It's strange to think that I will be leaving Costa Rica and CREAR during the first week of August. I am definitely not ready to go back to the states (nor do I want to)! After two weeks of July camp for the CREAR kids, I am extremely tired! We had up to 50 kids on one day, which can be difficult because of the size and resources of CREAR.
Expectations of CREAR
The Omprakash EdGE course was designed to prepare us for our placements. As I explained in the Omprakash survey, I do not think all of the information was helpful/pertinent to my particular placement. This is not exactly a criticism of Omprakash since volunteers are going to various countries around the world and thus everyone feels varying shades of culture shock and encountering different problems.
Costa Rica is a developed country. Despite this, I expected to see poverty in Guanacaste because it is the poorest province of the country. Admittedly, I had lower expectations for Sámara because it was described to me as a "rural, beach town." Thus far, I have visited over towns and places within Guanacaste and what I saw in Garza was something that I expected Sámara to look more like.
I also believed CREAR to have a solid team of volunteers. When I arrived to CREAR, I saw that I would be working alongside a co-intern who is a Master's student and the two administrators. Occasionally there are two other volunteers that help us, but not on a full-time basis. Essentially, there are four workers of CREAR - the two administrators, my friend, and myself. Though after working for CREAR for the past month and meeting volunteers for another organization in Nicaragua, I am thankful that CREAR has a small team with two loyal volunteers (and other community members!) Since the non-profit is so small, I am never idle!
I want to get more involved with promoting CREAR via social media especially since Facebook and texting are popular here. Updating the website has been challenging but now that summer camp is over I will definitely have time for editing and updating CREAR's blog. It's easy to get donations when tourists are constantly coming in and are interested to know that I am working with children. Also because the town is so small, all the ticos know of CREAR and many work in the service industry so they have many opportunities to advertise fundraisers for CREAR.
Once I received my position with CREAR, I thought I would be working alongside a teacher and serve as a teacher's aide - yet CREAR does not currently have a teacher. Like many non-profits, CREAR can only offer certain services depending on the number/people volunteering at a given time; for instance, CREAR's website advertises English lessons but CREAR will not be able to offer English lessons until at least mid-August when volunteer teachers come to Sámara.
CREAR Changes
Prior to arriving, CREAR underwent major changes between January and May. They began to focus less on education, which is what I had signed up for and was interested in. Thus I have written only a couple of lesson plans but I doubt they will be used; I did research on fun educational activities for kids (my favorite was anatomy and how our organs work.)
Despite this disappointments I have enjoyed creating material for the talks in schools called charlas. Charlas are new to CREAR (created sometime between January and May): they consist of a presentation to a school, discussion on the topic, and then a small booklet for coloring and filling in answers. I hope that CREAR will expand charlas despite not having a car/accessibility to the elementary schools in the area. (High schools are even farther away - the closest one is in Nicoya and that is a 30-minute bus ride away.)
I am still a little disappointed that I miss out on teaching the kids, however I still get to interact with the kids every week and learn a lot about their lives and personalities! The more enthusiastic kids are from El Torito; today I will probably find out from the CREAR administrators about whether or not we will continue to function in Sámara. My first month of CREAR was disappointing when attendance from the Sámara kids was so low that we had at times only three kids while El Torito consistently had about twenty for our after-school program. (I talked with the administrators about this and they claimed that attendance in Sámara has been consistently low for the past couple of months, even after making CREAR less educational and like a school.)
As stated in my earlier post today...
CREAR is still a young non-profit and has a small staff. Like I mentioned before, CREAR cannot offer language classes to kids in the area if we do not have language teachers. I still have a couple of weeks left in Sámara: hopefully I will be able to post about future changes. Because the staff is small and the administrators have been living in Sámara for a few years now, I think that CREAR will adapt well with the wants of the community.
No comments:
Post a Comment