Read in the Jungle

On the second week of the first session of my second summer with Rustic Pathways (wow lots of numbers, sorry) and everything is going really well, very tranquilo. We only have 6 girls and 3 guides on Heart of the Jungle and I really get along with all of them so that's awesome. One of the guides is from Connecticut (Fairfield county-yeah THAT area, haha though he is your typical Connecticut boy, he does crack some good jokes here and there) and Mary, a girl with a cute midwestern accent from Ohio who's really into outdoors sports like rock climbing and kayaking and hiking. Everything's been running pretty smoothly, no accidents to date (though we start our 3 day kayaking trip in a gulf tomorrow so knock on wood), and people have only asked for the med kit a handful of times for more hydro cortizone cream or band aids for blisters. We've been having good luck with the weather, and all of our activities like climbing a huge fig tree, surfing, rappeling a 150-ft waterfall, have all gone smoothly. Our community service has been going well for the most part too, except for today. We got to the school that we were supposed to prep for painting around 2 and no one was there to greet us. They usually get out of school around 12:30, 1, but today they got our even earlier and no one was left in charge to help us. Apparently the principal (who we only talked to and coordinated this with a couple of weeks ago when we showed up with our manager and had a look of surprise and confusion and vague recollection of our 10 week painting project at the school and then had to write down the dates when we would be there because everything works this way in Costa Rica. You really can't plan in advance and can't get anything done until the last minute because Ticos (Costa Ricans) won't let you! Frustrating!). Anyways, we got there and the principal had left the teacher in charge to deal with us, but he forgot to leave someone else in charge when he had to flee off to a meeting and anyways, we ended up playing games and telling stories to the girls to keep them occupied until we figured out what to do (which ended up being going back to the first and only air conditioned hotel of the 2 week trip to rest, pack for the kayaking trip, and watch TV!!).

One of the stories I told was about this book I'm reading which is really interesting. It's called Marching Powder and is about a Bolivian prison called San Pedro where prisoners have to pay an entrance fee, buy their own cell in a particular section that has a star rating, eat in restaurants and cook their own meals inside the prison walls, and bribe guards for everything, including letting their wives or girlfriends live with them in the prison or so they can have a 'night out on the town' and be back in their prison before 3 a.m. (which if they're not, they then have to bribe the guards even more to let them back in after the established curfew!). The book is told from the point of view of Thomas McFadden, an English guy nabbed for trying to smuggle 4 kilos of cocaine back to Europe. He smuggled it quite cleverly actually, hiding it in the wall of his suitcase and making sure not to leave and fingerprints or hairs and putting women's clothes in there so they couldn't trace the luggage back to him, but he was caught when the head police guy who he had bribed turned him. Eventually this guy started giving tours to foreigners who visited La Paz, Bolivia, of this wild, cracked-out prison, and Lonely Planet guidebook named it one of the most bizarre tourist attractions. A ridiculous story, and I can't wait to finish and see how this corrupt system comes to let McFadden finally go back to England.

Birthday Cards...?

If anyone is so inclined to send me a birthday card, postcard, any sort of piece of mail, I do have a birthday coming up (June 25) and I would just be delighted to receive something in the mail, especially after weeks of being sweaty, wet, and smelly in the jungle wihtout any contact from the outside world! You can send it to the Rustic Pathways office here in San Jose by addressing it in the following way:

Sarah Arnio

c/o Senderos Rusticos

500 m Norte de la Universidad Latina

Edificio Estancias Latinas#43

Vargas Araya, San Pedro

Costa Rica

Any type of unrelated birthday propaganda is also acceptable. Thanks!

Rustic Pathways Round 2

Just over a week in Costa Rica and it feels like so much longer! I'm back here to do Rustic Pathways, round 2, another three months of leading kids around on adventure, community service, language, and cultural activities.

I had a glorious reunion with Lauren in the airport when she came to pick me up. It was everything I imagined it to be, complete with a Love Actually embrace, sign made out on napkins with a pen, and lots of jumping up and down and picture taking. Guilherme, our Brazilian friend who we worked with at Rustic last year, was there too, and it seemed like everything just fell back into summer 2008's place. I spent the weekend with Gui at Kelly (another guide from last year and a girl I went to AU with) and Lauren's apartment and then we began a week of staff training in la Fortuna. This year instead of 60 guides, we were cut in half, making the pool of cool people a bit smaller with 35. Six of us were back from last year, designated as "senior guides" to help out the new guides, but mostly we just recounted stories of last year's problem children, medical episodes, and staff gossip. The best stories included the girl who got attacked by a cow, the girl who claimed her mysterious 22 year old boyfriend that her parents weren't aware of got into a car accident and therefore had to rush home ASAP, and finally the guide who kept calling the program "Kim"was on hoping to whisper sweet nothings in her ear. After we rapped up staff training, me and 2 other guides went with our manager Alex to check out the Osa Peninsula, where the program Heart of the Jungle runs. We had to meet with a bunch of operators (hotels, people who arranged community service, adventure activity companies, etc) while we were down there. We went around the geography that the 2 week trip covers in just 2 days. Today we drove 8+ hours from down at the tip near Playa Carate (zoom in, red dot at bottom of map). It's a gorgeous place right on the beach near the Corcovado National Park, which holds 2.5% of the world's biodiversity. It's so remote we had to have a horse take our bags and we walked along the beach for half an hour. I did this program last year, so it was nice revisiting these places. We met with most of the people who we'll be in contact with down there, but some of the community service projects are still not totally together. We met with the principal at one school today and she didn't even know when we were coming or what we were doing (apparently it had been arranged through someone else). But that's just how things work down here, everything at the last minute. Well the kids get here tomorrow night and the madness starts Wednesday so these blogs will be sporadic from here on out, sorry!