Blog archives for the day Tuesday, January 10th, 2017

Another beautiful day in Boruca. We woke early for our first day of service. Meeting at Dona Margarita’s place at eight, we moved as a group through the town, over the river, to Boruca’s high school. The school itself was situated on a hill, and as such, its buildings are were spread out along it, making getting from one end to another a little troublesome. We were originally under the impression that we would be painting part of the school, but  the president of the board of directors had some other ideas.

We were split into small groups, one went to clean off benches and tables, another left to put caps on the fences to make them safer, and the last went to rid the outer wall of weeds. The work was simple, but we felt like we were making positive impacts for the school. Later, two groups combined to help scrub and wash the fence for painting. However, at this point we hit our first snag; we had too many students and not enough supplies. Nancy reiterated that long term planning wasn’t really a custom in Costa Rica, and that the lack of supplies wasn’t really a shock nor a big deal. So we ended up having to compromise and share the supplies that we did have as efficiently as possible. By the end, we had painted a section of the fence and cleaned the benches and tables, but not as much as we would have liked.

We broke for lunch.

When we returned, we were asked to now paint the cleaned benches and tables, however, once again, there was only so many brushes and paint so only a few students could do work at a time. However, the time wasn’t wasted on the other students as they decided to group up to discuss their future service projects in Sierpe. By early afternoon we left the school in better shape than we found it, but still feeling like we could have done more.

Later, we met at the Borucan museum to further talk about the history of the town. The museum itself was small, only consisting of three rooms, one of which was a gift shop. The actual museum hosted a number of artifacts and paintings. We were given a small tour where the guide told us the history of Boruca, from their founding, to their scaring off of the Conquistadors via devil masks, and finally to the festival they hold each year celebrating that event. The gift shop itself held many Borucan items; mainly masks and hand woven textiles. All of these had been crafted by the townspeople and so they receive a portion of the sales when one of their items is sold.

After a long day, we decided to end on a student hike around town, soaking it all in, excited to see what tomorrow held.

by Tyler

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