Peter Bosch

Sarah: As I mentioned back in October, we have a volunteer worker here with us for 6 months at QERC. Peter Bosch is a recent graduate of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. While Peter graduated with a Spanish degree, he also took all of the pre-requisites for medical school and has already been accepted into medical school at the University of Michigan for the fall of 2009. During his year off, Peter was looking for an opportunity to serve in Latin America with a focus on international and sustainable development. With a little encouragement from a professor at Calvin who has a long history at QERC, Peter approached SNU with the idea of volunteering here for about 6 months.

As part of his time here, Peter is developing his own project that he can develop and implement during his time. With many options on the table, Peter has chosen to work in the QERC Restoration Nursery to further develop it and make it available to the community. He has already spent many hours identifying plants that would be good additions to the nursery. Peter is concentrating on plants that fall into 4 categories: erosion control, ornamental, reforestation, and those that produce fruits that quetzals and other birds eat. All plants are native to this valley and should be appealing to the community for many reasons.

A second part of Peter’s project will be making the nursery better known throughout the community and available for them to take. He will create a flyer to pass out to the 130-150 people who live here and explain what types of plants are available to them and the benefits they have. Peter will also serve as a consultant to the community members who want to take advantage of these free plants.

Besides working on his own project, Peter is giving 15-20 hours a week of his time to helping with the general work around QERC. David has taken advantage of the extra hands and together the two of them have done a lot of maintenance that was much needed. Peter has also been a big help in getting things ready and organized for the semester program to begin, and we look forward to his help as the program gets underway in the beginning of January. In addition, Peter has taken on the task of teaching English to members of the community twice a week. It’s great to see extra activity going on here and people doing good things as representatives of QERC.

*Disclaimer: There are lots of pictures on this entry so I loaded them as the small size. To view them larger, click on them!

Sarah: David and I have been here almost 2 ½ years now and we had never taken a trip by ourselves anywhere in Costa Rica until about 2 weeks ago. This is due to the large amount of guests we’ve had down here, and the excuse to show off a bit of Costa Rica to family and friends who are visiting. There’s never been a real reason that we’ve felt we’ve needed to take a trip by ourselves, since we’ve been able to see quite a bit of this country with other people. Nor do we feel like we need a getaway, since we live in a very relaxed environment, high up in the paradisical cloud forest. However, upon evaluating our time here, we decided there were a couple places we’d like to make sure we visited while we had an opportunity to do so, before our time becomes overwhelmingly busy with students and groups and activities and lots of LIFE going on here at QERC.

So two weeks ago we set out on our own adventure. First stop: Ostional. Now Ostional is actually a place we’ve been to before, twice for me and three times for David. It is a place where we take the students on one of their traveling courses to study sea turtles, since it is a beach where olive ridley sea turtles commonly nest. Ostional also happens to be one of 8 or 9 beaches in the world where a phenomenon called an arribada takes place. It’s a fairly recent phenomenon, something that’s developed within the last 100 years or so. What it is, is a specific time each month according to the lunar cycle where hundreds of thousands of olive ridleys decide to lay their eggs all at the same time. Complete and utter chaos. There are theories as to why they come ashore in such great numbers at the same time, but nothing proven.

Because there are thousands laying their eggs all at once, they practically walk on top of each other as they make their way to and from the ocean. Those that get there first aren’t exactly the lucky ones – they are the ones that get their nests dug up by the next few hundred turtles that decide to lay their eggs in approximately the same spot. For this reason, the community within Ostional is allowed to collect all eggs within the first 36 hours of an arribada – to use for eating, selling, however they want. Those eggs in particular have almost no chance of survival, so harvesting the eggs is actually permitted. It’s actually the only place in the world where it IS permitted.

While an arribada is supposed to happen each month, the fall months are the busiest with the highest number of turtles coming up on the beach. Living so close (relatively) to this phenomenon, we decided we wanted to make sure to see an arribada while here in Costa Rica. David began calling the ranger station as soon as we thought it was about time for the November arribada to happen, and as soon as they said that it was in process, we packed our bags and headed north. We arrived after the mad rush of the first few days, after the community had gotten their share of eggs, but still in time to see this incredible event take place.

