|
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Costa Rica! We arrived here April 18 and have been busy setting up our new home, learning our way around San Jose and adjusting to Latin American culture. It has been great finally being in Latin America and being able to hear Spanish 24/7.
We started language school at the Instituto de Lengua Espanol (Spanish Language Institute) on May 2. We love our classes and our teachers. All our teachers are Latin American, mostly from Costa Rica. Lori’s grammar teacher is from Nicaragua. The school specializes in training missionaries in Spanish to go to work in various parts of Latin America.
A typical day for us is like this:
Get up somewhere between 4 and 5 am. Children get up between 5 and 5:30am daily. Life in San Jose just starts early, light, traffic, work, etc. Between 5 and 7 we get the kids dressed and ready for school, shower, have breakfast. We leave the house at 7 and walk (or ride—see the picture!) to the Institute, about 15 minutes. Get the kids checked into the kinder (pre-school/nursery), classes start at 7:30am.
We each have an hour of Fonetica (Phonetics—pronunciation), an hour of Conversacion (Conversation) and two hours of Gramatica (Grammar) daily, along with a free period to study. Classes are over at 1pm.
We return home, eat lunch, and put the kids down for naps. Then we either study or run errands. We don’t have a car here, so everything is by bus or taxi. Things like going to the grocery, post office, and department store usually take the better part of the afternoon, so we are learning to pace ourselves and just be more gradual about getting things done.
|
In the afternoons, the kids often play with neighbor kids. Kathy (“Katty”) is a little 10 year old who loves to come over and play with them. We have gotten to be friends with her family too. Milena, the Mom, tutors Lori informally in Spanish on Friday afternoons, and her son, Kathy’s brother Rueben (24), tutors Mark every Saturday afternoon. He’s good about correcting me and helping me with pronunciation. Last week we went with them to Catholic mass at their church. Quite interesting! Rueben asked me to help him prepare a talk for some young people on “Perdon” (Forgiveness), which he’d been asked to do by a Catholic young people’s group he’s with which he is involved. They are answered prayers for us, as you recall we asked you to pray for language helpers and friends to help us learn the culture and the language. Thank you Lord!
We eat dinner, give baths to the kids, put them down about 7, then usually in the evenings we do our homework, work on emails, mail, etc. We’re pretty tired at the end of each day.
Lori has made great strides already in her language. She has more homework than me daily for some reason, so she is memorizing a ton of vocabulary, pronouncing words and phrases into a tape recorder for her phonetics class, memorizing dialogues to say in class, doing grammar homework. She is very conscientious, and it shows. When we go places, she is picking up more and more of what people are saying, and being able to participate more in conversations.
I’m also learning a ton. One thing we like to do is make everyday activities, getting hair cuts, going to the farmers’ market, going to the post office, things like that, into language learning projects. We try to pick up new words, learn a different part of town, practice asking directions, etc. So all of life becomes language learning, to some extent or another.
|
