I was up at 5:25 AM this morning.  We needed to leave by 6am in order to arrive at the rural high school by 7am.  Jorge works in the education department as an organizer of education counselors.  He arranged me to give a presentation of sorts to all of the teachers on web technology and trends, and maybe a bit on of China as well.  I didn’t prepare at all for the presentation because, up until the day before, it was fairly vague.  But, in the end, it went well.  The school is situated in a pastoral setting in the foothills above San Jose.  We met the director, a colleague of Jorge’s that he respects very much, who took us to the room where about thirty educators and teachers were waiting for us.  Jorge gave a brief introduction and we were off.

For the first part of the presentation, I just gave a bit on my background, how I ended up in China, what I was doing there, and what I had been studying lately.  This was almost exclusively in Spanish, which I hadn’t seriously spoke in seven years or so.  But, it went surprisingly well.  As I started to talk more about technology, my skills broke down and one of the English teachers, Julio, kindly offered to help out by translating.  At this point, probably more than half of the presentation was in English.  I mostly talked about what I had been studying lately – Web 2.0 and social internet technologies.  I talked a bit about Facebook, WordPress, and even Tim Ferriss, but the majority focused on Twitter.  Of course, I had no answers for them about how to best use this technology, but I shared some of my plans that I had for the team in China and some theories about how to take advantage of it.  It was mostly about showing them the technology, sharing my observations on the transformation of Twitter, and some rough ideas on how they could perhaps use it in the classroom.  It’s all about enabling communication.  The teachers asked challenging and thoughtful questions, each of which generated discussion:  privacy, open source vs. Microsoft, and how to train people to be creative are just some of the examples.  All in all, the presentation went about an hour and fifty minutes.

It was humbling and inspiring at the same time; here was this small rural school that obviously doesn’t have one tenth of the funding that a school in the US has, but the passion and potential here is tremendous.  It just goes to show you how many people can end up doing great things, it’s just a matter of the opportunities that present themselves.  Jorge and the director, Isabella, obviously have a good relationship and the potential to do great things.

The rest of the afternoon was spent with Jorge touring this part of the valley.  We hit numerous little sites:  a dam, the ruins of the oldest church in Costa Rica (from the mid 1500s!), hot springs, and more churches (each church we visited had Virgin Mary legends associated with them and relics to help prove the legend).  We breaked for a late mid-afternoon lunch in an open restaurant situated up on a hill with a grand view.  Many restaurants are open like this – basically, there’s very little to constitute the walls, so one feels like very close to nature.  While here, enjoying typical Costa Rican food, the clouds burst and dumped a sheets of rain down on the land.  We stayed longer and chatted while waiting for the rain to ease up.  It did an hour later or so and we headed back to Aserri to rest a bit (I also hit the internet cafe) and get ready for dinner at a famous “chicharron” restaurant.

“Chicharrones” are another typical food of Costa Rica – various cuts of barbecued pork served with different types of salsas, rice, beans, and corn tortillas.  Very tasty, of course.  The restaurant was absolutely packed; this was, according to Jorge, one of the most famous chicharroneras in the country.  Later on, three men started playing a giant marimba followed by a “Cimmarone” band accompanied by “mascadas”, typical clowns of Costa Rica.  They roamed all over the restaurant and danced by rapidly spinning back and forth, causing their fake arms to swing around and around.

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