In Search of la pura vida...

Shameless Self-Promotion

2011-04-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

Hey, I have a new blog. Check it out: http://www.alonghistoryofhardlyanything.blogspot.com/

Home

2010-10-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

My plane landed at the Atlanta airport on August 2nd, around 1pm. It had been a rough, restless night of travel, flying from La Paz to Santa Cruz, then catching a connection to Miami at 1am.

My first move upon arrival to Atlanta was to order a meatloaf lunch and sweet tea from the Paschal’s just outside the security gate. Then, I sat down in one of the big lounge chairs in the rotunda beside the food court to people-watch for an hour or so, and take some notes in my journal.

Two months later, I’m still taking notes and reflecting back a little bit on my Peace Corps experience and Post-PC travels. This will be my last post to this blog.

My PC story is probably not completely over, but this seems like a good a time as any to wrap things up.

Here are a few of the main things, worded as simply as possible, that I’ve taken away from my PC experience:

• Be Bold in Your Aspirations. Looking back at my own life, I have failed at very few things that I have put my mind to. PC is another event that I would consider an amazing success. In general, this is of course very positive; however, now and in the future I would like to fail a little more often, and in doing so, achieve great things. Life is full of the unexpected, and it took a handful of farmers in rural Costa Rica to make me reassess what I am capable of.

It’s like Theodore Roosevelt said: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

Okay…so Roosevelt’s wording is a little grandiose, but I like his rhetoric. My failed ascent of Mt. Chimborazo during my travels in Ecuador also have helped to drive his point home.

• Life is a Journey. Enjoy it. While we must always have an eye out for what lies ahead, and create compelling visions of our future path, day to day we must live in the present. Enjoy each sip of coffee, take pride in every key typed in that long report, and never forget how important the bonds of friendship and family are to us.

• Know yourself. It sounds so simple, but it is an idea oft repeated in history and popular culture:

“Know thyself” - Socrates

“This above all, to thine own self be true” - Hamlet, Shakespeare

The degree to which we can understand ourselves determines our ability to move through life with less friction. Knowing oneself, a person can make decisions that allows them to fight their own tendencies less, and move more freely through life, whether in work, love, or other situations. This is a life-long undertaking.

I didn’t do PC expecting it to change me in any fundamental way, but it definitely has. It has something to do with the challenge of it all. Spending two years in a small village in a different country with little access to technology can be a very solitary endeavor.

At times you feel extremely isolated from friends and family, and unable to relate to the people you see on a daily basis in the country where you serve.

Ultimately, the neverending series of challenges led me to a lot of introspection. I was brought face-to-face with myself – the strengths and the weaknesses, for better or worse.

In my experience, I have found that if you can be kind enough to yourself during all those trials, then you will eventually leave with a better knowledge, and appreciation, of who you are. This is one of the best things any individual can do.

For any friends or family, future Peace Corps volunteers, or anyone that just happens to stumble upon this website, if you ever would like to get in touch, feel free to contact me via email at blake.hen@gmail.com.

Until then, enjoy the journey.

Silver Mines and Salt Flats

2010-07-30T07:32:00.000-07:00

I arrived to La Paz about two weeks ago, still shivering from the winds off Lake Titicaca, and with the added disappointment of being turned down from the first three hostals whose doors we knocked on.

I say we, because I had been traveling with a Portuguese girl, Nora, who I had met in Machu Pichu and ran into again at Puno, on the Peruvian shore of the lake. Seeing as we were both traveling alone and in a strange new country, we decided to join forces for a few days.

In La Paz, I just had to stay warm and keep my spirits up long enough to receive reinforcements; or that is, one of my best friends from Peace Corps, Josh Kagan, would be flying in to meet me and travel for a couple of weeks in Bolivia before returning to the United States together.

Josh was arriving at an extremely opportune time, as I was feeling a bit worn down by the Bolivian winter, a cold that had been hounding me for several weeks, and the numerous discomforts of being on the road for over two months.

I can count on one hand the few people that I can handle traveling abroad with for prolonged periods of time. These are friends that I can arrange to meet with on a certain street corner, at a determined time, halfway around the world, with about 99% certainty they will be there at the appointed hour.

Josh was one of those few. He is fluent in Spanish, extremely flexible, has a great sense of humor, and possesses a common sense that is essential for traveling.

We had already traveled together often in Nicaragua and inside of Costa Rica during Peace Corps. On a busy street in any given Latin American city, trying to plot a course, a couple quick words or a head nod in one direction is usually all the communication that is necessary between us. (When in a new city it´s always best to at least give the illusion you know where you are going at all times.)

On Monday July 19th, at the agreed upon hour of 9am, I walked into a hostal in downtown La Paz and found Josh sitting in a chair in the courtyard, exactly where he said he would be.

¨Heayygghh man¨, Josh greeted me! He got up, and I walked over to give him a hug and a couple of bro-pounds on the back. It had been more than two months, since our last day in San José, Costa Rica in May, when I´d seen him last.

But something was wrong. He sounded terrible. His voice hoarse and barely audible.

It turned out Josh had spent a hard two nights of partying in Washington D.C. with friends before catching the red-eye flight on Sunday night down to Miami, and then La Paz. The nights on the town and the late flight had coincided with a cold that had been brewing for a few days, and seemed to have completely matured by the time of our greeting in La Paz.

So instead of the cavalry, I got a wounded foot soldier limping into battle. Instead of a fresh and rested Mariano Rivera coming in for the save, I had an injured and bloody Curt Schilling trying to pull out the win.

Okay, I jest. Josh was still coming in to help me finish in style the last two weeks of what has been an incredible trip. He would just need a couple nights rest and a few days of antibiotics to get back into form.

Unfortunately, the rest never came. Our first night was spent in, for all purposes, appeared to be a cold, attic at a hostal/Irish pub we stayed at in La Paz. Josh´s condition only worsened.

Our second night, resolving to get the hell out of La Paz, we boarded a night bus to take us down to the mining town of Potosí. A huelga, or strike, on the main road south from La Paz to Uyuni had forced us to change our plans slightly, opting to see Potosí first, and then the Salt Flats outside of Uyuni.

We fared better on the night bus to Potosí then in the cold attic in La Paz, and around 6am we rolled into the Potosí bus terminal. We quickly hopped into a cab that took us to the downtown, found decent lodging with heating, and then quickly laid down for a nap as soon as we entered our room.

Everything I had read about Potosí fascinated me, and frankly this small, little-known town was one of the main reasons I wanted to visit Bolivia.

Potosí is known as the highest city in the world, set at an elevation of around 4,100 meters. It is also the location of Cerro Rico (or the rich mountain), the most productive silver mine the world has ever known.

The Spanish discovered silver there in 1544, and deciding it warranted immediate attention, set up a mining operation around the cerro. For the next three centuries the Spanish would remove more than 45,000 tons of silver from the mountain.

Potosí would become the Spanish empire´s principal source of silver, financing its numerous wars, and causing the first prolonged inflation in Europe since the Dark Ages as a result of expansion of the money supply.

To work the mines, the Spanish employed a system known as mita, or forced labor by the local indigenous populations, as well as by black slaves brought in from Africa. The miners would work extremely long hours, up to 12 hours a day, and at high temperatures extracting ore from under the mountain. To sustain themselves, the miners chewed enormous quantities of coca leaves and drank alcohol, in nearly pure form, to keep them working. They would stay under the mountain working for ¨shifts¨ of up to four months, finally emerging to the outside world only by placing bandages over their eyes, which were completely unaccustomed to the sunlight.

The majority of the miners would perish of psilicosis pneumonia after less than 10 years working in the cerro. It is estimated that in the three centuries of Spanish mining, as many as 8 million indigenous and black laborers perished as a result of the mita system.

Potosí itself became a center of great importance. In the late 1600´s, the city had a population of over 200,000, larger than either Paris or London at that time. It was home to architecture and fine art, with more than eighty churches built within the city perimeter.

Today, Potosí is still a mining center, but on the decline, with a population of roughly 120,000, or 80,000 less than at its height. The conditions in the mines also have improved immeasurably, right?

Wrong. Actually the miners still work under extremely difficult conditions, although they are now organized under cooperatives, and largely reap the gains from their own labor.

On our second day in Potosí, Josh and I took a tour of the Potosí mines. Our guide was a young man, of about our own age, who had 15 years experience working in the mines (he began when working with his father in the mines when he was about 12 years old). He picked us up around 9am from our hostal, and led us to our first stop, a small road-side supply center for miners.

There, in an alley not far from the center of Potosí, we bought supplies and gifts for the miners - things like coca leaves, small flasks of alcohol, liters of soda, and a few sticks of dinamite.

Well provisioned, we continued on to the mines, where we were given helmets, head lanterns, and full clothing to cover us from the soot and dust of the mine. Once we were prepared, we entered a mine shaft.

We proceeded slowly along the shaft, at the farthest point in the tour reaching more than 700 meters, or more than 2000 feet into the mine. As we walked further into the mountain, we would constantly have to stop our movement and cling to the sides of the tunnel, as working miners continued by us moving their mining carts filled with materials on small railways. The temperature also reached up to 90 degrees Farenheit as we went further under the mountain.

I had never been in a mine shaft before, much less in a working mine. The miners walking by us had their cheeks full of coca leaves, used to give them more energy and allow them to handle the hard labor. They also drank regulary from small, plastic flasks of alcohol, which we tried and tasted almost completely pure, much like rubbing alcohol.

During the rest of tour, which consisted of more than two hours underground, we were shown small temples the miners had erected in side shafts, where they would take breaks and make offerings to the idols. We were also shown veins of silver and tin that the miners were still working.

Once we´d exited the mine shaft, our guide gave us a dinamite demonstration. He showed us how the fuse was connected to the dinamite stick, and after lighting the fuse, insisted we all pose for a photo with the lit dinamite. We all hurried to comply. Finally, he took the dinamite to a site about 40 meters from us, laid the stick of dinamite on the rock surface outside of the mountain, and then continued in the other direction to await its explosion. The resulting concussion took the air out of our lungs.

Josh and I outside of the mine shaft.

Having satisfied my curiosity of Potosí with the mine tour, Josh and I continued on the next day to Uyuni, farther southwest near the border with Chile. Uyuni is traditionally the place where groups contract tours of the neighboring salt flats and Parque Laguna Colorado. And so we were going to Uyuni to do just that.

We awoke the morning after arriving to Uyuni and quickly contracted a company to give us a tour of the salt flats. The tours are done by 4x4 Land Cruiser, meaning the tourists hire a driver/guide to take them out into the salt flats and beyond to the national park. The normal tour these days takes about 3 days and covers over more than 500 kilometers during the tour.

The three day tour was amazing. We saw landscapes that I would have never even been able to imagine. We were basically touring a desert located at 4,000 meters of altitude. The surrounding scenery was desolate and bleak, but beautiful at the same time. We traveled through one of the world´s largest salt flats, saw red volcanic mountains, and green salt lakes at nearly 5,000 meters of elevation. I have never seen anything like it.

Some scenes from the tour.

We also made some great friends on the trip. Of the three other people sharing the Land Cruiser with us there was a Swedish couple, Marco and Eva, and a young New Zealander doing some touring after she spent almost two years in the UK. They were a lot of fun to hang out with, and I think we all left extremely happy with the experience.

After a rough 3 days in the Land Cruiser and putting up with the cold (temperature reached down to 0 degrees Farenheit at night), Josh and I have continued on to Sucre.

Sucre is a beautiful colonial town, located at roughly 2,700 meters of elevation, with pleasant weather, beautiful Spanish architecture, good restaurants, and a live University scene. Here we have been relaxing for a few days before heading back to La Paz to complete our time in Bolivia.

This afternoon we board a night bus back to La Paz, and then after a couple of lazy days buying souvenirs in the capital, will board flights back to the US on Sunday night.

Going Home

For me I find it hard to believe, and even a little saddening, that my adventure is coming to a close. That said, I´m extremely proud of the things I´ve seen and done during the last few months.

In less than three days, I will land back in Atlanta, which should be quite a shock, moving from a Bolivian winter to the southern heat, not too mention all the cultural factors.

Once home, I hope to take some time to reflect on the last two and a half years in Latin America, and try to share some of these ideas via the blog.

Choquequirao and Machu Picchu

2010-07-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

What is Choquequirao?...you might be thinking. When thinking of Peru and the Incan civilization, most people instantly bring to mind Machu Picchu.

Choquequirao is an ancient Incan city that was abandoned shortly after the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century. Now all that remains are the ruins of the village, and some pretty extensive terrace work. It is very difficult to access the ruins today, the only way being a 32 kilometer hike (64 kms round trip) deep into the mountains southeast of Cusco.

Most people doing treks around Cusco opt for the famous Inca trail, a 4 day hike on an old Incan road through various Incan ruins leading up to Machu Picchu on the final day. This is a great hike, don´t get me wrong, but my friends and I wanted something a little more off the beaten path. On any given day, up to 500 people can be hiking the Inca trail at the same time.

Knowing this, my friends Kayla, Tamara, Farhat, and I contracted a guiding service a couple of months ago to lead us to the more removed Choquequirao. Normally we are pretty budget travelers, however, in this case we spared no expense.

On Thursday, July 8th we set off on the trail to Choquequirao from the small town of Cachora, about 4 hours southeast of Cusco by car. Our team was made up of 12 people - the four of us, three other Americans, our guide, three mule drivers, and a cook.

Our packs, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, and all other equipment were carried by six mules. The mules allowed us to only have to worry about carrying small day packs with water, snacks, sunblock, and other odds and ends weighing no more than 2-4kilos.

Despite having the mules, and walking on a good trail (the Choquequirao trail was built in 1994 with the help of a $5 million grant from the French government), the hiking through the mountains at an altitude of around 3,000 meters was still extremely challenging at times. The first day of hiking we did 21 kilometers, the last 9 kilometers being a steep ascent down to a footbridge alongside a river.

View of the valley we trekked down and out of to reach the ruins of Choquequirao.

Upon arriving to our campsite each day, we would be greeted by the mule drivers, who had gone on ahead, setting up our tents and laying our packs on a tarp for us to pick up. They would direct us to a shower house nearby while they and the cook began working on our meal. Like I said...we spared no expense for this trek.

After showering, getting into clean clothes, and some stretching, we would have our supper. Each meal usually consisted of 4 courses - an appetizer (such as bread), followed by a soup, then the main course, and a dessert. The food was pretty darn good.

I should probably introduce our company on this hike, which was so important to making the experience what it was. Our three co-hikers and guide were:

Mike - 70 years old, from Santa Barbara, California. Currently, an economics teacher at a local community college, he had spent his entire career in higher education, specializing in history and political science. Fluent in Chinese, and extremely well traveled, Mike was also a strong hiker. Several years before he summited Mount Kilamanjaro in Africa with his son.

Nancy - roughly 60 years old, from Durango, Colorado. She is a teacher at a local Montessori school located on an indian reservation. Nancy was also an avid hiker, hiking regularly around Durango, and also having done trekking in Nepal. Nancy was a free spirit. Her daughter seems to have a similar personality, and is a rafting guide on the Colorado River.

Patsy - Nancy´s sister. She currently lives in Encino, California, and is around the same age as Nancy. She and her husband are retired.

Alex - Our guide, age 34. He has an American girlfriend that he met while on the train back from Machu Picchu one day. He has a son with her, and his dream is to get a work visa to the United States, and eventually become a citizen, to be with his girlfriend and son.

From the start there was a mutual respect and interest between us. I think Mike, Patsy, and Nancy really enjoyed our company and sense of humor, while Kayla, Farhat, and Tamara and I loved to hear of their experiences, and also respected their physical strength as hikers.

On the second day of hiking, we got started around 5am and knocked out the remaining 11 kilometers to reach the Choquequirao ruins. The second day included an ascent from the river of roughly 1000 meters over 7 kilometers, which was pretty challenging.

Our third day was dedicated entirely to exploring the ruins. During the tour of some of the terraces, I kept pressing Alex, ¨but how much of this has been restored?...which parts?¨. Some of the terraces where in extremely good shape, the local workers were even growing corn on some of them, and I really wanted to know what the stonework looked like without any restoration work.

At the bottom of an extensive set of terraces I was finally able to satisfy my curiosity. The land below the bottom step of terraces seemed to give way to thick vegetation and trees, but upon closer inspection, the terraces continued! They continued not just one or two levels lower, but as many as 15 levels below!

¨I´m going down,¨ I informed the rest of the group. Alex advised me to be careful, watch my footing, and keep my walking stick in front of me to scare away snakes.

I slid down a hole in the vegetation where some old Incan steps and drain continued downward from the restored terraces above. Finally getting down a level, I could see that the stone terracing, the steps, and drainage system had held together very well! All that was need to do to restore them was rip away bushes and other plants that had established themselves in the walls, and then perhaps apply a layer of mortar on top to protect the wall.

It fascinated me to see the design and craftsmanship of a set of Incan terraces that had not been touched in 500 years, but were still in good condition.

After leaving the terraces, we went up to explore where the main town was situated. We toured a home of what used to be Incan royalty, saw an old Incan bath, and checked out a huge building that appeared to used for gatherings and assemblies. The acueduct which supplied water to the town was still intact, and recently restored, although water had not yet been routed through it. A cut could be seen in the vegetation running from above the town, over to a waterfall where the water used to be routed to the town.

In all the ruins we visited during our time around Cusco, it was always impressive how advanced the Incans were in the central planning of their towns and cities. Their architects would always arrive to an area, determine how the aqueduct could be built to bring water for consumption and agriculture, decide where the religious temples would situated, what areas would be used for homes, and what areas would be terraced for agriculture.

One of the highlights of Choquequiroa was that we were pretty much alone with the ruins. As we toured the hike, there were probably only another 20 people in the area, and most of them spread out across the site.

The fourth and fifth days were spent hiking out back to Cachora, another 32 kilometer journey. Following the hike, we had lunch in Cachora, and presented our guide and other crew members with our thanks and tips. We took a group picture outside of the little shop we used as a base in Cachora.

The entire team after a successful hike.

That night, the seven of us and Alex decided to meet up for dinner in Cusco, where we shared one last meal and said our goodbyes. Some special friendships had been formed between members of the group. Kayla, Tamara, Farhat, and I now know we always have a place to stay in Durango and parts of California.

The Choquequirao hike has been my favorite experience during this adventure, mainly for the quality of people in our group.

Following the trek, there was one thing left to do around Cusco...visit Machu Picchu. Farhat and I still had not been to visit the ruins for which the region is famous for, and that are known worldwide.

After a day of rest in Cusco, Farhat and I took a taxi about an hour and a half to Ollantaytambo, where we boarded a Peru Rail train which would take us to Aguas Calientes, the town at the foot of the Machu Picchu ruins.

Once in Aguas Calientes, we found lodging, bought our pass to the ruins, and turned in early. Aguas Calientes is mostly a town where people stay for 24 hours, purely for the purpose of visiting the Machu Picchu ruins.

Around 3am Farhat and I woke up, gathered our things, and began the walk to the foot of the mountain where the ruins are located. To get up to the entrance to the ruins, one has to walk up a set of 1,608 stone stairs, which lead up to the ancient city.

We hiked up the stairs at a brisk pace, and around 4:40am reached the gates to the ruins. We were in the first dozen to arrive to the gates. As we arrived we were greeted with nods of encouragement or greetings of ¨welcome¨ by our early-risers. It was a motley crew from all over the world - French, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, and other nationalities.

The reason for arriving so early is that the first 200 people to arrive are given a special pass to climb the Waynupichu mountain situated next the ruins. From the top of Waynapichu, one can see the ruins as the first light of the sun hits it.

We were let into the park around 6:30AM, and hustled over to the entrance to Waynapichu. Around 7AM we were admitted to Waynapicchu, and began to make the climb up on the winding staircase built by the Incas. I was the 4th person to reach the top, and the view was well worth it.

Looking down on Machu Pichu from the top of Waynapichu.

After resting for around 45 minutes at the top of Waynapichu, and taking numerous pictures of the ruins, we descended back down to the ruins of the main city. We took a one hour tour of the main sites, and then sat tired against a set of terraces to eat a lunch we had packed.

Around 1:30pm we left the park and descended back down the stone steps to Aguas Calientes, and at 3:30pm we caught a train back to Ollantaytambo.

Machu Picchu was incredible, but I left their feeling not so much euphoric, as relieved. A visit to Machu Picchu is a homage any serious South American traveler must make, and I felt like it had been hanging over my head.

Having satisfied the Machu Picchu visit, I felt free to continue on to other exploits with a clear conscience.

Upon arriving back to Cusco that night, I quickly hopped a night bus to Puno, a town alongside Lake Titicaca, and close the border with Bolivia. In the morning the next day I took another bus to the border, payed the requisite $135 entry fee for Americans (instituted two years ago by the Bolivian government in retaliation for various American foreign policies and the difficulty of entry into the US for Bolivians...the Europeans did not have to pay this), and successfully making the border crossing, continued on in bus to Copacabana.

Copacabana is also situated on the banks of Lake Titicaca, only on the Bolivian side. The conditions have been terrible since arriving here, with bitter cold and harsh winds creating high white-caps on the lake surface.

I had intended to make a trip out to the Isla del Sol, but woke up this morning to evaluate the conditions, and finding them not much changed, have decided to press on to La Paz, only 3 hours away.

As if to confirm the correctness of my decision, I was drinking coffee this morning inside a local café watching the light drizzle, when I realized it had begun to snow lightly. The café owner, a local, was mesmerized and said the conditions were some of the worst he has seen in 5 years.

Lake Titicaca, situated at around 3,800 meters of altitude, is the largest lake in South America, and one of the highest in the world. I would love to explore it more, but unfortunately it doesn´t look like that will happen this trip.

So onward to La Paz.

Climbing Chimborazo

2010-07-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

Where the last blog left off I was commenting on my intent to summit the tallest peak in Ecuador, Volcano Chimborazo, at a height of 6300 meters. The climb happened...although not necessarily with the result I had imagined.

Looking back, it seems like I was due for a reckoning during this trip. I had cruised smoothly through Panama, Colombia, and parts of Ecuador. I was meeting people, seeing amazing sights, but not really ever being seriously challenged by anything I came across. Attempting to climb Chimborazo changed all that.

On a Wednesday morning I walked into a local guide agency to try to find out how to climb the mountain. Our conversation went something like this:

Employee: Buenos dias!

Me: Buenos dias! I´d like to find out about how to climb Chimborazo.(in Spanish)

Employee: Okay, what kind of hike do you want.

Me: I´d like to go all the way to the top.

At that, the two people behind the desk sat up a little straighter. One of them, a young guy, introduced himself to me as Franklin Barca. I didn´t know this at the time, but Franklin and I were about to get to know each other very well.

Franklin, age 28, was an alpine guide and medical student studying emergency mountain medicine. He had been guiding for four years, climbed several of the tallest peaks in the Andes, including the tallest (Aconagua, at 6,800 meters, in Argentina), and had summited Chimborazo over 40 times.

There in the office we talked a little bit about what I had in mind, and we decided on a practice hike that Friday, followed by a hike to the summit on Saturday night.

We spent almost the entire next 3 days together. On Thursday, we went and checked out equipment, and on Friday we took a trip up to the mountain for a practice hike up to 5,300 meters.

Something I really didn´t have clear in head as all these planning steps took place, was that climbing Chimborazo was serious mountaineering. We would be trekking upwards through ice and snow, and into very thin air with the summit at an altitude of over 20,000 feet. We would be wearing heavy mountaineering boots with crampons, thick snow clothing, a harness, helmet, head lantern, and I would be carrying a heavy snow pick throughout the hike.

The seriousness of what I was about to attempt dawned on me following our practice hike on Friday. We took a public bus up to the entrance to the park, walked about 6 kilometers up to the refuge at 4800 meters where we would begin the summit hike, and then after a short break, continued on a point above the refuge around 5300 meters where the snow starts to cover the landscape.

The hike from the refuge to 5300 meters left me doubled over, gasping for air every 50 meters towards the end. And once we´d reached our goal, I looked up at the mountain still towering above us, covered in snow with wind whipping around its sides, and for the first time felt strong pings of self doubt. Would I be able to do this?

I spent that night alone in my hotel room, trying to steel my nerves and insist to myself that everything would be fine; that maybe, the mountain is not really as challenging as it looked. I decided I would not look up at the summit during the hike, as it only served to make me more anxious.

The next day, at around 4pm Franklin and I were transported in truck by the guiding agency up to the first refuge at 4800 meters. There our planned schedule was to eat ¨dinner¨ at 4:30pm, rest from 5 to 10pm, wake up for ¨breakfast¨ at 10pm, suit up afterwards, and then begin our hike at 11pm at night.

I did not know this prior to preparing for this hike, but the summiting of most high peaks is done at night...or at least the majority of the ascent. The weather conditions are generally calmer at night, with less wind and snow. Due to our timing, we would also have the benefit of a near-full moon.

So at approximately 11:15pm, having eaten a light breakfast and put on all our gear, Franklin and I opened the door to the refuge and set foot outside to begin our ascent.

I felt great. I was rested, had a light meal in my stomach, already pretty well acclimated to the altitude due to the practice hike and our pre-hike rest, and felt comfortable with all my equipment. Aside from that, we would be hiking in near-perfect conditions. There was almost no wind, very little cloud cover, and the bright moon above us gave us excellent visibility, almost making our head lanterns unnecessary.

