing array of birds and strange animals that looked like a cross between an armadillo and an anteater. One afternoon, we went to a butterfly garden and learned all about the migration patterns of butterflies and moths. We went to an orchid garden where we walked around with little magnifying glasses that looked as if they came out of a Cracker Jack box. I learned the characteristics of different orchids and saw some that were about the size of my pinky toe. We spent one afternoon at the ranarium, which is an indoor facility for frogs. We had a private tour with flashlights because most frogs are nocturnal rather than diurnal. I saw hundreds of different types of birds on a daily basis including a wide variety of hummingbirds.

I befriended two little boys whose parents owned my favorite restaurant. They wanted to show me how much English they could speak and were really very dear.

By far my favorite and most thrilling activity was an adventure called Sky Trek. Sky Trek was in the rain forest and it was a series of cables that zigzagged across the forest. Rhonda and I donned our helmets and zipped across these cables. The final cable required a climb up what looked like a large radio tower. It was about 500 feet up and by the time we got to the top, the winds were so strong that we had to clip ourselves to the top of the tower to ensure that we wouldn't blow off. It was scary, but the view was unbelievable. From one vantage point, you could see a huge mountain lake, and from another, a view of a volcano that is active but hasn't erupted in four or five years.

Main Street

One of the "perros de la calle"

My ten days in Costa Rica were filled from sun up to sun down with activities. It was a phenomenal trip that leaves me yearning to travel more. The only thing I would have to say that I didn't like about Costa Rica was that the culture was a bit bland. There is no indigenous culture to speak of which means that there is little social unrest. On the one hand, this makes the country very stable but, on the other hand, it just seemed too homogenized. The stability lures lots of Americans, which is also unappealing. I like to travel to places where there are fewer Americans. In countries, where they are not used to seeing Americans, people are more curious about you, and they tend to open up more when you are more of an anomaly than the norm. Any travel to other cultures, however, opens my eyes to different ways and people and hopefully, shows most of us isolated, monolingual Americans, that there is a whole other world out there. It's a harsher world, in many ways, than ours, but what we can learn just by venturing out of our comfortable cocoon is invaluable. I've always felt lucky to have traveled to different cultures, and feel that my job as a teacher is not only to teach the language itself, but also to try to inspire language students to travel and understand different people and their cultures. If I'm the least bit successful, I'll feel rewarded. In light of what happened here on September 11^th, I think it is our duty to understand the world better and be more sensitive as a people. Traveling to other parts of the world and living among different people is certainly one step in the right direction.