Disclaimer: These views are mine and do not necessarily represent the views of The Peace Corps, or the US Federal Government.

Hello everybody I hope all is well!

Im writing this on the Thursday of my second week at site. Life has been changing fast, but I have found myself with another great host family, that makes me feel comfortable, in a town with a lot going on. What else could I ask for?

What Ive been doing: I have been reaching out to the contacts in the community that were included in my briefing materials and have been working with the largest local association most days. After working with them for a while I am starting to think my impact here will mostly come from one on one projects with local entrepreneurs, working with smaller less developed organizations and potentially starting a program teaching entrepreneurship skills at the local highschool. The realization that some organizations in my town are already developed past the point of needing outside assistance took a week to understand, but Ive reframed my concept of how I can help here and am looking forward to scheduling some one on ones with local business owners or aspiring entrepreneurs.

My current Spanish skills: I rarely have to ask people to repeat themselves and mostly ask follow up questions if I don’t understand what people are trying to communicate. This is a more comfortable place to be with the language. Continuing to study on my own is still very necessary though because I intend on facilitating lesson plans on small business skills in the coming months and I would like to sound as eloquent as possible. Interestingly Ive also found it a lot easier to understand people around my age and younger. They generally pronounce all of the syllables and talk slower.

General Vibe of my town: I am starting to understand the vibe of the local community and because of its size, 26,000 people, I feel like everyone is busy and I really get no unwanted attention. It’s all about Pineapple and Yuca (Cassava) here with large fields, packaging plants and fulfillment centers. Generally for the community that means there are a lot of jobs and from what Ive seen the associations here have lots of public events to raise money for their projects. The center of town has the largest association, but each neighborhood, I think there are 16, also has an association. So if I am going to understand the full landscape of people motivated to change the community it will be after lots of coffee talk.

Impact of Family: One of the most interesting takeaways I want to share is the value placed on family here in my community and in Costa Rica in general. This isn’t to say that family is valued less in the United States, it is just different. Most people have several extended family members in their town if not all of their family members. Lots of the time your neighbors are family members. Often the first thing people will tell you about it is their family. Most of the time I understand how many kids and siblings someone has before I know about their day to day lifestyle. Ive even found myself sharing more about my family because it’s such a natural conversation topic here. People will even ask me how specific family members are doing which almost never happened in the states unless something is explicitly wrong. It has been cool to see this aspect of the culture and how the society in general is more collective.

Free Time: I just joined my local gym which has been a good reason to get day going and out and about in the community even if I don’t have a specific meeting that day. There’s also time in the mornings and before bed to brush up on some more Spanish, mindfulness practices and topics of personal interest. I have found myself interested in reading economic development case studies from around the world to see what the professionals in the industry are thinking about. Im also paying pretty close attention to AI tools. Specifically AI tools that can take video, change the language and make it sound and look like the person is actually speaking it. It’s already pretty advanced, but I can’t imagine the impact it will have on the world when movies and college lectures can be watched in any language without having to read subtitles the whole time.

As the work picks up I’ll start posting more updates about specific projects. I’m currently working on fleshing out some ideas from a meeting I had with an association so I can get a better idea of what their goals are at out next meeting.

I hope all is well state side. Pura Vida

Ben Schieber