!

It has been way too long not to blog for such an exciting few weeks. The biggest highlight of course was my dad’s visit. We spent the first weekend up in Monteverde, the quintessential Costa Rican rainforest. And although it was the dry season, it stayed true to its name with a constant refreshing mist. We stayed at a treehouse hotel up in the clouds that included delicious breakfast and 5 o’clock tea to watch the sunset. And we met some interesting characters, including a nature guide who had a fondness for potty jokes and spent more time talking about porcupines pooping and bird indigestion than about all the beautiful plants and animals we saw.

On Monday we headed back to Quebradas with a stop in San José for my Junior Achievement training, a course I am starting with high school aged kids in Quebradas that teaches them how to start their own business. And since I’ve never started my own business, I may need more than a three hour training to be qualified to teach the course, but it’s a start. In Quebradas, dad got to come to an English class, help out with building some planting boxes at the school for our greenhouse, observe a chaotic artisan group meeting and went on his own adventures in San Isidro where he learned the names of lots of new tools in the hardware store in order to construct a screen door for my bedroom. Not exactly a relaxing visit, but he did great.

And just to make sure he left good and tired, we decided to climb the highest mountain in Costa Rica for his last few days in town. Brigitte came down all the way from Bijagua and we picked up Adrienne in Canaan and made our way up 3820 meters and back in two days and one night, plus some side trips to some cool rock formations and a beautiful lake. It was an incredible hike. We walked through various microclimates: rainforest, desert, burnt trees, and up a trail called the “Hill of the Repentants,” right before we got to the lodge on the first day. So it was tough, but well worth it. Meals consisted of PB&J, granola, trail mix, and pasta with bagged tomato sauce for dinner, cooked over a portable burner that took a good 45 minutes to boil water. The second morning we got up super early to summit Chirripo, and it was as awesome as every says it is. We were above all the clouds and it was gorgeous and peaceful and totally exhausting, especially since we had to go all the way back down that same day. But we all made it more or less in one piece, and it was such a wonderful experience to share with my dad and my friends and I have a feeling I will be up there again before I go.

Although it was sad saying goodbye to dad on Sunday, I have hardly had time to miss him as last week was crazy with preparations for the Feria de Agua at FUDEBIOL, their big annual event. I was coordinating a lot of the activities, publicity and transportation (you may have heard me on Thursday’s San Isidro Catholic radio broadcast), and on top of all that preparing for my PCT visit. For those who have been following my adventures from the beginning, you may recall that a year ago, I headed off wide-eyed and clueless to visit a seasoned Peace Corps Volunteer in her site. Now I get to play that role and host a fresh-off-the-boat Peace Corps Trainee, and of course the visit was planned for the craziest weekend in Quebradas, but it ended up working out great because a bunch of the other volunteers near me who are hosting trainees all came to Quebradas on Saturday night and we had a campfire and slept up at FUDEBIOL and then they were all there for the activities on Sunday and lent some extra creativity and resourcefulness to the last minute activity planning. Not that I should be surprised at this point, but on Friday I was not feeling terribly optimistic about the event, and of course everything came together and there was a HUGE turnout (the bus I had begged FUDEBIOL to contract but they were skeptical of whether it would fill up ended up having to make extra trips and fit about double its capacity each time) and the scavenger hunt, traditional dance performance and soccer games I helped organize were all a big hit. So my visitor, Liz, definitely got to see one of the more eventful Sundays ever in Quebradas and we both left drenched from playing soccer in the rain and socially overstimulated, which means it was a good day in my book…

Party Time (3/4/10)

Computers!

Getting silly with the girls...

Most flattering uniforms ever

Last weekend was full of parties near and far, in some cases a little too near. Every near during the summer, the Quebradas Development Association puts on a big three-day “turno” right across from the soccer field, which also happens to be right next to my apartment. It is three days and nights of non stop music, karaoke, food, drink and all the noise, trash and good times that generally entail. A local band called Los Talibanes (which I later learned acquired their name soon after 9/11 because the lead singer’s name is Bin – they’re not so concerned about political correctness here…) played every night and the majority of the community showed up even though it rained in the afternoons.

