fun times in CR :)

im done!! well... not quite, but done my paper! "Liberation Literacy"... about literacy learning in Uganda for social change towards a culture of peace. i know reading papers are hardly anyone's weekend past times... but do read it if you want and have the chance! :)

aaand i can't believe it's already december.. and it'll be time for home (and snow on the mountains!) in just 3 weeks! my goodness the time's flown by!

although, i have to say, this weekend i was re-thinking my whole culture-of-peace, change-the-world grand models, when me and 2 of my classmates were staying at a hostel at the beach - the owner was a 73 year old man from texas, who was maybe *the* most bitter, racist, protective, and kind of calmly hateful person i have personally met! there were stickers on his window - "trespassers will be shot" was one - and as it turned out, i don't think he was kidding! he was talking about the 'crackheads' in town that were always out to get him, stealing his stuff, etc... he has this big metal gate in the front of his hostel, and he sits there, day in day out, in his rocking chair, watching TV, engineering ways to make his hostel more secure... and waiting for these kids to get close enough so he'd have the opportunity to 'jab em in the eye' with his big metal pole. and he sits there with 2 things in front of him - his calculator (calculating his losses from the business maybe?) and a big knife! he was kind and protective of us though - but if we were local, black, israeli, non-English speaking, or a whole list of other things, he would've turned us away! we spent a good chunk of our time there chatting with him and listening to him... we actually got groceries and cooked up a fancy coconut breaded jumbo shrimp dinner in the kitchen to share with him, and i was a little disappointed he didn't want to join us and sat in his chair watching movies by himself instead. but anyways it was really sad, this man hates everything around him! i hope one day he'll know what it is to wake up with a smile. and anyways, it made all of us UPeace students think a lot about what we're trying to do here... and the here-and-now tangible peace making in individual lives. on the way out today, we thanked him for his hospitality and Andro, another student in the International Law and Settlement of Disputes program joked "take care of yourself and don't kill anybody!", to which the man responded "i won't kill any of the good ones". yikes. maybe i should do my next paper or project on him.. anyways, i should get going to bed, but i thought i'd put that up now cuz if i didn't do it now, i'd never get to it later!

anyways, for those of you worrying for me that it's all work and no play out here, don't worry, i do get my share of fun days, in some extravagantly beautiful places here in Costa Rica. sometimes after a few weeks of paper writing it amazes me that im suddenly in a whole another honeymoon-beautiful world that's just a bus ride away! i mean, i just came back from a beach weekend in the pacific to celebrate my roommie's birthday, and got to go surfing when i decided after laying in the sun for awhile with a book and watching some surfers for awhile that it'd be a nice to surf for a bit after all! it really amazes me sometimes. here's some pictures, not from this weekend, because my camera doesn't work anymore... but just a collection of little adventures throughout the last couple months. sorry it's taken me so long to get some of these fun pictures up! :)

good friends from norway... somehow we all found our way to san jose, CR! :)

trying out some tico specialties... tortillas and chicken and some other goodies :)
real live volcano! with debbie who came to visit from vancouver!! :)


waterfalls! :)
natural river hotsprings from the volcano!


not-so-natural but still oh-so-beautiful hotsprings! (but still with all-natural volcano-heated water!)






getting caught in the big pacific waves with joffe!

black sand mud masks in the Caribbean! (and the white sand beach is just around the corner! strange!)


hehe.. snorkeling for the first time in the caribbean with joffe & seeing lots of tropical fish (on the other side of the camera)! :)




so no worries - im definitely getting my share of Costa Rican beach & sun too along with my reading and paper writing! random collection of my adventures here in the last couple months. now just 3 weeks more - planning out my thesis in my Research Methods class, and then home for the holidays! hope you are all doing well! take care & looking forward to coming home... and seeing some of you pretty darn soon!!! :)

xox!
rainbow =)

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thank you to Svenn Åge for fixing that up for me!! mucho gracias mi amigo! :)

papering...

i was hoping to post a little more this weekend, but it's been a busy one trying to get my next final paper together - i'm writing about functional literacy learning in Uganda, critiquing the culture of competition and commodification it promotes and how it could be structured more towards a culture of peace... that's the idea anyways - let's see what i can get down onto paper!

for now, if you're a bit curious of what i'm exploring here's my last paper - rationale for integrating Human Rights Education into literacy learning in Uganda, based on the work of the "Uganda Rural Literacy and Community Development Association" in Arua, northwestern Uganda.

i might actually have the opportunity to go to Uganda again for a few weeks in January for some research?! i'm not sure yet, i have to think about it some more... after i hand in this next paper on Tuesday! :)

okay, not too exciting post for now. but hopefully (as always) more coming soon!

a little more of the Costa Rican Costa Rica!

a special bonus edition for tonight, because i have been wanting to put this up almost literally since i arrived! we saw this on our very first day in CR - it was a festival of some sort in town... a perfect welcome! :) well almost, actually - my friend Joffe and i had gotten in very late on a saturday night and i woke up about 5am to what sounded like gunshots out on the streets. a little terrified in a new foreign country and having no idea what was going on, i woke joffe up and heard a couple more "gun shots", followed a few minutes later by the sounds of...some sort of mariachi band!! *whew*!! and a couple hours later, horses (with people!) trotting down our street. hehe... we wandered out to the streets in the morning and found this!


