Pura Vida

The end

2010-09-29T11:13:00.009-06:00

Sarah: Well we did it. We left Costa Rica and "moved" back to the States. Since we left we have spent a week on SNU's campus helping Michael recruit, and also to tie up loose ends. David continued on the recruiting journey to a few other universities with Michael before he officially finished as well. We are all now in Iowa, getting caught up on some much-needed rest and playing with my family. Adele is adjusting well and has even started walking! Our lives will never be the same...

In order to finish up this blog, let me recap our last week in Costa Rica. First let me say that I'm not planning on continuing this blog after this post. We intended it to be a way to keep friends and family updated on our adventures in Costa Rica, and that adventure has come to an end. I'm considering starting another blog that would include stories of reverse culture shock and reports of Adele's progress...but I haven't decided if it would be interesting enough to do yet. :)

Here is us in front of QERC for the very last time

So, this is our final blog post of Costa Rica.

During our last week, Independence Day happened in Costa Rica. It was such a fun way for us to get together with almost the entire community for some fun celebration. And fun it was! The morning of September 14th (Independence Day is the 15th but we celebrated the day before), many of the community members took off on horseback to the top of the hill. We decided to drive this year as there was a shortage of horses and we wanted to save time getting up and down the hill - cars are faster than horses. :) Also to save the inevitable pain our butts would have felt later on. At the top, we witnessed the passing of the torch, as it came down the PanAmerican highway. We listened as our neighbors sang the national anthem, ate some great breakfast that people pulled out of their cars, and headed back down the hill. We got stuck behind another tradition on our way down - the school kids run from the top of the hill down to the school, carrying the torch, with a parade of cars behind them honking and cheering them on. I was impressed - it was about 7-8 kilometers they ran!

Independence Day continued later at the school, with a few hours of fun at the school. The kids danced the traditional dances to the traditional music wearing the traditional dresses, we saw the parade of lights by the kids, heard some readings about the importance of the day, and ate some good traditional food. During the celebration, the hostess had David and me stand up and gave a little talk about how important we were to the community and thanked us for the four years we had spent with them. It was a neat recognition. The evening also included a couple of skits by some of our neighbors that put on a "wedding" and poked fun at the lifestyle of a typical campesino in the olden days. We didn't understand everything that was going on, but everyone was laughing so hard that they were crying, and we couldn't help but join in the laughter. A highlight was at the end of the night when the hostess called 5 volunteer couples up to the center and played music and simply said "dance!" The music kept switching and the dancing kept switching, and at the end of the dancing, we had to choose the winners. It was fun to see such great dancing, and so funny that this was included in part of the Independence Day celebrations!

One last time up at Laura's bakery with friends

During the end of the week, we took the opportunity to deliver our final newsletter to our neighbors, and took advantage of the time with them to sit and say some really good and meaningful goodbyes. We had a lot of coffee and hot chocolate over the course of a few days! We felt like it was a good time to have some closure with our time with the people we had been living and working with for so long. Our final evening in the valley was spent with some of our closest friends, who had also put together a really sweet book for us. They had gone around to the community, taken pictures, and had them write notes for us to compile in a book. We will miss our home and community dearly, but are so thankful for the time we were able to spend there.

On our way out, saying goodbye to Efrain and Caridad,
the founders of the valley

All throughout the last week, we spend most of our days finishing up projects and attempting to leave the building in a good condition for Michael to return in October to take over managing. We slowly started to pool all of our things in one location in attempts to be organized, and the packing really took place on Saturday. We actually weren't up too late our last night packing, which was somewhat surprising for us, and headed into San Jose on Sunday. After saying a few more goodbyes to people who are important to us in the city, we spent our final evening with Trevor and Laura. It was great to feel like we had a final "normal" evening with them, and hope that we'll continue to stay good friends in the future.

Our last night in Costa Rica, with Trevor and Laura

To truly finish up this blog, David and I have come up with a list of things that we'll miss most in Costa Rica. Hopefully this is a good reflection of our lives for the past 4 years!