Anyways it was pretty fun and funny how all the adults bring their kids and get drunk while the kids run around and play tag on the soccer field and nobody seems to mind. Unfortunately for me, though, my general routine of passing out by 10pm was disrupted for three nights straight, which was particularly tough because on Saturday morning, I woke up at 4:30am to head with the new volunteers in Quebradas to San Gerardo de Rivas to watch 250 crazy people race up Chirripo, the highest mountain in Costa Rica and second highest in Central America. It is a big all-weekend festival as well, but super inspiring and amazing to see these people without an ounce of fat on their bones leave the starting line at 7am and show up before 10:30am, accomplishing what takes most people two full days in less than 3 and a half hours. It definitely made me want to at least hike up the mountain, though not quite as quickly…

Sunday morning was the highlight, a Quebradas women’s soccer game versus a neighboring community, Miravalles. My friend had told me about the game about a week before, and we trained three times last week, with about five people showing up each time and about two of us actually knowing how to play. But incredibly enough, 20 women arrived the day of the game ready to play, including my friend Adrienne, a ringer we brought in from Canaan. We had a pretty big audience since the turno was still going on, and everyone was worried because Miravalles is supposed to be pretty good, and it turned out they were. We ended up coming back from losing 3-1 to tie the game 3-3, much help from Adrienne and me, and we had the whole crowd pretty riled up and I had big hopes of making my name in Quebradas history, until I missed my penalty shot and we ended up losing. Big bummer. However, all the girls seemed really pumped after the game and impressed by how Adrienne and I played and how fit we were (although we had both been complaining before about how out of shape we felt…it’s all relative) and enthusiastic about continuing with the team. So that would be a really fun thing to get going, and it was great to see women from the community running around outside of the house and having fun.

Monday was a bit of a downer, as my new cell phone was stolen out of my pocket on the bus. It was a big ordeal to get the phone and it is going to be a big ordeal to get another and I was pretty upset and frustrated with myself for not being very aware. But that evening, the great news arrived that the government computers I had solicited in October would be delivered to FUDEBIOL the next day. And sure enough, they showed up and were entirely installed, equipped with cameras, headphones, all the most recent software, and desks and chairs. Pretty exciting and should be a great resource for the biological reserve and people who work/volunteer there as well as the nearby community members. So that is just one example of how fast my life can go from up to down to up again in the Peace Corps.

Other than that, we are still moving forward with the school garden and recycling, working on the next community newspaper and potentially getting and “intern” from a nearby university to support the project, and I met with a guy today who recently moved here and is interested in starting a rural tourism project by building super low-cost suspended bamboo huts on family fincas. And most excitingly, my dad is coming tomorrow to visit for a week! So we will both have our work cut out for us…

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…

Bball camp

Cheeringfor Laura...Siempre en adelante!

Accepting my "Mas chispa" award

Team Kotex del Sur...I take no responsibility for that name

Beating up on little kids in Knock-Out

This week was more camp counseling and more fun. For the past five years, a group of Peace Corps Volunteers have gotten together to run a basketball camp in the big sports complex in San Isidro for kids of all ages from the area. There were about 10-15 of us there every day and 60-70 campers. I was with the 9-12 year-olds, and fortunately most of my basketball basics came back to me from middle school. Many of these kids have never played basketball before because everyone here grows up just playing soccer and generally don’t have basketball courts in their communities, so we really didn’t get too far beyond the very basics…

It was pretty exhausting to run around all morning with little kids since it has gotten SO hot here recently, but super fun to get to hang out with volunteers all day. One afternoon we went back to Quebradas and jumped in the river and cooked at my place, and we also went to a movie, went dancing, and went to a free concert put on by Laura Chinchilla, the frontrunner for the Feb. 7 presidential election.

Also yesterday I went to a big fair in a neighboring community to see my friend sing. Afterwards we went to the rodeo, which was quite a cultural experience. Instead of doing a real bullfight, a bunch of guys just jump in the ring and taunt the bull and then run away from it, many of them scaling the walls to escape. Also, an event entirely new to me was the rock and roll horse dance, which entailed each team doing a race to 50’s American rock and roll music. So all in all a lot more action than a typical week!

