My time is winding down in San Luis. I leave on Wednesday from Santa Elena with my final destination being Boruca. It will likely take 10 hours on a bus, but I hope to stretch it out over several days and see the Pacific along the way.

As you probably can tell, my time here has been absolutely wonderful. My family here has been extremely gracious and welcoming – Jenny asked me to stay forever! As tempting as that is, I need to head south for the project in Boruca.

The workshop went well, and I learned a great deal about timber framing. It was nice to have an environment where I could make mistakes and learn from them. Fortunately for me and the project, I didn’t make any gigantic mistakes, nor did anyone else. For the last three days, I was called upon to coordinate most of the layouts for the building and to run calculations with Steve, our instructor. Apparently my four years of studying Civil Engineering still returns dividends. The role was extremely draining in conjunction with returning home and speaking Spanish, and my loss of sleep due to the quantity of my bug bites. On Sunday (the course was supposed to end on Friday), my brain was completely fried. Luckily the remaining work was more brawn than brains.

Yesterday, I attended school with Jacqueline and Josue. I sat in on Jacqueline’s Spanish class for about an hour. There are only nine students in the class, which is multiage (4th to 6th grade). It was a little depressing at first how little I was able to understand, but after a little while, some of it made sense. I realized that this is how students must feel when they first immigrate to the U.S.

In the afternoon, I fell into my first real funk. I have been running low on energy, and since everything down here takes energy (especially communicating), it makes things a bit complicated when I just need some rest. I wished for a dinner with one of you where I could relax and speak with ease.

I really enjoy hearing from all of you. Please keep it up!