-Bioland products (environmentally-friendly food and personal hygiene products made in CR)
-The Spanish language - speaking it and hearing it on a daily basis
-The tropical biodiversity
-Living in a cloud forest
-Not hearing any traffic on a daily basis
-The river that flowed in our backyard
-Thick green environments all around us
-Being able to drive only 2 hours and get to the beach
-Water all around us
-Earthquakes
-Delicious and cheap tropical fruits: mangoes, bananas, pineapples
-Fresh fruit drinks as an option in restaurants
-The ability to travel all over the country and see mountains, oceans, volcanoes, rainforests, dry forests
-Wildlife: monkeys, sloths, beautiful birds, diverse lizards
-Knowing how to run a good study abroad program
-Good coffee
-Laura's bakery up the road that provides delicious pastries and good company on the weekends
-Drinking water that comes directly from the mountain springs
-Our good friends Trevor and Laura
-The field work and excuses to work in the forest
-Our small community of neighbors and friends
-How Costa Ricans give preferential treatment to parents with babies
-The attention Adele received out in public
-Cheap public transportation
-Not being a tourist and enjoying nights of eating out and renting movies
-A good hearty Costa Rican meal at a cheap price-
-A close network of conservationists, environmentalists, biologists, researchers
-Being outside of distractions of consumerism and technology
-All of the many friends and relationships we've formed over the years

This is by no means a comprehensive list...but some examples of things that have been important to us over the last 4 years. And on that note, thus endeth the blog.

10 months!

2010-09-16T11:58:00.008-06:00

Sarah: Today marks Adele's 10 month birthday. She now has 8 teeth and is eating (decently) well, climbing into everything, opening all cupboards and drawers and pulling everything out, and standing by herself for a few seconds at a time.

Adele looooves to make us laugh and when she knows she's doing something that entertains us, she'll continue it even more extreme. She enjoys hanging upside down, hiding from Daddy, and constantly wants to play peek-a-boo or hide-and-seek. She even hides behind walls and pops out and says "bah!" (her form of boo!). Her other favorite words are "mama" (of course only when she needs me) and "dada" (which she usually says as she's pounding on the window hoping David will look up from his work and notice her).

We are quickly rounding up our time down here and we will be very sad to take Adele away from her home! She loves it here and I am quite confident that the community here will be more sad to see her leave than us. :) Here are some pictures of her during the last month:

Playing hide-and-go-seek

Daddy time!

Visiting with her animals on the mural in our museum.

Mommy time!

One big happy family.

Chillin' in her shades.

A sad moment...

2010-09-10T22:09:00.003-06:00

Sarah: Well, we leave in a little over a week to return to the States. Every day brings both sad moments and excited moments, both of which I think are healthy, and more of which I'll share in the week to come. However, I just experienced a sad moment and thought I'd post.

We have just been in San Jose for two very long days, training Michael (the new Field Station Manager) on more business-related items in the city. We are all very exhausted and couldn't wait to come home and crawl into bed after so much activity for 2 full days. Except Adele. Adele has been a great traveler, sleeping well in her car seat, smiling and talking to people we interact with, and not much fussing.

BUT...nothing compares to when we come home.

It's 10:00 at night and we've been home for an 45 minutes, and Adele can't be any happier. As I was checking my email I heard lots of laughter from the bedroom and went in to see the commotion. Adele was in her crib, finding all her toys and throwing them off the side, waving to Daddy, and talking non-stop. David said before that she crawled all over the apartment, pulling things off the tables, finding all her favorite things to get into, and still talking non-stop.

I love moments like these, but I also realize that this IS Adele's home. She knows it, and loves to return home. It's a sad moment for me to accept the fact that in a little over a week, we will be taking Adele away from the only home she's ever known. *sniff.*

The new guy

2010-08-28T18:08:00.005-06:00

Sarah: Well, the countdown has begun. We are less than 3 weeks away from leaving our job here in Costa Rica and returning to the United States. More thoughts on that subject later!

As our time is wrapping up, SNU has hired our replacement. His name is Michael Guillot and he graduated from SNU with a degree in Environmental Studies, and graduated from the University of Houston with a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology. Michael spent 6 weeks down here at QERC back in 2002 and is excited for the opportunity to return to Costa Rica and take the job as the Field Station Manager at QERC.

Michael arrived down here at QERC toward the beginning of August, with the idea that we would spend 5-6 weeks with him, training him on everything we know about QERC and Costa Rica. Whew! It sounds overwhelming to me just to type that. We spent the first couple of weeks at QERC and in San Jose, going over building information, some semester program information, and meeting some people and places in San Jose. We even let Michael go on his own for a day in San Jose, to get him acquainted with downtown - much like we do with the students at the beginning of the semester.

