New Year

Greetings Everyone ! This is my first post for the new year and I am excited to get alot of new projects and have a lot more adventures here in Costa Rica.



I ended up going home for the Christmas holidays, which ended up being a blast. It ended up being exactly how I expected it to be. Spending quality time with a lot of good friends and family, as well as relaxing to be back in the US and enjoy the ammenties of modern suburban life like hot water and bathrooms. I ended up recieving a new camera for Christmas which I will hopefully be able to take full advantage of and post some cool new pictures up on the blog to show you more of what I have been doing and what is going on down here in Costa Rica.



For new years I ended up heading to Panama City, Panama with a large group of other Peace Corps Volunteers from Costa Rica. We had an awesome time partying it up on Calle Uruguay in Panama city, a spot where alot of clubs and restaurants are, as well I got a chance to see much of Panama city which is very metropolitan, you could call it the ¨New York City¨of Central America. Towards the end of the trip in Panama I ended up heading to Bocas del Toro, Panama which is a slew of small island off the Atlantic Coast of Panama. In order to get to the beaches we had to take small boats across to different island and hike a while to discover pristine yellow sand beaches. Overall it was an amazing trip which I really enjoyed.



These days of vacation have definately allowed me to recharge my batteries and get back to the not neccesarily stressful, but intense and interesting rural life which I lead in my site in the Southern part of Costa Rica. Things in my site are overall going well. There is still a break right now in the school year for the children so things are going particularly slow, but I am still continuing my english classes with the adults. They are close to arriving at their first midterm exam which I will be testing them on in the next couple of weeks.



Overall things have been going well. I am working well with the various committees in my site and we are little by little getting things done to completing bigger projects in my site. Right now we are in the works of doing a major overhaul of the soccer field, re roofing the church, fixing the 5 kilometer road to my site, and potentially building a community center in our town. All of these have projects have their little intricacies and loopeholes to them but little by little we are accomplishing things.



After coming back from the hustle and bustle of my vacations as well as my brief stint in New York I need to re accustom myself to the slow rural life. As well naturally as a Peace Corps Volunteer much of the time you are alone. Not alone in the sense physically since I live with 10 other people but in terms of mentally, in finding someone you can relate to and share your feelings with. In the US I had my real family and friends which I could either see of call up easily on the phone. I would normally see my good friends and family at home at the least 4 or 5 times a week. But as a volunteer living in a rural village of less than 150 people it can at times get hard not seeing anyone else for several weeks on end. Alot of the times the things you least expect tend to be the hardest challenges.



Anyways that is the latest for now. I want to give a shout out to my brother, Andrew, it his 21st birthday today and I hope he is living it up at Duke University in North Carolina! Happy Birthday !!!