The Road Less Traveled

Excuse me for not writing very much in the last month but without a computer and accoutrements, it was difficult. In addition, I was spending every waking hour planning for the school year which opened up last Monday. The boss and I have been spending our time writing the teacher and student manuals, talking about the strategic plan, timetabling, hiring teachers, organizing and reorganizing classes, buying materials, creating the evaluation software, preparing teaching workshops and so on. When you are the principal of a small school you have to do everything. In the past, I had no idea where the supplies came from. I just assumed they would be there!

Anyway, there is nothing more I can do. The ‘game’ is now in the hands of the teachers and I can sit back and watch it happen…sort of. The first day started off rather poorly mind you. We got a teacher all the way from Vietnam in 54 hours to start the school year with us and we could not even get him to school, a twenty minute bus ride! The bus went to get him, but since a teacher from last year was sick and they were on the same bus, the bus driver did not know what the new teacher looked liked. This is Costa Rica, of course, and people generally do not have phones so there I was at 8 am with two teachers missing. (school starts at 8 am.) Parents in Costa Rica infiltrate the school on the first day and take their kids to classes so there I was talking with parents and kids with no teacher to be found.

After I sorted out that problem, by personally getting the teacher, things started to go right and by Friday it actually appears as if things will go all right this year. Yesterday I even went with some students to el norte, just one hour from the school towards the border of Nicaragua. It was great. I travelled about thirty minutes north of Liberia, turned right on the first road and started driving east. After about fifteen minutes, the road, or anything resembling a road disappeared and I was travelling over potholes, huge rocks and through rivers, but did see great scenery which kept changing from pastoral farmland to hardwood trees, to ocean front vistas. I loved it as we made a circle from the east to the west and the whole thing probably took, in driving time, no more than two or three hours. Of course, no tourist ( of the legal kind) would ever travel these roads because the sexy spots in Costa Rica are the active volcanoes, the go go beaches like Coco or Jaco or even the other Hermosa but not where I went yesterday.

What I loved about it was the peacefulness of seeing cows grazing in the fields, real cowboys with real horses repairing fences and cutting crops and then seeing such change of scenery in minutes as we travelled from ‘Yafa” orange orchards for miles, it seemed, to volcanoes, beach vistas and old forest at Santa Rosa. There were lots of police checkpoints, probably stopping illegal immigration from Nicaragua but thankfully did not stop me because I did not have a passport with me which I think you are supposed to carry with you at all times. I am also sure they don’t do much of a job checking illegal immigrants either. After all, if they did, who would be working in Costa Rica?