This past week, David took Michael to Nicaragua to show him everything he needs to know about leading a group of students there for 2 weeks. David boiled it down to 5 nights, visiting all of our contacts within the country. For David, it was a chance to help make the connections for people and pass the ball from us to Michael, and also a chance to say some goodbyes to friends we had made. They had a whirlwind week with a night in Managua, a night in the remote village of Candelaria, a night at Rancho Ebenezer (both of those are where we've done previous homestays with students), a night back in Managua for some historical tours and information, and a last night in Granada to finish up like we do with the students.

David with his host family in Candelaria

Michael and David at Laguna Apoyo, Nicaragua

Adele and I decided not to go along for that trip - Adele had just spent a week feeling sick with a cold and working on all her new teeth coming in, and I figured some good rest and relaxation time was needed for her here at home.

While we are sad to be moving on from our job and lives here in Costa Rica, we are excited and confident in Michael's abilities to continue the QERC project.

Danta, danta, don'tcha want a...

2010-08-22T16:27:00.003-06:00

Sarah: We have had some interesting experiences lately with the danta (tapir, in English). After the Point Loma group recorded the puma and the jaguar on their cameras, there was a large buzz in the community surrounding the presence of large mammals. In fact, just a week ago, a danta was spotted walking around the gardens at the Savegre Hotel - 2 minutes walking distance from where we are located. So, we put up cameras hoping to catch a view of the danta, and sure enough, it appeared that night.

Here is the camera shot:

Also in regards to dantas, not too long ago there was one hit by a car up on the highway and, sadly, died. However, Los Quetzales National Park, which has its headquarters up on the highway, decided to stuff and mount the danta and display it at their office. Today they brought the finished stuffed product down to the hotel and unveiled it for all to see. It was pretty neat - and Adele was intrigued by it as well!

Arsenio, from the National Park, and Efrain Chacon with the stuffed danta.

Adele wasn't quite sure what to think at first, then decided she loooooved the danta.

9 month girl

2010-08-15T15:21:00.010-06:00

Sarah: Adele turns 9 months tomorrow! She is growing and changing and developing so fast that it's hard to keep up with her. She is super chatty, almost always happy, eating a ton, and is really teething, with 3-4 new teeth in and a couple more on the way. With her so busy and active, we have quickly found that QERC is NOT baby-proof. Adele has the gift of being able to find the chemicals in the laboratory, the cleaning supplies, and the tools in the storage room. I spend most of my day chasing her around the building. I have a picture of most of her other new tricks:

Adele is eating so much for meals now and I'm just thrilled! Here is one evening that she got so tired that she fell asleep in the middle of her meal, as David and I were cooking and the music was playing. I'm not so sure if this is a trick, or just a trait she gets after her Uncle Rusty Roth.

Adele loves to play in the most random places, as one of her favorites is any sink she
finds. I just have to stay right near her to make sure she doesn't turn the water on!

Adele can climb the stairs on her own now!

Adele loves to practice walking EVERYWHERE.

Adele can pull herself up on anything, and loves pulling all the
books she can reach off the bookshelf up in the library.

The girl LOVES to be outside - unfortunately with it being the rainy
season, sunny days where the grass is dry are few and far between.

Naturally, everything she finds goes in the mouth - bugs, grass, and dirt. :)

Large cats!!

2010-08-07T11:45:00.009-06:00

Sarah: As the mammal research group from Point Loma was finishing up their time here, some exciting last-minute things happened for them. First, they caught a PUMA on camera! And second, they caught a melanistic JAGUAR on camera...in the middle of the day!! Melanistic means that their skin appears black, so the jaguar in fact looks like a black panther. SO COOL. The pictures are from their camera traps, set up in the forest. Check them out.

THE PUMA:

THE JAGUAR: (Click on the picture for better views)

Mammals

2010-08-02T14:08:00.011-06:00

Sarah: For about 7 weeks this summer, QERC is hosting a group from Point Loma Nazarene University (CA). Dr. Mike Mooring and his family, and 4 research students, have been here in San Gerardo de Dota searching for mammals (primarily with an interest in large mammals). The research team is down to their final week at QERC and it has been fun to have them around this whole time.

Using a variety of techniques, the team has caught several coyotes and many raccoons on camera, and an ocelot on video. They have also hiked the trails extensively almost every day and have seen various signs of puma! By taking advantage of the local knowledge here, the group has also interviewed prominent community members to get an idea of what mammals have been seen historically.

As this is a pilot study, Mike will evaluate what type of work can be done in the future, and hopefully continue returning with a research team each summer to further the studies done on mammals.

