Dias de Luto, Dias de Gloria

  They're back in my mind today.  Those crazy Brazilian kids, their crazy translations: "Mason, you have beautiful hair - please don't wear caps."  Their crazy pop songs from Brazil and their corresponding dance moves.  Just when you think you're getting serious about your life, when you think you're getting old - kids come along to remind you that nothing has changed.

The whole group at Boston College

Socializing during free time

Learning about American food

My group!  Group 9 Forever!

Luiz, a fellow mountain biker and hooligan

Gabriel e Pedro, very bright kids - made my every effort worth it

Last minute lessons...

  They're back in my mind because they sent me a few of their favorite songs.  One is called "dias de luto, dias de gloria", it's really a beautiful song.  They told me that capital E everyone knows the song, and that they can all sing most of the lyrics.  Immediately, some of those songs from my youth pop into my mind.  I'm amazed at a young person's ability to learn so many strings of words by heart.  These songs are very important to understanding a culture, there is a reason they are known by everyone.

  I was going to make some awesome comparisons to particular songs, but I am really not that good at pop culture - unless of course you ask me to sing "Jack and Diane" or "Mirrors".
  So they're gone now, pretty far away - a few thousand miles.  They were here for two weeks, sixty or so Brazilian middle school kids.  I was lucky enough to get hired on as a mentor and to spend every day, 12-8pm with them for fifteen days.  There was a lot of things that stand out:

  I know most of that song by heart.  I had never seen the video before I posted it right here.  And I am beginning to understand the lyrics better so I like the song less and less.  But the smiles of the kids singing it don't get any less amazing.  It's really easy to take kids up as little brothers and sisters.  The affection is mutual, the mentors and I loved spending time with them and they with us.  Every moment was a new joke, or a and hilarious misunderstanding.

  The camp was a leadership and science camp.  But most of the lessons in leadership were learned through osmosis.  Once again, like my experience in the Peace Corps, with my many little siblings adopted from families where siblings abound, I found myself examining my every word and behavior to see if I wanted to see it spoken or reenacted ten minutes later.  And who knows which lessons will be the most lasting for them, likely not the ones that I gave intentionally.

  But most importantly, music has become a new form of dialogue for keeping in touch with my mentees, my little brothers and sisters.  As a good friend, Stephen, once said: Music started this conversation so let's use music to keep it going.  Several of my best friends and I exchange many more songs per month than words.  When a song rings true for me, I just have to share it.  So here's a few of the songs that are ringing really true for me right now - given to me by kids, just starting to understand friendship and family - and adolescents, understanding those things in a way that I have long forgotten:

This song is amazing.

This song was described to me as the "Piano Man" or "Bohemian Rhapsody" in that everyone can sing every single word, especially if it's in a group.

This is the wierdest post ever - blame Gabby.  Hope you liked it.

Here are more ridiculous songs that these kids love:

This next one is a genre called funk, look it up online if you wanna see how it's danced...

Rural Community Development Program

  The RCD program’s success can be gauged among Costa Ricans in many ways. Perhaps the most compelling among them is the impression that volunteers leave on their community members.  These range from coworkers to students, community leaders to the youngest of children.

  There is something to be said about the phenomenon wherein the further one travels from the largest cities, that is, the deeper into rural areas, the greater the affection with which volunteers are remembered.  

  This affection can be partly attributed to novelty.  Unlike regional capitals, rural towns rarely see a U.S. American spend two years alongside them as a committed member of the community.  

  However, more notably, these rural volunteers often integrate along an exponential curve.  Where a semi-urban volunteer might struggle to find connection due to the nature of city life, RCD volunteers become townspeople faster than coffee and picadillos can be readied.

  RCD volunteers have always joined communities with abandon.  They become entrusted with all of the community’s inquietudes, all of its joys and nearly all of its relationships.  True chameleons, they are remembered as being part of the town’s grander cause to overcome hardship.  Sometimes the memory of an ebullient volunteer is for a community member the most vivid and positive image of the town’s hope.  

  Volunteers provide a unique reflective experience for the community.  They reproduce the town’s essential character with an exactitude that only an outsider can achieve.  As the saying goes, the town members come to know that the community’s character and its fate are two words for the same idea.  RCD volunteers have influenced this process positively for decades and the result has been praiseworthy.  

  It seems that hope often wanes harder in rural towns, burdened as they are with longstanding family discord and antipodal perspectives on community issues.  Volunteers are rarely if ever able to overcome such antipathies and they often, in fact, give into them during integration.  Such difficulties must be accepted to be overcome and, usually around mid-service, volunteers break free of these fatalistic mentalities, and are famous for bringing other community members out of the darkness with them.

  Those children, educators, women and men, become the legacy of Costa Rica’s RCD program.  They press on with myriad skills and attitudes imparted through workshops, classes and countless informal (practical and psychological) motivational conversations.  

  Many staff members and volunteers believe that the Peace Corps should continue, as it has since its inception, dedicating itself more to cultural exchange, friendship, and peace than to skills-transfer or infrastructural initiatives.  Accordingly, and with no intention of downplaying the tremendous successes of the latter, the RCD program will be remembered more fondly than any other program in recent history for its intercultural successes, for its peacemaking and its friendships.

  It can be said that youth in rural Costa Rican towns develop a sense of respect toward teachers, elders, and mentors that often seems absent in urban areas.  Volunteers are simultaneously overwhelmed by and grateful for this incredible quality of rural youth.  It has given the generations of volunteers the ability to be mentors to hundreds if not thousands of children and adolescents in a unique way.  This closeness with youth is a hallmark of the RCD project, not by force due to its project framework, but due to the nature of working and living with rural peoples. 

  Notwithstanding, the RCD project’s impact often shines brighter than many others thanks to its infrastructural project successes.  This is largely because of its volunteers' ability to influence the people of a community through kind actions and thoughtful behavior.  A lasting impression of the best humans that the United States has to offer will remain long after the last RCD volunteer boards her plane home.