We made excellent time during the first hour and fifteen minutes, making it up all the way to 5300 meters, around where we´d finished the practice hike. At that point, we point on our metal crampons, helmets, and Franklin tied me into him, preparing to enter the ice and snow that would define the rest of the hike.

From 5300 meters, we spent the next hour and thirty minutes traversing a huge swath of the mountain. Franklin was bringing me through a longer, less technical route to avoid some difficult stretches along the normal route. We traversed the mountain for roughly 2 kilometers, with Franklin walking in front, digging in our metal crampons into the mountainside and using our hike picks like canes to stabilize us and provide badly needed friction on the 50 degree slope.

Folowing the traverse, we hiked another 200 meters up to a resting point. There we sat down, ate some apples and a granola bar, and chatted with a pair of guys who had come up from the normal route to rest in the same spot.

There were about six other people making the ascent that day, all strong climbers from a Quito alpinist club who were doing a practice hike, preparing for a trip to the Himalayas the following month. It´s safe to say I was the one with the least (read: practically no) experience on the mountain.

At that point we were about 3 hours into the ascent, and situated at around 5600 meters. After the short break we began to hike up the mountain again.

I now have some insight into how an astronaut feels during a moonwalk. Loaded down with extremely heavy mountaineering boots, heavy clothing, and our gear, all the while trying to walk up a snowy/icy 50 degree incline, the fatigue finally began to hit me.

We hiked another hour and fifteen minutes to around 5800 meters, where I fell to the ground and informed Franklin that we would have to take a break. Unfortunately, the break didn´t do much to make me feel better.

What´s more, at that point the altitude was really starting to take its toll on me. Each step was like a small battle. Mentally, I was also finding it harder to think clearly, and focusing on small things, like putting on a glove, became difficult dasks.

Franklin was extremely patient, was taking all the important safey precautions, and giving me every help to make it possible for us to climb the mountain...but my time was running out.

The following hour of hiking was one of the most miserable of my life. My calf muscles, so essential for upward movement as we dug the toes of our shoes into the snow, began to fail me altogether. I tried sidestepping my way up, but that only worked for short distances. At the highest point we reached, close to 6000 meters, I was only able to hike around 10 feet at a time, and then would collapse to my knees.

It was there, at around 5:45AM watching the sun beginning to come up, that Franklin and I sat down in the snow to have a little heart-to-heart conversation about the future of our little venture together. I was totally fatigued, could not climb more than a few meters without falling down, and the altitude was affecting my ability to think and even summon a few words. It was time for us to start heading back down.

It was difficult to give up on the goal that we had set, but under the circumstances, it was absolutely the right thing to do. We had been hiking for more than five hours, and although we were only another 300 vertical meters from the summit, it would take another 2 hours of hiking at a descent clip to reach the top. Plus, we had to think about the descent.

The descent, while fortunately using other muscles, would eventually take us another 4 1/2 hours. I arrived to the refuge and ran into a guy from the hiking agency that was in charge of our transportation, and he asked ¨How are you feeling?¨. Not able to lie, I responded ¨I feel absolutely aweful.¨

And I did. I was so fatigued that there was nothing else to say. It was the hardest physical activity I had ever done...more difficult than running a marathon, which while extremely difficult, usually took place within the span of 4-5 hours, while this climb took place over 10 grueling hours.

Looking back a week later, I´m would say it was a positive experience. I now know what that kind of mountaineering entails. Plus, I had challenged myself, and while I failed, had failed trying to achieve something very difficult.

On the way down the mountain, we ran into one of the alpinists that was training for the Himalayas. ¨Don´t worry about it. It took me five attempts to reach the summit.¨ His words succeeded in making me feel better during the long descent.

I would consider Franklin a friend, and hope he continues on with his studies to eventually become a doctor. We´ve kept in touch some since the hike.

Following Chimborazo, after a full day of rest at my hotel in nearby Riobamba, I made my way quickly to Guayaquil on the coast. From Guayaquil I took a 26 hour bus ride (no joke!) further south to Lima, where I met up with some friends I did Peace Corps with in Costa Rica.

Now I´m writing from Cusco, preparing in a few days to do a five day trek to Choquequiroa, some ancient Inca ruins, followed by a trip to Machu Pichu shortly after, which will probably be the subject of the next blog.

Quito to Riobamba

2010-06-24T18:04:00.000-07:00

I arrived to Quito one week ago in characteristic fashion, having not done any homework on Ecuador. I haven´t used a guidebook throughout the trip, relying instead on insights and recommendations from fellow travelers as I move along.

Frankly, I wasn´t even aware of what the currency was in Ecuador. After picking up my backpack and wandering around the baggage claim area a bit, and feeling a little dejected finding my lock cut off by Ecuadorean immigration authorities, I realized the currency must be the dollar. A visit to the ATM confirmed this, as it spat out a bunch of fresh greenbacks into my hands.

Ecuador is a different world. All of my travels in Latin America have taught me that the indigenous culture was the minority, an often overlooked group of people in societies dominated by white Spanish blood.

The view from the cab on the way to my hostel proved that I had finally reached the Andes, the land once dominated by great native indian societies, the Incas being the most well known. Here the indian culture is king. It is a nice change.

I think Americans often think everyone south of Texas is a dark brown color and eats spicy food (i.e. like in Mexico). Actually I know this is true, because I used to be one of those people.

The dynamics of race and color in Latin America are much more complex than that simplistic outlook. Latin America is full of descendants of white Spanish colonizers, mixes of indians and Spanish blood, black Carribean peoples, and everything in between.

Physically, the indigenous have a very distinct look. They are almost always short, with dark brown skin, straight hair, and a rounded face.

In demeanor, almost without exception, indians are a reserved people. They walk with a characteristic slowness, as if they already know their fate and their is no need to rush, paying little attention to the random gringo passing by. I would learn more about the indigenous during my next week of travels.

Ecuador is cheaper than Colombia, and Panamá for that matter. It was in a conversation on the San Blas islands off Panamá that I first realized the change in prices I would see during this trip. ¨Oh it´s just gonna get cheaper and cheaper for you,¨ said a random Aussie to whom I had explained my route, traveling from Panamá to Bolivia over the course of roughly three months.

And so it is getting cheaper. In Colombia a room in a dormitory would cost me around $10 a night. Here in Quito, almost without fail, I have been able to find private rooms, with a private bathroom, and hot water for around $8 per night.

When faced with the option of paying $6 for a dormitory or $8 for a private room with bathroom, without blinking I choose the option for a private room. The hard-core backpackers almost always opt for the dormitory, anxious to save a buck and often looking down on those with more ¨expensive¨ tastes. And so I have left their ranks without looking back. I was never that into roughing it anyway. Heck...I´m on vacation.

Food has gotten cheaper too. Breakfast and lunch at a local family establishment cost between $1.50 and $2. And we are talking full, sit-down meals. Lunch almost always includes soup, meat with rice and vegetables, and a natural juice drink. I have no complaints about Ecuadorian cuisine.

Whereas in Colombia I was paying out roughly $40 a day for room, board, transportation, and other expenses, here in Ecuador I seem to be living quite well for $25 a day. A guy could travel for quite a while at that rate of spending...and so I will.

My first two days in Ecuador were spent wandering around Quito, the capital. The weather there was pretty cold due to the city being situated in the Andes at around 2,800 meters (9,200 feet) of altitude. I enjoyed walking around the old city, but in general my time in Quito was pretty unremarkable.

From Quito, I headed to Baños, a small tourist center in the mountains under the shadow of the active (recently very active) volcano Tungurahua. There I found another decent room and spent a couple of days wondering around the town and the surrounding hills.

Baños is an adventure tourism hub, full of advertisements for rock climbing, gliding, bungee jumping, rafting, and other random adrenaline-rushing sports.

I bypassed all of that, still marvelling at the fact that I had my own private room, and opting to read a book and turn in early. The highlight of Baños for me was a four hour hike up a mountain to try to catch a glimpse of smoking Tunguragua, which gave me some great views of the valley, but no sight of the volcano due to the cloud cover.

The town of Baños.

Riobamba, without a doubt, has been (and continues to be) the highlight of my time in Ecuador thus far.

On Sunday I took a bus from Baños to the nearby of city of Riobamba. I had coordinated my visit with a friend, Emily Webster, a Peace Corps volunteer who I knew from Costa Rica that had extended a third-year in Ecuador.

Emily (shown at the start of page) is living in Cacha, a set of indigenous communities in the mountains about 10 kilometers south of Riobamba. She has been there about 8 months in the community, working on environmental conservation initiatives, and a range of other things.

I had contacted Emily about three months before, letting her know I would be traveling in her area and would love to meet up. I wasn´t going to miss an opportunity to have an authentic in-country experience visiting a Peace Corps friend.

Fortunately, Emily was receptive to the idea, and so we coordinated our rendevous in the Riobamba centro across from the train station.

After exchanging hugs and some catching-up conversation, Emily showed me around Riobamba, the regional hub. It´s a fairly nice city, with around 250,000 people. As we toured the city, we ran into a group of American medical students who were in the area providing assistance to some of the local indigenous communities for a month during their summer break. Emily was familiar with them, and they were to pop up time and time again during our next few days.

Getting dark, we finally hailed a cab to take us out to Cacha. It was roughly a 25 minute cab ride, but only ended up costing us about $4.(again with the low prices)

Over the next two days I was able to get a feel for Cacha, as well as Emily´s lifestyle in her site.

With none of the local dwellings meeting Peace Corps standards for homestays, Emily was housed in the local casa communal, or community house. She has running water (although not potable), electricity, a propane gas stove, and a sink (but no shower). On a daily basis, she resorts to cold water bucket showers, and the occasional hot water shower at a home in a nearby town once or twice a week.

The primary language spoken in Cacha is Quichua, a variant of Quechua, the Incan language spoken throughout the language. When I asked Emily if she had learned much Quichua, she demurred and said that she hadn´t learned much. After watching her interact with some of her neighbors that first day, I learned she was just being modest, as I listened to her banter on in Quichua.

The language was fascinating to me. Being a student of the Spanish language, I habitually listened intently to the conversation, but found I understood absolutely nothing. Quichua is from another world...the world before there was a New World.

Emily would always revert back to Spanish after conversing for a little while, her Quichua limitations being reached. The indians spoke Spanish well, and so they would switch back to Spanish with her. Still...I found it amazing to listen to her speak Quichua.

I evened picked up a few words myself. Ashtakamen: See you later. Kayaykamen: see you tomorrow. And mashi, or friend. As the members of her community would invariably ask Emily if I was her husband, or boyfriend, finally coming to visit her. We would respond ¨mana(no), mashi¨.

We had timed my arrival to coincide with an indian activity to celebrate the first day of summer, which was set to take place on Monday. I was told the celebration would include a lot of indian rituals, complex ceremonies, and native foods. Naturally, I wasn´t going to miss this.

We woke up early on Monday and marched up to the top of the hill above the town, following other groups of people headed in the same direction. On reaching the site where the ceremony was to take place, we were surprised by what we found - gringos...quite a few of them.

But not just any gringos, these were some serious hippies, the likes of which I have not seen in all my Widespread Panic / Phish concert going years.

As we were to learn later, the gathering had been announced to religious shamans all throughout the Americas...and these norteamericano-looking people represented different groups in the US and Canada.

Ceremony, with shamans in the inner circle.

But I gotta be honest, to me they just looked like a bunch of hippies.

That really kind of threw me, and while watching the different rituals taking place, I just could not seem to wrap my head around there presence.

Before the ceremonies ended we walked down the hill to a number of food stands that had been set up featuring indigenous foods. Indigenous cuisine is pretty basic, mostly consisting of root vegetables and grains. The medical students volunteering in the area would constantly complain of the malnutrition of the patients they attended to.

There were other sad things happening within the community. Emily had told me how almost all the young adults had moved to the city, and sure enough during my two days I mostly saw little children and older adults. Also, there were lots of abandoned houses in the towns resulting from this exodus, which made for an eerie setting.

On Tuesday, Emily and I hiked up the hillside so I could see the school where she had been doing some work. Our visit coincided with a parents meeting. Emily and I began to work on a world map she had been completing on one of the schoolhouse walls. The start of the meeting was delayed, so many of the parents and kids hovered around us as we worked on the map, then picked up markers and lent a hand. It was fun to see everyone crowding around the map, looking at it with serious consideration.

On Tuesday afternoon we came back down the mountain to Riobamba. It was to be my last night in Riobamba before heading farther south towards Peru.

But then, out at night with some of the medical students, over beers one of them suggested to me ¨Why don´t you climb Chimborazo!?¨ That majestic mountain, the highest in the country at 6300 meters, had been staring down at me for the last few days.

I decided it wasn´t a bad idea. Or that is, after shaking off a hangover the next day, decided it still wasn´t a bad idea. So I consulted a guide, who agreed to take me up the mountain. Tomorrow we have a practice / acclimatization hike, then Saturday we begin our ascent. If all goes well, after a few hours rest in a shelter in the afternoon, we will hike through the night and reach the summit around 6am on Sunday.

So it looks like I will be sticking around Riobamba a little longer.

Bogotá...and some commentary on Colombia

2010-06-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

As expected, Bogotá, turned out to be even bigger and more sophisticated than Medellín. For the most part, I spent 3 very tranquilo days walking around the old section of the city, La Candelaria, where my hostel was located.

One of the most important landmarks in Bogotá is without a doubt Plaza de Bolivar (shown above). It´s an impressive square enclosed by the Supreme Court building, a cathedral, the Senate building, and the municipality offices. It was a nice place for people watching.

My first full day in the city I visited the Botero Musueum, an art collection whose primary works displayed are the paintings of Fernando Botero, Colombia´s most famous artist.

I´m not always a huge art fan, but I really liked his paintings. He´s most famous because of how he plays with dimensions in his paintings, most notably by making people and objects look fat or inflated. Case in point below.

In this painting you´ve got a really fat woman, lying on a very wide bed, with almost no space left elsewhere in the room to even walk, and she´s reading a letter from a lover and crying, all the while eating these silly, fat looking orange slices. It´s pretty hilarious.

The shapes, dimensions, and colors make his paintings a lot of...well...fun.

Also during my time in Bogotá I took a train up the mountainside behind the city to the Monserrat monastery which overlooks the capital. The view from there really gives you a healthy respect for the sprawl of Bogotá and it´s 7.5 million inhabitants.

Yesterday (Tuesday), I took a quick day trip two hours outside of the city to a town called Zipaquirá. Zipaquirá is nestled alongside a mountain that is basically pure salt underneath. It has been used to extract salt since the 7th century, when the indigenous began gathering the salt water that ran from under the mountain and drying it out to form salt cakes.

The mine is famous today because a huge cathedral capable of fitting more than 7 thousand people has been built roughly 200 meters underground in the old mine shafts.

It´s supposedly the #1 tourist attraction in all of Colombia, and was definitely pretty impressive. We walked along with a guide more than 2 kilometers down the mine shafts to reach the cathedral.

In the afternoon, I came back into town on the Transmilenio public transportation system, or basically a huge line of buses that shuttle people throughout the city via dedicated lanes that only they can use. It´s no underground, but I found the system pretty impressive.

Once back in the city, I checked out the Gold Museum, run by the National Bank. It is one of the largest collections of gold in the world, mostly from indigenous sites located within the country.

So I stayed pretty busy during my time in Bogotá. I think I was trying to get back to the basics after our partying in Medellín.

Still, I managed to stay at a very active hostel, and every day found myself sitting down for beers to watch a World Cup match or the NBA finals.

Colombia´s History of Violence

I´ve been meaning to write some kind of commentary on the state of things in Colombia...so here goes.

Colombia has a pretty bad image as a very dangerous place to live or travel, and with good reason. It´s important to understand the country´s past to better understand what is happening now in Colombia.

I´ll only go as far back as 1948, when the Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was poised to come to power, with a promise to unite the people of Colombia. Imagine someone with three times the charisma and popularity of Obama in a period of tense, uncertain times.

On April 9, 1948 Gaitán was assasinated while walking out of his law offices, unleashing massive riots in Bogotá. This unleashed a bloody conflict between Liberals and Conservatives throughout the country from the late 1940´s to early 1950´s, resulting in the deaths of more than 180,000 people. The period is simply called La Violencia.

In the late 1950´s a fragile peace was finally reached, but it could not stop the rise of guerilla groups, the most famous of which is the left-wing Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the FARC.

In Colombia, the central goverment has a long history of not being able to extend control over it´s own borders. Or that is, to provide even basic security throughout the country. You can understand why this is once you realize Colombia is the size of Texas and California combined, and thick with jungle, mountains, rivers, and many hideouts for guerilla movements.

So the left-wing FARC and conservative central government waged what amounts to a constant civil war for decades. Bad, right? It gets much worse.

In response to the central governments inability to crush the FARC and left wing groups, rich landowners and members of the oligarchy took matters in their own hands, raising private armies known as paramilitaries.

These paramilitaries were allowed to operate in certain areas of the country against the FARC with the tacit approval of the national army forces. But as you can imagine the paramilitaries soon resorted to some very shady practices, such as organizing outright ¨death squads¨ to pass through areas known to harbor FARC forces, and eliminate suspected collaborators. (some members of a small village Derek and I visited outside Valledupar told us of past visits and killings by paramilitaries in that area)

So the country was now swarming with government forces, the left wing FARC, and right wing paramilitaries. The advent of cocaine in the 1970´s heated things up even more.

Once the size of the cocaine market became evident, cocaine cartel leaders began making hundereds of millions and investing them in their own set of armed groups and hired assassins.

As the FARC and even right-wing paramilitaries became aware of the huge potential profits, they too began operating in cocaine production to finance their organizations. Pretty soon the right wing paramilitaries had completely shaken free of their masters and become an end unto themselves. Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the drying up of it´s funding sources, the FARC would also take on cocaine production (not too mention kidnapping) as it´s primary financing mechanism.

It can probably be safely said that rock bottom was reached on November 6, 1985, when the Palace of Justice (or the building which houses the Supreme Court) was raided by the left-wing armed group M-19. More than 300 lawyers, judges, and administrators were taken hostage by 35 M-19 guerrilla fighters.

The building was surrounded by the national army forces, and after hearing the demands of M-19 and determining that negotiating or giving in to the group´s demands would only further weaken the government, it was decided the army would be allowed to try to remove the rebels by force.

During the raid by government forces, the Palace of Justice caught fire, and more than 100 hostages were killed, including 11 of the country´s 21 Supreme Court Justices.

Stepping back for a moment...Can you imagine what that would be like? It would be as if an armed group suddenly raided the US Supreme Court and killed four out of the nine justices.

Between the M-19 raid and assassinations of judges and lawyers by cocaine cartels, the Colombian justice system was effectively crippled. It took years for the justice system to regain it´s strength.

Assasinations of political officials (including the 1989 Presidential candidate) continued to afflict the government throughout the 1980s and 90s.

Why does all this matter? The point of this review of Colombian violence is not to romanticize or glorify any of this. Quite the opposite, the real reason is I personally simply can´t imagine violence of that scale.

It´s also important to taking into account the present circumstances in Colombia. The eight years of Alvaro Uribe´s presidency have seen incredible changes in the security conditions around the country.

Uribe´s government effectively cleansed itself of some corrupt elements, waged absolute war against the FARC and other groups that couldn´t be negotiated with, and also coordinated negotiated surrenders with many right-wing groups.

It has not always been pretty or clean. Many people argue (probably correctly) that some paramilitaries have been able to literally get away with murder.

However the changes speak for themselves. The number of yearly kidnappings has dropped from 3,700 in the year 2000, to less than 175 in the 2009. FARC, the only remaining active rebel movement, has dropped from a force of 16,900 to 8,900. More importantly, the have been pushed deep into the mountains and cannot strike at vital regions in the center of the country.

The last 8 years have seen Colombia rescued from a nightmare, and it appears ready to experience a boom - especially economically. During the next 5 to 10 years, I expect the country to become a major tourist destination. I´m really happy to have been able to travel in Colombia some before word gets out, and the masses come flooding in.

Culturally, Colombia has always been a regional leader - with writers such as Gabriel García Marquez, musicians like Juanes and Shakira, and it´s impressive architecture and art in it´s cities. However, in the future, look for Colombia´s image to change in a big way.

I think that about does it for my Colombia rant.

Quito, Ecuador

This morning I arrived in Quito, Ecuador after flying Bogotá. I´ll be in Ecuador roughly two weeks. One of the highlights that I´m really looking forward to is visiting a Peace Corps friend from Costa Rica who extended her service for 1 year here in Ecuador. This weekend I plan to visit her in her community (high in the mountains) and be around for an indigenous festival celebrating the first day of summer. Should be pretty awesome.

Medellín

2010-06-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. – Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Mark Twain had it right. This quote definitely holds true for my experience in Medellín. Maybe not so much for dispelling prejudice or bigotry, but definitely for giving me a new perspective on Colombian society.

Colombia, frankly, has an image problem, and with good reason. The new tourism pitch being shown in the US and Europe is ¨Come to Colombia. The only risk is not wanting to leave.¨

As opposed to the old motto ¨Come to Colombia. The only risk is someone else not wanting you to ever leave.¨

He he. Sorry…forgive a guy a little backpacker humor.

In the past, whenever I heard mention of Medellín, only one word would come to mind – cocaine. Okay, cocaine, and possibly the name Pablo Escobar.

Unfortunately, Pablo Escobar, dead since 1994 when he was gunned down, is still Medellín´s most famous citizen. His story is a fascinating one, but also extremely violent. I won´t go into it, but basically he was head of the Medellín cartel for more than a decade, at a time in the 1980´s when cocaine first came to the masses.

At his height he controlled more than 70% of the cocaine trade, and was ranked by Fortune magazine as one of the top 10 richest people in the world during the 1980´s, with a fortune of over $7 billion.

But back to the topic of getting a new perspective on Colombia. Derek and I arrived by bus around 9am on Tuesday morning, and very quickly boarded the Medellín Metrorail, a very modern public metro system running through the center of the city.

We made our way to our hostel (Casa Kiwi…which was to be our glory and downfall), and then headed back out to get a glimpse of the city.

Medellín is Colombia´s second biggest city behind Bogotá. It is home to about 3.5 million people, situated at 1500 meters above sea level, in a valley between two tall mountain ranges.

It is home to universities, museums, art galleries, a botanical garden, fine hotels, colonial architecture, a metrorail system, and all kinds of other cultural ¨stuff¨ that I wouldn’t even begin to know how to appreciate.

Basically, I was really impressed! The city was trendy, modern, and clean. The kids were all dressed in the latest styles. For a moment, I felt like I had wandered back to Spain. It was easily the nicest city I have been to during my travels in Central or South America (including Panama City).

The cool weather was also extremely welcome after a week and a half of sweating it out in the steamy, low-lying region around Cartagena.

The people of Medellín are known in the country as paisas (pronounced pie-zas), a title which they are truly proud to hold. Being a paisa means you are down-to-earth, middle class, and most importantly…not from Bogotá.

I never realized it before coming to Colombia, but the two leading Colombian cities have a fierce rivalry. It can almost be compared to the relationship between Madrid and Barcelona in Spain, or Florence and Rome.

Here in Colombia, Bogotá represents power, the rich oligarchy, and white-Spanish decent. Bogotá, since colonial times, has been the seat of the government.

Medellín, one very tall mountain range away, has always somewhat resented the snobbishness and control of the capital. It is a constant source of conversation when talking with people from Medellín.

¨Medellín has the best people, tastiest food, most comfortable weather, and most beautiful women in the country¨, they will say to you. When I told my cab driver this morning that I was headed to Bogotá he said, ¨Why are you going there?! They´re all a bunch of snobs. And the women all have flat asses!¨

I was in no position to argue with him, so only complemented him on the beauty of the paisa women, and promised to continue on to Bogotá so I could find out for myself.

Derek and I didn´t get into many cultural activities during our four days in Medellín. Unless drinking can be included as a cultural activity…which I think it probably can be.

As previously mentioned, our hostel, Casa Kiwi, was to be our downfall.

The hostel is situated in the hills above the city, in a very rich, trendy neighborhood called El Poblado. The streets were lined with stylish cafes, restaurants, and bars. In addition, the hostel boasted a bar ($1 bottles/$1.50 micro-brew beers), a large 3-tiered TV room, a kitchen, pool table, extensive deck overlooking the street, and rooftop pool and patio.

It was obviously a recipe for disaster.

To be fair, the start of the World Cup also played a part in the resulting debauchery. Starting on Thursday morning, a bunch of hung-over, smelly backpackers would clamber down the stairs, filling the TV room before the 8:30am start.

This may not seem like a very impressive feat, but it is when you know a lot of the crowd didn´t go to sleep until 5am, and has been going at that pace for several days.

Irish-accented streams of curses would fill the air, insulting some French player, followed by all kinds of chatter and shouts in Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, German, and the occasional Isreali ranting in Hebrew…which is worth hearing if you ever get the chance.

Up until a couple of days ago I had underestimated the impact the World Cup was to have on my travels.

We met one American traveler, Jeff, whose sole plan for the next month was to hole up in Medellín so he could watch all of the 64 World Cup games. I have to admit, it didn´t sound like a bad plan, especially considering the $1.50 microbrews.

Ironically, none of the five countries I am traveling through qualified for the World Cup. But I don´t think it matters. Between the motley crew of backpackers and Latin American love for football, it should make for some interesting World Cup viewing.

