I Love School!

First day of class today. So wonderfully, exactly what my hopeful imagination pictured.

For the first hour & 15 minutes the whole class of 2011 (all 180+ of us) are together for a lecture. Or as close to together as we can get- most of us in the Council Room where Orientation was held; those that don’t fit in Classroom #1 with a video feed. UPEACE may be small but we rock the technology. Amr Abdallah, the Vice Rector, gave the lecture this morning about the beginnings of conflict and peace studies as an academic discipline. After the lecture we had a ½ hour break, then met in smaller seminar groups of 22 (minus, of course our African contingent) for discussion. So there we were, 16 of us from all over the world sitting in a classroom with windows all over three of its walls looking out at gorgeousity everywhere talking about the nature of peace and conflict and whether there is such a thing as a ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’ perspective. Having exactly the kind of rich, juicy discussion that I came here for. The time flew by.

Over lunch I met with some of my fellow Peace Ed students to start brainstorming plans for our program for International Day of Peace on September 21^st. I naturally took up the role of note taker and spent a ½ or or so after lunch typing up the notes and emailing them out. Then bus home to Ciudad Colón, talking with Manuel from Honduras/Montana about how our days had gone and how an influx of wealthy Californians is starting to liberalize Montana.

So yeah. I love school. I love what we’re reading about and talking about. I love the totally international group in which we are doing all of these things. I love the beauty of the location in which we are working. Love, love, love where I am right now.

Good news!

Just got word via my roommates that at least our 4 Asian classmates still awaiting visas have been approved! If all goes well they'll be arriving this Thursday or Friday. This is especially a huge relief for the rest of the students in the ALP who have been fretting over the fate of their friends. One of the students coming will be in the Peace Education program with me. His arrival will double the number of men in our group. The arrival of the Africans (fingers still crossed) will double it again. The female to male ratio at school is pretty high in general and particularly in our Department, which also includes the Gender and Peace Studies program. However the breakdown of our professors is slightly more males than females. So is our class a trend in the peace and conflict resolution field or an anomaly?

Once upon a time...

One of the things we learned in Orientation was the history of the University for Peace. Here’s what happened. Pardon me while I geek out for a moment. In December of 1980 the General Assembly of the UN gathered in Rivendell to adopt resolution 35/55, calling for the establishment of a University for Peace. Rodrigo Carazo, then the President of Costa Rica stepped forward to say, “I will carry the ring to Mordor!” A philanthropist by the name of Bennett then stepped forward to say, “You will have my wallet!” And then Costa Rica stepped up to say, “And our support!” They looked around to see if six more entities would step forward and there was an awkward moment while other countries and people with money looked at their shoes and mumbled things about needing to make a phone call. Then President Carazo and Mr. Bennett and Costa Rica all set off together while the UN waved goodbye and wished them luck and there followed many highs and lows including a dark time when it seemed all might be lost. But then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan flew in on a giant eagle to re-organize and re-structure the University so it would be a real place where real students could take real classes and get a real degree. Since then, other universities around the world have established partner relationships including the horsemen of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Korea, the tree people of Ateneo de Manilla University and the tower dwellers of American University in DC. And now we all live happily in golden light and slow motion, laughing and jumping on the bed.

Roommates

My roommates made dinner for us tonight and invited over another friend of theirs from the Asian Leaders Program, Munty. I have really lucked out. Everything was delicious though Benjamas kept apologizing that she couldn't find coconut milk so her curry was as good as it could be. We ate family style with four different dishes in the center of the table and each of us with our own plate of rice. I took a little bit of everything right from the start, like dishing up at a potluck. I noticed that they spooned one bite at a time from the center. Right now they are Skyping with another friend from ALP who is stuck in Manilla, waiting for his visa to come through.

Benjamas is from Thailand and is in the Media and Peace Studies Program. At home she's led workshops teaching various aspects of media. She says she is like many other people from her country because she is very outgoing and loves to talk. Mai is from Vietnam and is in the International Law and Settlement of Disputes Program. She's studied law in Vietnam and France. Benjamas jokes that she is a professional student. Mai seems always to be looking out for her friends and I'm glad that now I'm one of them. I wonder what will happen in March when all the ALP students return to Manilla. I think we'll all be quite sad. The whole school will get smaller and our apartment will be a lot emptier. But there's plenty of time to worry about that later. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy whatever food comes my way.

Oriented.

Just a quick post to say orientation is over! We met with our Programme (I guess we're British?) groups this afternoon so I finally got a chance to see who my Peace Education cohort is going to be- minus the 5 Africans and 1 Sri Lankan who are still awaiting travel visas. I look forward to getting to know all of them over the next 11 months.

We've already got our first group assignment too. September 21st is International Peace Day and the Peace Education class is in charge of coming up with a 45 minute program for the whole university to observe the day. Classes will stop and all eyes will be on us.

