A warm welcome for the new volunteers (one of whom is a vegetarian)

Providing entertainment in San Cristobal Norte

Our entertainment in San Cristobal Norte

The runners up

Laura! Firme y Honesta...

Special Occasions (2/21/10)

The past two weeks have entailed many new ways of celebrating old occasions, namely Election Day, Superbowl Sunday, and Valentines’ Day, and movie premiers. To elaborate a bit, Election Day is basically a giant party in Costa Rica, and everyone is invited. It doesn’t matter who you’re voting for or who wins as much as just that you are showing up to vote and participating in the democratic process, which Ticos are (rightfully) very proud of, as they are one of the more stable democracies in the Southern Hemisphere. Everyone in Quebradas voted at the school, and all the kids in town were there helping register people and sporting the t-shirts and colors of “their candidates.” Unclear what they were basing their decision on, but there were definitely some families with siblings going for different candidates, so it couldn’t have been entirely based on their parents. Costa Rica also holds an election where kids get to vote and they actually tally the results, and apparently it is almost always indicative of the actual winner. Based on my observations and conversations in and around my community, I thought Otton Solis was going to win, but it turns out he is from Pérez and the rest of the country was going with Laura, so at around 9pm on Sunday, Feb. 7, she was declared the winner by a landslide, making her the first woman president of Costa Rica. The coolest part of the whole thing to me was that everyone I talked to after was not bitter or angry that their candidate had not one but instead shrugged and said that she got the most votes so now we will all get behind her. We could probably use a little more of that attitude back at home…

Concurrently that evening was the Superbowl, which it appeared that about six people in San Isidro cared about, four of us being Peace Corps Volunteers (and me really only half-caring). We went to a sports bar in town where the game was playing on one screen and the election results were playing on the other, but unfortunately there was no sound and the commercials were local and in Spanish, which took most of the fun out for me. But we did eat nachos and drink Imperial and bond with the two other gringos in the bar.

Last week I spent three days in San Cristobal Norte, a beautiful town in the mountains outside of Cartago, for a training with FINCA, the organization that supports our micro-finance projects in Costa Rica. It was really cool because they conducted the training with the Community Credit Enterprise there, which is one of the most successful examples in the country. They have been operating for 15 years and have an office and computers and are actually able to pay someone to work their part time. A far cry from what any Peace Corps Volunteers have in their communities currently (and Quebradas doesn’t even have a CCE), but definitely something to aspire to and know is attainable if you find some motivated people and help show them why it is valuable to have access to micro-credit on a local level. We stayed with host families and the last night they put on a little party for us with a mariachi singer and karaoke, which was pretty adorable. I also ate more rice, beans and plantains than I have since I moved out on my own.

On Friday, the third edition of La Voz Quebradeña came out, this time summer/Valentines’ Day themed (here it’s called the Day of Love and Friendship, so maybe appeals to a wider audience…), and it got a good response as always. Last weekend began the 2-week Expo P.Z., which is basically a big fair in San Isidro that they put on every year with lots of little stands, giant cattle on display, carnival rides, horse parades and dance parties at night. So we checked that out one night but then it starting pouring rain, which kind of put a damper on the activity. Valentines’ Day morning began with a big event that we had planned with the artisan group in Quebradas: cleaning a giant rock. Not a typical romantic morning, but it ended up being a lot of fun and very satisfying. We were getting rid of all the brush and mud that had covered it because we are starting a public art project to paint a few of the giant rocks lining the road in Quebradas in an ecological theme to beautify the community and hopefully attract more tourism. So rock-cleaning was step one, and about six people showed up and we had a fun time and I killed two mini-snakes with a machete, which I feel is kind of a right of passage here.