We were only in Ostional one night, so once we got there and had some dinner, we headed for the beach. The sea turtles typically start coming up on the beach to lay their eggs around 9:00pm, so around 8:00 or so we started walking on the beach. Within minutes we had counted 10 turtles – walking carefully, and using only our red lights so as not to disturb their nesting. Soon we heard a large rattling noise, which sounded larger than an olive ridley sea turtle, so I went over to check it out. Turns out it was a green sea turtle, which is about twice the size of an olive ridley, that had accidentally knocked into a garbage can and was making noise as it was frantically trying to turn itself around. We watched her for a while, and then continued on our trek. The closer to 9:00 it got, the more turtles we were seeing emerge from the water. We decided to call it a night around 9:30, and had seen around 100 at that point.

The next morning was the ultimate prize. We had called it an early night in order to get up before dawn and head back to the beach, with hopes of seeing a few turtles in the daylight. We were in for a surprise as we made our way down to the main beach and saw hundreds and hundreds of sea turtles spread out across the sand! We figure there had to be around 1,000 we saw, many of them heading back out to the ocean, but still many coming up on land. It was incredible to see the entire process in daylight of turtles coming from the ocean, digging a hole, laying their eggs, covering up their nests, and returning back to the ocean. We even saw two babies, which made the entire process feel complete! I never knew I enjoyed sea turtles so much, but that experience had to be one of my favorites in all of the time we’ve been here.

After a couple of hours of watching the turtles, we packed up our bags and headed a little more north, to Playa Grande. On our way there, we decided to take the road-less-traveled that went over a mountain range. The views were breathtaking, and we had a couple of encounters we wouldn’t have had on more traveled roads. David stopped at one point because he saw an enormous boa constrictor in front of the car. Naturally, David got out and got close enough to it to take some pictures, and since the snake was about 7 feet long, he went to the tail end of it and touched it. While he was crouched down snapping photos, an unusual looking animal started darting down the road right toward him. Lo and behold, a kinkajou was galloping down the middle of the road and veered off toward a stream on the side of the road right before he got to David.

Finally, we made it to Play Grande. Our purpose for going to that beach was two-fold. One, it’s a good beach to potentially see leatherback sea turtles. We’d already seen one leatherback about a year and a half ago on the Caribbean coast, but thought we’d try our luck at seeing another one. Two, we have a friend named Randall who works for the national park there. He used to work here in the valley, and we had become good friends with him before he moved away and took a new job. He still comes to visit and do some work with plants in our valley, so we took the opportunity to visit him while we were in the area.

Randall showed us around the different beaches within the national park, and we had a good time catching up with him. The following morning the three of us rented canoes and went out in the estuaries for a few hours in search of new birds for David. And also because we like exploring mangrove systems.

One of our nights in Playa Grande we signed up for a leatherback tour. The tours are run differently there, because the leatherbacks are so endangered. They have guides and volunteers who walk the beach every night looking for leatherbacks, and once one is found, the on-site guide is notified and he can take 30 people out to look at the turtle. If another turtle is found, the next 30 people can go out looking at that turtle. Unfortunately, no turtles came out to nest the night we had signed up for a tour, so we were unable to see a leatherback on this trip. However, it was great to be up in the Guanacaste area of the country, visit Randall, and explore the mangroves in canoes.

Our 3^rd stop was to Palo Verde National Park, a dry forest and wetland ecosystem. Here we went in search of more birds for David, and also to explore a new area of the country we’d never experienced before. The land was beautiful, and very different than anything I’ve seen in Costa Rica. Right around dusk we sat at the end of a long boardwalk overlooking some marshy areas. There were birds everywhere! We also saw one of the most beautiful sunsets we’ve ever seen.

