Wow, a woman looking for jewelry buddies in Costa Rica? French
jewelry terminology? I’m so glad there’s more of us out there,
learning our trade despite the hardships! Don’t let a little thing
like being in a third world country, or a place where you don’t speak
the language fluently stop you, there’s resources everywhere! I’m
taking jewelry courses in Peru and in Spanish right now. My husband’s
in the foreign service so we move every few years, so I’ve had to do
a lot of research on where I could continue training, or find great
resources! I always lobby for posts in countries where there’s gems
and jewelry!
First, language: if you have no language you may need some language
classes first, but you don’t have to be fluent to take advantage of
what’s around. If your language skills aren’t 100%, don’t worry! My
Spanish skills are BARELY conversational, but I’m doing just fine
with my jewelry classes. As long as you can more or less get by, the
language difficulty is pretty much offset by getting a visual
demonstration of what they’re explaining (easy to gist the meaning
with all that context), and the time between explanations and
in-class work, allowing you to ask more questions or break out your
dictionary. You can generally tell if something you didn’t catch is
going to be necessary to do your work; don’t worry about it; if it
becomes necessary later they’ll say it again, and then in context.
Don’t be afraid to ask what you think are really dumb questions.
Sometimes it takes saying you don’t understand a few times in order
to get them to explain it in ridiculously simple vocabulary - but
they do eventually! Most people, teachers and students, are really
happy to help - you may even find one that speaks some English! I
think they’re generally impressed that a gringa with barely enough
language skills is in their local joint, trying that hard to learn in
the first place! Also, early on, ask your teacher if they have any
good general texts on jewelry making, photocopy the whole thing, take
it home and study!! Spanish texts are hard to come by according to my
teacher, but he still had one to lend me. If you’re trying to learn
from a basic level, however, don’t try to try to translate every term
for every tool - the names for these tools would be as new to the
other students as they are to you, so no need to add the tendency to
translate where you don’t have to. Sandra, I completely sympathize -
I’m supposed to have an “ojo de pollo” in my supplies within the next
few classes; I’m fairly sure they don’t really want me to have a
chicken eye in a jar…
As for resources and contacts, for the woman who’s living in Costa
Rica right now, and anyone living abroad, start with your local
yellow pages! Unless you’re in a really REALLY poor country with no
resources (and even then) you may have pretty good luck finding
something under technical schools or jewelry. See if there’s an
association; they may have contacts also - they may even have
classes! AIGS in Bangkok actually has gemology classes in English -
who knew? You could also try the area universities; they may have
degree programs involving jewelry training (though this could be
harder to get into, being a university). Just on an internet search,
I found two mentions of escuelas of joyeria in Costa Rica - no web
pages, but the yellow pages could help you find them. One was A more
informal route, try befriending a really nice local jeweler who does
custom work. Someone who has a good rep with the embassy and expat
community is a good place to start. The jeweler I knew in Sri Lanka;
I could have learned some bench techniques at his workshop, but I
couldn’t survive that heat without AC. However - had I known back
then that GIA did distance gemology courses, I certainly could have
asked to use his equipment to complete my assignments and gotten a
gemology cert. for half the in-class price! Oh, hindsight…
Hope this helps for anyone trying to do this work far, far away from
"home"; if anyone’s looking for training resources please email me;
I might be able to help!