This week I had to go into San José for three days to edit La Cadena, our tri-annual Peace Corps publication. Always fun to get a paid trip to the big city, but I’ve taken that bus ride over the Mountain of Death a little too often lately, so it was pretty exhausting. But we got the job done and the added perk of getting invited to the Costa Rican premier of Invictus at this fancy mall outside San José. Hearing the work “premier” brought me back to my LA days, and I was envisioning open bar, dessert table, the works. They do it a little differently here, namely you get a free ticket to the fancy theater but then have to pay a lot for fancy food (I had sushi!), and instead of movie stars all the rugby teams in Costa Rica were invited. Who knew Costa Ricans played rugby, you ask? Yeah, me too. Anyways it was fun and funny and reminded me that San José may seem fancy relative to Quebradas and San Isidro, but I’m still a long way away from Hollywood…

Last night we had a charla in Quebradas about how to form a Guías y Scouts group, and the turnout was decent, thought a lot of people I had invited and hoped would come were not able to make it, which was disappointing. But there seems to be enough enthusiasm among kids and some parents to get a group organized, and the woman who gave the charla, the Regional Director of the whole Zona Sur, is super energetic and awesome and seems like she will provide a lot of support. So hopefully I can keep the momentum and move this forward. Also, four new volunteers from Europe arrived in Quebradas yesterday and will be staying here with host families for six months and working with FUDEBIOL, so I am super excited to have some extra support in the community. The girl from Portugal is actually a Girl Scout there, so she was really enthusiastic about this project and came to the meeting last night with her uniform!

The best part of my day yesterday was, however, my belated Valentines’ Day gift, by now fault of his own. Dan asked me casually last Sunday if I had gotten anything, which I hadn’t and assumed it was because whatever he sent had gotten stuck in the mail and it’s not delivered on Sundays anyway. On Tuesday, when I was already in San José, I got a call from this guy saying he was outside my apartment with flowers. The 1-800-FLOWERS guys would not have gotten away with being two days late for a delivery, but he didn’t seem to see the problem. So I had to wait until I got back to San Isidro, but I found him in his shop next to the bus stop waiting for me with a dozen roses and a note written in English from Dan. What I don’t understand is how Dan ever found this guy, but I was way impressed and got the added bonus of getting to parade around San Isidro with my roses while I went grocery shopping and on the bus home and having everyone tell me my boyfriend at home must be a good one, which he sure is. Now maybe they’ll stop telling me I need to find a Tico boyfriend too and that a long distance relationship makes all four people happy (apparently this joke never gets old). I couldn’t be happier with my one…

The last days of summer (2/6/10)

Typical Borucan architecture

Luis Carlos and me at the edge of a waterfall

Our view the whole hike back

At Sirena ranger station

One of many rivers we crossed

Summer break in Quebradas in coming to a close, but the weather is only getting hotter. It was not until last week, when I ventured south of San Isidro for the first time since I’ve been here, that I appreciated how much worse it could be. Last Tuesday my friend Nate came down to visit from Bolivia, where he has been living since November. He crashed on my air mattress for a few nights and came to my classes and meetings, and it was really fun to compare our daily lives in two different Latin American cultures, as well as similarities and differences in language, food (apparently in Bolivia they consume an equally ridiculous amount of starch but it comes from potatoes), and bus systems, or lack thereof. It was also fun to introduce him to some of my friends in the community since he speaks Spanish and could hang, though they had a bit of trouble pronouncing his name.

On Friday we took a 6 hour bus down to Puerto Jimenez on the Osa Peninsula and spent the afternoon kayaking around a mangrove swamp and swimming in super clear deserted water. Then we loaded up on a hearty dinner of fresh fish and a brownie with ice cream to prepare for our two-day adventure in Corcovado National Park, known as the most concentrated bio-diverse area in the Southern Hemisphere.