The next morning we went on a guided hike with a local biologist, who also happened to be a bird-enthusiast. He took us on a trail that ended up on a large rock, high up, that overlooked the whole valley. It was a beautiful view. One of the neatest things we saw up there were 2 pairs of scarlet macaws fly by, almost at eye-level. After the rock, our guide took us down a road in search of the elusive jabiru, the largest stork in the world that stands about 5 feet tall. We spent a long time looking for it, with no such luck. Finally David and I went back for lunch, and packed up our things to head back into San Jose. On our drive out of the national park, David suddenly stopped the car and off in the distance we saw the jabiru standing tall. It was so large that we entered into a discussion of whether or not it could eat our head if we were close enough to it. Pretty cool bird.

We arrived in San Jose just in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with some good friends of ours, Trevor and Laura, and a mix of other friends and new friends. We all gathered up at Trevor and Laura’s house, went around and said what we were thankful for, and enjoyed a feast of food including chicken (turkeys are WAY too expensive here!), mashed potatoes and gravy, stuffing, green bean casserole, roles, and pies. It truly felt like Thanksgiving, and we appreciated being able to celebrate with friends. After Thanksgiving, Trevor and Laura joined us out at QERC for a night along with Laura’s mom and her friend, in order to show them the cloud forest. We had a nice relaxing evening and a good walk in beautiful weather the next morning before they headed back into San Jose.

In Search of Local Coffee

David: Costa Rica is well known throughout the world for the excellent quality of the coffee beans that they grow. The seed inside a native berry from the highlands of Ethopia discovered in the 9th century has become one of the most popular beverages in the world. Here in Costa Rica Coffea arabica has historically been the number one export.

QERC is located just a little too high in elevation to be suitable for coffee farming but a little lower altitude in this region is one of the best places on earth for growing a high quality bean. Awhile back Sarah and I thought it would be interesting to find the coffee farm in the closest proximity to QERC in an attempt to buy coffee from the most local farmer possible. That search led us to Albergue Armonia Ambiental.

Albergue Armonia Ambiental is located in the small agricutural community of La Piedra, which is about ten minutes past the town of Providencia. If the Talamanca Mountain Range, which we live in, is the spine of southern Costa Rica, then all of the valleys that run off of the spine created by different watersheds are the dips between all the rips. Providencia is simply after the rib just northwest of the upper Savegre river valley. As the crow flies the town is actually pretty close but there are no roads that go directly there. To get there from QERC we drive 30 minutes out of our valley, 1 mile north on the highway, and then 45 minutes down into the adjacent valley. The drive is beautiful but the road isn't always in good shape. This last trip down, after significant damage from a heavy rainy season, we were confronted with option A, a bridge in very bad shape, or a option B, a swift running creek. The creek wasn't too bad so we chose the creek.

In English, Albergue Armonia Ambiental would translate into something like Harmonious and Environmental Mountain Lodge. It really isn't a mountain lodge as much as it is a working organic family farm that offers educational experiences for individual and student groups. On our recent visit we were impressed more than ever with how hospitable and generous this family of four is. Orlando and Noire and their two children Nelson and Dailey run their subsistent organic farm to produce 32 fruits, vegetables, and grains.

What they are doing on their farm, and combined with an amazingly beautiful location, makes an experience at their albergue a great teaching tool for student groups. In their remote valley of the Costa Rican highlands they are choosing a sustainable approach to farming because of their desire to protect the health of the land that they live on. In the meantime they live extremely active, healthy, and fulfilling lives while working on the land and being stewards of the environement.

As was started by a group of students from NNU this last March, led by Dr. John Cossell, QERC will continue to promote this family farm as a learning tool for student groups visiting our location. Albergue Armonia Ambiental is within hiking distance from QERC and therefore can be made into a very interesting 3 day hiking trip fully accomplished by burning a little unwanted body fat and not fossil fuels. Groups can leave QERC and hike about four hours while dropping 2,000 ft elevation before arriving at the farm. It is a gorgeous hike that follows the Savegre River and showcases a change in forest and biodiverisity. Groups will then spend 2 nights at the farm to take part in a complete coffee growing, harvesting, drying, grinding, and packaging demonstration. A similiar demonstration for sugar production also is made. Students get their hands dirty while learning what it takes to run an organic farm but they also get to enjoy the beauties of a remote location and the simplicity of the campesino (small farmer) life in Costa Rica.

