Yesterday, September 15, was Independence Day here in Costa Rica (in Mexico too for that matter). For over a week, the school children have been practicing marching nearly every day in front of our house. Our subdivision is called "Los Colegios" because there are so many schools in the area. Remember many children in Latin America go to private schools - more than in the U.S. First through sixth grade is "escuela" and seventh through twelve is "colegio".
Our neighbor children leave home about 6:20 a.m. for school. Since the sun rises at 5:30 a.m. everyone gets up and gets started very early down here. All children wear school uniforms too.
Anyway, they have been marching to drums with some of the girls wearing long, tiered skirts which they twirled and others carrying flag poles without flags. (They got flags for the real parade)
The culmination of all this practicing was yesterday. On the night of the 14th they have a parade of lanterns and on the morning of the 15th there are long parades in every area of town.
We went to the parade which started at 9 a.m. about 3 blocks from our house. Some of the children were dressed in the costumes of the old farmers, some as religious figures, etc. There was lots of loud drumming; baton twirling and so on.
There were thousands of folk watching. All of the groups had parents walking along side of the "bands" with mothers taking drinks of water and Gatorade out to the children periodically.
We heard a few firecrackers but didn't see anything. It isn't really a very big holiday here but we missionaries know how to celebrate Independence Day so got together in the afternoon for a cookout and homemade ice cream.
You may or may not know that Costa Rica has no military and is a very peaceful, prosperous country - for Latin America. The people are very modern and "in the know". You will find few Costa Ricans in the U.S. as they have no good reason to leave home - life is good here.