Unfortunately, this morning I had to say goodbye to Derek, as I had to press on to the airport for a quick flight to Bogotá. Derek has to head back to Costa Rica on Sunday to continue working for Peace Corps, which leaves me traveling alone for awhile.

Now after a quick 50 minute flight, (as opposed to the 10 bus ride through the mountain) I´m installed in another trendy hostel in the Bogotá city center. I´ll be here until Wednesday, before flying on to Quito.

I´m kind of looking forward to a few days traveling alone…going at my own pace. I´d also like to get out more than we did in Medellín to understand the historic sites around Bogotá a little better.

But this hostel is also equipped with a bar area selling cheap beer, a large flat-screen TV, and a bunch of soccer loving backpackers…so we´ll see how long that plan lasts.

I keep intending to write a little background on Colombia´s violent history, which is important to understanding the country today, but I seem to have run out of steam again. (i.e. time for a beer and conversation with fellow travelers.)

Cheers.

Cartagena and Around

2010-06-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

My Colombia travel partner, Derek, and I met up at the airport in Panama City and boarded a plane for Cartagena on Saturday, June 29th.

Derek is still a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica. He has extended for a third year as a Peace Corps Volunteer Leader, which means he is based out of the central office in San José supporting our project leader.

We arrived to Cartagena, took a taxi to our hotel, dropped of our stuff, and then started walking around to check out the city for the remaining two hours of daylight left.

We made our way to Cartagena´s old city, to the old city wall by the sea, and then started hovering towards a bar to watch the sunset. We were instantly disappointed after talking to the hostess. ¨No estamos serviendo liquor hoy¨. Or that is, there would be no sale of booze for the next two days due to the presidential elections. Talk about disappointment! :)

So we spend the next two days wandering around the city, checking out the beautiful architecture of the restored Old Quarter, but without being able to enjoy a little badly needed alcoholic beverage. And we had the perfect chance to buy a duty free bottle of whiskey in the Panama City airport, in basically a duty free country...so dumb!

After two days we got tired of Cartagena. It was, frankly, too posh and touristy. Cartagena is the major tourism hotspot for Colombia national tourism, and is also growing pretty popular with some Europeans and random travelers. The Old Quarter was filled with expensive hotels and restaurants (or at least relatively, considering our budget constraints). A full meal at a good recent would probably run you between $40-$50 a person.

We were able to find some family run places out of the Old Quarter with full sit-down meals for around $5. To Cartagena´s credit, they had done a very good job restoring the old section of the city to its original styles. It looked like a refined port city your would expect to find in Spain.

On Monday, we headed up the coast about 4 hours to a port town called Santa Marta. It was not what you would call beautiful, but it was more authentic, and there was a really cool backpacker hostal located there, so Derek and I were happy.

We stayed there two nights, taking one day trip to see a nearby fishing village turned tourist outpost, Taganga. Once again, we were not that impressed! The village was filled with Colombian and European tourists, mostly there to do scuba diving. So we retreated to Santa Marta again to regroup and formulate a new plan.

Derek wanted to find a more authentic Colombian town in the interior of the country, so after a little looking around on wiki-travel, we set our sights on a small city called Valledupar (pronounced Va-yay-du-par), located about 5 hours inland not far from the Venezualan border.

On Wednesday we set off for Valledupar. As soon as we boarded the bus/van that was taking us, we started talking to our fellow passengers, and getting a better feel for Colombians.

The gentleman sitting next to me, about 50 years old, was going to a town located just before Valledupar. He was headed there to manage some affairs of a pension that he received from his wife´s work. His wife had died two years ago from hemorragic dengue fever, and the pension had been left behind to the family. I felt bad for him, as he had three young kids at home with no mom.

We began talking about politics, as well as the situation of tourism in the area. ¨You would not have come here 8 years ago,¨ he told me. He explained to me that up until 5 years ago, paramilitaries based in the area were very powerful, and they would come out of the mountains to block the same highway we were traveling at that moment, and then ¨go fishing¨, as they called.

This meant they would basically pull everyone out of the cars and buses at gunpoint, find out who were the people of value - lawyers, politians, police men, soldiers, and some tourists - and then once they had rounded up several dozen people, they would march them off into the mountains, later asking for ransoms from the families or appropriate authorities.

My follow-up question was naturally, ¨Well do they still do that?!¨ ¨No¨, he said, ¨they have been pushed back into the mountains since several years ago.¨ So I breathed a little sigh of relief at that news.

We arrived to Valledupar, encountering some rain along the way, but without problems. And as I am writing now we have been here for 5 days!

Here in Valledupar we have found a very unique city. The city is extremely safe, with security having been restored to the region within the last few years, and has basically been untouched by tourists.

As we´ve walked around the city the last few days, doing different activities like swimming in a couple rivers, or going out to eat, the people have taken a lot of interest in us. It´s obvious that most people do not see many foreigners in the area. And once Derek and I begin talking, they are usually even more suprised. ¨Hey! The gringos speak Spanish!¨.

We have been asked several times, ¨How did you decide to come to Valledupar?¨ We usually just respond that we´ve always been interested in the country, the history, and the culture, but the security situation was never good enough to want to travel in Colombia. ¨How do you like it?¨, they then ask, to which we reply that it´s been fantastic.

During our second day in Valledupar we visited a swimming hole about 1 hour outside of the city, in a small town. There we went swimming and diving off rocks into a local river. We were there alone with just a few locals. It was a lot of fun.

After swimming, we ran into a lady in town that was friends with the hostal-owner in Valledupar, and she invited us back to her house for coffee.

While we were there conversing, a patrol of 5 soldiers came up to the house, they were friends of the lady. She gave them coffee as well, and we began to talk with them. One of the young guys was carrying a machine gun. ¨That´s looks heavy!¨, I said to him. His response kind of suprised me, ¨Here..pick it up!¨ So we posed for a few photos with the soldiers.

The talked with us for about 20 minutes, finished their coffee, and then continued on their way. They had been patroling in the hills since around 6am, and considering it was around 3pm, they had walked quite a ways carring some heavy guns.

The lady spoke very well of the soldiers after they had left. She explained to us that before the government had negotiated a truce with the paramilitaries (or basically, privately armed groups) they used to pass through the countryside from time to time killing people, rich or poor.

Pretty much everyone has acknowledged the security situation has improved dramatically under the eight years with Alvaro Uribe as president. It is probably for that reason that during the elections last week, the candidate from Uribe´s party, Juan Manuel Santos, received about 48% of the vote.

This was still not enough for him to win the presidency, but he will almost surely be the next president following a run-off scheduled for June 20th.

While I´m still in Colombia, I´d like to get into a little more detail about the history of Colombia, about the left-wing FARC, right-wing paramilitaries, government forces, and drug traffickers that have made this country such a dangerous, violent place in the past. This violence is something that still exists within the country, but is much smaller in scope.

For now, Derek and I have to head out the door to catch an overnight bus to Medellín, Colombia´s second biggest city. Medellín has a pretty terrible reputation, considering it was the center of the cocaine trade during the Pablo Escobar years, however I think we are going to be suprised by what we find. Everything we have found about the city by talking to people and doing research suggests it is an extremely modern, prosperous, and safe international city.

So we are going to find out. I look forward to writing about this next leg of our trip...and seeing the World Cup matches starting on Friday!

Boquete

2010-05-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

Just returned to Panama City after having spent 3 days in the beautiful mountain town of Boquete, near the western border with Costa Rica. I wasn’t crazy about taking a bus 7 hours back towards CR, but the cool mountain air more than made up for it.

The town is situated at about 1200 meters of elevation, surrounded by mountain streams and lots of cloud forest. On Thursday we went for a hike, with my goal being to site the famed quetzal, a colorful bird native to the area (photo above, as example). But unfortunately, no quetzals were spotted.

On Friday, Mike and I went our separate ways. Or that is, he went his way and I stayed behind in Boquete. Mike has a couple more days than me in Panama, so it made sense for him to work in one last leg of the trip. So yesterday morning he took off for the islands on Panama’s northwest coast, known as Bocas del Toro.

With Mike gone in the morning, I lounged around the hostal with the staff and a few other travelers. Some of the hostal “staff” had come to Boquete with plans to stay only a few days, then ended up being recruited by the friendly and gregarious owner, Miguel. So two of the would-be backpackers ended up staying there a couple of months.

Later in the day, several of us hopped into Miguel’s truck, to drive up the mountain for a quick hike and a few afternoon beers. It was clear after the first few minutes that they intended to lure me into sticking around Boquete. “Don’t take the morning bus tomorrow. It’ll be full and makes a million stops. Go in the afternoon,” says Miguel.

They were a lot of fun, but I assured them I would be leaving in the morning.

So now I am back in Panama City at the same hostel where we started the trip, getting ready for a new leg of the adventure. At 3pm I head to the airport, to meet up with a Peace Corps friend coming from Costa Rica, and then board a flight to Cartagena, Colombia.

A few words should probably be said about my Panama travel partner, Mike, who I’m going to miss. Mike and I had not really hung out much for more than 5 or 6 years, ever since we studied abroad together in Valencia, Spain. However, when we spoke at Christmas and he mentioned he was interested in making a trip to Latin America, I jumped at the chance to travel with him.

My instincts did not fail me. He’s been a lot of fun to hang out with these days – always game for an adventure and meeting new people.

On the islands in San Blas, Mike kept myself and our fellow islanders marveled by his knowledge of all kinds of subjects – from biology and geography, to astronomy and Spanish (Mike is fluent). At some point during the trip Mike mentioned that he was interested in possibly seeking work as a teacher for his next job.

After listening to him talk very articulately about a variety of subjects for two days, it became clear that he would make an incredible teacher. So between myself and our other island friends, we encouraged him to go back home and become a teacher. The regular hours of a teaching job would also suit him, as he is coming from a job where he burned out due to the extremely demanding and unregular hours.

By Boquete, it looked like our lobbying was starting to bear fruit. Once we said our goodbyes, Mike had decided he would go home to begin the process of qualifying to become a teacher, which first involves taking a few required education courses at a university.

So I’m excited for him, and the kids that will benefit if he does go on to teach. I also look forward to seeing him later this year in Melbourne, FL, where he currently lives, to watch one of the last shuttle launches.

Colombia / Presidential Elections

Now, it’s on to Colombia. I’m extremely excited to be going to this country, where the Latin feel should be much stronger than Panama, which has had so much American influence.

We fly to Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. Today, Cartagena is know for it’s tourism. It was recommended by a State Department friend, as it is friendly to tourists and safe.

Also, we will be fortunate to be present for Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday. The two frontrunners are the Conservative Party candidate, Juan Manuel Santos, and the Green Party candidate (not related to the American Green Party), Antanas Mockus.

The election comes at an important time for Colombia. The previous 8 years under the Conservative president, Alvaro Uribe, have brought great gains in the security situation throughout the country, as the military has greatly weakened the left-wing FARC.

Because of these changes, the conservative candidate should, and does, hold an advantage. Santos is up by roughly two points (38% to 36%) over Mockus in the latest polling.

However, it is extremely suprising that Mockus has even been able to achieve these numbers. Somehow, by campaigning with an emphasis on human rights and environmental protection, he has been able to strike a chord with Colombians, especially young voters.

It appears that after the recent security gains, Colombians are beginning to demand something more from their government.

Also, Mockus is no pushover on defense. Pretty much any presidential candidate in Colombia must have a proven defense record to be a serious contender, with the country’s history of violence. Mockus is a former mayor of Bogota, credited with reforming the local government, and ex-university professor in Mathematics and Philosophy.

Santos, on the other hand, is the establishment candidate. He is known as Uribe’s hand-picked sucessor, as he was Defense Minister under Uribe.

Colombia appears to be on the cusp of some very important changes in its society. I’m really excited to see what this presidential election will bring. Also, I’m interested in being around the atmosphere of the election, and seeing if it is at all similar to the Costa Rican attitude towards elections.

Costa Ricans mainly treat the elections as they would a football game, taking to the streets with flags of their party (or team), driving down the streets honking, and yelling for their candidate. I imagine it might be something similar in Colombia. It will also be an opportunity to talk politics with some Colombians.

The election winner must receive at least 50% of the vote to win, which would be extremely difficult for Mockus or Santos to achieve, so we can most likely expect a runoff.

Will come back in a few days with some thoughts on Cartagena and the election.

The San Blas Islands

2010-05-24T19:39:00.000-07:00

To understand our last three days, you probably have to know the people we spent time with, considering how an island with an area of roughly one square kilometer has very limited space and brings you face to face with your fellow inhabitants.

Setting: Robinson Island, the indigenous reservation of Kuna Yalah. Or basically, an archipelago along the Caribbean coast of Panama.

Cast of Characters:

Michael – Age 25. Ex-manager of a Residence Inn in Melbourne, FL, and my traveling companion for these two weeks in Panama.

Elan – Age 28. Works in Real Estate in New York City. Parents are from Isreal. Fluent Hebrew speaker. Extremely funny.

Etsy – Elan’s wife. Works in software development.

Kale – Age 19. Ex-construction worker. Just wrapping up four months of backpacking through Central America. Young guy, but very mature and curious nature. Good sense of humor.

Jaquelyn – Age 18. Traveling with Kale. Also a very mature person with a great attitude and sense of humor.

Anna – Age 25. British, from Manchester. Spent the last 6 months traveling around the work through Southeast Asia, South and Central America. San Blas is her last stop before returning to England.

Tal – Age 27 (approximately). Isreali. Ex-Captain with an Intelligence Service in the Isreali Defense Forces.

Anel – Age 20. Kuna Indian. Spent all his life among the islands. Often our captain when traveling by boat.

“Robinson” – Age 55 (approximately). Kuna Indian. Manager of the island where we were staying. An amateur historian, he studied philosophy and history at the University of Panama.

Some others that deserve mention are a trio of South Africans, an older Swedish gentleman, a Dutch man, two Dutch women, a young Isreali woman, and roughly 40 Kuna indians that inhabit the islands.

On Friday morning, after a long jeep ride to the Caribbean Coast, we boarded a set of boats piloted by the Kuna indians. After a quick trip for gas at one of the islands, we headed further down the coast towards Colombia, to one of over 300 islands that form part of the Kuna reservation.

After arriving to the island, we each talked to Robinson, the island business manager, to negotiate our rate, ($20 a day with three meals a day included), and be assigned to a small cabina.

The huts where we stayed. Ours is on the left.

Roughly 10 minutes later, after accommodating our things, and taking stock after the travel, everyone plodded back out onto the beach to check out our surroundings.

The expanse of approximately 100 meters of beach in front of us, dotted with coconut trees and the occasional hammock was to be our world for the next 72 hours.

Most of our days were spent sitting alongside the beach, or taking a dip in the cool blue water, watching small rain clouds move across the panorama as they passed over the other islands and coastal mountains. (see opening picture)

Typical day by the water.

Fortunately, our fellow island guests were a very open bunch. We spent the nights drinking rum and coke, and playing card games under a bright lamp that provided us with illumination until the generator ran out of gas around 10pm each night.

After that, the only two options were to go to sleep, or sit out by the beach looking out at some of the clearest views of the stars that I have ever seen.

The food we were served completely depended on what the Kuna could catch. Luckily, during our stay they served us red snapper the first night, then lobster the second day, followed by crab the last night. They also provided some vegetables and rice as a side. Not bad!

It was very interesting being on such a small island in a remote area, yet hearing conversation in English, Spanish, Kuna, Hebrew, and Dutch. While most travelers spoke English well, we would sometimes have to go through two different translators to tackle the intricacies of a certain situation – such as the rules of a card game or a financial transaction.

During the days we took two trips, one to visit another island where there was a shipwreck that allowed for some great snorkeling, and another trip to a local Kuna island village, to see the living conditions and also hunt for some local Kuna artesanry.

On the first trip, I finally got a chance to chat up our driver, Anel. He was a very pleasant, sincere young man, and I really enjoyed talking to him. He spoke Kuna, as do most of the indians, but he also spoke Spanish perfectly well, so that’s how we conversed.

He told Michael and I about some of the Kuna beliefs about nature and their religion. About how the sun was actually a Kuna warrior, Ibe, that was ordered by mother nature to the sky. Ibe is red in the morning because is always angry, and at night he drifts down below the earth to battle with evils and sicknesses.

Anel also told us about how according to their legends that were passed down orally from generation to generation, the Kuna had come down to the Earth from a golden flying saucer. (No kidding!) And also that one day, they will return to the mainland to live in the jungle.

The Kuna have also noticed the rising sea levels, as any change has a great effect on the land where they live, and that many believe it is the beginning of the Kuna prophecy of their return to the mainland.

He was a very young man, and he liked to joke and had a good sense of humor, but he spoke so freely and with a matter-of-factness about his beliefs.

I commented to him that to me it was impressive that he had such a solid faith in his beliefs at such a young age. He responded back, “It’s not only about believing in your religion, it’s about loving it.” I found that to be a pretty powerful statement, and could think of no response.

At the end of our three days on the island, I ran into Anel in the morning and told him I enjoyed talking with him, and gave him my green Peace Corps hat which I had worn for more than a year and a half, and had always been important to me.

About 10 minutes later he came back to me and told me he would have to return the hat, and he couldn’t offer me anything as well. He explained that according to his beliefs, if you are given an important article of someone else’s, like a piece of clothing, it carries with it a part of their being, or intelligence. So by accepting my gift, he would be taking something from me, and neither could he offer me something of his.

I was disappointed but wasn’t about to tempt the karma of the Kuna indians.

So we reverted to the next best alternative. Or that is, we exchanged email addresses and promised to become Facebook friends!

The trip to San Blas and the Kuna Yalah reserve was incredible. I don’t think Mike or I expect to beat that during our remaining week here in Panama.

Tomorrow we take a bus west for about 7 hours, to a small town called Boquete, near the Costa Rican border and Volcan Baru, to enjoy the freshness of the mountains and some great hiking.

But for now I’ve got to go Facebook my new friend, Anel.

Panama City

2010-05-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

My friend and travel companion, Michael Schaaf, opened the door to our hostel room at 2am after arriving on a late flight from Miami. I was sound asleep, but had rehearsed the moment in my head beforing going to bed. Following my somewhat pre-scripted plan I looked at his silouette in the doorway, dragged myself out of bed, walked over, gave him a hug and a couple guy-pounds on the back, and said something that was supposed to be encouraging, but I’m pretty sure was unintelligible.

And so our Panama adventures had begun.

The next day, Tuesday morning, we grabbed a cab down to Panama City’s old quarter, called Casco Viejo. On the way we drove past several dozen high-rise apartment complexes and hotels. The air was filled with the sounds of workers yelling from scaffolding, cranes groaning overhead, and the banging of hammers. Panama seems to have not noticed there has been a worldwide economic downturn.

Arriving to Casco Viejo, we hopped out of the cab and began walking around. After about 30 minutes of aimless wandering, on our way to Plaza de Francia, a Panamian guy walked up to us and started jabbering away in Spanish, going into a lengthy explanation about the history of the buildings we were walking past.

He finally stopped talking an hour and a half and a 4-kilometer walk later, after walking through half a dozen churches, the intact home of a pearl merchant from the 18th century, a couple of courtyards, and by remnants of the old city wall. !Ya…es todo!” From the fact that he had stopped outside a local cafeteria, it appeared that it was his lunch time as well.

We were quite pleased with our guide, and since no negotiation had been made beforehand, we were in a pretty strong bargaining position. The guide, whose name was Andres, hinted that in the past he had been tipped up to $20 for his services. I politely informed him that those people most likely had jobs, and more money than we did. We each handed him $3, which he seemed satisfied with, and went on our way.

I suppose another thing worth mentioning is that both Michael and I are unemployed right now. He just resigned from a position with Marriott Residence Inn after 3 ½ years as an assistant manager. So...we got that going for us.

On Wednesday, we went out to the Panama Canal visitors’ center, located alongside one of the locks, Miraflores. A Peace Corps friend, Josh, who had already visited the canal a year before had helped manage my expectations regarding our visit to one of the world’s most impressive engineering feats. “Have you been to the airport and seen planes take off and land?...It’s pretty much as exciting as that,” said Josh.

Despite my friend’s blasé attitude towards the canal, Michael and I thought it was pretty damn cool. Three massive ships passed through the locks as we stood watching from the observation deck.

It was also interesting to learn the history behind not just the canal, but the trans-isthmus crossing. Back in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century the Spanish shipped gold and silver coming from Mexico and South America to the Pacific Coast of the isthmus, and then packed it across with mule trains (heavily armed). Then in the mid-1800s the isthmus experienced another boom as American miners headed to California during the gold rushes.

The miners traveled to the Caribbean coast by steamer, boarded a train that ran from coast to coast, and then hopped on another steamer on the Pacific side that took them to the American West. The isthmus was an extension of the Wild West during those days, with hold-ups and armed gangs being very common.

As all of this was going on, what today is known as Panama, was part of Colombia. Panama did not become a country until 1903, once the U.S. had finally committed itself to building a canal across the isthmus, and Theodore Roosevelt helped engineer a coup which lopped off the section of land that forms the country today. A U.S. friendly Panamian president was installed shortly after. Roosevelt supposedly even bragged about creating the republic out of nothing.

So when I’m in a conversation with a Latin American, and the creation of Panama is used as an example to point out the U.S.’s imperialistic ways, it might be best to cede the point.

I was also unaware that the crossing of Central America through Nicaragua competed with the Panama isthmus crossing, and it was first considered the logical place for a canal to be placed.

All together the canal is 51 miles long and took more than four decades of labor to finish, after the French had their try, and then the Americans completed the work.

In 1914 the canal was opened, and it has been in operation ever since. Actually, the original doors are still used on the locks, so they have been in use for almost 100 years. In 2014 the canal administration is scheduled to complete a new set of locks that will allow some of the bigger boats that are under construction to pass through, thereby keeping the canal competitive.

As for my impressions of Panama City itself, I like the low prices, metropolitan atmosphere, and American food. But at the same time, it puzzles me that they can continue building with such intensity here. It seems they have so much excess capacity in terms of housing and office space, I wonder if they are not fueling their own real estate bubble.

The average Panamian living in the city seems fairly affluent and worldly, with lots of nice cars on the roadways and plenty of jobs in the service sector.

Although on the other hand, we’ve met some Panama Peace Corps volunteers here in the hostel, and they assure us that there are two sides to Panama. The prosperous, bustling city, and the very poor, stagnant small towns and indigenous villages. Here in Panama a significant portion of the Peace Corps volunteers work in indigenous communities, living out of huts and using latrines.

This seems so amazing to me while being surrounded by all these high-rise buildings here in the city. So Panama is definitely fairly affluent, but there are huge imbalances in income distribution.

Some of the volunteers have hinted that it would probably be possible to visit their communities, as most of the small towns have their hand in rural tourism to some degree, but we haven’t been able to define anything at the moment.

Tomorrow (Friday), Michael and I leave the city for the San Blas islands on the Caribbean side. The San Blas islands are governed by an autonomous tribe of indians called the Kuna. The embarcation point by canoe to the islands is only accessible by a 5 hour trip by 4x4 to the coast.

Once reaching the island, visitors have the option of staying on the main island with the majority of the tribe, or being transported out to one of hundreds of tiny islands along the archipelago. Just you, a bunch of palms trees, a latrine, and a hammock on an island the size of a football field.

Or at least that is what I have pieced together from Peace Corps friends and other travelers. But Michael and I will find out for ourselves.

The Trip

2010-05-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

Arrived to Panama City, Panama after a 15 hour bus ride from San Jose, Costa Rica. Total distance traveled thus far: 535 miles.

The Trip - What

A 10 week, 5 country journey beginning in San Jose, Costa Rica on May 16th, and ending in La Paz, Bolivia on August 1st. The countries visited will be Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, with roughly 2 weeks in each country.

Some of the highlights will be: staying on a private island on an indigenous reserve in Panama, being present for an important presidential election in Colombia on May 30th, a visit to Cuenca, one of the oldest cities in South America in Ecuador, a 5 day trek beginning July 8th through the Andes in Peru to an ancient Incan city, and a bunch of other things that are not even on the itinerary yet, and let's face it, I have no idea what will happen.

Why

Why not? Being at a unique point in my life, having just finished 2 years in Peace Corps, and without any pressing commitments, I'm going to take advantage of the circumstances to see some places I've always wanted to.

The trip will be tough. It will oftentimes be uncomfortable and probably a little unsettling to be in South American cities and countries I have no experience with, but still being in Peace Corps "mode", now seems like an opportune time to do this kind of traveling.

Also, my Spanish language skills are probably at their best right now, so it should be interesting to meet and converse with people from these countries and learn about the culture, politics, and history.

Who

I'll be traveling with friends at times, and also alone in parts of the trip. For example, here in Panama I will be meeting up with a good friend, Michael, who I studied abroad with in Spain. And for Colombia, I will be traveling with a good Peace Corps friend, Derek.

On the other hand, in parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, I will most likely be going solo. It should be interesting.

Panama City

Having just gotten in to the town and arrived to my hostel, there's nothing really to say at the moment. Lots of tall buildings on the way here from the bus station. Panama City looks to be a pretty modern city.

The plan for the day is to go for a jog, get some dinner with some PC friends that are passing through to Venezuela, and wait for Michael's flight to get in around 1am tonight.

Leaving Costa Rica

2010-05-16T13:33:00.000-07:00

I now know what one of my saddest moments in Costa Rica is. It´s waking up at 4:30am in a dingy hotel room in San Jose to say goodbye to a handful of people who have become your best friends over the previous two years …and then staying in that room as they all file out to head to the airport to catch flights back to the US. Left in the room is just you, a crappy air conditioner cranking out artificial cool air, and a bunch of dirty sheets and towels.