Needless to say, Sarah and I are really excited about the expereience this will be for QERC semester students and other groups that choose to have an adventure like this. Our semester students will be visiting the albergue in April and a group from Point Loma Nazarene University will be taking a similiar hiking trip there in May. To top it all off, we found the freshest and most local coffee to serve at QERC while supporting a small organic farm who's caretakers have hearts made of pure generosity.

And for your viewing pleasure we added a photo of a quetzal that Sarah recently took. It would be a shame not to have a certain quota of quetzal pictures in our blog so hopefully this will help us meet that.

October showers

Sarah: We don’t have any pictures to share this time, but I figured I’d give a quick update over the happenings of QERC because we’ve been quite busy since we’ve been back.

Starting this week, we are going to have an intern staying with us for the next 6 months. His name is Peter and he is a graduate of Calvin College. While Peter is here with us, he is going to be dedicating 15-20 hours a week to work with us at QERC, developing his own project within the community, and having an RA-type role within our semester program. Peter arrived right after we returned to Costa Rica, and has been traveling around the country with some friends before coming to stay for good at QERC. We were able to meet him briefly as he stopped by here to drop off some of his belongings, and we are excited about the possibilities this internship position.

We also had another visitor last week, a professor from Eastern University who is a long-time friend of Leo Finkenbinder. He is in Costa Rica for a conference and was able to come early and visit the Latin American Studies Program and spend a few days with us at QERC. He has a lot of connections with environmental education groups, and we love being able to have more contacts for potential groups to stay at QERC in the future!

And this weekend we had a full house. It was fall break for LASP, so 19 students and an intern decided to come to QERC for a few days. As they had just returned from an intense trip to Nicaragua, they found themselves enjoying the relaxed pace of life here in the valley. They did lots of exploring, hiking, and relaxing while playing games and watching movies together. We’ve definitely enjoyed the activity at QERC since we’ve been back, especially since this time of year can often be a slow time with not many people around.

to the U.S. and back

Sarah: We apologize for our absence from this blog, but there has been a good reason for it – we weren’t here in Costa Rica for most of that time! We recently returned from a 7-week trip to the US, and what a joy it was to drive into the valley and arrive at our home once again. But first, a recap of our time in the States:

This trip included 11 plane rides, 12 different states, 6 college campuses, and a visit with family members and many friends – from high school, college, Latin American Studies Program, QERC students, California work, church, etc. Exhausting, but well worth it.

We began our adventure in Urbandale, Iowa to visit my family and some good friends back home. During the course of our two weeks there we saw my youngest sister Rachel play volleyball, helped my other younger sister Katie move out to her own apartment, visited family down in Pella, and took a 4-day trip to Colorado with my parents. Though it’s hard living in another country because we’re so far away from family and friends, it’s great to have a decent chunk of time to feel like we can truly be with them. It was a special treat to visit Colorado – we went to Rocky Mountain National Park and stayed at the Y-Camp, which is where we used to stay every summer while I was growing up. We were also there for the beginning of the bugling season, so we were fortunate to see a few males fighting with each other and calling out in order to attract the females. Naturally, it’s our time with our families that seem to go by the fastest, so it was hard for me to say goodbye at the end of the two weeks there.
Our next leg of the trip was to visit Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma, to help plan our semester program and speak in classes to recruit students to be a part of that program. We were on campus for almost a week and were busy during the day with meetings and speaking engagements. Because we were staying on campus, our evenings were kept occupied by our former students who had already spent a semester with us at QERC. It was great to reunite with them, play games, and share a lot of laughter.

Part of our trip to the States was a recruiting trip for other Nazarene universities, because this year for the first time we are opening up our program to the other biology departments in the Nazarene schools. Once we were well-equipped with information and schedules from SNU, we traveled out to Northwest Nazarene University. We spent about 2 ½ days on campus in meetings and speaking to classes about our program, and walked away feeling extremely positive about what their involvement with QERC will be like in the future, beginning even this spring. NNU is also David’s alma mater, so it was great for him to be back on campus, reminiscing and visiting people both on campus and around the area he hasn’t seen in years.

