Costa Rica and "travel education"

This is the reflection essay I wrote in correspondence with the grant I received to teach English and work on an organic farm in Costa Rica from June until early August. I taught English at a language school where I also took Spanish classes, CPI (Centro por Idiomas PanAmericano), in Monteverde. The Spanish classes were pretty good, but the English department was pretty much in disarray when I was working there. The farm I worked on was on the Caribbean coast, just south of Puerto Viejo, called Punta Mona. It's a little cheesy, but, hey, I wrote it for people who gave me money.


October 27, 2007

¨The only way to learn is to go into the framework of freedom.¨-- Michael Pollan

Cloud forests and Caribbean jungle farms. English and Spanish and dirt in my fingernails. Discussion groups and compost toilets. Poetry and plants. Rain and bugs. One of the insights on the English language that was illuminated this past summer teaching English and farming in Costa Rica is the often needless separation between travel, ¨to move or go from one place or point to another,¨ and education, ¨the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.¨ If we are not moving or going towards the act or process of imparting or acquirig general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life, in one place or point or another, then what are we doing?

In Monteverde, I aided the director of the English language program, Royner, at the CPI, Centro Panamericano de Idiomas, school. We would look through stacks of English planning books and find fun activities for English teaching, and create workbook pages. Examining the processes of teaching English was illuminating, or embarassing, when the one of the students in my discussion group asks how many tenses there are in English and when my face is as blank as my idea of the answer, another responds ¨Trece.¨ But certainly the most influential experience I had was the discussion group I led with three Costa Rican youths in the evening, after they had finished their school and work and made the 30-60 minute walk to the language school at the top of the hill. When Royner first shuffled them into the room to meet me, they sat down awkwardly at the table, flitting their eyes amongst one another, responding to any of my attempts at English conversation with a muffled silence and, if I was lucky enough to get a whisper of an attempt at an English response from one of them, gales of giggles quickly drowning the attempt. Royner had told me that they had had classes for a few years, and this may have been true. Though they certainly were just beginning learners, eventually through some warm humor and some shameless incorporations of Spanish into the ¨intensive English¨ class, we found our own language by the end of our time together. Hugging them goodbye after hearing bits about their ¨bruthers and seesters,¨ football, their pets, and their mamas and papas was a kind of connection I have rarely felt, full of a real, deep pride and a tenderness inordinate to the hours we had spent together. It was a bit of a shock to walk them safely to the door, wave goodbye and realize, ¨Huh. I guess that´s what teaching feels like.¨
When one declares one´s English major to a querying individual, the expected response (beyond the always shockingly difficult question of ¨So what´s your favorite book?¨) is ¨So you wanna be a teacher?¨ I think for this reason I had always sort of ruled out teaching as a possibility in my life. I didn´t want to be that cliche--I can come up with a more creative answer. Not that I haven´t always respected the business of teaching, and felt moved and sparked by a variety of truly great teachers throughout my lifetime; I had much respect, but I still felt, not for me.

Unfortunately, this experience brought yet another possible career path back onto the plate that I´m supposed to be narrowing down at this point. My silly little discussion group made me feel infested with the power of a great teacher student relationship. While I was familiar with the feelings of a student having a great teacher, I had never felt in that way the feelings of a teacher having a great student. Considering that as of yet my life has been pretty much straightforward that of a full-time student, this perspective taught me volumes.

And then, at the tail end of my Costa Rican adventure, my Gilbert award brought me to a ¨center for sustainable living and education,¨ a permaculture subsistence farm on the Caribbean coast by the name of Punta Mona. I had long felt it one of my most acute gaps in education that I had very little grasp of plant life, food, farming, gardening, the growing process. If it´s true that ¨You are what you eat,¨ I did not know who I was, and that is what travel education is for. While I was there, I woke up early to go for a morning swim in the Caribbean before breakfast made entirely from produce growing on the farm (subsizidized with the occasional ingredient traded at the farmer´s market), backstroking by the tropical flowers and palm trees. On my first day I arrived after the work day ended and sea kayaked out to a little palm tree island with my fellow volunteers. As we paddled out, a family of dolphins splashing through the salty water warm as the sunshine with me. We had handpicked, hand roasted local coffee and fresh cracked coconut milk on tap all day. I never tan. But, somehow, during my time there, I tanned. And there happened to be an ex-professional chef there at the time who loved making brownies with cocoa beans picked from the farm.

But of course, the gods of the farm have a sense of humor--just as I was growing dizzy with the fact that I had, in fact, discovered Eden so marvelously tucked away in a little corner of Costa Rica, hidden to all but us brilliant 13 volunteers, the moon came out. And all the electricity poofed out, run only on solar power (there was a generator, but, of course, we tried to save its expensive juice for necessary occassions). And the water for showering and flushing and hand washing ran out for a week, because we only used that collected from the rainwater catchment system, and it hadn´t rained, and we´d been doing manual labor in the dirt and 100 degree weather all day. (Not that, ironically, the knee-high mud that so cleverly collected in pockets on the trail to the bathroom, was affected by this dry spell.) And the bugs came out. ¨Buggy¨is such a relative term. I have never, ever in my life known the feel of a cloud of mosquitos and their delightful relative the ¨zancudo,¨ small as a gnat with a more long-lasting sting, buzzing from ears to ankles. One particularly trying day, I was attempting to help salvage the rainwater collection system on a day where it hit 110 and got literally 80 bug bites. It felt like the marrow of my bones were swollen with mosquite venom. And towards the end of my trip there, a huge bout of Dengue fever came out amongst almost all the volunteers (luckily, I escaped this fate, but still, one of the only healthies in a sea of pale, fevery, diarrhea-filled unwell is another level of Dante altogether).

But, still, I survived! And beyond survival, I had an education. And I even had fun. During the work day, whether that was putting on knee high boots and a shower of insect repellent and sloshing out to carry bamboo to build a new fence, or pushing wheelbarrows of wet leaves to mulch the new squash garden I planted, or the ever glamorous reality of bathroom duty (made all the more noble by the numerous composting toilets), I stretched muscles I was shocked to learn that I had, I was bit places I never knew I could be bit. I had never smelled so bad, or lived so fully. Smelling yourself awake in the morning is, certainly, a ¨travel education.¨

I chose the English major to be able to read and write about life. I chose the Peace & Conflict Studies major to learn about the systems of human life. If there could be a Venn diagram of the worlds of these two interests, I lived in the center this past summer. On it´s face, it could be argued that manual labor in a Spanish speaking country has nothing to do with an English major. I believe this is entirely missing the point. Although I´m well aware that this is not the case for everyone, for me, ¨English¨ is rather an arbitrary title for my major-- what I wanted is to be able to use language to create. The essence of the English major for me is getting trained in all the urgent needs we have in this world for appropriate applications of communication--learning to be able to carefully treate the world with word salves and word balms, to be able to mix up a vial of word solution and inject it into the vein. This past summer, I received some invaluable training. There is no way that I could have done this without the Gilbert Award. I had a baby-sitting job lined up. From both the specifics of a now active interest in becoming a teacher to a the broader education from entering the frameworks of my own freedom, because of the Gilbert Award I have been able to continue my love affair with words and be safe in saying I am truly more educated.