Fires in the cafeteria and the CIA

Today I was walking home from school (about 3 miles) and this car pulled over and an elderly lady asked me for directions to the hospital. Despite my being bewildered as to why she'd chosen me to ask, I was actually able to do so.... "por aca y a la derecha." I was pretty impressed that someone thought that I didn't look out of place and that I was able to not only give them directions in a city that I've only been in for about 5 weeks, but that I was able to do so in Spanish that didn't make them look at me twice.

I also found out that one of my students' family farm was a former secret CIA weapons air base for shipping weapons into Nicaragua during their civil war without the rest of the world knowing about it. Apparently they also had a fake radio station set up here in the city so that they could listen to Nicaraguan phone lines. The boy's grandpa now lives in Indiana because he was accused of bombing a meeting of Nicaraguan leaders on the Costa Rican side of the border to support la Contra. He was going to have to go to jail here, but the US shipped him out and set him up oversees. Interesting.

Monday the school had an assembly for Juan Santamaria Day (basically this guy came down from the US in the late 1800s and tried to take over Costa Rica and the rest of of Central America to make everyone slaves. The Costa Ricans went to fight the army with their normal citizens and Juan Santamaria managed to burn the building that the other troops were staying in down with a torch and helped turn the tide) which took about an hour and involved lots of readings, skits and singing. It culminated with some of the high school students symbolically burning posters of societal flaws (prostitution, divorce, murder etc) in a big stock pot on the floor of the cafeteria. At one point, the flames were at least three feet high and the younger kids went wild!

One of the third graders' mothers came in earlier that morning and threatened to take her out of the school because she didn't like the grade that her daughter had gotten (93) on the project that she had clearly done the majority of. She was mad that the teacher had indicated that in the future, the oral component of the presentation would be better if the student had actually written it.