Hola Golden Bay!
Most of you probably know by now that I’m currently participating in an AFS high-school exchange program to Costa Rica in Central America. For the past nine months I have been living with a tico (Costa Rican) family in Coronado, San Jose (the capital). I am living with my host dad - Enrique, mum - Ana, four host sisters - Mariana (20), Gloriana (19), Ximena (17) and Camila (10) and also Marianas husband, Jose Pablo (20), Fabiana their one-year-old daughter, and Santiago who is not due until February.
Our typical day involves getting up at 5.30am and getting ready for school. Xime, Cami and I leave the house at 6.30am when Ana, who drives a school bus, picks us up and we arrive at school at 7.30am. Schools here are very basic, nothing but the desks and a whiteboard in mine, no library, computers or sports equipment, and mine is a private school so it’s one of the nicer ones. I finish at 4pm and take a public bus home. My host mum serves dinner around 8pm and around 10pm we all go to bed!
A typical Costa Rican meal (by typical I mean every... breakfast, lunch, dinner, pudding and drinks) consists of rice and beans. Spaghetti is the only alternative I have had, apart from fast food, in the whole nine months I have been here! Generally speaking there’s not a lot of night life; after dark it gets dangerous. Last year Costa Rica had 11 homicides for every 100,000 habitants, one of the downsides of being stuck between Colombia and Mexico. All of the houses have bars on the windows and doors, and barbed wire on the tops of the fences. In the smaller towns it’s safer, especially by the beach, but I still wouldn’t go out by myself after 7pm.
I have managed to travel quite a bit, visiting volcanoes and beaches. I went to the world surfing champs in Jaco in July and recently went on a trip to an indigenous village in Talamanka, which involved driving for five to six hours then walking two to three hours on a dirt trail through the rainforest and crossing several rivers to arrive at a tiny village in the middle of the mountains. The people there speak their own language and live in little tin-roofed shacks that don’t have walls, without electricity or running water. It was a crazy experience seeing how they lived, in such poverty, and they were still happier than most of the city people I know.
I’ve only got two months left now, and so much still to do! I’m going to Nicuragua with other AFS students in December as well as to the Panama border with my family. I hope to have time to explore a bit more of the Caribbean coast as well. And of course there is the experience of Christmas in Costa Rica!
A huge thank you to everybody who helped me fundraise, brought sausages, etc, and of course AFS for making the trip possible.
See you all in two months.
Sara Isbister