Some pictures of their time here:

Caleb and Jared, hiking in the rain

Dr. Mooring, Caleb, and Bobby setting up a camera trap

Will, in front of the grand oak tree

Some of the group on a community horse ride day

David and Adele and me at a community Bingo

8 months

2010-07-16T10:01:00.008-06:00

Sarah: Happy 8 months to my little girl! Here are some things to know about Adele this month:

She waves: It started as a slow-moving turning of the hand, grew in to frantic two-handed waving, and now it's a combination of both. We're not convinced she knows what it means, but it's cute and she definitely does it to get attention or in response to people!

She's crawling: A few factors contributed to this new trick. Carpet in the USA, and cousins who already can crawl and go after toys. All of a sudden, Adele decided she needed to be able to crawl to race her cousins Ash Ford and Benjamin Roth to the toys!

She loves to walk: With assistance, Adele shows off her walking legs by taking giant dinosaur steps all over. To wear her out, we'll take turns walking her all around the building.

She still loves to bounce: Are you getting the idea that this girl likes to be active? She loves to be bounced up and down all day, and giggles and squeals when that turns into being thrown up in the air by Daddy.

She has a new fascination with rocks: Ever since we let her suck on rocks in Colorado while we were hiking around to keep her distracted, she has decided she loves rocks. She loved to try to eat the rocks on the bottom of the lake in Spokane, and now crawls straight to the big rocks that hold our doors open at QERC when we let her loose.

She pulls herself up: Our days of Adele sitting still and playing by herself are over. If she's not going straight to the crawling position, she's pulling herself up into the standing position. We have to watch closely so she doesn't fall over and knock her head on the tile.

She can clap: Somehow along the way, her frantic waving resulted in her hands making contact and now she can (on occasion) clap.

Here are some pictures from the last month:

Vacaciones

2010-07-11T16:15:00.015-06:00

Sarah: These past two weeks we spent in the good ol' US of A visiting family for our summer break. Instead of going to Iowa this year, we flew straight to Denver to meet up with my family in Estes Park. The whole gang came - my parents, my younger sisters Katie and Rachel, and my older sister Emily, her husband Greg, her stepson Hunter, and their son Ash. We had a great time all hanging out together, playing with the babies and spending time in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Highlights of the week include (but are not limited to):
~A short beautiful hike in RMNP to Bear Lake, Nymph Lake, and Dream Lake
~Horseback riding in RMNP through Moraine Park
~Ice cream at the Y-Camp
~Church service with large windows showing the beautiful mountains
~A drive up Trail Ridge Road
~Seeing lots of elk and deer
~Watching a coyote
~A beautiful long hike in RMNP past Alberta Falls, to The Loch, and a long (but beautiful) journey back
~Evenings driving around RMNP looking for wildlife
~Cinnamon rolls at Glen Haven
~Whitewater rafting the Poudre River
~The little creatures - chipmunks, pika, marmots
~Time with family!

And some pictures from the first week:

At Bear Lake

An elk up on Trail Ridge Road

Emily and Ash and Adele and me on Trail Ridge Road
Professional family pictures taken at the Y-Camp
Ash and Adele chilling in the grass
The hiking crew at The Loch

The second week we spent with the Hilles, also for their family vacation. We spent the entire week up at a cabin they rent right on a lake near Spokane, Washington. It was a week full of relaxation, naps, being entertained by many kids, and swimming in the lake when the weather and water warmed up a bit. David's parents were there, along with David's sister Jordan, husband Rusty, kids Gracelyn, Gabriel, and Benjamin (and another baby on the way!). David's sister Jenna was able to come over from Montana and hang out with us for our last night.

Highlights from the week include (but are not limited to):
~Fireworks for the 4th of July over the lake
~Cooking hotdogs over the fire pit near the lake (and s'mores)
~The 4th of July boat parade
~Huckleberry smoothies
~David's nature hikes with Gracelyn and Gabriel
~Walking to get ice cream
~Visits from Aunt Karen, Mort and Terry, Aunt Dian and Uncle Laurence
~Watching the sky change colors over the lake in the evenings
~Observing Adele get smothered by 3 cousins who desperately wanted to hold her and play with her every waking moment
~Eating dinners out on the deck in the warm evenings
~Horseshoes and croquet
~Swimming in the lake (or barely getting in for some of us wimps who can't handle cold water)
~Family time!