From NNU we traveled over to Spokane, Washington to spend the next couple of weeks with David’s family and some friends who live around the area. We spent a good amount of time both at his parents’ house with his younger sister Jenna, and also at his older sister Jordan and husband Rusty’s house with their kids. A real treat was spending lots of time with our niece Gracelyn and nephew Gabriel. They have grown up and changed so much in the past year, and though it’s always hard not to be a part of their early lives, it was nice that it didn’t take long at all for them to warm up to us! We also got to meet our newest nephew, Benjamin, who was only 2 weeks old when we arrived. While in Spokane we took a 2-day trip over to Montana. David is looking to get into grad school at the University of Montana in Missoula, so we went there for him to talk with professors. David’s parents and Jenna also came along, because from Missoula we went north to Kalispell, where Jenna was soon to move to begin a new job. While there we visited with a friend that we studied with through the Latin American Studies Program and his wife and baby, and took a quick drive through the beautiful Glacier National Park.
From Spokane, we drove over to the Portland, Oregon area, stopping first through Kennewick to visit more family members. We were in Oregon for another 2 ½ days and spent a day and a half on the campus of Oregon State University, another school David is pursuing for grad school. We were able to see more family in the area, more students who graduated from SNU and had spent a semester with us at QERC, and we stayed with good friends Lane and Hilary Chitwood.

After Portland came San Diego, California. We were there to visit Point Loma Nazarene University and have meetings to discuss potential involvement from their campus with QERC in the future. All meetings were positive and we were able to help a biology professor plan and make arrangements for his trip to Costa Rica in May. We happened to be at PLNU for their Creation Care week, which in itself was very impressive. As part of the week, David was asked to give an hour-long presentation over the conservation in Costa Rica. There was a pretty good turnout for students, and raised their interest in coming to Costa Rica and potentially QERC in the future. Also at PLNU we were able to get together with some good friends we worked with at Mission Springs a couple years ago, who are now living in the southern California area.

To end the trip, we made it back to Oklahoma for a few last days at SNU to wrap up and debrief our recruiting trip. We had more meetings during the days, and more evening adventures with our former students and friends.

After a few flight problems we finally arrived back to Costa Rica Wednesday afternoon. Thursday during the day we met with our muralist, who had completed a sketch for us of what the actual painting was going to look like in our museum. We were absolutely thrilled with the quality of his work and his depiction of our cloud forest! He is going to begin painting in the next couple days, and hope to have it complete to display at QERC in the next couple months. At this point we are around $700 short of what we would like to be able to give him for the mural, so if any of you are looking to donate some money to a good cause, let us know and we can help you do just that. :) Thursday evening we made it back to QERC, and it hadn’t stopped raining since we landed in the country. We found out we were coming into Costa Rica toward the end of an incredibly rough 5 days of straight rain, with lots of damage to roads and landslides that have already caused 6 deaths. However, when we woke up Friday morning, the sun was shining. Ana, our housekeeper, came later in the day and told us how rainy it had been, but now that we were back it was sunny – and in her own words, that was explained because “todo el mundo esta contento”. :) It’s good to be back.

old friends and new friends

Sarah: The last week with Matt was spent both here at QERC and in San Jose. We did some hiking, collecting plants for QERC’s native plant demonstration, and plenty of games and hanging out time. Matt’s friends from Taiwan, 2 of whom are Costa Rican and another who is Bolivian, were here in CR and came out to visit us at QERC. We took them out on the trails a little bit, looked for quetzals, and stayed up late playing games. It was a fun combination of Spanish and English being spoken over the course of a few days.

Unfortunately, our time with Matt was coming to an end, so we wrapped it up by spending a couple last days in the city doing some souvenir shopping and going to watch the Dark Knight. That was a fun evening, because we went to the fancy theater on Wednesday, when the tickets were half price. So for a mere $4.00, we sat in a huge theater in our own personal recliner seats and enjoyed a very good movie. On Thursday evening we got together with Alex Grant, a former LASP staff member who was around when David and I went through the program, as well as when Matt was here. It was fun to catch up on each others’ lives.

