sing the body electric: La escuela de amigos

Another Sunday where I should be hard at work. Heh.

I'm going to try to do this quickly! After a wildly successful night at the Santa Elena Cloud Forest preserve--nine owls on one 2.6 km trail--I got a lusciously full eight hours of sleep, and got up early this morning to head down to the Monteverde Friends' School for a ten thirty Quaker's meeting.

Where my best friend on the street (a seven-year-old girl who dreams the pasture behind her house is all her own Costa Rican kingdom) lives. They have quite a few birds...I'll be sure to feature them sooner or later.

Another mini-story: the kids on my street love to give me handfulls of Bougainvillea when I come home because I told them once that Bougainvillea remind me of California.

The beginning of my walk in to Santa Elena!

The vet's office: a garage under a store that sells farm and pet supplies. This is where our sad little owlet is currently living.

..... veterinarian.

The vet's office is on the main drag in Santa Elena. Santa Elena central is about 3x2 blocks total.

It takes me about 47 minutes to walk here from home.

The friends' school is where my homestay family sends their children, and where Kathy and Alan, our program organizer and director, sent all their kids. It was founded in 1951 by the Quakers that settled Monteverde: the community grew around it, in a way.

I saw five different perching bellbirds before I went in to the service! This picture should be titled "Nikki needs a lens with more zoom for all the birds she's always seeing." The bellbird is more or less in the middle. Yeep.

Pasture behind the school. Have I mentioned how gorgeous Monteverde is?

The school from the soccer field.

Everything hand-painted! Love it.

Sorry to be rushing through these. The service was an hour and a half long, after a half-hour hymn warmup. For those of you as unfamiliar with Quaker custom as I am, a friends' meeting consists of everyone gathering in a meetinghouse in complete silence.

Stained glass panels by a local artist and alum.

I liked the difference between the arrangement of seats in the meetinghouse versus the Catholic church I used to attend back home: here, the benches are fashioned with thin cushions and arranged in a sort of circle, so at any given time, you can see most all of the people in the room.

Sleepy cat. There were also two middle-school age girls making bracelets throughout the service in the back. That took me back to when my Dad used to let us bring coloring books to mass. Heeee.

Anyway: when any single person in attendance is moved to speech, they will stand up and say what they feel is right, sit, and continue contemplation. This particular meeting had translators: if a person spoke in English, the other would translate to Spanish, and vice versa. It felt familial to sit in complete silence in a room of people who welcomed so wholly the travelers in their midst: I would highly recommend it to anyone who gets the chance.

And I suppose I'll include the last shots of my walk home, too. This is the cheese factory that the whole CIEE program visited before the second field trip.