Pleasantville, Costa Rica

…aka, Zarcero. Land of beautiful views, people, and cheese – and, of course, of the infamous Tech Week! Basically, Tech Week is an official Peace Corps debacle where trainees visit the sites of really successful volunteers to try out the things we’ve learned so far, all the while being evaluated by our supervisor. For Community Economic Development trainees, this means doing a DiCE analysis (a really in-depth interview with a business owner that should take months to complete, but we do this in a day), doing a SWOT analysis, teaching the Junior Achievement sequence – a series of classes about basic economics and financial management – to high school kids, and teaching (“facilitating”) a computer class.

And in case it was unclear, I had the good fortune of being sent to Zarcero, the coolest of all Tech Week sites (fact)! This site belongs to an amazing married couple, known informally as the “golden couple”, because they’re awesome and successful at everything they do. Of course, I’m sure it helps that Zarcereños are probably the nicest, most hard-working, and genuine people in the whole world. It’s kind of a phenomenon.

DiCE

I was paired up with another trainee and assigned to interview La Finca Segura, a pretty big farm that grows/sells potatoes, carrots, and cabbage. We asked a ton of questions and then met up later in the day to give some “suggestions” for how to “improve the business”, but it felt kind of artificial because the DiCE tool is really supposed to be spread out over the span of several months, so that you can build rapport with your clients. But hey, it was cool, and I had the opportunity to pick enormous carrots out of the ground.

Not weird at all.

Here’s a photo of the 3 brothers who own/work at the finca, the volunteer who lives in Zarcero, my partner-trainee, and myself, hanging out in the fog…

SWOT Analysis

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. We did this as a big group the first night we arrived in Zarcero with a bunch of young people from Jovenes Empresarios de Zarcero (JOVEMZA) who want to start an agroculturismo business (it doesn’t really translate smoothly, but I’m sure you non-Spanish speakers get the idea…agricultural+cultural+tourism). Basically, awesome idea, and there is a ton of potential for this type of enterprise to take off in Zarcero, so we went around the group presenting ideas and stuff. We were really poorly organized and a bit taken off guard, so our supervisor wasn’t thrilled with our performance, but JOVEMZA seemed pleased with our suggestions and at least we all enjoyed ourselves.

Junior Achievement

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Basically, Junior Achievement (JA) is a pre-organized series of lesson plans directed for high school students, and our role is to deliver these lesson plans in a way that is (hopefully) not totally boring and lame. The idea is that a ton of high schoolers don’t graduate (statistically, MOST don’t), and JA really presses the idea of education and the role that it plays in getting a decent-paying job. There aren’t any reports on how successful JA is, unfortunately, but hopefully it keeps at least one kid in school.

I look ridiculously short standing next to my CED boys!

Computer Class

What can I say? We taught computer classes. I helped someone make an extremely tacky PowerPoint presentation because she wanted to learn about all the transitions and noises that you can add. I shouldn’t be snobby about it, but I’m kind of a PowerPoint snob. If any of my Rockefeller ladies are reading this, I’m sure you can empathize with my pain… but it was pretty cool, because a bunch of the other women in the class had never used a computer before, and by the end of the class, they walked away with some pretty solid skills.

Fun Stuff

All work and no play makes Peace Corps trainees no bueno. So we went to a waterfall that was basically the temperature of ice, and we swam-ish (more like, walked painfully on rocks), and got dirty because there was no path, so we had to scale the side of the riverbank by grabbing onto trees and stuff.

We also rode horses! I rode this beautiful mommy horse who had recently given birth, so at first she was being stubborn and didn’t want to follow the rest of the group out of the stable but then our guide realized that the problem was her baby, so we brought the baby and it was absolutely darling.

Prettiest horse ever. Her name is Pepita!

Qué cosi… (omg omg adorable)

The Famous Zarcero Park

Zarcero is known throughout Costa Rica as the town with the cool park. Here’s why:

Last-but-not-Least

That pretty much sums up my Zarcero/Tech Week experience. The host family I stayed with was amazing, but unfortunately I forgot to grab pictures with them. Jo (my awesome trainee housemate) and I learned that Zarcero sells REESES (unlike anyplace else in Costa Rica we have seen so far), so we stocked up and ate Reeses until we were sick, which made me grossly happy. And here’s my favorite view of the weirdest cloud formation I’ve ever seen, but this is how clouds look every morning in Zarcero…