And sadly, we said our goodbyes to Matt early Friday morning. Also sadly, we had to take our car into the mechanics during our time in the city to get some more problems fixed on it. When it was finally ready to go again, we were able to make it back out to QERC on Saturday. It was fun for us to be in the city on Friday and Saturday, because Saturday, August 2^nd, was El Dia de La Virgen de Los Angeles. Thousands of people from all over Costa Rica come to Cartago (just outside of San Jose) for concerts on Friday and mass on Saturday, to remember the miraculous appearance of a small statue of the Virgen Mary, which is supposedly responsible for several miraculous events. Many come by car, bus, bikes, horses…..and many walk! People from all over the country start their journey many days in advance in order to walk all the way to Cartago. When we were coming into the city on Wednesday, we saw hundreds of people up on the highway on their journey. Those closer to Cartago actually make the journey completely on their knees. It was quite a sight to see thousands of people on foot headed toward Cartago, and traffic backed up for miles.

Chitwood-Hille reunion

Sarah: This past week and a half, Matt Chitwood has graced Costa Rica with his presence once again. Matt is David’s best friend, who also studied through LASP a year after David and I did. He is currently living in China, after living in Taiwan for almost 2 years. It had been 2 ½ years that we have seen Matt, given the fact that with all of us traveling and living abroad, our visits home haven’t coordinated very well together. Matt started off his trip here in CR by meeting up with a friend in San Jose, Chino, whom he met in Taiwan. Matt also is starting up an English teaching program here in CR, setting up recent grads with a teaching position and a host family for a year. He already has the program up and running in Taiwan, with 4 graduates teaching, and kicked off this year with one student teaching and living in San Jose. While Matt was in San Jose for the first couple days of his trip with Chino, he set the recent graduate up with his new family and started seeking out a place to teach. After a couple days in the city, we met up with Matt and brought him out to QERC. Unfortunately we had been having some crazy weather patterns and some heavy rain hit us hard for a couple days. It was nice to lay low and relax and catch up, before heading out for a beach trek.

We left Sunday for our beach time and started off the week at Dominical, a lazy surfing town only a couple hours from QERC. David and Matt tried out their mad surfing skills, and we enjoyed some time to throw the Frisbee around on the beach. Next we headed down to Uvita, another beach along the Pacific coast. We spent one day inside Marina Ballena National Park, where we walked along the beach out to the Whale Tail, only accessible during low-tide. We experimented a bit with snorkeling, though the water was pretty cloudy, and threw around the Frisbee some more, playing 500 a few times. Our national park pass allowed us entrance into other beaches, so we explored a few other beaches around the area as well, while David and Matt body-surfed the waves at each place.

After Uvita we headed even further south to Golfito, stopping in Palmar Norte to have a quick lunch with our old housekeeper Liseth, her son Diego, and Liseth’s in-laws (also Ana’s in-laws) Vera and Francisco. On Thursday morning we went into Piedras Blancas National Park to hike around. The national park was bought by Austria and given back to the Costa Rican government, and after visiting their research station near the entrance of the park (Tropenstation, best said with a thick German accent), we were given a map and some rubber boots. We took off for a hike and passed a waterfall, found the trails to be shorter than we realized, and decided to do the longer loop. Though the signs were maybe a bit confusing, we continued on the trail we were convinced was the right one. After about 2 hours of hiking…we started to second-guess ourselves. All of a sudden we came up with the idea that this trail could be a longer trail that would somehow lead us all the way to Corcovado National Park…which would have been bad news. We made the decision to turn around and make our way back to the confusing signs. Once there, we figured out that we were indeed on the right trail, and could have been within minutes of the end of the trail. Instead we hiked yet another hour to make it back to Tropenstation, passing Caiman Pond on the way and seeing a few caimans nearby.