It´s not quite my time to take a flight back to the US. I´ll be doing some other things first, and will get to that in a minute. The focus of this blog is more about saying goodbye…and moving on.

Saying goodbye to Costa Rica – the Peace Corps, people in my community, and other Peace Corps volunteers – has been about a two week process. Thank god it has finally come to a close!

I had no idea saying goodbye would take so much out of me. The most difficult part, easily, was saying goodbye to people I´d worked with in my site, struggled together with on projects, experienced failure and overcome obstacles, and become great friends with.

Last Saturday my counterpart, the community bank, organized a dinner with about 30 people that I worked closely with over the two years in the town. A lot of people, including me, were given an opportunity to say a few words. People were extremely generous in their praise, and there were definitely a few tears shed. I´ve honestly never felt so honored in my life, and wonder whether or not I will ever feel that way again.

When it came to me to say a few words, I started out my apologizing for having failed them during these two years, or that is, for not having found a girlfriend that would cause me to stay in San Cristóbal Norte. Fortunately, that brought out some laughs.

The dinner was a type of Going Away and Welcome party. The new volunteer that is to replace me, Liz, had arrived that same day, and so the bank decided to take advantage of the timing and do both activities on the same day.

Liz is from San Francisco, California, studied business, and will be spending the next two years in San Cristóbal Norte, continuing to support some of the projects I began, and also beginning her own initiatives.

I´m so glad Liz will be there! I had requested a female volunteer be sent to the town to follow me, and fortunately Peace Corps was able to accommodate my request. She seems to be an extremely bright, thoughtful person who I believe will do amazing things during her two years and come to be a wonderful role model for the women of the town – young and old.

So after roughly two weeks of dinners, goodbye parties, cafecitos in friends´ homes, and a million other small chats, I finally left from San José on Wednesday of last week.

One of the most difficult goodbyes was with my 74 year-old host mom, Doña Albertina, who I had lived with and had taken care of me for the last two years. Doña Albertina´s husband passed away about 5 years ago, and although she has a lot of family very close by, I know it was hard for her to see me go.

We had become good friends over the course of the two years, and I know she liked the extra presence in the house I provided, which kept her from feeling so lonely. And I also think she liked the feeling of being needed, as she was responsible for most of my meals. We will continue being friends, and I´m grateful for the time we shared.

After leaving San Cristóbal Norte, I stayed in San José with friends for several days as we completed lots of paperwork in the Peace Corps office to finalize our close of service. We took advantage of the few days to enjoy each others company one last time.

Bros Icing Bros

When my good PC friends get together, the result is usually a mix between a fraternity party, a family reunion, and well…maybe just a fraternity party. A good example of this would be ¨Bros Icing Bros¨, a game that one of my friends, David, stumbled upon on the internet.

The game plays on the aversion most men have for Smirnoff Ice. The rules of the game are basically, any guy presented with a Smirnoff Ice, in any place – whether it is in a bar, restaurant, hotel room, bus, car, or other random setting – must immediately drop to one knee, and slug down the Smirnoff Ice. This is called being ICED!

The only defense one can have against being iced, is to have a Smirnoff Ice on your person at the time of being iced, then the ice is reversed and the other person is then iced. This forces you to choose between the two unhappy scenarios of either having to chug a Smirnoff ice, or having to walk around (being seen) holding a Smirnoff Ice for hours on end.

David insisted that we play, and so once we got the idea (which didn´t take long), and the endless number of possibilities for icing someone, our final days were mostly defined by people getting iced in various random settings.

I hold the dubious honor of being the first person iced. As I stepped out of the bathroom after showering one night, the guys had propped up a Smirnoff outside the bathroom door on top of my friend Marcus´s saxophone case.

Having heard of the game earlier in the day, I understood the implications of finding the Smirnoff Ice, and dropped down the one knee to chug down the drink. However, even if I didn´t know what it meant to find the Smirnoff there, I probably would have figured it out soon enough from the jeering and laughing from the other 5 guys in the room.

So somewhere out there is a picture of me in a towel chugging down the Smirnoff on one knee in our San José hotel room, but unfortunately it’s not available for the blog.

On the flip side, I feel I will get the last laugh, as last night after the guys had gone out for a pre-dinner beer and I was left in the room, I was able to order Smirnoff Ices from the bar and bury them deep into my buddies´ baggage that was to be checked. And so right about now that should be arriving home, unknowingly about to be iced as the start to empty out their bags. Sorry boys, but you had it coming!

Reflections after two years in the Peace Corps

It seems to me that something needs to be said after this whole experience - come kind of conclusions that sum everything up. I still haven´t been able to think of anything too apropo; however, my good friend Josh, who is a good writer, came up with a few things on his blog that I completely agree with, and I wanted to share them with you. Josh´s thoughts:

¨I should say at the outset that there´s no way I could possibly encapsulate my Peace Corps experience in a few paragraphs. So I´m not going to try. I guess that´s what my 20 or so previous blogs, in the aggregate, are more or less for. But with that being said, here are a few thoughts on my experience:

• I made the right decision by joining the Peace Corps. I´ll be honest, I haven´t loved every single moment of my time as a PCV. I´ve been lonely sometimes. I´ve been frustrated sometimes. But then again, I can´t remember any particular period of my life when I loved every single moment. I can say this though: I´ve learned things as a PCV – about myself, about another culture, and perhaps even about the world – that I never would have learned otherwise. I hope and believe that I´ve made a positive difference in the lives of the people in my village. I´m pretty good at Spanish now. I don´t know if any of this will ever serve me in a professional sense in the future (though it probably won´t hurt), but I know that to me the most important thing is that I had a dream, I went for it, and I´ll always be glad that I did. As the sign in the Peace Corps office says: “Peace Corps....it´s about never having to begin your stories with 'I should´ve...'”

• A Peace Corps experience, much like life itself, is what you make it. Like anything else in life, in Peace Corps you get out of your experience what you put in. While there´s no guarantee that if you´re constantly trying to work with your community, staying positive and helping to motivate those around you, and always looking toward sustainability and community ownership of projects that your projects will necessarily be successful and your time as a PCV will necessarily be fruitful. But it´s generally a pretty good formula for success. Likewise, the more time you put into your relationships with members of your community, the more you´ll learn from them, the more you´ll understand them, and probably, the more they´ll learn from and understand you. Life and the relationships that make it meaningful are, of course, two-way streets. I think I´ve always known that, but maybe it didn´t really hit home until about the 30th time I was awkwardly sitting in someone´s house sipping afternoon coffee, making small-talk, and eating some strange food even though I wasn´t even hungry. As much as I love being able to get away from it all and curl up with a good book – and I spent many evenings doing just that after everyone else went to bed – I found that as a PCV my level of happiness was directly correlated (positively) to the number of times that I got out and interacted with other people in my village, regardless of what we ended up doing. In Peace Corps and in life – you just gotta get out there.

• Peace Corps, while not perfect, is an important program. I´ll be the very first person to admit that Peace Corps isn´t perfect (but then, what is?). Sometimes there´s a lot of downtime, little supervision, and adjusting to a new culture and pace of life can make what seems like it should be a simple project take frustratingly long. Maybe you could accomplish more – in a concrete, resume-building sense – by volunteering with an NGO or being in a formal work setting. But I can say with a very high degree of certainty that there is no better way to actually work with and get to know people in developing countries on the grassroots level. There is no better way to really understand a culture and a language than to live with a host family for two years. There is no better way to learn what people really want, what they need, and how you can help them than to spend two years as their neighbor listening to them. In Peace Corps there´s no office to retreat to, no condo to ensconce yourself in. For those two years (and maybe even beyond), you ARE a member of your village, of your community. And I know this too – if more people served as Peace Corps Volunteers, we as Americans would be more culturally understanding, more adaptable to new situations, more willing to listen, and, I believe, the rest of the world would respect us more for it.

• If you really want to, you can probably become a Peace Corps Volunteer (or something similar). While you do have to be medically, legally, and financially cleared to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, the program is really pretty accessible for most college graduates. If you have a chronic health situation, Peace Corps will often work with you. If you have federal student loans, Peace Corps will allow you to defer them (and in the case of Perkins loans, even partially cancel them). There are volunteers right out of college and some that have been retired for years. There are assignments which require prior language or technical skills and others that don´t. There are assignments in cold places and assignments in hot places. You can´t pick a country, but you can express geographic or cultural preferences during your interview. In sum, you have input in the process, and I honestly believe that while Peace Corps is a very challenging experience, it´s something that most people can do if they want to. But even if you for some reason can´t, or don´t want to, become a Peace Corps Volunteer, there are lots of other ways for you to get involved, become part of a community, learn a language, help others, etc. Peace Corps might be one of the most famous service options, but it´s not the only one. Oftentimes it´s just a matter of taking the time to do some internet research or talk to people. Whether you want to live abroad or volunteer after work in your own backyard, I think the most important – and maybe the hardest – step you´ll have to take will be the first one. Like I mentioned before, in Peace Corps as in life – you just gotta get out there.¨The Trip

I´m not going to go into great detail about this topic, as it will be the subject of the next posting, which I should put up within the next day or two.

Basically, I´m not ready to go home yet. Tonight at 11pm I will catch a bus to Panama City, Panama to start off a 10 week, 5 country trip taking me through Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

I will be traveling with friends during parts of the trip, and alone on some legs. This is just something that I want to do, and now being a unique time in my life, I´m going to do it.

I hope to keep the blog well-updated with stories from my travels and the places I visit. Expect postings about twice a week. I hope you can follow along with me on my adventures.

Saying Goodbye

2010-05-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

Caution: graphic descriptions of a pig butchering included in this blog

Only one week left for me here in San Cristóbal Norte. The time for saying goodbyes has finally come.

Fortunately, saying goodbye in this culture also means...a good ol´fashion pig roast.

That´s right! Why not have a little fun and make it a celebration. Last weekend I decided to treat my host family (the entire family) to a feast.

It had been quite awhile since the family had a proper pig killing, and seeing as how I paid for most of the animal, I figured I should take part in its demise. You know…to get the full experience.

There are a number of different ways to kill a pig. You can shoot it in the head, which is quicker and ultimately cleaner. Or you can string it up by its hind legs to a low hanging tree branch, and then drive a knife through the animal´s heart. Also, you can hit the pig on the head with the dull end of an ax, and then once the animal is unconscious, follow it up with a knife to the heart.

Actually, come to think of it, every pig butchering seems to end with a knife to the heart.

As I was to learn, in addition to killing the animal quickly, this allows the blood to begin draining quickly from the pig before it is butchered.

One cardinal rule here in Costa Rica when a pig is killed – you always respect the preferred style of the person doing the butchering. Or that is…nobody likes the equivalent of a backseat driver when it comes to killing a pig.

After butchering this pig on Sunday morning, I´m still not sure which way my host family prefers.

Our pig butchering takes place behind my host brother-in-law´s house, and the principal players are myself, a neighbor named Zurdo, and another brother-in-law named Macho. Zurdo, whose name/nickname means ¨leftee¨, is practically a family member, and is the butcher in charge. That leaves Macho and I to follow his lead.

Macho and I have been discussing butchering a pig, and I understand that his preferred method is to string the pig up, followed by the knife to the heart. Hanging from its hind legs, the pig has little range of motion, so it can be killed without much effort, and the resulting butchering is much easier since it is hanging.

That said, Macho respects tradition, and makes no mention of this to Zurdo.

That´s okay though, because Zurdo has a plan. Or at least we think he has a plan. Or maybe he just had a plan…but it didn´t work out, so he switched to a new plan without telling us. Yeah…I think that is what happened.

Zurdo directs us to help him grab the pig, which has been tied to a tree near us, and hoist him onto a table. Only the pig, who is starting to get a clue that we have it out for him, naturally starts putting up a fight.

Pigs are strong animals! This one weighed 70 kilos, or about 150 pounds. And they have extremely strong legs. A kick from one of them can really hurt.

The pig is squealing, and kicking, and causing a ruckus, and throwing around all his weight, so Zurdo decides to abandon his plan.

Zurdo decides we need to take the pig off his feet, Macho and I will hold him down, and then Zurdo will just go ahead and pierce his heart from there.

I didn´t really sign up for that. But at that point, with your hands gripping two powerful pig legs, and being the only thing stopping it from kicking my compañeros in the head, I really didn´t have an out.

So I held the pig´s front two legs while Macho held the back two. We took the big animal off his feet and then leaned on him as hard as possible with our shoulders.

At this point the pig definitely knew something was up. Plus, Zurdo was hovering under his neck with a 6 inch, not-so-sharp-looking pocket knife. Zurdo is not a guy you want hovering around your neck with a knife.

The pig goes nuts and starts belting out some of the worst noises I have ever heard (or at least since the last pig butchering I remember). Finally, Zurdo finds the right spot and drives the blade into the heart of the animal.

Macho and I apply more pressure and wait out the pig as it continues bucking and screaming, and finally the life drains out of it. Picture three men in the dirt, hugging a squealing pig, blood splattering everywhere, prolific cursing in Spanish, and that about sums up the scene.

When it was finally over, feeling only slightly traumatized, I stood over the pig and felt an unexpected feeling come over me.

Hunger.

Saying Goodbye

The family put together an incredible going away party for me, with tons of food, a soccer game, plenty of cold Imperial, and gifts. I feel so honored to have been able to be part of their family for these two years.

Also, the 19 students that finished my English class also through me a little party. After taking classes for more than a year and a half, they will be receiving a diploma from an accredited English speaking institution here in the country. English-speaking visitors to the town that have met with my students have expressed how impressed they were with their level of knowledge.

Pictures from our class party.

I´m really proud of my kids! They will probably have the opportunity to continue their studies once my replacement arrives at the end of May.

Expect an update next week following my departure from the town on May 12th. Thanks for those of you still following along. I really appreciate your support.

Tech Week

2010-04-23T13:40:00.001-07:00

I´d like to retract the title of a post from a couple of months ago ¨Getting down to the End¨. Apparently that was premature, because since then I´ve been hella busy.

About six weeks ago one of my bosses came to me in the office and asked if I would agree to receive a group of Peace Corps trainees (PCTs) in my site for what is called ¨Tech Week.¨ Being a team player, I agreed.

Although hosting PCTs for Tech Week has always been known as a dubious honor, and it was a lot of work, we had a lot of fun and I think the trainees had a good experience. The picture above is of the group.

During their five day stay the PCTs each taught an English class, gave a computer lesson, facilitated a group activity with the Guias y Scouts, and participated in a mini-project by assisting with the library project.

The new trainees were a great group of people, and it definitely took me back to how I felt when I was training. They have been here in country for about 2 months and will soon be finding out which community they will be sent to…so that was pretty much all they talked about towards the end of the week. I remember that.

I wanted to provide you with a few updates.

Community Library

We are busy executing the project budget. Bookcases have been contracted with a local carpenter, over two hundred books have been bought from a non-profit foundation Give-A-Book, and we are buying tables, chairs, and other odds and ends.

The trainees met with our library committee and helped us catalogue all the books. The project is advancing quickly, although I´d imagine their will be plenty of work for the next volunteer, who will arrive in the community at the end of May.

For those of you that donated to the project: thank you again and expect an update from me soon via email.

Computer Lab

The computer lab is finished! The equipment was installed on Tuesday! This is a huge accomplishment. It has been a community project for the entire time I´ve been here, and it is the first public computer lab in the town. See pic.

Saying Goodbye and Post PC

So now that Tech Week has come and gone, I suddenly look at my calendar and realize that there are only 3 weeks left before I leave this country. It is going to be pretty sad to leave, but I am definitely ready to move on. Following a discussion with the Boy Scouts committee, during the trainees stay, I began talking to the junta leaders about how much they meant to me…and I must say I got pretty choked up.

And it probably won´t be the last time. It´s just so crazy to think of all the things we´ve been through together over the last two years.

So what´s next?

I´m not quite ready to go back home yet. On May 16th I depart Costa Rica, not for the United States, but for Panama. There I will begin my journey…call it a quest, through South America.

Make no mistake. I am in no financial position to make this trip. But there are some things that just need to be done.

The general itinerary is to visit Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, with roughly two weeks of travel time in each country. Some legs of the trip will be done with friends, others I will do solo. Arrival back to the states will probably be around August 1st.

So stay tuned! Not being loaded down with so much work, I plan to keep the blog pretty active. I hope you´ll follow along in my adventures.

Into the Jungle

I´m writing this from an internet café in the sweltering town of Puerto Jiménez, located in the far south of Costa Rica, beside the Corcovado National Park. My friends and fellow volunteers – Josh, Derek, and Fraser – will be doing a 3 day hike through the jungle.

I´ll plan on posting some pictures after the hike. To those still following along – thanks so much for your support! I can´t wait to hang out again back in the US.

Cerro Chirripo

2010-03-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

Last weekend myself and a few friends hiked to the top of the tallest peak in Costa Rica - Cerro Chirripo. The mountain tops out at around 3,800 meters (less than 12,000 feet), which is fairly humble altitude, but proved to be a tough hike. Let's just say we were happy to reach the top!

We began the hike on Sunday from a small town, San Gerardo, at the base of the mountains at around 1400 meters. We hiked up 15 kilometers the first day, to an installation operated by the park service. Then on Monday, we woke up at 2:30AM, stepped out into the cold and darkness, and hiked up the remaining 5 kilometers to reach the top by 5:15AM, in time for the sunrise.

Looking east, as the sun begins to come up.

The ridgeline with more light out.

The sky was mainly clear, although there were some clouds out of the east that disrupted our view of the sunrise, it was still beautiful. We were able to see Volcano Turrialba, which recently became active again after 140 years, smoking in the distance. In the West, we could see a small bit of the Pacific ocean. The clouds obstructed our view of the Carribean. Cerro Chirripo is one of the few vantage points in the Americas where you can see both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Turrialba smoking in the background.

Team Chirripo. Marcus, Kayla, Dom, Josh, Fraser, and myself.

After watching the sun come up and taking in the views for awhile, we began our hike down. In the afternoon we arrived back to the town of San Gerardo, where we stayed the night. Overall, we hiked 39 kilometers in about 36 hours. It was a great trip! Hope the photos give you an idea of the views.

Getting down to the end...

2010-02-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

It’s been four eventful months since the last posting to this blog. When I began this page I was hoping to update it every couple of weeks or so, but I’ve found that’s easier said than done.

Since the last posting I went home for a week during Christmas, my Peace Corps group had it’s Close of Service (COS) conference in late January, and my parents just left the country after a two week visit.

As for work, we’ve pressed forward with English classes. After almost a year and a half I now have 21 students (down from the 45 we started with). They have improved tremendously and I’m very proud of them. I continue to work with two small business on their business practices, and was able to impart another project management workshop to a group of local artesans that want to organize themselves into a cooperative.

We also were able to complete a Peace Corps Partnership grant, and with donations from friends and family, received a donation of $3,500 for a local library. Implementing this project will be my primary project work over the next few months. Thank you so much to all who made a donation! Expect more news in your inbox as the project progresses.

Our rural tourism group has received two more groups of International Student Volunteers (ISV). This time the students came from Australia and New Zealand. They worked with the Sports Committee and Catholic Church on projects. My hat is off to the ISV volunteers! Every group has made a great effort. They are an extremely positive force in the development of San Cristóbal Norte and we are so lucky to have them. I hope some of the volunteers have a chance to read this blog and understand how much we appreciate their work.

In the school they are putting the finishing touches on a brand new computer lab. The classroom is ready with air conditioning, a new electrical system, freshly painted walls, new furniture, and a security system. The computers will be installed within the next couple of weeks and the school is expected to receive a teacher to give computer classes to the kids. It is very satisfying to see this project nearly finished.

Incredibly, my Peace Corps experience is coming to a close. The COS conference we just completed marks our last official conference with fellow volunteers and the Peace Corps office. (see picture above of group at COS) From now on we will still be busy closing out projects, but we will not be getting together as a group. This still has not completely sunk in. It’s amazing how fast two years can go by!

As I look ahead to the next few months, it looks like I will be pretty busy. I have to finish up project work with the library and English classes, prepare for the next volunteer, take care of a mountain of paperwork that PC requires for me to be able to leave the country, and start planning for the future.

On the other hand…who am I kidding! I live in a wonderful country, in a small town surrounded my people who care about me and look after me, and work over the next few months should be pretty manageable. I hope to take more time than usual between now and May to enjoy friendships down here, with Ticos and fellow volunteers.

Also, I hope to make a few more blog posts over the next months with more details of the completion of my service in San Cristóbal Norte.

Yesterday at the school, one of the teachers said to me “you’ve really done a lot for the town during your time here…it’s been a very productive two years!” That comment was very kind of her. I think it’s true, when I think about all we’ve accomplished here…it makes me very proud.

So there’s my ramble! I hope to make some more posts between now and May. Post Peace Corps my plan is to do some traveling through South America, which I also plan to record here on the blog.

So stay tuned!...the adventure is not over yet :)

Nicaragua

2009-11-11T08:21:00.000-08:00

The long awaited trip to Nicaragua finally came and went. It was my first time leaving Costa Rica to visit another country in Central America, so the change of scenery (and culture) was pretty exciting.

For a while it looked like the trip might not even happen, as people couldn’t quite work out the timing for work and other commitments. Once the dust finally settled from planning, it was my good PC friends Josh, Marcus, and I left standing. So it was to be a guy’s trip.

We took off from San José by bus, headed north for about 7 hours, and after working our way through the rather inefficient border crossing, hopped off the bus in the small town of Rivas in Southern Nicaragua.

Nicaragua is the 2nd poorest country in the western hemisphere (behind Haiti). It’s government and political structure is dominated by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN, in Spanish symbols), of which Daniel Ortega is now the leader and president.

It’s not exactly clear what the “Liberación” in the FSLN means at this point as there’s been no war for roughly 20 years now in Nicaragua. Liberation from poverty?...international humanitarian aid? Either way they still have the country on lock down and it has made only marginal economic advances since peace was struck in Central America roughly two decades ago.

Apart from some very marginalized parts of the country, Nicaragua has a reputation among adventurous travelers as a damn fine place to travel. It’s cheap, has a rich (if violent) history, the oldest colonial architecture in region, big freshwater lakes, smoking volcanoes, and friendly people.

Before coming to Costa Rica to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer I probably would have never considered traveling to Nicaragua. During our travels we ran across plenty of European tourists but very few Americans. It’s probably safe to say most Americans don’t even have it on their radar as a place for tourists. My only guess as to why would be that the country conjures up certain images when people hear Nicaragua and think Iran-Contra scandal, or our country’s not-so-friendly standing with the Daniel Ortega and Co.

Either way, it is a shame that the country is not taken advantage of by more American tourists.

After getting off in Rivas, grabbing some Nicaraguan cash and a decent lunch, we pushed on to our destination – Ometepe Island. Ometepe is the biggest freshwater lake island in the world. It just also happens to be the home of two volcanoes – one active and one inactive.

Ometepe from the ferry.

We stayed on the island for three nights, took a day-long hike up the extinct volcano and into it’s crater down to a little lagoon, and then recovered from our hike the next day with swims in Lake Nicaragua and plenty of local Victoria beer. (yes, this is the extremely abbreviated version of our trip…internet time is limited)

Lake Nicaragua.

From Ometepe we went to the small city of Granada next, located on the shores of the lake farther to the north. Granada is the oldest city in Central American, founded around 1540, and retaining a lot of fantastic Spanish colonial architecture. We really enjoyed Granada, but unfortunately don’t have any pictures to share. Excited to reach a “real” city, we spent the first night at a crowded bar with live music and cheap Flor de Caña rum sold by the bottle. The cheap rum combined with running into some hilariously crazy Aussies we knew from Ometepe, made the night a complete despiche (fill in here with the English word you believe is appropriate and it probably will be).

As a result we spent the following day and a half alternating between eating cold fruity drinks, lounging on park benches, and seeking out any shady spot that would allow us to forget for a moment that we had no air conditioning in our $8 a night hostel. In other words, picture taking fell by the wayside.

The next stop was the university town of León in Northern Nicaragua. After a quick stop in Managua to pick up bus tickets for the return trip to Costa Rica, with the obligatory overcharging by a Managua cab driver who’s best attempt at a selling point was “other cab drivers will drive you somewhere and rob you”. Naturally we felt honored to be in the company of a cabbie of such integrity.

We finally arrived in León after a two hour bus ride from Managua and found a decent place to stay this time with air-conditioning and cable…our gift to ourselves for being on vacation. After getting settled we started exploring the city.

León would actually turn out to be our favorite city in Nicaragua (which means it was better than any Costa Rican city, as we had already deemed Nicaraguan towns to be far superior to those in CR). León is home to six universities, the biggest Catholic cathedral in Central America, the best art museum in Central America, lots of decent restaurants, and a lot of young people.

We ran into very few tourists, but still never felt that out of place. Most people just went about their business and we weren’t badgered by street vendors to by things like we were in Granada. León is also know as the home of the Sandista movement, so we caught up on some history of the leftist movement in the country.

We also took a short tour “volcano boarding”, which basically involves hiking up a semi-active volcano with a snowboard-like board and launching yourself down one of the rock and sand sides of the volcano. It was quite awesome. Although you couldn’t exactly “carve” down the volcano face like snowboarding, I was surprised to have quite a bit of control on the way down.

