What to think

What just happened? Last night while we were preparing a lovely meal of spaghetti, we were visited by a 15 year old girl who goes to Leif''s school (which ends with 6th grade). I say Leif's school because she is part of a small group of older students who for one reason or another don't have the skills to go on to secondary school (grades 7-11) who have taken quite a liking to Leif. They are in a class of 6-8 and everytime Leif walks by or there is a break they call out to him.
Before I go further I want to note that the Leif phenomenom is not isolated to this group. Literally anywhere we go in town people call out to us "Leif" whether he is with or us not. It is strange.

Anyhow, last night Ines the 15 year old walks to the front door and asks if Leif is home. We recognize her from the school and invite her in. To make a very long story only sort of long, she ends up staying for dinner but also stays to play on the computer afterward and makes herself an "appointment" to come back again today. She also hinted a number of times to borrow Laurie's flip flops as hers were broken. Laurie and I stayed up in town to meet with Kiria at the English language school, so we were not around when our mothers got back to find Ines at the front door waiting to play. Seeing as Carolyn was not feeling great and neither of our kids were home my mom suggested another day would be better. As the story goes, it didn't end there. Ines went on to ask dozens of questions about where we were? what we were doing? when can she come back?and the like. She finally did relent and go away and she did return the flip flops.

So why is this story so interesting (other than the fact that our daily lives are so slow that squeezing one's own orange juice is a nice diversion)? We have read in books, have heard from our Cuban friends, and heard from our around the corner Costa Rican friends, that people don't go up to people's houses unless they are good friends or you have an "appointment". If you want to communicaate with someone at their house you should either call first or yell from the street. Before we learned this we couln't figure out why our landlady wouldn't answer the door when we came knocking even though we heard sounds/voices from within the house. Whether this is the reason no one answered the door is unknown but it makes sense.

So here is this very brazen young lady not only coming up to the door un-invited (we didn't even know who she was to invite her) but stays for dinner, eats seconds, than says she is coming back the next day. No one in the states would do what she did and we don't even have the same cultural expectations that she was raised with. She gave off a very strange vibe indeed. In reality she didn't do anything wrong by our standards it just seemed a bit odd. This anecdote is really mostly for us as the whole situation was kinda eerie and a you had to be there to feel as we did, so sorry to those of you that made it this far down the page.

As far as what we learned from our meeting with Kiria the director/owner of the English school there looks like real potential for some work and we will know more soon hopefully.
We hope all are well where your are. We also want to send thanks to those that have responded/commented, every little bit of contact really helps so keep it up.