Thursday evening we drove a short distance north to Sierpe to stay the night, so we could get up in the morning and kayak through the mangroves. This was a real highlight of the week, as we spent 4 hours out kayaking in search of wildlife. Matt saw what he was looking for – crocodiles, including 2 baby crocs that we were able to get very close to. And David saw a new bird, a hummingbird found only in the mangroves. And I found a snake – not the desired fer-de-lance, but close…a boa constrictor! It was a great morning. Friday afternoon we made our way back to Dominical to spend the night so Matt and David could get some last quality time in boogie-boarding.

And finally, after a good week of adventures, we made it back to QERC Saturday afternoon – just in time for community Bingo up at the school. Matt won a prize, a set of nice cooking bowls. And David…almost won a prize. It was a big box of a variety of stuff up for grabs, and once David got his beans 5 in a row, he stood up and yelled “Bingo” as Matt and I were going crazy at our table. Wendy, who was reading the numbers, then proceeded to read off the next number. So we yelled even louder, assuming she didn’t hear us. And it was then that we realized we were on the last round, which was a Blackout round. OOPS. Most people were laughing (hopefully with us rather than at us!) and especially our Costa Rican friends at our table were laughing very hard for most of that round. Good times with the community. :)

Quetzal parties

Sarah: Surprisingly for this time of year, we’ve been extremely busy this past week. Last Tuesday afternoon, Efrain came over for a quick visit and ended up telling us about the inauguration of Los Quetzales National Park that was going to happen on Wednesday morning. He was wondering if we had some of our butterflies in good shape that we could set them up on sort of a display. The more we talked, the more he came up with ideas of other stuff we could display for the ceremony. The Savegre Hotel had rented a space to have their own display, and Efrain decided there would be enough space for us to set up a couple of tables and show off some of the work QERC has done over the years. We spent the rest of the day sprucing up some butterfly and moth displays, put together a bat display with a couple of stuffed bats we had, put some homemade frames on a bunch of pictures we had taken in the valley, set aside all of the research books we had bound together, and gathered together the jars containing the lizards and snakes and frogs collected last year. We made a large sign, borrowed tablecloths from the hotel, and decided we were ready.

We showed up at the inauguration ceremony early, saw a couple of other hotels that had booths set up, and got to work with the help of Efrain to make ours look as professional as we could. Turns out it was a great idea for us to be there – there ended up being probably at least 300 people for the ceremony, and most stopped for a while at our display. The kids and the adults alike enjoyed seeing the bats and the jars of specimen from here in the valley, and everyone was interested in the work that we do here. Efrain and a few of his sons would grab people out of the crowd that they knew (usually important people) and proudly show off our stuff, so we felt like it was a great way to continue to build a good relationship with the hotel and have them take pride in having us on their property. Los Quetzales National Park also backs up to the Chacon Reserve, which is where we are located, so we are hoping to build a good relationship with them as well.

The next day the activity started up at QERC as well. First we had a couple of girls show up who were going to stay the next few nights. One was a former LASP student who was here last fall, and she was back visiting her host family in the city. When one of her friends came to visit her in Costa Rica, they decided to spend a few days out here with us. Later that day, another couple of people showed up. David’s friend Alyssa from college, and her husband Ken, are on vacation in CR for a couple weeks and came to spend the first few days with us as well. It has been great getting to know them, and catching up on their lives since college too.

The next day we had a couple more visitors come. Gary Keller, who has been here at QERC plenty in the past, is the Director of the Hispanic Research Center from Arizona State University. He was in Costa Rica for a conference and came just for one night with another professor to experience QERC and the quetzals. Also on Friday came a couple of girls who are here in Costa Rica for 8 weeks studying at the Firestone Restoration Ecology Research Center. They were on a short break and came to explore the cloud forest for a couple days.

Besides those who stayed, we have had an abundance of visitors who have come by to check out the building and see what we have going on here. Besides that, our aguacatillo tree right outside our building has hundreds of fruit on it right now, and the quetzals are going crazy. Every day we have 1-2 dozen quetzals flying right by our window and hanging out for a long time in the tree. The toucanets are also hanging out, and every now and then we have 3-4 quetzals and a couple of toucanets in the tree at the same time! That in itself has increased the number of people in our building, because many tourists come over just to check out the quetzals and take pictures.