The volcano boarders.

After the descent.

Following León we stayed one uneventful night in Managua, then headed back to San José, Costa Rica. All told we spent about 9 days in Nicaragua. It was a fantastic trip and I would recommend traveling to Nicaragua to anyone.

Within a week of getting back to Costa Rica I had to leave my town again to participate in the annual All Volunteer Conference (AVC), which is the last one for me and the rest of the volunteers in my cycle. It was still a good time seeing all my friends and meeting the new volunteers that arrived about 8 months ago.

Now I’m getting back to work! I hope to put up another blog post in a few weeks to tell you about a project to establish a library here in my town that you may be able to help us fund!

I’ll end this blog with a friendly admonishment: Don’t be a bogan! Which only Josh and Marcus are likely to understand.

Hint: bogan = redneck in aussie

Will be in touch.

Living Poor

2009-09-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

No, I´m not talking about myself. Amazingly, my meager Peace Corps living allowance covers the majority of my expenses and I haven´t had to plunder the savings (yet).

By this title, I´m talking about the people in my site. Sometimes living here in the Costa Rican countryside everyone is so pura vida, so friendly, and so laid back that you forget about an important fact: They don´t really have much money.

Sure, everyone has a house and food on the table, and if they hit a rough patch they have family members nearby that can come to the rescue...but that too can be stressful. Most people anywhere want independence and some success that allows them to do what they want to do in life - enlarge the house, buy a little car or work truck for the farm, or take a trip shopping in the closest big town.

But life in a small farming town can be tough. A few recent events made me take note of it.

One of my host brothers, Ananias, is 50 years old and has been working as a farmer in some capacity for all of his life. He is a hardworking and respectful person.

Ananias earns most of his money working on a coffee farm that his sister-in-law owns (her husband is deceased). Also, for quite a while he has been supplementing his income by making cheese. He owns a few cows that produce the milk for the cheese business.

Starting a couple of years ago, Ananias began to take out loans with the micro-finance bank (my counterpart) in town. He took out the loans and starting buying cows. In the time I have been here he went from two cows to five in a period of about 1 year. Things were going very well. The cows he bought produced large volumes of milk, and he was able to up his production from roughly 20 kilos a day to about 40 kilos. He went scouting for people to buy up his new production capacity, and with some minor setbacks, he was able to sell all the cheese he produced.

Ananias´s plan is going good. He tells me his plan is to continue buying cows, up the cheese production even more, stop working on his sister-in-law´s farm, and take up milk production full-time. Later on will come the purchase of milking equipment (he does it by hand now...you should see this guy´s forearms!) which will make his job even easier.

This is the Tico equivalent of a retirement plan. Ananias is old enough to start thinking about the future, and he wants something that can give him some financial security as he gets older. Makes sense to me...more power to him.

About 3 weeks ago one of Ananias´s recently bought cows got sick and died within about a three day period. No big explanation. It just got sick, and then keeled over and died. This happens plenty on farms, from what they tell me. Unfortunately, he is still paying off the loan with the bank, and so he will have to pay off this dead cow for the next year or so...taking away important income.

Then two nights ago, one of his cows was about to give birth, but wouldn´t drop the calf. It turns out the calf had already died and was stuck in the birth canal. Ananias called a veterinarian out the next morning. They operated on the cow to remove the calf, but something didn´t go right, and now he´s had a second cow die on him.

Ananias´s response: ¡Que va! ¡Hay que seguir! Oh well! Gotta keep going!

Despite the positive face Ananias has put on the whole situation, I know it has been a setback for him and has a hurt. This morning I watched him making cheese, and he just wasn´t moving with the same gusto that he normally has when he is making it. He had invested a lot of time in those cows, searching for grasses, giving them shots, steering them to pastures, and they just died on him.

I´m not trying to tell you a sad story or depress you, but it seems like out of respect for this Peace Corps experience, which overall has been extremely positive, you have to include the sad situations you see that bring you down to earth.

Now bringing this back to Peace Corps work. When I arrived in Costa Rica and was told I would be basically a small business development volunteer, I have to admit I was a little skeptical. What are we going to be able to teach a farmer or small business owner about running their farm or business more efficiently? Since then my skepticism has subsided and has been replaced with a lot of enthusiasm.

I began working with two families on a farming project about 10 months ago. They came to me after hearing that I had been working with some other local farmers, and asked if I could join them to talk about their project.

We sat down together and I explained to them a little bit about what I could offer them and what my role would be. I would be a facilitator. My job was not to make the decisions, but to help them with activities that would allow them to get all the facts out, and hopefully allow them to analyze and make their business decisions in a more orderly way. What do you think?, I asked. Sounds good to them.

We began meeting weekly for awhile after that. The husbands and wives both participated in the meetings, so there were five us.

We began with a basic SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis. In my experience, this is a great activity to get to know a project and start the conversation. For their project they wanted to grow lettuce hidroponically, which is not organic, but very clean (few chemicals) and in high demand here in Costa Rica.

The SWOT analysis left them with a very positive feeling about the project overall. We decided to move forward with some other steps to investigate the project.

I helped them put together a viable budget for the greenhouse and other materials they would need to start-up the project. They didn´t have the money, so they would have to take out money with the local bank (again, my counterpart). The budget was an important point, in my opinion, so I pressed them to be sure to include all start-up costs were present, including the costs for the first 4 months of the operation until the could get producing. We did not want to have to go back to the well twice.

They got the budget ironed out, analyzed some other risks, and then they decided to move forward. They took the plunge and went to the bank to take out the loan. With only a minor change to add another co-signer to the loan agreement, it was approved and they got the money. They were committed.

Next step was to help them bring more order to their meetings. They had funds - they needed a treasurer! One of the wives was elected treasurer. We dedicated two meetings on how to keep a basic ledger to keep track of the coming and going of money. No high finance...but very basic accounting. The one woman was treasurer, but all learned how to keep the books.

There was no record of the weekly meetings - it was time to appoint a secretary! The other wife was appointed secretary. I gave them some basic tips on what should be present in most meeting minutes, and we got started with the next meeting.

We did a session on how to develop goals effectively, or that is, SMART goals. Specific. Measurable. Attainable. Realistic. Time-Constrained. We practiced. They understand and the outcomes of the meetings began to show up in the meeting minutes with greater accuracy.

Together we created a meeting agenda they could follow every week that would encompass all the business they needed to do. They began to read the agenda aloud each week at the start of each meeting.

They elected to put a point at the beginning of the meeting for ´motivation´ where they basically bring in a short story or anecdote that imparts a positive lesson each week. What a great idea!, I thought. They haven´t missed a week yet with the motivational point, and I have no idea where they get their material.

They meet on their own more frequently, and sometimes when I am with them, I scarcely say a word. They have the hang of things.

I get to know the families better. They tell me about how they can´t keep living in the same way, as they describe it, ´working today to pay for what we ate yesterday´. I see the dedication in their eyes. It becomes apparent that except for their homes and some other odds and ends they don´t have much in the way of money. This project is a big deal for them. They are giving it their all. To myself, I commit to giving them all the help I can in the next months.

Time goes by. Advancement of the project is slow. Slowly the base of the greenhouse is build, then they walls, and finally the roof. Xinia, the wife, continues to be a great treasurer, meticulously holding keep track of receipts and noting every amount down the fraction of a colon.

They begin the feel the pressure of the project. They were only about to gain a six-month grace period from the bank before they have to start paying the principal along with the interest, which amounts to a big bump up in the monthly payment.

The wives put on the pressure. They men get moving. We do a 3 month work plan in one of the meetings, or basically a Gantt Chart, detailing what they need to accomplish in the next critical few months.

They begin working two-days a week on the project instead of the 1 day they had been putting in (in addition to their regular job). They plant things on the side, broccoli and chives, which will get them some extra funds.

A month goes by. They greenhouse is almost ready. They have begun planting sample crops with the help of a Ministry of Agriculture engineer. The samples are coming along well.

The begin to harvest the extra crops they planted, giving them a good buffer to make the monthly payments even when they start paying the capital.

This week, in the regular meeting, they review finances. More funds have come in from the extra crops. They elect to take another look at the 3 month work plan to review their progress. What do you think, Blake?!, they ask me. I can see the pride in their eyes. You are doing it!, I say. I can tell they believe that as well.

Even if they have problems growing in the greenhouse (which is doubtful), they believe they will be able to pay off the loan through the monthly payments to the bank.

So in short, I believe myself, and other Peace Corps volunteers, can make a difference here with small business and farmers. At least...that is my experience. Unfortunately, I still don´t have the end to this story to tell you yet. But I will keep you informed. Until then - pura vida.

Gotta go catch a bus.

Coming to America (and back again)

2009-08-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.

When the sun comes up, you better start running.”

- African proverb
______________________________________________________

So I finally went back to the U.S. after about a year and 3 months of Costa Rica. It was everything I’d hoped it would be – two weeks of seeing friends, eating great American food, drinking beer, wine, and other fine spirits in vast quantities, playing in the sun, and oh yeah, seeing family. (just kidding, Mom)

I had planned on posting this blog about a week after my July 7th return from Costa Rica, but work got in the way and I’ve been extremely busy for the last month or so. And for that work I am grateful, because it knocked me out of my post-US funk I was in for a few days following the trip.

It doesn’t seem to make sense to describe my trip in detail, so I’ll just catch you up on the broad strokes.

I flew into D.C. on June 22nd and hopped into the car with my ex-roommate, Michael, who was waiting for me outside the airport at Reagan International. (note: this is not the broad strokes part, which will really begin following the next two paragraphs) It all felt pretty surreal frankly…I was finally back in the U.S.! The surreal feeling lingered on as we headed back over to my friend’s apartment, or that is, my exact same old apartment from my DC days. We walked in and it quickly became apparent very little had changed in the decor, save maybe someone else’s things occupying the space in my old room. Other than that, it was the same apartment I had left on an overcast day more than a year ago, hauling a big roller suitcase and overflowing backpack heading off to staging to begin my Costa Rica Peace Corps adventure.

After dropping my stuff off, we headed over to a favorite local neighborhood hangout, Whitlow’s on Wilson, for dinner and a few...well...many beers. This would pretty much set the routine for the rest of my 4 day stay in DC. Michael would head into work in the morning, I would wake up later and run some errands in the day, and then Michael would come back and we would go back out to hit the town. Monday – Whitlow’s on Wilson, Tuesday – 51st State Bar, Wednesday – Ray’s the Steaks and Whitlow’s on Wilson (yet again), Thursday – Cookout at the apartment followed by barhopping in Dupont and Capitol Hill.

Wednesday I was able to meet up with some co-workers from my job at Veterans Affairs for dinner at Ray’s the Steaks in Arlington. This was a meal I had been dreaming of for several months – a nice, thick New York Strip from Ray’s the Steaks! It didn’t disappoint.

Based on the size of our group, I’d say a number of other people from the office were anticipating this evening as well. We had a great group of about 12 folks come out, all very good friends. It was fantastic to catch up with them. Ray’s makes a pretty stellar steak…but I’ll just assume they came out to see me!

Thursday, my last full day in DC, I was able to make it into the Veterans Affairs to catch up with some more folks I hadn’t seen the night before. That night Michael organized a cookout in the apartment courtyard and a number of other good friends came out to catch up and have a few beers. For everyone that came out – Annie, Dan, Chad, Nhi, Austen, Charles, Phi and others – it was great seeing you! Thanks for all your support during my time in Peace Corps!

Late night Thursday , a good buddy, Kevin, decided that maybe it wasn’t so important he report to work the next day and so he dedicated the rest of the night to barhopping with me around DC. We didn’t stay out late enough to see the sun come up…but just about. It was a great ending to a fun week.

On Friday morning I groggily boarded another plane at Reagan to head down to Atlanta for the second leg of my trip. It was time to hit the lake.

The next 8 or 9 days were spent in the lower foothills of the Blue Ride mountains at my parents’ house on Lake Keowee in South Carolina. Their home on the lake, which is as beautiful and peaceful as it sounds, is my personal Mecca. When I am there, all is right in the world.

Under normal circumstances, I would make a pilgrimage there every six months or so, but Peace Corps had kept me away for about a year and a half.

We took full advantage of the time. A group of good friends came up the first weekend. We enjoyed the water, great weather, the large porch, and cooking on the grill. Everyone got caught up in the slow pace of the lake, and most friends ended up staying an extra night.

During the week following my friends’ visit, I played a lot of golf with my dad. The was another Henderson family tradition that had not been able to take place for awhile due to my stay in Costa Rica. I continued playing golf and by the end of stay we had played six rounds of golf in one week!
Photo: The lake weekend with friends. Nuff said.

The following weekend was sort of a family reunion. My aunt and uncle, grandparents, and cousins all showed up to have a big lake weekend! It was a lot of fun, and even though we hadn’t all spent time together for a long time, we got right back into the swing of things. We spent a few days on the lake enjoying the lake house. Also, we saw two great fireworks shows on the lake on July 4th.

After a quick night in Atlanta on July 6th visiting some friends, my U.S. vacation was over and it was time to head back to Costa Rica on July 7th.

So you would think a trip back home after more than a year in another country would leave someone with a few impressions, right? Although nothing drastic came to me during my vacation, here are a few ideas I took away from the trip:

I’m so fortunate to be a Peace Corps volunteer!!! Granted not everyone’s PC experience works out well, but I have had an incredible time. The trip home left me really motivated about being a volunteer. It has been such a great experience. I have learned many new skills – the Spanish language, teaching, facilitating, micro-finance, how to work with kids, working in groups, and playing the guitar. Also, I have made so many great friends – both among fellow volunteers and in my town.

It’s great to have a job. While I don’t see myself extending my service at this point, I’m very pleased to be working at something I love and is very satisfying. Also, when I was hanging out with my buddies at the lake house, we realized that a lot of my good friends (all very capable) are out of work, or in-between jobs, or only working part-time. I feel very lucky to be working for Peace Corps right now.
Savor Every Moment. In the big scheme of things, a two year commitment to Peace Corps isn’t that long. I’ve only got about 9 months of service left, and I plan on taking advantage of it to the maximum – be it with work projects, social life in my town, or adventures with my many great fellow volunteer friends. The entire experience has been a great journey that I will probably look back and reflect on later in life with nostalgia. I’m gonna live every minute of it.

Where’s the next challenge!? Let me at it. Although I’ve still got a lot of time left, it will probably fly by, and it doesn’t hurt to think about the future. PC has been an extremely challenging experience – getting accustomed to small town Costa Rican life while trying to learn a new job, language, and culture. It has also been extremely rewarding and has brought out the best in me. PC has reminded me that I must continue to challenge myself in my life after Peace Corps, whatever that may be. The only limits we have in life are of our own making.

So in keeping with the third point on that list above, I recently sat down and came up with a slate of projects for the remainder of my time working in San Cristóbal Norte. Here is the line-up:

Ø Support of Emerging Rural Tourism Group – We recently received our first group of international student volunteers here in San Cristóbal Norte. They came to us through a fellow PCV connection in a neighboring town. The experience went extremely well for us, and we are expecting to receive a second group in late August. The first group stayed for two weeks and completed a project roofing the local nutrition center. They stay with families, and in addition to the valuable labor they provide, also give a modest financial donation for the project.

To bring this group to the community (literally called International Student Volunteers - http://www.isv.org/) we set up an ad hoc committee of several of my acquaintances in the town. The committee has really come together as a team, and if all goes well with these first two ISV groups, they may opt to form a permanent rural tourism group in the town. If this happens (as I think it will), then I would really look forward to helping them through their early planning stages. (Potential project dates: August 2009 – End of Service)

The volunteers. They were a fun group and worked very hard. Let´s be clear, in no way have I obtained permission to post their images on the world wide web.

Ø Establishment of a Community Library in the School – This will be a project you will be able to get involved in! Peace Corps offers something called the Peace Corps Partnership Program which allows volunteers, only once in their two years of service, to formulate a project and solicit funding from donors online via their website.

I would like to use my PCPP project to establish a small starter library in the local school, which doesn’t have a library at the moment. While Costa Ricans in the campo are not know to be big readers, the kids in my host family have all shown a lot of interest in the books I read and even mimicked my behavior. When I began reading the Harry Potter series in Spanish, two of my host nephews asked to borrow the books after me. They are now reading book six while I’m slowly plodding through the fifth book of the series.

Also, a fellow Peace Corps friends, Josh, has also established a small library in his local school and the kids have been actively checking out books and shown great enthusiasm for reading.

I am convinced a library would be a fantastic resource here in the community for the kids education! So to my co-worker, Mark, from Veterans Affairs, to whom I’d promised to post on this blog a wish list of books for him to send me – you will just have to wait, buddy! I may be putting out a big wish list of kids books soon (albeit books in Spanish).

Also, I’d like to thank my roommate, Michael, for giving me a great book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World. Written by an ex-Microsoft executive, the author tells the story of leaving his job to begin the Room to Read Foundation (http://www.roomtoread.org/), an organization that has built thousands of libraries and schools in the developing world.

This is a project that really excites me! I’m also really happy to be giving you all a chance to get involved since you’ve given me so much support over the last 18 months. I will keep you posted via this blog and email on the development of the project. (Project Dates: September 2009 – March 2010)

Ø 2nd Project Management Workshop and Best Practices Guide – As I wrote in the previous blog, in May a member of my counterpart and I gave a two day workshop in basic project management skills to about 12 participants here in town. The workshop was an extension of a workshop given by Peace Corps that Olman and I had participated in several months before in San José

The workshop was an overwhelming success! We organized the workshop in a very professional manner and were given rave reviews by the participants. They absolutely loved it.

I really enjoyed this project, and had always intended to offer the workshop a second time in the community, but this time I would like to raise the bar a bit for sustainability’s sake. This second edition of the workshop will be giving entirely by three members of the bank’s managing board that have already been trained in the skills. I will be working on the workshop in a support capacity, but will not be doing any of the teaching. Also, I plan to formulate a best practices guide in Spanish to share with the bank and other Peace Corps volunteers.

If we can pull this off, and I believe that we will, then this workshop may make a big difference for the bank and other PCVs long into the future. I recently shared my ideas for the project with the bank’s managing board, including those that would be teaching, and they expressed enthusiasm for the idea. (Project Dates: September 2009 – November 2009)

Ø English Classes – For the last 9 months I have been teaching English to two different classes here in the town. The English course is given through Centro Cultural books and curriculum, a very respected English teaching non-profit organization here in the country. We began in October 2008 with 45 students divided into two classes. I now have 24 students, or roughly half the original number.

Teaching English has been a great learning experiencing for me, and although I’ve found it very challenging, it has also been very satisfying. The remaining students are highly motivated to continue learning. I plan to continue offering English classes through this program until the end of my service.

Through this program as offered by Peace Corps volunteers, the students pay only $20 or so for about 9 months of class, whereas in the city they half to pay roughly twenty times that amount. Our work allows rural Costa Rican students to study English under a highly recognized program at a price they could otherwise not afford.

Many of my English students I would also consider great friends. For my birthday, they surprised me with a birthday cake, sang happy birthday to me, and gave me several gifts. A few of the students had remembered my birthday from an activity we did learning dates nearly 6 months ago! I was thrilled they thought of me and felt really honored they would remember my birthday. (Potential Project Date: Present to End of Service)

Ø Micro-Entrepreneur Support – I am currently supporting three farmers here in town with their emerging businesses in a one-on-one capacity. We have made great strides in applying basic business planning skills, including SWOT analysis project management techniques, marketing, and accounting. I also consider these farmers and their families good friends, and I plan to continue to provide this support until the end of my service.

Ø Organic Garden in the School – a project was recently dropped in my lap from FINCA, a Costa Rican non-profit organization that supports micro-finance banks such as my counterpart. They are looking to set-up a system for funding communal projects in towns where micro-finance banks exists using the PCPP model. The want to use my counterpart, and our town, as a pilot project to set up an organic garden in the school using a technology called the EarthBox.

My birthday cake. It tasted glorious.

The idea is the students will take responsibility for the garden, all while doing activities online that connect them with other classrooms participating in the same project. This project still needs further development within the community, but it should be a great opportunity for the school. I will keep you posted on the progress.

Other Potential Projects on the Waiting List – Coordination of a Leadership Forum among Community Leaders, Junior Achievement classes in the School, a Best Practices Fair Among Farmers in the Town, Painting of a World Map Mural, and Development of a New Volunteer Program with the High School in the Neighboring Town.

So as you can see, there’s plenty to keep me busy in the coming months. All this talk of projects has made me realize I probably need to give an update on the town computer lab project that has been so important to us.

The school began with a projection that it would need to raise roughly $15,000 to prepare the local computer room for the computers it would receive from the foundation here in country. The Board of Education recently held a beauty contest, or reinado, as a fundraiser. With the reinado, a candidate is chosen from each grade, and they have to go to work fundraising for about six weeks. The candidate that raises the most money is the queen! (Sidenote: the candidates are usually drawn from each of the major families in town, ensuring a very strong rivalry)

The reinado was a huge success, raising roughly $7,500 through the event. To add onto that, I was able to kick in another $3,500 from a grant I applied for through the Costa Rica – United States Foundation (CRUSA). So we have almost three-fourths of the funding raised, and the improvements to the lab are on schedule. Everything appears to be in order. The only thing that may go off schedule are the computers, which seem to be running late due to the extensive contracting process.

As usual, I hope this gives you a glimpse into my life and this crazy experience called Peace Corps. I will continue to try to update the blog more regularly, but no promises, considering all my prior efforts seem to have failed up to this point.

The quote at the beginning of this blog relates in no way to the content…I just thought it was cool. Hope it blew your mind.

This blog goes out to my DC roommate and great friend, Michael, for staying out late on the town with me all week (barring Thursday, which you totally punked out on), all while having to drag himself out of bed each morning at 6AM for a full day of work. Towards the end of the week he was counting down the days to my departure so he could finally get some rest. You’re a soldier, Bernie! Thanks for showing me a great time in DC.

Michael working with about 12 ours of sleep over a 4 day period. Just putting ketchup on that burger took him 17 minutes. That´s one TASTY burger!

Ruminations after 1 Year in Site

2009-06-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

At the moment I’m listening to the familiar sounds of a Denny’s diner, sitting in a booth at the restaurant outside of San José. This is the first time my laptop has been connected to the internet in over a year, and surprisingly it has not exploded as I expected it to.

Due the remnants of last nights obligatory partying that goes along with the usual San José run, please excuse me in advance for what is sure to be a pretty lousy reader experience as I’m not feeling like much of a writer at the moment. But its been too long since I last update, and a lot has gone on, so I’ll do my best to hack out this update.

Things continue to go well. We had our big community party at the end of April and overall it was a pretty big success. Six of the eight community committees participated and all told the groups made about $5,000 from sales of food and beverages. But more importantly than money, everyone walked away from the experience without wanting to kill each other.

The Boys and Girl Scouts group had a big bonfire during the fiesta and the regional folks came out and swore us all in officially as scouts. It was a pretty sweet moment, considering a group of 10 parents or so has battled for more than 6 months getting the group up and running. Even better is that I’m starting to notice changes in the way the adult members of the group carry themselves.

The presidenta is a seamstress and has six kids. When she took on the role as president she didn’t have much confidence in herself. After overcoming some difficult circumstances with the losses of some supporters and all the additional trials of the project, lately I can visibly see her confidence has grown as she works with the other members of the junta, communicates with parents, and works with local community leaders.

At our first assembly a few weeks ago my good friend Olman joined us for a little while to show support for the new group. Olman works in a number of community organizations and is a leader of the town. As the presidenta stood up to address the assembly (although admittedly we were less than 25 people), Olman said he was so moved his knees shook.

He had known the woman all his life, and although always had respect for her as a person, but never thought of her as a leader. That happens a lot in small towns I think. Everyone knows everything about everyone, that after awhile they stop giving people a chance to step outside of how they have them categorized.

I have seen other noticeable changes in the scout leaders. They recently attended a 4 day training course over two weekends at a camp outside San José. Since then they have taken the lead in every session with the kids. They do a great job! …by any standards.

The project is taking on a life of its own. I spend very little time working on the project now except for filling in as a scout leader sometimes.

It has been a great experience as a Peace Corps volunteer to provide challenges to individuals who are looking for something different, engaging them in the responsibilities of the town, and seeing the changes in how the town views them and, not to mention, how they view themselves.

The picture below was taken following the first annual assembly a few weeks ago. The presidenta is sitting on the bottom steps, second from the left.

And to close out a theme from the last blog, the group made about $300 dollars during the fiesta, which we used to immediately pay back the loan after buying our uniforms. So fortunately I was not responsible for bankrupting the group with the loan idea.

We also completed another project that had been in the works for awhile – a Project Design and Management Workshop. I say “we” because Olman and I co-facilitated the workshop. It took place over 2 days, 5 hours each day. We had 11 participants that attended both days to complete the training.

The workshop was an extension of a workshop Olman participated in about 6 months ago in San José offered by Peace Corps. As part of the deal to participate in the workshop, we had to commit to provide an extension of the workshop in our town.

The workshop in San José was really well done, however I think ours in San Cristóbal Norte was better J. Thanks to Veterans Affairs (my last job) I have a pretty solid background in basic project management skills.

We threw in some things they never touched on in San José: the definition of a “project”, work breakdown structures, and risk identification. Plus we scrapped a few things from the San José workshop such as differentiating between goals, sub-activities, and performance indicators, which frankly was just tedious. And we had them doing the WBSs using newsprint and sticky notes. The result was a much more interactive experience for the participants.

