Greetings from Costa Rica:

 

As I walk through Parque de la Paz to the university, a trail of leafcutter ants crosses my path. The ants themselves are hidden by the leaf wedges they bear in a moving trail. It must take a dozen ants to cut and carry one leaf, but together, they can strip a branch clean.

 

Meanwhile, I notice the human groundskeepers in Peace Park cutting a month’s worth of grass—with machetes in the wet places, where the grass is already three feet tall after so much rain. One person mows with a gasoline-powered mower. Two others work the hillsides with weed-eaters, and the rest swing their machetes. They keep working at this unending job, a little patch at a time.

 

That´s how my work goes too—grooming a little patch at a time. Our English extension classes are intentionally small, no more than twelve students in a group, but we average five students per class.  Some days I feel like a leaf-cutter ant—carrying a tiny chunk of the whole project, but a chunk that is bigger than I am. I go back down that trail again and again, carrying another little chunk.

 

Learning English is a burning issue in Costa Rica right now, as the government leaders seek to have a bilingual population within ten years. The English teachers in the public schools are not competent in English, so many of them have been suspended from their classrooms two days a week to study English intensively. Some of those teachers have enrolled in our Saturday classes, and they also study our approaches to teaching English. They’ll tell me, sometimes, how they have used certain of my teaching strategies in their own English classes.

 

At UNELA we teach from the perspective of a God-centered worldview, which is new for some of our students. The study of English is the instrument that enables us to focus on God as Creator who calls us to serve Him in every aspect of life. Sometimes the “foreign” language requires us to articulate more carefully who God is and how we serve him as Lord of our lives. Sometimes the students say, “Oh, I heard about the Bible in Spanish, but in English I have to think about the meaning more carefully.”  Sometimes we sing English praise songs, which have become very popular among my students.  

 

I have been in Costa Rica for a year already—I remember that shortly after I arrived a year ago, the nation was celebrating Independence Day with parades and marching school children and processions of faroles, little box houses with lighted candles in them, which the children carry through the street the evening before Independence Day.  Last week on Independence Day weekend, I visited a rural community up in the mountains. The school children proudly carried their elaborate home-made faroles up the road, some walking 45 minutes from home, to march in the evening parade, singing the National Hymn. There weren´t many fireworks, and an aguacero, a drenching rain, brought the festivities to an early close. But the next day the children were at school again at 7:00 a.m. for more patriotic marches and programs.   

 

UNELA’s classes were canceled for the holiday. The academic year flows with the calendar year, in quarters for graduate students, in nine-week bimesters for students of English. We are nearly ready to start the last bimester for 2008, the extremely rainy season—already, the poinsettias are blooming fully, tall as trees, abundant with life.

 

Lorna Van Gilst