On Monday we meet Derek (from NY) our teacher coordinator, and the other teachers - Will from San Antonio, Channal from Ocean City MD, and Paul from Manchester.

Derek has a Nathan Lane-style about him, always cracking camp, and sometimes I actually think he's gonna break out into song.

The first day of orientation is all about cultural differences we can expect and the hard-core truth about our students and the skills they need to learn from us in order to find and keep gainful employment.

A full 25% of the population is in the Poverty or Extreme Poverty classification.

High school graduation is approx 35% in CR, keeping many families on a treadmill of poverty. Teenage pregnancy tends to keep the girls uneducated, and poor resource management (such as over-fishing) add to the male unemployment problems.

As is globally, CR as a hotter climate tends to move much slower and much more casually than the colder countries. Our English classes will often serve to introduce the idea of "being on time" to many of the students. We may also be the first to introduce accountability - with homework assignments.

The students are given a scholarship from the government to attend the course. They're paid the scholarship directly each month, and then they pay half of that to the program for the English classes and use the other half for bus transportation or day care for attending the classes. This introduces learning about financial management, teaching our students they need to mindfully allocate their funds.

The only reason a student can be removed from the program is absence or incessant tardiness. 3 tardies counts as 1 absence, and 6 absences gets you kicked out. Again, a basic life skill needed to keep a job.

The basic level of the skills we'll be enforcing has come as a real shock to some of us.