I picked up my reader for the first course, which starts on Monday. It's a foundation course in Peace and Conflict Studies that we all take together in the morning and then break down into smaller seminar groups for the afternoon for a total of 3 hours/day of classroom work. We'll spend the rest of the day on homework and organizing our group activities. The reader is enormous and I've already started tackling our first assignment.

This morning's trip into San José went very smoothly. We all got copies of our Costa Rican police records and turned in our birth certificates and home police records. Next step on Tuesday is fingerprinting. Then we wait to be processed and hope our colleagues waiting in Africa and Manilla will have a chance to catch up. Please send happy visa thoughts their way.

Orientation Days 1 & 2

See, this is what happens. A thousand things happen, which means you have a thousand things to tell but then you're exhausted from all the things happening and the thought of telling them all makes you more exhausted and then you don't tell anything at all. So what follows will be a few snapshot impressions, rather than an attempt to catalogue all of the last 2 days.

Yesterday was our first day of orientation. Because I’d somehow failed to reset my watch correctly, I left the house an hour earlier than I needed to in order to catch the bus. An hour earlier than 7:30am. After several times walking up and down the street where I thought the bus (and a bunch of other students) would be, I began to suspect my mistake. I asked the man sweeping the street what time it was- in perfectly good Spanish, by the way- and was somewhat disappointed when he felt it necessary to hold up 7 fingers, in addition to saying, ‘siete’ as if I might not know what ‘siete’ meant. The whole incident, however, serves as triumphant proof that I am a braver soul than I was at 15 when I once waited for a bus for three hours on the wrong side of the street because I was too shy to ask anyone why the bus wasn’t coming.

Speaking of shy, being delivered into a teeming mass of 185 strangers with no other task than to meet people is an excellent way to torture a shy person. I’ve been looking forward to meeting my classmates and learning all about where they are from and what they did before coming to UPEACE, but huge groups are really not my scene. It has to do with the approach. If I were stuck in an elevator, say, with one other person, I could successfully engage that person in conversation and be very charming. But show me a lawn full of people, all of whom seem to be already engaged in the most fascinating conversations of their lives with their new best friends, and I have problems. How do you cut in on that? So one at a time I sought out the other shy souls who seemed to be similarly at a loss. Now me, I love being rescued like this. Others are not talking to anyone because they just don’t want to talk to anyone right at that moment. By the end of the day I’d used up every once of my “faking extroversion” energy and gave myself permission to revert back to my natural state. We’re all going to be here for a while. There will be other opportunities in more Sara-friendly settings to get to know everyone.

Here’s the other intimidating thing about getting to know all these people. They are very impressive and accomplished individuals. And so are you, Sara, you’re all saying to yourselves because you’re my friends and you’re like that. And you know what, I even agree with you. However, I have never been arrested protesting for freedom of speech in Beijing. I do not speak four languages fluently. I have never bottle fed a baby elephant. My list of things to do just got longer.

The campus is so beautiful I can hardly believe it. As we sit in the Council Room- the back wall of which is all floor to ceiling windows and sliding glass doors- we can see mountains in the distance, green tropical foliage everywhere and huge birds of prey (hawks? eagles? rocs?) swooping not so very far away; it becomes pretty difficult to concentrate on the Power Point presentation about the Costa Rican health care system. The classroom buildings are built around courtyards so even walking down the hall there are gardens and fountains. And hammock chairs. Hammock chairs tucked away here and there wherever there’s a spare beam or substantial tree branch. I’ve found 6 so far plus a full fledged hammock out by the entrance.

We’ve been introduced to the staff and resident faculty. We’ve stepped through the Student Handbook. We’ve been warned about earthquakes, theft and skin fungus. We ended the day with sign ups for student activities. These are all pretty much in our own care with tons of support from the Student/Faculty/Staff Committee. And think about it- in a four year (or even 2 year) program, the seniors and juniors basically run things while the freshman and sophomores learn the ropes. But here, we’re all seniors and freshmen at the same time. So our groups and activities need to hit the ground running with people ready to be organizers, driving things forward. I’ve volunteered to organize the annual V-Day presentation of The Vagina Monologues to raise awareness of violence against women. Students and possibly some staff &/or professors? will be the performers. I won’t let myself get sequestered back or offstage though. My stopwatch stays in retirement.

Off to sleep soon now. Tomorrow we have an even earlier day heading into San José to get started on our student permits. For all the anxiety I had about getting my paperwork together, I see now how relatively easy I had it. Diane, who is from Uganda (north of Burundi and I know you all know where that is) had to travel all the way to South Africa to get her documents authenticated. There are about 20 more African students and 4 Asian students who haven’t even been able to get their entrance visas yet so we’re still awaiting their arrival. For me, just a few more bureaucratic hurdles to jump.

This is Where I'll Study

Conveniently located right behind the computer lab. There is also a fountain to the left.