We also bought little folders for the attendants that they received upon signing in that included a printed agenda and a page with the objectives for the workshop. They used the folders to hold onto the loose pages of information we gave them with each section of the workshop. (Below, top to bottom: Olman directing an activity, participants working on a project, a group presenting)
Okay enough details...anyway it went great! Of the 11 participants, 7 were women, which was really great to see. Also, of the group, four were members of the Boys and Girls Scouts junta. They ended up working in groups of 3 or 4 people, and elaborated 3 different projects – a project in hydroponic lettuce, clothing manufacture, and a candle making business.

The participants gave the course really high marks on the feedback sheet we provided, and they commented openly to us at the end that it was really done. Also, the bank treasurer was there and really loved it. So…we nailed it!

That left me feeling really satisfied. It was a goal I’d had for quite some time and the vision finally came to fruition. I think we will give another workshop within a few months, and the bank is even thinking about weening a couple of there members into the role of trainers, so they can offer the workshop regularly in the future.

That would be sweet if it turned out to be sustainable. I’ve really drilled some of these project management principles into a few of the micro-entrepreneurs. It brings a smile to my face to hear them tossing around terms like “vision”, “risks”, and developing “SMART objectives” – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Constrained – from time to time.

I realize I delve into talking about work in the majority of the writing for this blog, however, lately I guess most of my life is just work. Pretty much every day I’m in my town I have some kind of commitment. Every three or four weeks or so I have to get out of town an hang out with other PCVs just to unwind. The last few months have been pretty nuts though, and I hope soon things will start to calm down so I can relish just being around the town more.

On a social side of things, a good friend, Paul Marola, just came down to the country for about a month or so. He stayed most of the time with another friend in Jacó, on the central Pacific coast. I was able to escape the weekend before the project management workshop to hang out with them there in Jacó for a couple of nights.

Then he came back with me to San Cristóbal Norte for a few nights to check out my side of Costa Rica. Mostly we just hung out and talked. We had probably not caught up to each other in about two years or so, but we fell right back into joking like no time had passed at all…sure is great to have friends like Paul.

Plus Paul speaks great Spanish (we studied together in Valencia, Spain for a semester) and he was able to relate really well to Doña Albertina and the family there in my town. He took off just a couple of days ago, but fortunately we will catch up with each other back at my parents’ place in South Carolina within the next month. So more of the “Blake and Paul” show to come soon!

Having not finished the blog there at Denny’s, I’m now writing from a small training center where all the volunteers from my group are for the week. This week is our Mid-Service Training, or MST. On the work side, the purpose is to review what we’ve done in the past year, plan for our final year of service, and take care of a bunch of odd and end medical and security stuff.

On the play side, it’s a great time to catch up with all the fellow volunteers, speak English J, hang out, bullshit, and recharge batteries. The facility is an old seminary rented by Peace Corps. The accommodations are pretty simple – bunks, shower rooms, chow hall, meeting rooms – but the highlight is the soccer field and basketball court, that we try to take advantage of at every opportunity.

Tonight I’m feeling much better following a couple hard games of ultimate frisbee and basketball, and a good meal. This is going to be a great week!

This week we all have to provide stool samples three consecutive days so the medical office can check for parasites and what not. Naturally, for a Peace Corps crew this is a subject ripe for discussion. Most of our post-dinner discussion was spent discussing different strategies to “complete” the stool samples. It should be an interesting theme to watch develop as the week goes on. Too much information?! I couldn’t help it.

Overall, things are going very well in my service. As I told Paul, I feel like I’ve accomplished more than I had ever dreamed of prior to my service. That’s partly due to managing my own expectations from the start, and partly from a lot of hard work and a very collaborative town. Either way, I’m pretty happy with being a Peace Corps volunteer at this point.

On June 22nd I will be leaving to San José to visit the states for two weeks, my first time back in almost a year and a half. First stop is Washington D.C. for a few days, then down to South Carolina for about a week to hang out with family and enjoy the lake.

I’m super pumped about this trip!!! Frankly I’ve thought about it every day for the past month or so…and its finally here. If anyone is reading this that would like to hang out when I’m back…just shoot me an email. I’d love to hang out, and as Paul knows, will be “down for whatever.”

Hope to see you back in the good ‘ol US of A. Peace.

This blog entry is dedicated to my aunt Linda and uncle Kent. Linda has had a rough year, after experiencing an accident and then discovering she has cancer, both requiring operations and lots of follow-up. It has been difficult, but by all accounts, Linda has been really strong. And I’m including Kent because I know its been pretty mentally tough and he’s had to work his tail off taking of her. Kent - Every kid should be lucky enough to have a fun, wily uncle like you! See you all in a few weeks. I can’t wait.

Risky Business

2009-04-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

My hands were sweating a little in the partially lit side room. Is it hot in here or is it just me?...I was thinking. The situation brought to mind a old southern saying – “It’s not the heat, it’s the humility” – I remembered reading recently from To Kill a Mockingbird.

We needed money, and we needed it fast. To get la plata, the cash that is, we had gone to the only option in town. This was the smartest (or the dumbest) move I had made as a Peace Corps volunteer.

¿Cuánto ocupa? ¿ A qué plazo? ¿Tiene fiadores? Translation: How much do you need? For how long? Do you have cosigners? The questions were endless. Why can’t we just get this over with! They know we’re good for it. Three casually dressed people were sitting across from the dull gray table looking mildly combative while filling in a form with our responses.

Sitting to my right was a short woman, middle-aged, short brown hair, fidgeting with here small purse in her hands. Alongside her was another woman of roughly the same description. Respectively, they are the fledgling Boy Scouts group’s Treasurer and President.

The Boy Scouts needed cash. To explain how it had come to this I’ll have to go back and recap a little bit about what’s happened here in town…

Yours Truly is now a temporary dirigente, or boy scout leader. Right now the group has 3 other scout leaders, and we have roughly 40 boys and girls split between us, from ages 7 to 17. We’ve been working with the kids for about 3 weeks now. We had broken the ice and were starting to feel pretty good about being scout leaders. Plus, the kids loved the games and activities we had been organized. Sure we were still pretty rough around the edges and there was a lot more to learn...but we knew we could lead a scout group! This was a big step.
The first day of activities in the town park in front of the church only a little over half the kids showed up. They session went well though, and at the end of the day we handed out little plastic ID cards to with the kids name printed on it. This was something the central office had sent us after the group was signed up 3 months ago.
The next week about 90% of the kids that we had signed up participated. They had heard all week in school about the good time the others had, and wanted to show up to be included and receive there ID card.
Everything was going great. But there was a problem. The town had a fiesta comunal coming up and we still don’t have uniforms for the kids yet. There is only a month left until the fiesta, and we want the kids in uniforms to communicate to the town that YES, WE ARE HERE! Up until now we hadn’t really felt like others believed in us.
It was the recommendation of the Boy Scouts that we have parents pay for the uniforms so they were invested somewhat in the group. They had had bad experiences in the past with simply raising money and giving out uniforms. That made sense to us.
Okay, so what do we do?
It was at this moment that I decided to step in with my brightest (or dumbest) idea as a Peace Corps volunteer. –“Why not get a short-term loan from the town bank?!”
We chewed on the idea a bit. A short term loan would allow us to get the shirts done quickly. Plus, the parents could finance the shirt over 3 or 4 months instead of paying all at once. We estimated the shirt and bandana would roughly cost 4,000 colones…or roughly $8 a piece. This was cheap, but some of the committee members had 3 or 4 kids plus themselves to think about so this would add up.
But financing with a few payments over 3 or 4 months would make the situation much more manageable, right? Plus, we wouldn’t start to make the shirt until we’d received a signed permission from the parent along with the first payment.
The idea started to sound pretty darn good.

…so that brought us to the small side office there in the offices of my counterpart, the micro-finance bank.

The loan application was approved without any problems. A week later the Boy Scouts Regional Representative paid the group a visit (I wasn’t there) and our junta informed him of our plan to “finance” the uniforms. He strongly advised against the financing idea since it had not worked out well in other areas in his experience.

After hearing that, I was totally willing to give up on the idea, but the junta went ahead and voted to take out a portion of the money they had been approved for. They were approved for a credit line of $500 and decided to only take out $300. I wasn’t present at that meeting either due to my participation on the Comisión de Fiesta.

The idea is the money will be used to buy cloth for the uniforms that will be made by the president (a seamstress), and then to pay for food and other things we will be selling during the fiesta. They tossed out the financing idea and decided participants would have to just buy the uniforms outright. They could still finance, it would just have to be a forward-financing type arrangement.

Despite the fact that I still eventually may be responsible for planting the idea that eventually bankrupted the town Boy Scouts group…I was proud of the junta. They decided together to take a calculated risk by taking out the loan, and also tossed out the uniform financing idea after hearing from the regional representative. Plus, with the money we are almost sure to make from food sales during the fiesta, it should more than justify the loan.

As time goes on they are becoming much more confident, taking decisions on there own while my input becomes less and less important. I guess I could feel left out…but the bottom line is it is becoming a sustainable project. I will keep you all posted on the outcome of our loan.

Volunteer Trainee Visit

About a week ago one of the new volunteer trainees came to my site to stay here and shadow me for a few days. It is a normal trip as part of the training program. There are now 54 new trainees recently arrived to the country that will be spending the next 2 months learning how to be PCVs, just as we did.

I enjoyed the company. His name was Mick. He had studied Economics in undergrad, and then got a Masters in Anthropology…a curious mix. His father is actually a current Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa. Mick was researching Peace Corps in grad school, told his dad about it, and then his dad, who was retired after working in international recruiting (human resources), started doing his own investigating. Eventually, he accepted an assignment to Botswana and has been there for more than a year now.

Mick and I went on a hike with the Boy Scouts troop, visited one of the micro entrepreneurs I help out, went to a junta meeting of the bank, and I gave him a tour of the town among other things. It was nice to have somebody to throw the frisbee and BS with for a few days. Some pics from the Scouts hike below.

Visit from Joe Biden

No, he didn’t come out to my site, but he did visit the country to meet with a bunch of regional leaders. He came at the exact same time as the trainee site visit, and so all of us receiving trainees couldn’t go see him in San Jose. The PC office gathered up some volunteers and went over to the embassy where he sat down for a few minutes with the volunteers. Some of my friends who were there said it was enjoyable and he seemed very genuine considering all the people he had to meet with. Oh well…I’ll hold out for Obama!

Project Management Workshop Postponed

At the beginning of April I was planning on putting on a project management workshop here in town, but it didn’t work out because of all the fiesta planning and Semana Santa coming up. I had to push it back to May, which is a bummer, but it will eventually happen.

Fiesta! Fiesta!

The party starts this Saturday (Saturday 18th) and then runs until the following Sunday (April 26th). Its been a lot of work in planning. Most of us on the planning committee have out fingers crossed since this is kind of an experiment. I’ll let you know how things go and try to post some pictures next blog.

This blog goes out to my Mom who had a birthday last month and I don’t remember saying Happy Birthday. Looks like I blew it. She also sent me some great Easter Candy and some plastic eggs that might save the day when we have our Boy Scouts Easter Egg Hunt here soon. Love you Mom!...and errr, sorry ‘bout that.

We are Going to Party in San Cristóbal Norte

2009-02-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

Last week my English classes finished their first level of the English course after taking final written and verbal exams. I am relieved to be through with the classes for awhile. Each verbal exam took about 15 minutes per students, which is not that bad…except if you have 37 students like I do.

My mind was numb after 3 straight days of half-conversing with these beginning English students. That experience was enough to make me push for a 3 week break as opposed to the two weeks off I had initially planned.

The good news is everyone passed. Or that is, everyone that didn’t voluntarily drop out. Out of the 45 students that started the class at the end of October, I still have 37 after almost 4 months. I am pretty pleased with that.

But things are going to get harder. We will see how many continue to stick with it. My goal is to finish at least 4 levels of the course…which should roughly take me into December of this year.

As I mentioned in the last blog, the school has a big need to raise funds for the new computer lab they should be getting. Where we left off last, I believe the community was going to organize some event to raise funds to outfit the computer lab with air conditioning, an alarm system, and furniture.

Since then we’ve had a couple more meetings of the Unión Cívica among community leaders, which have resulted in a very positive, although suprisingly different outlook.

It now looks like, with the support and leadership of the town padre, that we will be organizing a 9 day cultural celebration to take place from April 18 – April 26.(!!!) As it probably sounds…this is a big deal. From what I understand the town hasn’t thrown a big summer party for 7-8 years.

From what I can tell, several things brought this about.

First, the local district representative to the county, who has some political friends higher up in the county and national levels, was able to get the right people in the county gov behind the idea of a summer fiesta in San Cristóbal Norte. With the support of the county comes all kinds of logistics support – they coordinate extra transportation, publicity for the event, program a parade with school bands, invite important groups, bring out a stage, and coordinate security.

Second, the padre got on board with the project. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of San Cristóbal Norte as the parroquia, or founding of the church as the religious center of the surrounding towns. The padre wanted to do something to honor this milestone, so he then pitched the idea to the Unión Cívica participants. Also, it seems he had started to pick up on signs from some people in town that the time was right to organize an event of this scale.

Either way…it seems the opportune time has finally arrived for our little group of community leaders in the Unión Cívica. They have decided to use this group of 8 community organizations as the base for dividing the work and the proceeds of the event. Also, we recently reviewed a draft charter written by the leader of the development association, and it was met with approval by the group.

So after another draft or two, the group may actually sign a basic charter agreement to establish the group as a standing organization in the town. Against all of my expectations…it appears it may actually be a sustainable project after all.

And naturally…the future of the group will be tested over the next couple of months and probably determined based on the success of this party. But hey…what’s better than a trial by fire?! :)

It is a very exciting time. I am very excited at least. This excitement is shared by the other community leaders in the group, although they are a bit more reserved. No vamos a disfrutar, vamos a trabajar…they say. Or basically put…we are going to be too busy working to enjoy the party! Despite this bit of realism, I know they are all pleased.

So now its time for us to roll up our sleeves and begin working on the planning! We’ve basically got 2 months to do all the work that is normally done in about 4 months for a fiesta communal of this size. There is a lot to be done – determining the events schedule, organizing kitchen teams, scheduling soccer matches, planning the parade, obtaining gifts for the bingo, coordinating with the cerveceria to get the outdoor cantina, or bar, in place…and much, much more.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. All readers of this blog are hereby invited…provided you coordinate your own transportation.

So what happened with the school computer lab project…you might be wondering? Admittedly, they have been pushed off to the side a bit with the prospect of this new fiesta…but not forgotten. The members of the Education Board put their heads together and came up with a few fundraising ideas they plan to use in the next couple of coups…such as a beauty pageant – also called a reinado, in which each grade level has a nominated queen, and the class to raise the most money wins at the end.

The Education Board also coordinated with the micro-finance bank, my counterpart, and has taken out a line of credit to be used should they need the money to outfit the computer lab immediately in the near future.

And the Education Board will also be able to benefit from some fundraising done at the fiesta in April. They appear to be in good shape. The president, a friend of mine, is such a great guy. He has been a participant in the Unión Cívica group since the beginning. He said to me, “I didn’t really care what we project we worked…I just wanted us to work together.”

Temporary Boy Scout Leader

The Girls and Boy Scouts project is still moving along well. We are now ready to start working with the 40 or so kids we have signed up. The only problem is we have the same weakness that most groups do when they are starting out – that is, a lack of adult scout leaders. We have 3 committed scout leaders, but need 1 more to direct the 10 or so kids of the Tropa group (ages 11-14). We desperately need to get started working with these kids and get them in uniforms. The theory is that just about every kid in town wants to be a boy or girl scout, but until the town sees a couple of groups working around town in those bright blue uniforms…we won’t see a whole lot more support from the parents.

So like the Unión Cívica project, we have staked the success of the project on how we fair during the fiesta communal in April. We have determined this should be our “coming out” party, complete with community activities, participation in the parade, community works such as trash pick-up, and other things we haven’t thought of yet. We hope to drum up all kinds of support that week and find some more adult scout leaders so we can enlist more kids.

In the last meeting of the junta, the subject came up, “what do we do with the 10 or so kids of Tropa?” The scout leaders were adament that if we didn’t have enough scout leaders, then someone from the junta would have to direct the kids – and unfortunately they were right. All eyes turned to me.

…So I bit the bullet and committed to being temporary scout leader for the next 3 months of the Tropa boys.(!) This is not what I had planned. But before agreeing I extracted a couple of promises from the junta: 1) they had to do a better job of require the scout leaders attended training sessions at the regional level, and 2) they had to actively recruit new scout leaders. We did not discuss specifics, but hopefully those ideas will stick.

Anyway I start working with the boys and whipping them into shape on March 7th…I will try to get you all some pictures…as I’m sure it will be entertaining for all.

Not the only Gringo in Town

It turns out I am not the only gringo in town now…which came as a complete surprise to me. Last week I was sitting outside in the morning practicing guitar – which is coming along nicely by the way – and a Nissan Pathfinder drove up and a man who was obviously American greeted me with a shout, “Hey! Are you Blake Henderson?” (Response: Yes) “Oh I found you on the internet!”

The man had recently bought a small plot of land just outside of town and found this blog while google-ing San Cristóbal Norte. So after recovering from my surprise, I invited him inside and Doña Albertina treated him to a cup of coffee. He is a pastor in San José of a non-denominational English language church (part time) and then has other projects on the side. He was looking to get the know the town a little better and get a little bit involved in the community, so I told him I would keep him informed the best I could. I enjoyed the conversation and enjoyed talking about different aspects of the town from my experience.

So…it is with great reluctance that I inform you that I no longer hold the dubious honor of “the only gringo in San Cristóbal Norte.”

1 Year Mark in Country

Amazingly tomorrow (2/25) marks 1 year of being here in country…but hey who’s counting?! Kidding…but I am amazed at how fast time is moving. I’ve been here in town for about a month straight and so it seems like a good time to get out and do some hiking to celebrate hitting the 1 year mark.

This weekend I’m headed north to do some hiking in a small mountain range of extinct volcanos (and one active one!) in the interior of Guanacaste. There is a volunteer there in the area, so we plan to hike from his town to volcanos Miravalles and Tenorio there in the area. We have a good group of about 5 guys. I am really looking forward to the short break.

I can say one thing about Peace Corps Costa Rica…the time off the job is as interesting as the time on the job.

Headed Back in July…Si Dios Quiere (translation: If God wants. Common Tico-ism)

If god wants I will be back in the States for the 4th of July and couple weeks after…with a short swing up to DC planned for sometime during the trip. I sure hope God is in favor of this trip…because I am sure looking forward to seeing you guys back home. Will keek you posted on the details.

This blog goes out to the people who send random emails and ping me for G-chats from time to time checking in – Candy, Mema, Bernstein, Shelley, KristIn, Jim, Paul, Matt, Kelly – and others…you know who you are. As always…thanks for thinking of me.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo!

2009-01-08T12:35:00.000-08:00

Where do I start? So much has happened in the last two months. My family visited, Matt (that’s my brother) stayed here in my site for a week, then Christmas, New Year’s, and back to work. I guess I’ll work in that order.

Mom, Dad, and Matt flew into San José on Nov 24th for their two week stay, or make that 3 weeks for Matt. They then came back to my site for two days for some intense cultural exchange. They got to know Doña Albertina and the whole family. They helped me teach an English class, in which one of the highlights was my brother explaining in Spanish that he is a fisícatera-puta...instead of a fisícaterapeuta. Small difference, I know, but it can mean a lot. (For all those folks that aren’t that familiar with Spanish, you’ll have to look up that ending for yourselves)

Other highlights were my Mom trading knitting tips with the ladies of the family. She also brought down some yarns and wooden needles as gifts. She was a big hit. Dad got to learn a little bit about raising cows with one of my host brothers. And Mom cooked them one of her breakfast dishes our last morning here. Also, they were able to come to a meeting of the junta directiva of the bank to learn a little bit about how micro-finance works. We also took a walking tour around the town. It was an action packed two days. Follow the link to see some pictures of our time in San Cristóbal Norte: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=hrxv88s.92xblhww&x=0&h=1&y=-1z9qjo&localeid=en_US

From San Cristóbal Norte, we headed to the beach. After picking up a fellow Peace Corp-er on the highway south, we made our way to the Central Pacific coastline. A bunch of volunteers had rented a big house by the beach in a little town called Matapalo to celebrate Thanksgiving.

The original plan was to have about 20 people or so, but due to a flood on the Atlantic side that ruined some of the more veteran groups’ plans, they tagged along with us and the result was about 35 volunteers in one house! The house was dubiously named the “Jungle House”. My parents graciously dropped Matt, Tamara (other volunteer friend), and me off at the beach house and they proceeded on to a little Bed and Breakfast an hour north in Manuel Antonio.

Over the next two days there was considerable debauchery. Don’t get me wrong, this was Peace Corps debauchery, which means it is not some type of evil wickedry were engaged in, but a silly, drunken, half-naked, laugh-until-you-fall-down debauchery. And of course…there were the obligatory late-night swimming expeditions. Let’s just say our presence was felt in the town, and I don’t think they’ll be a group like us there for quite some time.

Another highlight of the Matapalo house was my brother waking up in a daze on the first morning. We were situated in a 3rd floor loft up in the trees. The first thing Matt saw as he opened his eyes was a large Howler monkey staring right back at him – from inside the room!

The monkey had climbed in threw the open window. As Matt woke up, the monkey made its way back outside onto the 2nd floor roof, which was level with our room, and proceeded to jump up and down and side to side for about 15 minutes, successfully waking up most of the 2nd floor.

And so it was in that way we experienced the true “monkey hour”.

It was a great Thanksgiving. Complete unlike any Thanksgiving I’ve ever had, but great all the same. And we actually managed to have turkey. One very noble volunteer bit the bullet and fronted the money to buy two massive turkeys. They had to buy the turkeys in San José, so I’m still not sure how they got them to the house, but it must have been by backpack. Either way, it makes to laugh to picture two Peace Corps volunteers on a public bus with a pack bulging with a large, raw turkeys. It was tasty turkey.

Matt and I had enough after two days at the Jungle House. Mom and Dad came down for the afternoon to hang out on the beach and meet some of the other volunteers, and then we got in the car to head back to the Bed and Breakfast in Manuel Antonio with them.

The next week and a half was a blur of excellently prepared meals, fine wines, luxury accomodations, good books, American TV, and nature tours of the likes which have not been seen since…well…our last family vacation.

Mom and Dad know how to relax and live the high life, I’ll give them that. (No, the beer High Life, was nowhere to be found in this scene.)

Naturally Matt, being a minimalistic climber, and me being the humble Peace Corps volunteer looked on this atmosphere of decadence with complete disdain accompanied by reluctant acceptance.

¡Mentiras! Lies.

It was awesome!

We spent a couple of relaxing days by the beach in Manuel Antonio, then launched our assault on the interior of the country. We passed a couple of nights at a little inn situated alongside a cloud forest in the mountains around San Ramon. Then we made our way to La Fortuna to spend a few days alongside the active Arenal Volcano.

I’m serious! We were only about 4 or 5 kilometers from the lava-oozing crater of an active volcano. We’re talking about a FIRE BREATHING mountain here, folks!!!

We never even saw the damn volcano. A cold front moved in from Nicaragua the day before we arrived bringing clouds and rain that canvassed the area for 4 straight days. We stayed there for four nights and got one tiny, miraculous glimpse of the glowing top of the volcano the night before we left…which was actually pretty cool.

Another fun activity that we did around La Fortuna was the SkyTrek zip line tour. There are a lot of zip line tours in the La Fortuna, but this company was supposedly the best, and I believe it. They take you up the side of a mountain in an enclosed ski lift type device, then to get back down you have to do about 7 or 8 zip lines back and forth across a valley. The highest single zip line was about 600 meters off the rocky ground below, and the longest was over a half mile stretch.

We were flying through the forest! We were probably going about 30 miles an hour through the misty trees and valley. The only drawback was that all that friction from the zip line device means the metal cable has to be well-greased. Combine that with the downpour that was falling as we did the tour, and we all looked like a coal miners after about two stretches of zip line. We were covered in oil! We looked pretty funny. The following link has some pictures of us during the tour: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=hrxv88s.4nffear4&x=0&h=1&y=ctpj6i&localeid=en_US

Honorable mention goes to Mom for her adventurous spirit and cool headedness throughout the tour. She was dubbed “Extreme Mom” by our fellow tour goers.

From La Fortuna we went to a small inn (Mom likes inns) not too far from the airport and San Jose to recharge after the extremely strenuous La Fortuna adventures (not). Okay, we didn’t really need to do that much more relaxing, but it was enjoyable. After a tough goodbye, Mom and Dad left on December 8th. Matt and I were left to make our way back to San Cristóbal Norte.

First, however, Matt and I had to make one stop before heading back to my site. We stopped at a guitar store in San José and he helped me pick out a decent starter guitar and some other necessary odds and ends. I had been wanting to pick up a new hobby…something other than reading, which I love, but was looking for something different. I was very excited we were able to find a decent guitar, since there weren’t many options, and was also pleasantly surprised when Matt whipped out his credit card to pay for everything. ¡Qué hermano más pura vida!