Summer break!

Before the fire...

Indian princes

Muddy hugs!

Juan, super activities director, and the kids

The overflowing bus

So far, it has been an AWESOME 2010 in Quebradas. After parting ways with my friends from home, I met Aunt Didi, Uncle David and Alec in San José and brought them back with me to Quebradas, where they spent two nights in Roger’s rustic and “enchanted” cabin, which was an adventure. It was really fun having them visit and a nice way to ease back into community life after lots of great vacation time.

I found out last week that, gracias a Dios, I had gotten a grant from an organization called Kids to Kids for a camp I was helping plan this week at FUDEBIOL. So we were able to confirm all the plans and buy the materials and everything came together at the very last minute, but the only person who seemed surprised by that was me. The idea of the camp was mostly to give kids something to do besides watching tv or helping clean the house (again) during their summer break, but also a first step in trying to better connect the community to FUDEBIOL and perhaps start a youth group that is supported by and supports the biological reserve. I was planning it with my friend Gina, who lives in Quebradas and used to be a Scouts director until recently, when she and her whole group resigned because of corruption on their familial Board of Directors. And I thought the parents on the sidelines of my soccer games were bad…

But lucky for us, that meant there was a group of motivated youth leaders with nothing to do this week who volunteered to come work at the camp. And it worked out GREAT. They were so good with kids and had so many ideas for activities, songs, games, etc. that I hardly had to lead anything and mostly just hung in the background organizing the snacks and other logistics. About 35 kids showed up ages 10-16, which is way more than I had anticipated, and I had ordered a bus for 20-25 people to go up and down from FUDEBIOL everyday, but somehow we all managed to fit. The camp started at 9 and lasted until whatever hour in the afternoon we ended up finishing, which varied from 1 to 4. We did hikes, arts and crafts, obstacle courses, relay races, and other crazy games whose names I wouldn’t know how to translate into English. On Thursday we had a campfire and all the parents were invited as well, which was really special. I think it was the first time a lot of the kids from the community had been to a campfire, and they sang camp songs and learned how to cook bread and potatoes on an open fire and then I taught everyone how to make s’mores, which was a big hit. And finally on Friday we closed with prizes and thank you’s and went for a swim in the river after.

The whole week was a great excuse for me to act like I was 10-16 years old and made me remember how much fun I had at summer camp and made me think how exciting it must be for these kids who had never done anything like this before. I came home on Friday so content with the week but also sad it was over and wondering if it would lead to anything more. The kids kept asking when were going to have another camp, and I am trying to encourage them to get organized and start a youth group or a Boys and Girls Scouts group in Quebradas, but getting people to invest their own resources in something more long term without a grant and amazing experienced leaders is a big next step, so we’ll see. What made me most happy was just to see so many kids up at FUDEBIOL enjoying the beautiful space and running around in nature, and I really really hope we can organize more programs up there to get the community to take more advantage of the space.

In other news, I was introduced to a new tradition of taking down Christmas decorations last week, which of course must be accompanied by a prayer session in Costa Rica. But the one I attended was extra special because it included a live acting out of the nativity scene. However, the whole production started 45 minutes late because a bull, who was tied to the gazebo and meant to be decorative, got lose and started running around as everyone screamed and about 20 people jumped into one car to hide.

Also, a new feature of my blog, as a result of my New Year’s resolution to cook one new dish a week (which means pretty much anything but scrambled eggs, stir-fry and pasta) will be an update on what I’ve concocted, as much to make me stick to my word as to entertain you, many of whom have already commented on my excessive sub-conscious discussion of food on my blog. Anyways, last week started off quite strong, with southwestern chili, pesto sauce, pineapple smoothie, and gazpacho soup. My least successful dish was tonight’s chili relleno, which was one of my favorite things my host mom used to cook. Lesson learned: do not attempt a recipe in Spanish unless you are absolutely sure of what all the verbs mean…