Cooperative Living May 2021 - 10

Co-opPeople | by Gregg MacDonald, Staff Writer
Stirring the Melting Pot
Costa Rican woman finds happiness teaching
Hispanic culture in Virginia
W
hen Roxana Chaves first
arrived in Virginia from
Costa Rica, she spent a lot
of time crying.
Her husband came to the U.S. to
study at Georgetown University, and
subsequently got a job with the InterAmerican
Development Bank in
Washington, D.C.
The couple decided to stay and
raise a family, but Chaves didn't
speak English and felt like a fish
out of water.
" Roxana had to completely reinvent
herself, " her husband Mario Umana
says. " In Costa Rica, she had a long
marketing career working for
pharmaceutical companies but with
a new baby, in a new country and
with no job prospects,
she was understandably
a little depressed. "
Chaves says that in
addition to the language
barrier, she initially found
it difficult to adjust to
American culture.
" In Costa Rica, I was
used to speaking to neighbors
who would be outside
every day, " she says. " Here,
everyone seemed to stay in
their homes and only come
out to get into their cars. "
She also had to get used to
new food, and she missed her
homegrown Costa Rican coffee.
" I really felt out of place, "
Chaves remembers.
FINDING A NICHE
But after doing some research
and discovering that the United States
was the second-largest Spanishspeaking
country in the world after
Mexico, Chaves said she decided that
instead of being a disadvantage, her
Spanish language proficiency
and Costa Rican cultural knowledge
could be turned into an advantage.
She joined some local children's
playgroups with other Hispanic
moms, eventually starting her own,
which grew exponentially. She also
established relationships with local
libraries in Prince William County,
a service territory of NOVEC, and
became a storyteller at several
different branches, telling Costa
Rican and other Hispanic folk tales
in Spanish.
Chaves began incorporating arts
and crafts and other visual elements
into her storytelling, dressing up in
Screenshots from some of Roxana
Chaves' online lessons, portraying her
flair for hats and costumes.
8 | Cooperative Living | May 2021
Roxana Chaves
teaches children
about making
toothpaste.
costumes and hats to represent
characters in her stories. She also
put on cooking demonstrations that
highlighted international dishes and
performed simple science experiments,
such as making homemade toothpaste
with baking soda and water.
Her local library sessions became
incredibly popular with parents and
children of all nationalities, who
began attending in droves.
" When I started at the Bristow
Library a few years ago, I had 10
children in my group, " she says. " Just
before the pandemic, we were up to
more than 100 children. At the Bull
Run Regional Library, we had to start
limiting the number of children
attending to comply with the local
fire codes. "
CHANGE OF PLANS
COVID-19 threw a wrench into
everything. Libraries could no longer
allow large groups and Chaves was
forced to take her educational
storytelling online.
" At first this seemed terrible, but
in the end, it turned out to be a good
thing, " she says.
Chaves started her own YouTube
channel and established herself on
co-opliving.com
PHOTOS COURTESY ROXANA CHAVES
http://www.co-opliving.com
Cooperative Living May 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Cooperative Living May 2021