Back in San Cristóbal Norte I resumed my English classes and dove back into other projects. Matt practiced his Spanish with my family, read books, and went to classes and meetings with me. A couple of mornings we went out and picked coffee on the micro-finance bank’s president. He is a real humble guy, and he doesn’t have any fieldhands, so we thought we could help him out. Fortunately, the weather was great. We both really enjoyed zoning out picking some coffee in the lush green hills with the warm sun above us.

Matt showed me a few basic cords and then a few songs. I’m still picking away at them, and really enjoying practicing. Hopefully it will stick.

Matt has really committed himself to improve his Spanish, and as I was helping him out with Spanish and he was helping me with the guitar, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between our goals.

I was watching Matt play in front of the family on the porch – they were all pretty captivated – and it struck me that he has been playing guitar for about 10 years now. During that time, he has become a really talented guitarist, but it was also humbling to think how many hours and days he had spent practicing and honing his talent.

On the other hand, my Spanish has come a long way since I first started seriously studying Spanish my freshman year in college. That is…about 7 years ago! And after countless hours of study in college, 4 months in Spain, and almost a year in Costa Rica, I still wouldn’t say I’ve come anywhere near mastering the language.

I really enjoyed the week with Matt in my site, trading tips on Spanish for some guitar lessons. Matt has really learned a lot of Spanish in a short time, and I hope he sticks with it. Same goes for me with the guitar. Knowing us, I’d give us decent chances of continuing on…which is pretty good considering we both dream big.

Matt flew out on December 14th. It was tough to see him go, both for the company in my site, and for the fact that his leaving meant vacation was over and I really had to go back to work.

But first of course, there was Christmas and New Year’s. I stuck around San Cristóbal Norte and hung out with the family. I was tired of traveling. Also, I wanted to take advantage of the time to experience the holidays from a Tico point of view, as I’m not sure if I’ll be here for the holidays next year.

We killed a pig, made tamales, exchanged gifts, ate entirely too much, drank cheap whiskey, and told jokes...in that order. Basically, it was just like Christmas back home… except for the butchered pig and the tamales. Although I’ve begun to think we should make killing a pig a holiday tradition back in the U.S. Mom..Dad…what do you think?...any neighborhood covenants against the very public butchering of a pig?

There was one gringo-meets-Ticos cultural exchange worth telling here. I’ve imported the “Dirty Christmas” game to my Tico family. It’s a holiday tradition in my family so I thought Doña Albertina’s family might get a kick out of it here. You know the game – where everyone draws numbers and everyone has a choice to either pick a wrapped gift or “steal” an already wrapped gift from someone who already had their turn.

We had 24 people bring a gift on Christmas Day to play the so-called “Navidad Sucia”, as the spanish version has been dubbed. The game took roughly an hour and a half (a Dirty Christmas record, in my experience), and there was rampant stealing. The most contested gifts were 2 cans of Imperial Beer, some lottery tickets, a box of chocolates, and a pillow.
the tamale assemby line

They loved it! Luckily, even after so much robbing of gifts and some people literally physically resisting their gift being stolen, no feelings were hurt and everyone had a great time. They immediately insisted that we must play the same game for their New Year’s Party. I informed them this was highly unorthodox and I didn’t know if the “Dirty Christmas” gods would allow such a sacrilege…but I would not be heard. Thus, Año Nuevo Sucio was born.

The last I heard one of the town soccer teams had played Navidad Sucia for their yearly holiday party, spreading the game even further into the community. And to think…they used to just draw names out a bag and give a gift to that person as a Christmas gift exchange. Ha! Welcome to Christmas gift exchange gringo-style.

One of the main goals of Peace Corps at a worldwide level is to promote cultural exchange. Check.

Now, following Christmas and New Year’s, things are becoming a little more routine. I’ve started back English classes, work with the Boy Scouts, and some of the micro-entrepreneurs here in town.

The latest excitement is that a Foundation here in-country that promotes IT in communities has approved for us to be provided a fully equipped computer lab. The equipment will be located in the school, but available for the use of the whole community. In addition, the Foundation can provide maintenance, as well as training of those in the town who would wish to teach computer classes to others here in the community. It is an incredible opportunity!

The only challenge is that the town must furnish the proper electrical wiring, air conditioning, alarm system, and furniture to the room before the equipment can be installed. If the room is not ready by the time they wish to install the equipment, probably within 3-4 months, then Foundation will move on to another school.

Our Education Board president informed us of this opportunity last week in the meeting of the Unión Cívica, and since then we are starting to get organized for a fundraising drive. Everyone agrees that this is too good to pass up. We have now tentatively planned an activity for the end of February. This could be a great opportunity for the town to come together for a common cause. I’ll will include an update on this project in future blogs.

In other news, we now have a cat…or a kitten, I should say. Here is a pic of it nawing on my shoelaces. It’s very cute…for now.

I hope those reading this enjoyed the holidays. Thanks for the random emails and gmail chats. It is great to keep up, and I appreciate all the encouragement. The tentantive plan right now is to come back and visit the U.S. in July for a couple of weeks…so mark your calendars.

Will stay in touch. ¡Pura vida!

This blog is dedicated to my buddy Kelly Rejent who just graduated with a degree in Accounting from Ole Miss. Kelly, or Stigs, as we call him sometimes, has been plugging away at this degree for a while, and finally got it done. For what it’s worth, I’m proud of you man. Congratulations!

p.s. A couple hours before posting this we actually had a small earthquake in Costa Rica. It registered about a 6.2 and registered in the Northern Zone around Volcano Poas, or so I´m told. It was the first one I had felt. (We´ve had two others in the last couple of months, but happened at night, and I slept through them like a baby)

It was weird. I was in my room and watched my dresser slowly bump across my room. Anyway, all is well! Hopefully these tremors aren´t a foreshadowing of something stronger to come.

Winter Ramblings+2008 Presidential Election+All Volunteer Conference+...

2008-11-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

We are now in the thick of the Costa Rican winter, or invierno, which basically means the days are filling with rain, strong North winds, the constant threat of berrancos…or mudslides. At least that is the Tico side of the story.

I can tell you from my experience that is not really completely accurate. Take the last 4 days for example. We haven’t had a drop of rain and almost no wind. Great weather. Everyone once in a while we have spells like this during the so called “winter months” and you will hear people saying things like puro verano hoy, or its summer today.

I’m very confused with the seasons at this point. We have had some cold spells, but it hasn’t been nearly as noticeable as I was told to expect by the Ticos. I guess it is all relative. December is almost here, supposedly bringing the fiercest North winds. They keep saying things like “you haven’t seen anything yet…wait for December.” Well we shall see soon enough.

My rant on the weather is almost finished. To be fair, the additional rain does soften up the ground quite a bit, leaving pieces of terrain that seemed to be firm one day, sliding down the hillside the next. Just a few weeks ago we had a perfectly good piece of highway wash away in a matter of days. First it showed a few cracks, then dropped about 5 inches a couple days later, and then after a week se fue!...it went. The picture should be above at the start of the blog if the file uploaded correctly.

So what is new?

Mom, Dad, and Matt will be here in 1 week!!! That is the biggest thing going on right about now. They are flying in on Monday, November 24. They will stay here with me in my town for 2 nights, then we will head to Playa Manuel Antonio for about 4 days to celebrate Thanksgiving. About 20 volunteers, mostly from my program, are meeting up there and renting a huge house to enjoy a few days of R&R. I can’t wait! It should be a complete despiche…use your imagination to translate that.

After Manuel Antonio, we will spend about a week exploring a couple of different cloud forest reserves, as well as the Arenal Volcano in the interior of the country. It should be relaxing and a lot of fun.

My parents will leave to go back to the States on Monday, December 8. Fortunately my brother will then be sticking around for another week or so with me in my town. Matt has been studying Spanish, so I think he is interested in the language practice and also experiencing daily Tico life. He takes off on December 15th.

Since the fam is coming down for Thanksgiving, I will not be returning to the U.S. for Christmas. I don’t have any plans to come back at the moment, but am thinking maybe July 2009 will be the right time for me to come back and visit. Will keep you posted.

As for work…business is good.

I am the proud new teacher of 45 English language students in my community! Actually, about 20% of them are coming from surrounding towns to take advantage of the classes. Since my last blog update, I’ve had class sign-ups, acquired the books and teaching materials, and started classes. I’ve been teaching now for about 3 weeks. Managing 45 students probably sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but fortunately Peace Corps has an agreement with a respected English speaking program so that we can use their materials and bring high-quality English teaching to rural communities. Having the program saves me a lot of time and I probably only spend about 15 hours a week on English classes, which includes the 8 hours of in-class time each week.

A picture of one of my English classes. We use the town elementary school.

The San Cristóbal Norte Boys and Girl Scouts Troop (here the Guías y Scouts de Costa Rica) is well on its way to formation! We went through some rocky times at first trying to drum up support for this program, but seemed to have turned a corner. We now have a Committee of 6 parents in place, 4 scout leaders on-board , and more than 30 kids signed up. At the end of October the Committee members, scout leaders, and myself attended the Introductory Training, which helped solidify and motive our team. I ended up as Vocal, a minor role which I was happy to take on. It has been an unexpectedly fun project!

The Boys and Scouts committee before we started the introductory training course.

In other projects I am almost finished with my Community Analysis Tool report, or CAT. I hope to be done with that this week and push it out the door. I continue to work with community leaders on an organization to bring more union to the town, which has a history of groups working independently. The result as been the formation of the Civic Union San Cristóbal Norte or Unión Cívica. We have been meeting monthly for several months now. The group still has a lot of internal strengthening left to be a sustainable project, but we seem to be on the right track.

I’m almost finished with the Junior Achievement class mentioned in the last blog. With the completion of the Junior Achievement class and my CAT I hope to have a lighter schedule for a little while once I get back from vacation with the family…that is the plan anyway.

Other important events.

The 2008 Presidential Election!

Obama won. How crazy is that?! I was able to watch the election night coverage with a large group of Peace Corps volunteers at a bar in San Jose before we started our All-Volunteer Conference (AVC).

I am no Obama nut, but it was an exciting night. As you can imagine, the Peace Corps crowd is about as far left on the American political spectrum as the U.S. military is to the right. That only made things more interesting. Even still, I found McCain’s speech, as well as Obama’s speech that followed to be very moving. With the bar dead quiet in rapt attention, it was a special moment.

All-Volunteer Conference.

We had our All-Volunteer Conference, a once a year event, from November 5-8. It was great to finally see all the 95 or so volunteers together. For some reason to me it felt like the last step in truly becoming a Peace Corps volunteer.

Sometimes the money is not in the budget for an annual AVC, and that was nearly the case this year, but our inventive Volunteer Advisory Committee was able to put together something on the cheap. By cheap, I mean to say we camped out for 3 days in the mountains north of San José. To be fair, it was a nice pre-prepared camp with tents, a chow house, meeting room, wi-fi internet, and pre-constructed tents on platforms. (Okay, so we didn’t exactly rough it.)

The meeting was basically 3 days of teambuilding, best practices exchange, program meetings, and social events. There was a Halloween party and costume contest…in which myself and two other fellow volunteers, Matthew McMillan and Clinton Glase, cleaned house! At the last minute, Matthew came up with the idea of going as Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s. We slapped sun glasses on Matt, then Clinton and I spent the rest of the night dragging Matt’s limp body around the costume/dance party. Due to Matt’s dedication as a corpse, not moving for nearly 3 hours that night, we won Most Creative and Best Group costume…2 out of the 3 events. Sadly, I have no pictures for you.

AVC also featured a talent show the final night of the meeting. Having no "talent-show” worthy skills that I could think of, I decided to just sit back and watch. A number of volunteers performed on the guitar, sang, did stand-up comedy, played the drums, acted out comedy skits, or demonstrated other abilities. Suffice it to say that I have never been in the company of such a gifted group of people. It was also a very memorable night and made me proud to be a PCV.

That is about all the major updates I have for you right now…or want to continue typing, that is. It is 2pm at the time of this writing. Time for a cafecito! If you read this and I have a few minutes, drop me a line and let me know what is going on back home…I always love to hear updates. I will come back with a full report on the family visit. Best-

I want to dedicate this blog entry to my friend Brian Gandy who recently got engaged. He is living in Augusta, GA managing an organic produce farm. Gandy (the old hippy…as he describes himself) seems to be in a good place right now and I am very happy for him. Best of luck to him and his fiancé.

I just thought you all might get a kick out of this. There is a certain skill to milking a cow, and I haven´t figured it out yet.

A day in the life

2008-09-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

Monday, September 22

5:30AM Wake up. Hit the snooze on my alarm (now my Ironman running watch).

6:00 Wake up again. Think about the hill. Reflect on the soreness in my legs. Decide running this morning is not such a good idea. Go back to sleep…without setting the alarm again.

7:00 Wake up once more…groggier than usual. I did not sleep as well as usual.

7:15 Take a shower. (cold)

7:30 Walk into the kitchen. Doña Albertina greets me with se lo pegó la covija! or in English “so the covers stuck to you this morning”. With a grunt I acknowledge this is the case.

7:45 Eat gallo pinto with an egg, tortillas, and coffee. It is a hearty meal. I wash the dishes afterwards as a good will gesture to Doña Albertina. Plus it feels good to be doing something around the house…just like the old days (i.e. pre-Peace Corps). She basically spoils me and does just about everything for me – wash my clothes, dusts my room, cooks all the food.

8:30 After brushing my teeth and cleaning up a bit, I realize the school is expecting me at 11:40AM to teach a Junior Achievement (JA) class to the 6th graders. It will be the first class and I need to review the lesson plan.

8:45 Begin reviewing the lesson plan. Decide to write my own secondary plan so I will know the material better. I review the JA suggested class plan and opt to make a few changes and additions.

10:45 Complete the lesson plan and feel about 80% comfortable with it. After gaining modest experience with teaching I have come to realize this is about as good as it gets.

11:00 Announce to Doña Albertina that I will now begin my walk to the town. She bids me good luck with a Que Dios lo acompañe. I begin the trek, 1.2 kilometers of steep hill. The sun is bearing down on me. I begin to sweat about a quarter of the way up, so begin to adjust my backpack to different sides so I don’t sweat too much, but it doesn’t work. I hate sweating when I am perfectly clean and going to work! I shout Pura vida! or Adios! to the mechanics, storekeepers, and other people living along the route that I’ve come to know over the last few months.

11:30 Arrive at the school, talk to the 6th grade teacher, and then enter the class to get organized a bit before the students get there. I am still soaked in sweat at this time.

11:45 Class begins. The kids are a little rowdy. I point out to them this is the first time I have been in there class, and that I don’t know what the rules of the class are…so would they please point them out, I ask. The kids are able to think of a couple of things, like don’t get out of your seat…and other things. The teacher, Marco, points out that the class does have rules, but the kids don’t pay any attention to them. This is not a good sign.
I inform them that I would like to institute a new rule. I have a squishy ball in my hand that I show to them. The rule is that whoever has the ball can talk and has the full attention of the class. If someone has a question, they have to raise their hand and I will then pass them the ball so we can all give the person our attention as they talk. We practice. This proves to work moderately well throughout the class.
The course is called Economía para el Éxito, or Economy for Success…or something along those lines. During the course, which consists of 6 classes of 1 hour each, the students play games and do activities to recognize what their interests our, learn the jobs / earning potentials of people with different levels of education, and practice managing a personal budget. It seems to be a good course for the students because they will soon be heading to the colegio, or high school.
The first class went pretty well and the students seem to enjoy. Marco and I make an arrangement so that I will come back each Monday for the next 5 weeks. I leave my umbrella in the classroom by accident.

1:15PM I make my way back down the hill (minus the umbrella).

1:35 Arrive back at the house. Doña Albertina heats up my lunch – rice, beans, chayote (similar to potato), plantains, and a little meat patty. I add hot sauce. We chat with the brother of Doña Albertina’s deceased husband, Naun (pronounced na-oohn), who just arrived from San Isidro farther to the south. He brings a bunch of ears of corn. This is a good sign, since it means fresh tortillas for the next couple of weeks (Corn is the third most common crop here, but won’t be harvested until the next month).

2:15 It begins to rain. I sit on the porch and watch the rain for awhile. I realize I have forgotten my umbrella at the school and curse inwardly at myself. The cover of the porch is tin. There is no sweeter sound then a light rain falling on a tin roof, and I have to fight to keep from falling asleep. I read a bit.

3:15 Olman, one of Doña Albertina’s sons, comes over to the house and we begin the walk up the hill again. Olman is a member of the junta directiva of the bank, and we are headed to the weekly meeting.

4:00 The meeting starts, or is supposed to start, but we are missing a couple of members of the group.

4:20 The meeting really starts.

6:20 After listening for a couple hours to the business of the bank – correspondence, applications for credit, other agenda items – I begin to doubt my usefulness at these meetings. But at the same time I realize the local micro-finance bank has been a good counterpart and it is good to stay in close contact with them. I inform them I will be having an informational meeting for more English classes next week, and also that I need to use the bank office for a meeting of the junta of the Boy Scouts group we are setting up. The are supportive and give me all the help I need.

7:30 After having hot tea and homemade bread, we end the meeting. I begin to head down the hill with Olman. It begins to rain. I curse myself again and get wet.

8:00 Arrive at the house, change clothes, and eat dinner. Doña Albertina is already in bed so I heat the food up.

8:30 I got to my room and start to read. This is my nightly ritual. Right now I am reading, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, sent by my Mom’s friend as a gift. He is a Columbian writer and won the Nobel Prize for literature back in 1982. At first I wished I had a copy in Spanish, but then I began reading and realized I didn’t know some of the words in English…so better to just stick to my native language. The book is about a mythical town that seems to be set somewhere in the countryside of Columbia. The story rambles and twists and turns every which way though 100 years of the towns life…it is a little convoluted and confusing, but overall pretty good.

10:00 End of the day. I turn of the light and go to sleep…hoping that I will have the will power to make it out of bed at my normal hour tomorrow. (p.s. I do)

This one goes out to Jim and Barbara Sorber, friends from the VA who are retiring. Jim and Barb - Congrats! I’m really happy for you. You will now be free to roam around the world exploring all kinds of crazy animal habitats. Come visit Costa Rica… or better yet, just join Peace Corps! :)

The 3 month mark comes...and goes

2008-09-12T12:37:00.001-07:00

Hello my friends. I realize the blog has been quiet for the last couple weeks, however a lot has happened.

The third weekend in August about 8 of us volunteers from the Central Valley region got together and did a day trip on the Pacuare River, a river very famous for its beauty. It was a really exciting day, with a lot of class 3 and 4 rapids. Unfortunately, no pics available right now as I´m still trying to get copies.

The last weekend in August all the volunteers in my program (Community Economic Development...about 15 of us) got together for our first In-Service-Training, or IST. The training last 4 full days and after being out in the sticks for 3 months, it was a real treat!

Peace Corps put us up at a very decent little hotel just outside of downtown San José. Each of the rooms had a little kitchenette, beds with thick, soft mattresses, and last but not least...all the hot water we could ask for.

I honestly have not laughed so much in a 5 day period. It was great to get together with other volunteers to catch up and share experiences from the last few months. Thankfully, everyone seemed to be in good shape mentally and physically.

The training was also much more stimulating from a content standpoint, as we focused more on trainings needed to implement projects in our communities - for example rural tourism, Junior Achievement classes, English teaching, working with women´s groups, establishing micro-finance banks, small business coaching - instead of the more general language, culture, safety, and security training that made up about 85% of our Pre-service training.

Following the 5 nights in San José, a few of us jumped off for a couple of nights to the small seaside town of Uvita, on the Southern-Central Pacific Coast. It was great to have a little bit of free time away from the long day sessions of the IST. We were also able to contact a local volunteer who was able to plug us into a whale watching tour for very cheap. So...we went one more and luckily were able to see a few humpback whales! ...something I had never seen before.

At this point you are thinking....really Blake...whitewater rafting, hotels in San José, whale-watching...what exactly are you doing down there? :)

You all will just have to trust me that the last 3 months in my site has been an extremely productive time of community integration. One in which I have started to form great relationships with numerous community leaders, gained the trust and begun working with small business owners, completed an informal English course with 30 students, begun the formation of a local Guías y Scouts troop (the Costa Rican form of the Boy Scouts), made great strides in my Spanish-speaking abilities, and finished a draft of the longest paper I´ve ever written in my life (the Community Analysis Tool)...and all en español.

In short...I´m thrilled with the strides that have been made during the last 3 months! Thanks to all of you out there who have been following along and pitched in encouragement with comments on the blog / emails / g-chats. It means a lot.

Also, thanks to a friend of my Mom´s, Candy, for sending down a great care package. Both my fellow volunteers and my host family appreciated it. Not-so-suble-message: you too can be given a shout out...send goodies! Just kidding...kind of.

What now? Mostly it is back to work for me. And thankfully now after setting a solid base for myself in my community over the past few months...I can start to partner with people to undertake some more long-term projects. More on that to come.

I´d like to leave you all with something written by a past Costa Rica PCV. This was read to us at the close of IST as inspiration...and for me it really struck home. What a blessing it is to be an American and a PCV. Hope you enjoy.
----
Words of Wisdom from the veteran volunteer.

One thing that I have come to realize after being involved in the Peace Corps Costa Rica for nearly three years now is the incredible privilege and opportunity it is to be able to simply be a Peace Corps Volunteer. I know very well that being a volunteer is not easy, an experience filled with ups and downs, hardships and challenges but at the end of the day, we as volunteers should feel fortunate to have this opportunity.

Very few countries in this world have the vision and most importantly, the luxury, of being able to financially and theoretically support a program such as Peace Corps that sends professionals oversees for two years and three months to learn a new language, learn from a new culture, obtain valuable new skills and work with communities to better the lives of those around you. How many times have I been asked by Ticos, “Is there a Peace Corps for Costa Ricans to do what you are doing here, in your country?” The unfortunate answer is no. The only way a Tico would be able to go to the states to learn English, learn from another culture and do development work with Americans is to do it all on their own; win the Visa lottery, come up with enough money to support his or herself and find an organization that would be willing to take and train someone who hardly speaks the language. O sea, not likely. We, as volunteers, don’t make any money but we don’t spend a dime either, Peace Corps foots the bill for us to live this life-changing experience, and what a luxury that is. We are fortunate enough to come from a country where we can afford to take a two-year hiatus from making money, confident that we will go back to our country and be able to find jobs and make enough money to buy a car, a house and start our families. Citizens in so many parts of the world aren’t afforded such a luxury struggling to barely make ends meet. The average citizen in the third world and developing countries isn’t thinking about leaving their country when they struggle to establish themselves in economically unstable, sometimes war-torn places.

It is important that we, as volunteers, never forget the gift that we have been given. As recently as our grandparents’ generation, Americans were fighting wars without the luxury of joining a Peacekeeping mission such is ours. Even our parents generation didn’t have it so easy, many of them being drafted into war. And there is no guarantee that our children or grandchildren will have such an opportunity. I hope it never happens but some day, American legislators – forced by budget constraints or God forbid, security issues -- might decide we no longer have the resources to spend ___ a year to send ___ Americans oversees to help others.

I would give this speech to volunteers in any country but I think it rings even more true here in Costa Rica, a country rich with human warmth, natural beauty and an intrinsic tropical energy that warms and brings a smile to the face of even the most hardened, capitalistic Gringo. It is hard to not end up feeling a little bit Tico by the time you’re done here; hard to not crave Gallo Pinto in the mornings, hard to not cheer for La Sele, get addicted to the visits to the beaches, to the cafecitos, to not feel a brotherhood with the warm and hearty Ticos. In the end – despite all the worlds problems – it all is Pura Vida!

I encourage you all to view your experience for what it is: a privilege, an opportunity, a gift. You will have lonely days, feel beaten down and maybe even wonder why you chose this program but I urge you all, instead of feeling sorry for yourself or like a martyr, to take advantage this gift you’ve been given and remember how lucky you truly are. Good luck to you all!
----
The blog entry goes out to my grandfather, who very recently had surgery to replace a hip. Gran - I´m thinking about you, buddy. I know you only have one speed normally, and that is 100% all out, but try to take it easy and get healthy. Wishing you the best. -Blake

The pilgrimage and the 15th birthday party

2008-08-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

It has been an eventful last couple of weeks.

On Friday, August 1st we set out from the house for our pilgrimage, or romeria, to Cartago. The romería is done once a year by catholics from all across the country to honor the patron saint of Costa Rica, La Virgen de Los Angeles. The trip is done on foot, and the pilgrims walk from the farthest corners of the country. The few hearty souls that begin the walk from close to the border with Panamá set out nearly a month before. Our stroll…excuse me…pilgrimage…took about 6 hours.

The group was made up of some members of my host family, Clarisa – another volunteer from a town close-by (side note: the link to her blog is on the right side of this page), and myself. We had to climb for about an hour up the hill to the Interamerican Highway, however, we finally made it and started long, slow meandering walk down the mountain to Cartago, located in la meseta central, or central plateau.

Along the way we met up with Tamara, another volunteer located in San Pablo, a town close by. Tamara was helping out at the Red Cross tents stationed along the highway. She has gotten to be good friends with the Red Cross folks after organizing some emergency planning public meetings following a violent tropical storm that passed through the region a couple of months ago and displaced people in her town.

It was good to see Tamara…who I hadn’t seen since training ended about 2 ½ months ago. Despite the fact that Clarisa and Tamara only live about 2 or 3 mountains over in the same general area, there is no public transport between our towns and so sometimes it feels like they might as well live on the other side of the country.