The journey started with catching a 5:30 am bus to a nearby community and then finding a guy on the street with 4-wheel drive to take us to the ranger station, which entailed crossing about 19 rivers. We set off for our actual hike, overnight backpacks in tow, at about 7:30 and spent the next 7 hours trekking up and down hills, crossing rivers, listening to the insanely loud sounds of the insects in the rainforest, and spotting an occasional cool looking bird, butterfly, and anteater-like mammal that we couldn’t identify since we had chosen not to go with a guide. We also did not see another human until we arrived at our destination, which was the Sirena ranger station located on the coast in the middle of the park. There was a big lodge there with hikers from all over the world, which was pretty cool. In the dining hall that night we heard English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch being spoken. We were very tempted to jump in the ocean as soon as we arrived but were warned there were crocodiles and sharks, so better to go to the nearby river, which turned out to be another 45-minute walk. I suppose distances are all relative when you’re actually in the middle of nowhere. We got a pretty hearty meal that night and then pretty much went straight to bed, both out of exhaustion and because they turned off the electricity in the entire lodge at 8:45 to save energy.

The next day we hiked out on a trail that ran along the beach the entire way. It was milder terrain but much hotter and so so beautiful. We hiked with a couple we met at the lodge who live in Dominical, and throughout the course of the next seven hours learned, among many other things, that the man is a Portuguese travel journalist and the woman is a Polish masters’ student writing a thesis on the migration of Polish Jews to Costa Rica. Who knew? Anyway that was fun and made the time pass and we also saw some amazing scarlet macaws and wild boars, which I would say were the highlights of our wildlife viewing. The hike out took about 7 hours as well, and our new friends drove us back to Puerto Jimenez and we got some cold drinks and went our separate ways, but I hope to see them again. That evening we met up with my friend Laura who lives in a nearby community and gorged on Italian food and felt really good about ourselves for hiking about 20 kilometers two days in a row.

The next morning, however, I came down off that high and found myself sore in very strange places such as the backs of my knees, realized how much all my clothes stunk, and spent 6 hours cramped up on a hot bus after saying goodbye to Nate, who flew back to San José en route to Bolivia. We also both realized in subsequent days that we had brought a little of the nature back with us in the form of ticks, but I think I snagged all the suckers before they could do any serious damage.

All in all, it was a really cool, off-the-beaten-path adventure in every sense of the cliché.

This week consisted of a lot of editing and designing for the third version of our community newspaper, English classes, and meeting with my guy at the Ministry of Agriculture to talk about starting to plant the greenhouse at the school, which made me realize I really have no idea how to do anything I intend to teach the kids, so I need to start studying up. I also got the big bummer news that the teacher who I was working with on recycling and planning to work with on the greenhouse is transferring to another school, and our school director is changing, so that leaves everything a little more up in the air, and I am sad because she was really organized and motivated, and that combination is hard to come by. But I can’t let myself get discouraged before I even give it a try.

Today I went on a trip with the women’s group that runs the volunteer exchange program in Quebradas to an indigenous reserve 2 hours south of San Isidro called Boruca. Every year the group likes to visit a community that runs a similar program to exchange ideas and see how they work. There is a Peace Corps Volunteer working in Boruca, so I arranged the visit and other than it being super hot and dry and Ticos in general not liking to walk, especially in those conditions, the visit went well and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. This community is very well-organized for tourism, and their main source of income are these masks they carve out of local wood and paint in beautiful colors and intricate designs. They also do a lot of weaving using natural dyes, so we got to see a little bit of that process. It looks like a pretty typical rural Costa Rican community, but some of the houses are made of the traditional thatched roofs and some signs are written in their local language and they are definitely very proud of their heritage and the history of their community more than I have observed anywhere else I have visited in Costa Rica. So hopefully this will provide some motivation and new ideas for our women’s group, which is doing fine but could use some new activities and better organization.

Tomorrow is election day, so there will be voting at the elementary school in Quebradas. The streets were pretty hectic today with caravans of campaigners, and it doesn’t seem to be a given who is going to win, so it will be exciting to follow. My taxi driver tonight told me he doesn’t like either of the candidates but he is going to vote (as most of the population does here, they are automatically registered when they turn 18), so he is just going to flip a coin in the voting booth. If that is how the future of the country is decided, it should make for an interesting next four years…