Greetings from a mostly sunny Monteverde. We are approaching our one month mark of living in Costa Rica and I think we’ve mostly found our groove at this point. Last Sunday, we attended our first Meeting at the Quaker Friends School as a family. The girls attended the first 15 minutes and then were pulled out for a children’s activity while the adults remained. This meeting was a first for me and I found the silence and lack of direction from a minister or lecturer to be refreshing. Instead, we sat in mostly silent meditation and people only spoke if they felt compelled by the “spirit” to do so. At the end of the meetings, the girls returned with other kids and led us in a rousing version of “Peace like a River.” At this point, I can say we don’t see ourselves necessarily converting, but some of the individuals conversations with other members were incredibly welcoming and conveyed a sense of joining one on a journey, but not forcing their journey on you.

I should add that an initial draw of Monteverde was the possibility of the girls attending the Friends School that was started by the Quakers over 70 years ago. In fact, Monteverde was founded in 1951 by Quaker families who fled Alabama to find a peaceful like and avoid military drafts during the Korean War. There is a really interesting documentary about them that one can view here. We ended up enrolling the girls at the Creativa Cloud Forest School, but the Friends School is a large part of the community and we are there every Friday ourselves for drama club with the girls.

The start of this week was full of events to celebrate Costa Rica’s Independence Day on the 15th. Monday night was the Desfile de Faroles (Lantern Parade) that always takes place on the eve of Independence Day. Families walk through their neighborhoods carrying handmade lanterns. These lanterns represent the historic torch procession that brought the news of independence across Central America in 1821. Prior to this evening, there was a running of a torch through all the local schools that originated from Guatemala and travels all the way to the Ruins of Cartago (the old Colonial Capital) covering 378 meters total. It is considered a great honor to be one of the students that get to carry the torch for a 200m section of the route. It was an amazing event to witness at the local school near our house.

On Tuesday morning, we dropped the girls off early in the morning to participate in the local Independence Day parade. The girls had been practicing and rehearsing since their very first day of school and despite the rain, it was an amazing event to be part of and girls had an unforgettable experience. Wearing their hats, scarves, and Creativa red shirts, they marched and played their instruments through the surrounding neighborhoods of Monteverde. It was nice to be part of a red, white, and blue celebration where the red hats didn’t signify bigotry, racism and hatred.

Lastly, with two days without school, we decided to visit a local waterfall that is just down the road from our house. We had no idea that such a paradise would be found at the end of our hike down to the river. We will definitely return to this place when we want to live our own Indiana Jones adventure and swim beneath the rush of falling water.

That more or less summarizes what we’ve been up to lately in Costa Rica. The girls have been creating their own stop-motion movies in their free time and we had a film festival screening of their movies last night. I will post some to their pages soon on the blog. Cleo has also been reading up a storm and it has greatly influenced our Movies in the Attic with viewings of Holes and Are You There God? It’s me Margaret? Thank you for making it to the end of the update and remember you can subscribe by clicking the button at the bottom of the page (come on Mom and Dad, I know you can do this!)