From the Red Cross tents we had about 12 km left. We slowly made our way into town, although admittedly stopped for a short beer break along with some of the more fiestero pilgrims.

Gracias a Dios as the Ticos would say, it did not rain on us that day, which is really a miracle considering we are well into the rainy season. Once in Cartago we hung out by the cathedral, which is the big destination for all the pilgrims. It was pretty chill around there, so we bought some food before heading back to our respective towns.

Overall the pilgrimage was a great experience, and it was great to finally catch up with Clarisa and Tamara.

The other big event that has happened since my last blog entry was the 15th birthday party of my sister from my training host family. 15th birthday parties for girls are a huge deal in Latin American…so I’ve recently learned.

This would have just been any other interesting cultural experience for me, however this time I participated as the acompañante, or date.

The weekend after the romería, I arrived back in Tarbaca the Saturday afternoon before the big party so I could help the family set up. Over the next few hours and into the night we completed a looting of desks from the local school, and managed to blow up a couple hundred pink balloons, a process that kept us up working until around midnight.

Skip to the good part!…so the next day I find myself with the birthday girl, Paola, on the other side of a big wall separating us from the rest of the party-goers. It’s finally here!...Paola’s big social debut…she is visibly nervous.We are given the sign to start our procession.

We walk out into the sunlight surrounded by about 150 guests and 15 couples especially designated to serve as accompañates to the birthday girl and her date. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Terri, or Teresita, my old host mom wipe away a tear as we move into the room. We make a lap around the big party area, all the while everyone is continuing to clap.

Finally, we make it back to the group of 15 couples. The music starts. We are the first to dance. The dance is the balz…a very slow rhythm. As we dance we have to make it around to each of the 15 couples and once we approach them Paola leans over and blows out the candle held my each of the female dates, which starts each pair dancing.

How do I play this?...was what I was thinking through the whole process. Do I smile real big as we walk around the room…or do I go with the somber, no smile look. I decided to go no-smiles…as the record (i.e. photos) will show. After all…it’s her day. Nobody came to see me strutting around smiling like an idiot. I caught some grief from my friend Marcus for the serious look…but still think it was the way to go.

After the dance….the 15 couples all gathered around the central table. A juice drink was poured in all the glasses, and we all had a toast. Then, we sat down and all stared at each other…actually… maybe that was just me doing the staring. I tried to start some conversation but nobody seemed to interested into talking to the big gringo serving as acompañante to their cousin.

The whole ceremony was pretty awkward…and funny. Hey!..that pretty much describes my whole Peace Corps experience up to the point.

The rest of the night was spent trying to procure food (unsuccesfully) from the overworked kitchen area and dancing regaton with a group of 15 year olds. Overall it was a great time…and I got to see my good friends Marcus and Kayla from training.

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

Next up is a regional volunteer meeting that has somehow devolved (or evolved…more appropriately) into a whitewater rafting trip. A week later we have IST, or In Service Training, a 5 day event in San Jose with 15 other volunteers from my program. After 3 months in the sticks…it is bound to be interesting. Will let you know how it goes.

This blog goes out to my grandparents – Mema, Gran, and Papa – all back in the great state of Kentucky, and whom I miss very much but haven’t been able to talk to in recent months. I miss you guys and am thinking about you a lot. Watch out!...I have a Skype account now..so expect a call soon.

Feeling the flow...riding the bull... (w/ shout out to DC dawgs!)

2008-07-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

All is well here in San Cristóbal Norte. A lot has happened in the past two months. I’m not even going to try to recount all of it, but will try to hit the highlights.

When I left off last blog, I believe most of my days were spent walking around in a stupor being amazed at my new surroundings. As it turns out, after the first couple of weeks I was able to move onto something a little more structured, in the form of a survey of the townspeople. Over the last two months, I’ve been able to complete the survey, as well as a number of interviews with the local leaders. All of this information is then funneled into my gigantic community diagnostic that all volunteers have to turn in after 6 months in-site.

The hill continues to be a daily trial, but I’m happy to report it has not bested me yet. In fact, I seem to be getting better at the climb.

Also on the work front, feeling the pressure from some of the local folk, I started up some informal English classes. I now have 2 classes every Saturday morning with 30 students. They are mostly high school age with some adults sprinkled in. We play games, review grammar rules, and mostly just have fun. Overall, it has been a great experience, and I have discovered I actually enjoy teaching.

Between the English classes, research for my report, and a handful of smaller side-projects…I have been staying very busy.

What else can I talk about?...recreational activities. I have only taken a couple of short pleasure trips.

The first was a 1 night trip into San José for an all-volunteer dinner about a month ago. It was the first time seeing other volunteers after about 6 weeks in our communities. We did a lot of catching up. Dinner was followed by dancing late night, and then a handful of us crashed with a friend who works at the embassy (DC connection). It was interesting to go from our small town life to staying at the plush two-story condo of a U.S. diplomat…quite a change. It was a great night, although it passed too quickly.

The second trip was the next weekend when a group of us met up on the Atlantic side in the small beach town of Cahuita. There were about 10 of us from our training group that met up in a small hotel across from the beach. For the next two days we mostly sat on the beach and told stories over beers. This trip also passed too quickly, and I soon found myself chugging back up the hill numerous times each day.

Cahuita pic...with a straggler from Wisconsin (middle) we picked up for the day.
If these brief breaks are any preview of what future trips will be like with fellow volunteers, I can already tell we are in for some good times.

Other updates...we lost another volunteer from our program due to a family medical issue. The guy was part of one of our two married couples. He and his wife had to leave due to an ailment of her mom. It sucked to see them leave under those circumstances…and with them being such good friends. That brings our total number of volunteers in my program to 15, minus 3 from the 18 we started with.

What is life where I am at like in terms of comfort? Fortunately for me it is fine here. Because we are higher up here in the mountains, it is not very hot and I do not have to worry about all the bugs which bring illnesses like malaria and dengue fever to other parts of the country. Also, because the terrain is so broken, we don’t have to worry about flooding…just landslides.

From the bits of news I pick up, it seems like the food crisis is really taking its toll on some of the poorer countries in the world. The food crisis does not put Costa Ricans at any health risk, but it does take its toll on farmers and other low income families who feel the price increase. The increases in the costs of fertilizers are also taking a toll on the farmers. It really cuts into the farmers profit margins here, and the high prices of fertilizers is a common complaint.

Things are definitely not as bad as in other places. Peace Corps has its own small internal publication called The Peace Corps Times. They put out a special issue recently focused on the food crisis. It talked about how some volunteers, such as in Africa and other hard hit places, might soon feel the pressure to start skipping meals out of the desire to help others in the village. Also, one article from a volunteer talked about how his small African village has turned into a ghost town because the farming work normally done in the village is not viable now due to the high transportation costs.

It is terrible to think there are still millions of people out there trying to get by from one day to the next. I will get off my soapbox now…but just couldn’t help to comment in case any of you were wondering about how the higher prices affected life in my town.

Other happenings…I had my 25th birthday a couple of weeks ago! Thanks to all who dropped me a line. To the rest of you…you are rotten friends! Ha ha…jus’ kiddin.

Doña Albertina and the rest of the family threw me a party. They cooked a bunch of food and made a cake. After eating…everyone sat around telling jokes for hours…most of which I did not get. Truly, I think understanding jokes is of the last things to come to someone learning a language. Either way, it was a great night.

There are a couple of upcoming events on my end that should be pretty interesting. On Friday this week is la romería, or pilgrimage, to Cartago. This is a national religious tradition. People from all across the country walk for days in the heat and rain to reach the cathedral for el dia de la Patrona. I am walking with the family here. The trip from San Cristobal Norte is only about 5 or 6 hours on foot, and we will be taking off Friday at 1pm. I will do my best to come back with a recap.

Also, the daughter of my old host family in Tarbaca is having her quinceañera, or fifteenth birthday, on Aug 10th. Fifteenth birthdays are a big deal here in Costa Rica. The daughter, Paola, doesn’t have a boyfriend or too many guy friends…so yours truly has been picked as her date! I’m happy to oblige. Seems like a great excuse to learn a couple more dances. Will try to report back on this as well.

This blog entry goes out to my friends on the DC dawgs for pulling off an awesome softball season. I wish you guys the best of luck with flag football coming. I definitely miss hanging out…keep representing the dawgs well!

First Week in San Cristóbal Norte

2008-05-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

Now that I am in my site, it seems I will have a little more time to reflect on this crazy experience.

So what does a Peace Corps volunteer do during the first week at his or her site?...you might be wondering. In my experience, mostly just walk around down and be completely stupefied by the thought that this strange new place is going to be my home for the next two years. From what I’ve heard from past and current volunteers, this is pretty common.

Actually, after arriving late Sunday afternoon, I woke up Monday morning early for a run to brush off the cobwebs and try to get some of those first day jitters out of the way. Doña Albertina’s house (my home) is located about 1 kilometer outside of town, and that 1 km of road is what the Ticos like to call pura cuesta, or pure slope.

They don’t mess around here in Costa Rica when it comes to hills. I decided to give myself a break and turn right, heading down the hill as a warm up. Unfortunately, that strategy only worked for around a half a kilometer when I came upon the cemetery and realized I’d hit the town limits. So I did what any good volunteer would do, and turned my butt around to face this monster hill that is probably to become either my worst enemy or best friend during my time here.

That moment starting up the bottom of the hill, nay…mountain, was very apt considering I was feeling pretty small at that point in time anyway, it being Day 1 of my two year experience. Between the 40 degree grade and 1800 meters in altitude, I was sucking wind pretty quickly. Slowly but surely I made my way to the top of the ridge and into the town center. After some my explorations running around the town, I made my back to the house and proceeded to attack the day.

That run actually succeeded in getting some of my jitters out of the way and so has become just about a daily ritual. I slog my way up to the top, all the while yelling A Dios! to any passer-byers on the road, mostly moms walking their kids to school. (A Dios is actually a salutation here in Costa Rica. It took me some time and quite a lot of confusion before I figured that out too.) They usually give me a weird look, say A Dios back, and we both have a good laugh in passing. It’s working out pretty well as a community entry technique, to break out a nerdy PC technical term on you.

Interestingly, my living situation here in San Cristóbal Norte is actually better here than it was in Tarbaca, the training site. Here in SCN I have my own larger room, a bigger bed, and no kids living in the house. Doña Albertina is also a heck of a good cook. The house is more of a farm, with cows, chickens, and all that jazz. It’s pretty interesting having all these animals around, and that will no doubt have to be the subject of another blog. As usual...hot water continues to be elusive.

I say it is interesting that my living situation is better because everything we’ve been told up to this point has led us (volunteers) to believe our situation was to be much worse following training. Two-thirds of Ticos live in the Meseta Central, or central plateau, part of the country. These folks are generally better off and reap the benefits of better infrastructure. The remaining third outside of this central area are usually poorer, more removed, and the folks are left to fend for themselves. This is usually where you will find the Peace Corps volunteers operating. My town is on the edge, but still inside of the Meseta Central, and hence better off.

Costa Rica’s more developed characteristics actually had some of my fellow volunteers worried they would not be getting the FULL Peace Corps experience. To be honest, I did not share their concern.

This worry led one friend in my program to exclaim to our program coordinator “Give me the hardest shit you got!” during our 1-on-1 interviews prior to site assignment. How bout that.

He is now happily serving out his term…errr…service in Los Angeles de Páramo de San Isidro. Its about a 2 hour drive from the nearest small city, which is saying something in a country the size of West Virginia. They don’t have a phone at his site. If you want to get in touch with anyone there, you have to call the nearest town a few kilometers away. They will then get on a 4-wheeler and make their way down the road to let the person know someone is waiting on the line in the next town over.

I would feel sorry for him, but I know he is tickled pink and loves to recount this aspect of his living situation to his friends back in the states. You probably have to know the guy to fully appreciate this.

Despite the awkward communication situation, it is doubtful that even he is suffering any extreme discomforts. (Google the UN Development Index and you should see Costa Rica just scores well enough to be considered a “developed” country) No, Peace Corps life in Costa Rica is not going to be like a volunteers experience in Malawi or Chad. Either way, two years living and working alone in a foreign community is exactly that.

To be fair, I actually got a lot more accomplished this week than simply walking around in a daze. I started researching the history of town, being one of the components of my CAT (that is the 30 something page report mentioned previously), and this being one of the subjects I find interesting. Doña Albertina’s family was able to refer me to a few of the local history buffs. Several interviews later, I’ve got a couple pages of notes, a written manuscript, and a keepsake book written in honor of the 50th anniversary of the construction of the church.

There is a lot of good material among these things. The problem is not the amount of information. The problem is that everyone seems to have a different version of the history, and it somehow has to be parsed out in a way that is fully truthful and takes into account the points of these locals. I’m going to have to either get these three or four folks in a room together to duke it out, or just hold off and print the darn thing later and catch what flak comes…I’m definitely leaning towards the latter.

Actually, looking back, it was an extremely successful week. Besides the history research, I met with the Director of the local school, Don Esteban. We had a good talk. He was completely open to me undertaking projects in the school and was nice enough to give me a short introduction to the kids in each of the classrooms.

This may not sound like a big deal, but its common PC knowledge that when you are in a community, if the kids know you – EVERYONE knows you. Kids do a lot of talking. They just have to run home a say “Mom, Dad, there is a new gringo in town. I can’t pronounce his name and he’s really tall.” Then everyone will know who you are. Kids are a major gateway to the community.

Another first week highlight was the Sunday mass. This week they had a special celebration for Corpus Christi. Their tradition here is to put flowers, colored sand, sawdust from different trees, and Cypress branches to form shapes on the sidewalks using molds. They had flowers throughout the downtown…really very beautiful.

I got up early to pitch in with that and the next thing I know they had roped me into being part of a representacíon. A representation is like a small scene. The Catholic tradition is to lead a procession through the town and stop at these different themed representations to say a few words about the particular topic.

The them of our representation was Diversity. They sat me down at this table with a dozen other folks – young, old, single, married, handicapped, etc. I was to represent the Non-Costa Rican peoples. That’s right, yours truly was tapped to represent the some 6 billion other people on this planet.

The procession came around (i.e. half the town), we stood up at the table, the padre did his thing, blessed us, and the gaggle moved on down the street. It was a stoic performance by all the participants. We congratulated ourselves on a job well done and joined the masses.

However the fun was not over for me. At the end of the service, during the community announcements, one of Doña Albertina’s sons, Olman, got up to the pulpit and introduced me to the congregation. He said a few words and had me stand up so everyone could get a good gander. The padre even through in a few words of encouragement. I was very grateful to them both for their words. It was a packed house! Several hundred people, or about half the town, was probably there that day. They saved me days of awkwardness with this brief introduction to the community.

Between jogging through the town screaming at the locals, the introductions at the school and the church – this has been a pretty productive week in the PR arena. Regardless, it is week 1 of the two year experience and there is plenty of pura cuesta ahead.

Here is a link to some of our swearing in pictures. Hope this works for you all:

http://picasaweb.google.com/mesa802/PCSwearingCeremony?authkey=uYsTTOjbMcE

Released into the Wild

2008-05-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Man…when I created this thing I thought it would be something I could stay on top of and keep updated, but it just hasn’t happened so far. Oh well, I hope it suffices as a short update to say that I am now done with training and am living in my work site – San Cristóbal Norte – a small town about 1 hour south of San Jose just off the Interamericana Sur Highway. The will be my home for the next two years.

Last week we had our Swearing-In at the Ambassador’s residence, which was pretty cool. We are in between Ambassadors right now but the folks at the embassy were nice enough to let us use the house. It was a lot of fun, we were all presented with certificates by our country director and a representative from the embassy. It’s nice to not be a trainee anymore!

After a night of partying in San Jose, we (the volunteers) all parted ways with each other as well as our training host families, and headed to our sites. From here, life is slowing down a lot.

San Cristóbal Norte is a small agricultural community of about 900 people located roughly 1800 meters up in the mountains of the Cordillera Central south of Cartago. Coffee country. It’s absolutely beautiful. I’ll try to get some picks up soon so you all can get an idea once I can find a better connection.

For the next 3-6 months my life will basically consist of living like a Tico, and talking to the locals and associations in my town. All of this is in order to develop a 30-something page report called a Community Analysis Tool (CAT).

Each volunteer has a counterpart organization within the community that is supposed to serve as their sponsor and home base within the community. My counterpart is the San Cristóbal Norte communal micro-lending bank, or ECC SACRIN for short. The bank began about 12 years ago with about $200 dollars in capital and 20 associates. Over time and through steady invest by community members, today the bank has roughly $120,000 in lending capital and 60 associates. All of this done with capital raised from within the community. I’m not sure how it all works yet, but it seems to be running pretty smoothly for them.

So where do I fit into all of this? The idea is the bank will serve as my base from within the community, and from there I can reach out to provide assistance as necessary to the various micro-entrepeneurs connected with the bank.

As with most things Peace Corps, the situation is very loosy-goosy, and will most likely depend on what I and the bank make of it. Either way, it seems like a pretty cool way to start off, and I will get to learn more about the micro-lending environment from one of the leading organizations in the country.

Other projects I will probably be getting into, aside from micro-enterprise collaboration, are things like teaching English, rural tourism, teaching Junior Achievement, and IT courses.

As for the living situation, my new home is in the house of Doña Albertina. She is a 70 year lady whose husband died a couple of years ago. Although she lives alone, the entire extended family lives in 4 of the neighboring houses in what makes up a little family compound. She is very nice, has a good sense of humor, and is a good cook (that’s important). I think we are going to get along just fine.

That is about all I can think to say right now. I hope that gives you some insight into my world. I really want to get some pictures posted soon so you all can get a better idea of what the town looks like.

This blog entry goes out to my friends and co-workers at the VA. Some of them, but not all, are pictured here. And no, this is not a police line up. I really appreciated there support when I decided to commit to Peace Corps, so this one goes out to them.

(If anyone shown here has a problem with there pictures being slapped on a website for the whole world to see, please let know and I will remove this from the site…maybe. No seriously, just let me know)

The Bulldawg has landed! (okay, about 6 weeks ago...)

2008-04-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

Pictures to the right under the "Tarbaca" slideshow.

The last month has been pretty busy. I know its taken me awhile to get something posted, but the internet access is not so great. Hopefully once training is over I’ll be able to post things more regularly.

I’m living with a family in a small town called Tarbaca in the mountains to the south of San Jose. Their are three other volunteers living with other families here in the same town. This is our training community for the next six weeks or so.

During the week we usually spend at least 2-3 days in language classes all day. The other days we are meeting with our full training group in San Jose or meeting with local officials here in the community as part of our training projects – principals of the local schools, chair of the development association, owners of businesses, and other community organizations. Our training coordinators keep us pretty busy.

On the weekends I and the other three volunteer trainees usually hang out with our families here in Tarbaca. The families we live with, as well as the other three volunteers, are all buena gente (good people).

My training family is made up of the parents (Pablo and Teresita) and their three kids (Paola, Pablo, and Sharon). There ages are 14, 13, and 7, respectively. The dad works at the local telecommunications station as a security guard, but also grows and sells tomatoes and some other vegetables on the side. Between the two jobs he probably works at least 60 hours a week.

The last two weekends on Saturday we have gone to la feria, which is basically the local farmers market, to sell his tomatoes. We get up EARLY (think 3:30am) to load up the tomatoes in the truck, drive them to market, and get set up. These are long days but it is a hell of a lot of fun! Plus I get to meet plenty of locals through Pablo and brush up on the language skills.

The other three volunteers in my training community are great people. Two of them, Marcus and Kayla, live about 10 meters (that’s right folks, we are using meters now, part of the integration process) from my house. The families are all related. Marcus lives with Teresita’s father and Kayla with her sister and family. The other volunteer, Brittany, lives about a kilometer away with another family. We all still hang out with Brittany all the time though.

Marcus is from Arizona and went to UConn and then Alabama, where he ran track at both schools. He has a great sense of humor and spends about all day laughing. He greets just about any person on the streets with a booming “Como le va!” or “Pura vida!” He generally spreads joy and good humor wherever he goes. You can’t miss Marcus in Tarbaca.

Kayla grew up in Roswell, GA, where we were only a few miles from each during high school (but never met prior to Peace Corps). Kayla went to Valdosta state, where she studied Business and Spanish. In total I think she spent about a year and a half in Spain. About six months in study abroad, and a year following school teaching English in Malaga. Kayla enjoys watching movies and shaking her booty to some salsa music.

Brittany is from Florida (Tampa Bay area) but spent a lot of time in Montreal where she went to school. She studied philosophy in school and served as editor-and-chief (and founder) of a bilingual publication produced by philosophy students at Canadian universities. Brittany enjoys selling eggs at la feria for Marcus’s dad and confounding all the Costa Ricans by responding “I’m agnostic” to questions regarding her religion. A long explanation usually ensues.

These are the three people I spend the vast majority of my time with at the moment. We get along great and have a lot of fun. Together we are el equipo!

Tarbaca is a sleepy little town. There is no internet café or access to daily newspapers (which always kills me). Since our family is kind of campo (country), we seem to wake up early and go to bed early. Any time not in class or on training projects is spent with our families. We are generally the center of attraction at home. Between my house and Kayla’s, there are six kids in our little barrio, and they have a lot of energy.

While I’m not usually that crazy about kids, these kids are great – very happy-go-lucky, not spoiled, and overall good-natured. It’s been a lot of fun to hang out with them.

How do you live as a volunteer? Do you get paid? Some of you have asked me this. For the entire time we are in training, or about 12 weeks, each volunteer receives Э130,000 colones!!!...or about $260.

That may seem like an incredibly small amount of money, but it seems to be working out just fine (surprisingly). This money does not include the money given to our host families for lodging…which is about Э80,000 colones a month!!!....or about $160.

Note: From now on all amounts in colones will be followed by three exclamation marks, followed shortly by … and then the amount in U.S. dollars. Please see the two previous examples. This is done for dramatic effect.

Once we becomes volunteers we will be paid more, but not much more, and we have to negotiate our own rent in the sites.

What else can I say? In a few words – I eat rice and beans with every meal, the roads are terrible, and the showers are cold. That is my life in a nutshell. No great hardships right now…just a few quirky things to make life interesting.

As for work, there are roughly 50 or so volunteers here in training in my group. 18 volunteer trainees are in my work project – Community Economic Development. I will get into the specifics of my work project with a later blog. Basically it involves lending a hand to small business in communities, with emphasis on women and youth.

In about 2 weeks I will be assigned my work site. This is a big deal! It is where I will be living for the next two years. It is pretty exciting. I will let you all know what happens.

This is my world for now and for the next six weeks or so. I know it took me awhile to get a blog entry up. I had to go through a process with Peace Corps to make sure this conformed to their policies (note the disclaimer). Hope to have more for you soon and hope you all are doing well wherever you are. I posted some pictures to the right under the "Tarbaca" slide show. Hope you enjoy.

This blog is dedicated to my Mom who recently had a birthday. Happy birthday, Madre.

Bienvenido! Welcome!

2008-02-18T21:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the inaugural blog of my Peace Corps Costa Rican adventure. I have no idea what I’m doing, so let’s just roll with it.

Two years! Actually it is a little more than two year commitment. Man, that is a long time. I have a feeling it’s going to creep by in some periods and other times will fly by and I will be wishing I had it back.

Based on preliminary research of Costa Rica, I’m going to do development work in what looks to be a fairly developed country. Stable democracy since 1949. Income per capita around $11,000. Decent health care. Increasingly diversified economy. Not to mention it is absolutely beautiful with what is reputed to be a very hospitable people with a warm culture.

How did this happen? How did I land this? I have no idea, but some things aren’t worth looking into too much. Either way, with about 20% of the population living below the nationally-established poverty line, they still have a ways to go.

"Pura vida" is the motto of Costa Ricans, hence the title of the blog. In most parts of the world people say hello or goodbye - in Costa Rica they simply say "pura vida", or pure life. I'm not sure what la pura vida is right now, but I plan to find out.

My hope for this blog is it will be somewhere you can check-in every once in a while, verify that I am in fact, still alive, and also learn a little bit about Costa Ricans, the country, and the life of a Peace Corps volunteer along the way. Every blog I plan to dedicate to someone out there. This is an idea I picked up from another Peace Corps Volunteer's (PCV) blog. It seems like fun. Also, I’ll try to keep it relatively unprocessed as much as possible…more stream of consciousness than painstaking editing. Holla Stu!...a.k.a. the kid on the couch.

No prediction is ventured at this time regarding how often posts will be made. I have a feeling there will be long lulls in communication as the pains of culture shock set in…followed by rapid fire posts as I get more acclimated - the coffee starts tasting good again, the sun is shining, birds are chirping, etc.

I almost forgot…please post comments!

Here’s the general schedule for the coming weeks:

Feb 11-17

Hang out with friends. Party like a rock star. Enjoy all things American.

Feb18-24

Downsize my life. Anyone need furniture? Clothes? What about a car?

Feb 25, 26

Orientation in DC.

Feb 27 Fly to CR. Feb 28 and Onward

Three months of training, then I truthfully have little to no idea.

This first blog is dedicated to my bro! With an absolute lack of savviness (not sure if that is a word, but it should be) for all things technological, he will most likely never see this and receive no gratification from this dubious honor.

This is truly the most flattering picture I can find of him. Taken after mysteriously being hit with a falling rock while on a hike in Canada, he has not been quite the same since. Matt – wherever you are climbing in some Southeast Asian land – I love you brody!