que precioso! :)

peace education!

hello again! im not getting to post half as much as i would like to... but here's a little more for now!! :)

so here's my peace ed class!!

there's 16 of us... mostly from North America this year, funny enough! from the leftish of who you can see - Oliver (Italy/US), Candido (Belize), Trish (Canada), Francine (Canada), Jean-Bosco (Rwanda), moi! :), Liza (US/Costa Rica), Brooke (US), Jesaka (US), Emily (US), Sharon (Costa Rica), Birta (Iceland), Taylor (US), Kerri (US) and the back of those heads would be Julia (US) and Ochieng (Kenya)! and Ellen (US) i think is behind the camera. it's a really good group - lots of very different backgrounds and aspirations... everything from school teachers to eco-camp to-be-starters to Belize prison staff to radio host to Kenyan military trainers... we've definitely always got more to talk about than time allows!

our classes have been good so far... i started off a little overwhelmed trying to get through a couple inches of this every night

... (we get one of these for every 15 day course!) i think i've gotten into the swing of things a little bit more now though and am enjoying my studies a lot more than at the very beginning!

our classes are quite different from course to course, because we get visiting professors in. some classes we've had have been pretty creative in teaching methods, which is what we are hopefully going for as future educators - here's some pics from one of our classes!

discussing human rights of different groups in society

"banana split"... how much of 10 cents should each group in the process get? [answer in reality: growers (1.15), pickers (0.1), packers (0.5), shippers (1), importer (0.75), wholesale (1), retailer (5.5!!!!)].

representing different people in society, make a structure that represents your relative place in world


that was our most "creative" introductory course in peace ed... we've been doing more seminar-like discussion-based types of learning since, and i really wanted to take a picture of our white board the other day when we were creating definitions and our concepts of violence and security, but unfortunately... i'm not sure i'll have a lot of pictures to put up of my recent adventures because my supposedly waterproof camera apparently didn't like the hotsprings very much! :(


but anyways, we're learning a lot about learning as we're challenging traditional teaching & classroom methods, and i'll hopefully tell you more soon... this is definitely a more bits-and-pieces than a chronological blog! but that's ok... :) anyways, bedtime for now!

take care!
xo
rainbow =)

history in the making... :)

obama's speech!

(not quite MY costa rican news... but what else could be more relevant to where the world and peace is heading?)

where in the world is Rainbow??

hellooo lovely friends & family!

i know, i been doing a very terrible job of answering that question!! it's hard to believe over 2 months have passed since i've left Vancouver... it's already more than halfway to coming home for Christmas! yikes! you know i love sharing my travels... but no internet for the first couple weeks here, then finding myself awash in seas of intense classes, readings and papers and life... (and some visits from some wonderful friends!) and poof! here i am November! but yes i DO have much to share with you all... but it might have to happen in bits and pieces as i catch up with the last couple months! anyways, sorry for the very long delay... but BIENVENIDO!! welcome to my blog and mucho gracias for visiting and journeying with me this year!

sooo... where am I??

i'm here in Costa Rica, Central America... in a little-ish town called Ciudad Colon, about a half hour from the capital, San Jose.

i'm here studying for one year, in a masters program in Peace Education at the United Nations University for Peace. briefly, i'm studying about transformative education... how and what kind of education can lead to personal and social change for peace in society. i finished my studies at UBC in Global Resource Systems... studying mostly about international development in Africa. near the end of my studies, i became more and more aware of the challenges that conflict pose to any sort of development - that $$, school buildings or malaria nets, or even technical solutions like infrastructure and economics can't answer. then in Norway i happened to come across a book called "How Children Understand War and Peace: A Call for International Peace Education" and became very intrigued and excited about the possibility of creating cultures of peace through education. some friends in Norway might remember me running into an Applied Tropical Agriculture class with that book one morning saying that i think i'd found my life calling! :) but being one with lots of different ideas all the time (and just figuring it was something a teensy bit closer to my passions than intercropping and soil nitrogen indicators that i just couldn't connect with in that ATA class!), i never thought that a year later, i'd be accepted to study a masters here! anyways, i'm here now, hoping to get a deeper and more purposeful & practical understanding of the field... which, quite honestly, i really don't know how i will apply specifically after this year, but we will see. right now i've just written a paper about human rights education through community-based literacy learning programs in Uganda, and i might explore that a little bit more, but we'll see - ideas are still floating and spinning and off and running. :)

anyways, that's a lot of text... here's some pics of our beautiful campus!





okay, more to come, but i have class in the morning so i should pack up and get some sleep... but i'll be sure to share more soon! :)

lots of love to you all!

xo
rainbow =)

ps. i used to email out my updates to anyone who wanted me to... but nifty new technology says there is a way to subscribe to them through my blog. i haven't quite figured out how to do it, so let me know if you want me to email you for now and i'll direct you to subscribing to them when i figure it out!