One of the most exciting people we have had visit is a muralist. We have been trying to get a muralist interested and willing for the right price to paint a mural of the cloud forest in our museum for a long time now, and it’s looking like we have a winner. We got this guy’s contact information from a photographer who stopped by a month and a half ago, and he is pretty excited to get going on the project. We are thrilled that it’s looking like this will work out!

Nicaragua

David: Back in February Sarah and I led a Nicaragua study trip for the QERC semester students as a part of their Applied Cultural Integration course. At that time I wrote a blog entry that was never posted. We thought we shouldn't let already written material go to waste. So, if you were just absolutely dying to hear about our February trip to Nicaragua, today is your lucky day.

David(5 months ago): We recently were in Nicaragua; “beautiful and unfortunate Nicaragua” as so insightfully stated by national hero Benjamin Zeledon. It is the land of lakes of volcanoes. It is a country home to mouth watering tortillas and generous and happy people. It is a history of inspiring patriots and corrupt politicians. Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and it is the perfect place to take a group of students if you want them to face history and reality that encourages a deeper look at several aspects of life.

Our group of 5 students, Sarah, and I spent a total of 11 days in Nicaragua digging into the richness of the culture, complexities of the history, and beauty of the people. After a 10 hour bus ride from the San Jose to Managua our group stayed 2 days in Managua to explore historical sites. Among these sites where the Revolutionary Plaza where the Sandinistas rolled victoriously into on their tanks when they over threw the Somoza dictatorship, the old national cathedral that is in ruins from the devastating earthquakes from the 1970’s, and the Popes’ Plaza where Pope John Paul III spoke several times during his life of service.

The highlight of these sites was Loma Tiscapa. Historically it is a military base notorious for holding political prisoners and the location of years of torture of political enemies. It is here that the U.S. Marines trained the National Guard of the Somoza regime and where Augusto Cesar Sandino had his last meal before being kidnapped and assassinated. In fact there is a very large silhouette statue of Sandino on the Loma Tiscapa hilltop that can be seen from almost every location in the capital of Managua. The students were able to engage in this history and rightfully so as it is hard to be at these locations and not be enthralled with it all as you can see how history has shaped the lives of Nicaraguans.

After our short time in Managua we headed to the rural area of Niquinohomo for a service experience and home stay at a farm called Rancho Ebenezer. Rancho Ebenezer is a Christian organic farm that is dedicated to educating rural families in subsistence farming. If a family has 1/10^th of an acre they can teach them to supply all their family's needs in a way that is ecologically friendly. There is a strong emphasis on humanity's role of creation stewardship and ecological principles. The project believes in truly investing in a family's long-term well-being and it shows by the multiple year training commitment that is given and the importance that is put on family values. This location actually is an ideal place for service teams from the U.S. and the project is looking for groups who can help out with manual labor. If you are interested in setting something like that up here is there website. (www.ranchoebenezer.org)

While working at Rancho Ebenezer our students had home stay experiences with local families who have a connection to the project. Their work day started early at 6:00 AM. The daily chores usually consisted of watering and feeding the goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and rabbits all being raised as demonstration projects for a sustainable protein source, cleaning out the pig sties, shoveling poop from multiple animals sources to use for feeding the worms that would then create good fertilizer, fertilizing the crops, harvesting foliage from the crops to feed the animals, and many other things as well. It was very educational and great experience. In the evenings the students were on their own back with the families they stayed with.

And finally, to finish our time in Nicaragua with a little relaxation we spent two days in the colonial city of Granada. It's a charming city with good restaurants and a hostel with hammocks that hit the spot.

All in all Nicaragua proved to be a very meaningful and trans-formative experience for our five students. "It was awesome", I say with a big smile on my face. The students were faced with the reality of a 3rd world culture. They lived, ate, and bathed in it all to find out that there is something very special about Nicaragua. It was fantastic to see them mentally, emotionally, and physically challenged, all which pushed them to maybe grow a little bit. Plus, Sarah and I successfully led our 1st trip to Nicaragua and felt good about it. We're excited to do it again this February.