Student Reflections
With many quick stops and lectures along the way, we finally arrived in Monteverde. The fieldtrip I had been looking forward to most since the beginning of our program proved to be exactly what I was hoping for. We hiked up to the Continental Divide, ate lunch among the clouds, sipped milkshakes at the Monteverde Cheese Factory (some of us could not resist the temptation to purchased large quantities of cheese as well), conducted our own experiments in the forest, visited the inside of a wind turbine during a tour of a wind farm Arenal, and swam in hot springs by Volcan Arenal.

As a special addition to the trip, some of us opted to go to a free salsa concert in San José to benefit World Habitat Day. Of course, as it is the wet season, it was raining, and one would assume that normally not many would want to attend a concert in the pouring rain. However, tons of people crowded in the area around the concrete sculpted gazebo and danced and sang and truly felt the music. I had never been in such a place where I felt so free to move and connected to the people who were all around me.  The rain somehow set the tone for this loving and eccentric atmosphere. In fact, if it had not been for the rain I don’t think anyone would have had the same reaction.

While the weekend ended with a soaking wet bus ride back to Atenas, I learned more about myself than just to appreciate my surroundings or adapt to a soggy environment. I learned to embrace the many pleasures in the otherwise unpleasant and my capacity to connect with a community based not on our words, but our movements.
-Abby  Beissinger

Every week here we do an outreach program that benefits the community of Atenas around our center. Seven of us hopped in a van with buckets of paint and drove up a long windy, hilly road to La Escuela de Las Pavas. Las Pavas is a twenty student elementary school that focuses on learning about the value of the environment and its conservation. One element of our outreach was teaching the kids English. We drew posters of different environmental aspects (beach, forest, sky) and wrote the English words next to them. The kids then repeated after us and drew pictures of the new words they learned. We then went outside and played head, shoulders, knees, and toes.

The other half of our outreach was dedicated to a mural on their bathroom building. We helped the students paint a mural on the outside walls of their cement outhouse, covering its bland gray walls with vibrant kid-inspired creativity. The teacher wanted it to be about water conservation, so we designed the mural to have an earth with three panels above it each with a different saying: “Water is Health”, “Water makes me happy”, “Water is Life,” and then on the other side it had the water cycle with kids saying “Lets learn about the importance of water!” We chalked the design out and had the older kids paint within the lines. A little bit of insanity ensued and the language barrier allowed for some color mix-ups but with a little touch up by us and a step back, the end result was beautiful. I've learned here an important lesson about how to forage interpersonal relationships in unfamiliar, even explicitly foreign, environments: that art- like science- is a universal language that allowed us to form a bond with these kids.
-Nellie Laskow, Trinity College

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