And some pictures from the second week:

Gracelyn and Adele having a conversation

Adele crawling with Benjamin cheering her on

David throwing Gabriel up in the air

David, Gracelyn, and Gabriel recording what they saw on their nature hike

Hanging out on the raft in the lake

In the (cold) lake

7 months

2010-06-16T10:10:00.007-06:00

Sarah: Adele is 7 months today! She is so much fun and we are loving our time with her. Here is a little insight on her personality:

What Adele Likes:
-BOUNCING. Non-stop. (A good arm workout for Mom and Dad!)
-Looking at herself in the mirror
-Drinking out of glasses
-Dancing
-Being tickled by Daddy
-Watching hummingbirds
-Eating grass and dirt
-Animals, especially dogs
-Little kids
-Using her two bottom teeth to bite
-Hanging upside down
-Sleeping with Mom
-Trying to sneak in some taps on the computer keyboard
-Eating her feet
-Stuffed animals, especially those that make sounds
-Finding food that's spilled and rubbing it all over the table
-Splashing in the pool
-Being naked
-Sitting on Mom's lap while being entertained by Daddy

What Adele Doesn't Like:
-Getting dressed
-Sleeping by herself
-Sitting still
-Any pacifier other than her old one that now has a hole in it
-Riding in her car seat for too long
-Getting shots
-Getting flicked when she bites while nursing
-When dogs don't pay attention to her

And some pictures from the last month:

Full circle

2010-06-08T10:27:00.004-06:00

Sarah: Now that we are finished with the semester program, we have been working on finishing up other projects. One of those has been painting the building. We did not paint it, but hired some local guys to paint both the inside and outside. The outside went smoothly, and they were actually able to finish that before the semester even ended. We waited to have them start the inside until we had no groups here so we could be free to move all of the furniture out of the room they were painting at the time. The upstairs went easy, and we put everything back together within a matter of a couple days. The downstairs was quite a bit more difficult, as it took us a long time to even stay ahead of the painters by tearing apart a room. Thankfully, Ana was a big help, and she basically took care of our whole apartment for us - taking it apart AND putting it back together. That woman sure likes to organize!

The lab and storage were the most difficult to take apart, and we found quickly that the lab was FULL of stuff in the middle of the room. It reminded us of our first month here at QERC...

When we first arrived to this job almost 4 years ago, most everything was disorganized and a mess, and we took it upon ourselves to go through the lab and storage to try to make some sense of it. It took weeks, but after pulling everything out and going through it all, we found a home for every piece of equipment. We find ourselves finishing up our time similar to the way we started, having come full circle. Here is a picture from 4 years ago, and a picture from a few days ago:

On a separate note, this past weekend brought some more visitors for us. We hosted a group from Pitzer College, and also welcomed back NNU professor Dr. John Cossel. Along with John came his daughter Jessie, and 2 researchers - one of them being a former student of ours, Kyle Luthman. It was great to spend time reconnecting with Kyle, and we we enjoyed having the whole NNU group here for a few days of hanging out.

Hilles in the House

2010-06-02T16:35:00.003-06:00

Sarah: This past week we have had the pleasure of hanging out and traveling with David's parents, younger sister Jenna, and her friend Ashley. The Hilles wanted to take advantage of visiting us one last time before we no longer live in Costa Rica, so this time we planned an adventure down on the Osa Peninsula. All pictures on this blog are from the Osa.

Adele warmed up to Nana the first morning, when she dug into a suitcase full of her new 6-9 month clothes and toys. Adele was the excited "kid-in-the-candy-store" and found that she just didn't have enough hands to hold onto everything that she wanted to at the same time! After a morning in the city, we headed out to QERC and enjoyed a couple of rainy days, complete with a hike to the waterfall in some pouring rain.

Though our time at QERC was short at the beginning of the trip, we were eager to get on with the adventure and head down to the tip of the Osa Peninsula. David had found a good deal on renting a house for 4 nights; however, after a long day of driving, ending with some rough and bumpy roads to the middle of nowhere, we were all a little skeptical of what we'd find at our final destination. We were all completely blown away at the sight that awaited us. The house was incredible, sitting on a cliff that overlooked the ocean, decorated with beautiful art, a pool at the edge of the cliff, and an amazing layout with complete open air that felt like we were outside even when we were inside the living room. There were two bedrooms, each with an outdoor shower, lined with beautiful tiles and rockwork and lights for a nice way to cool down in the evening. Jenna and Ashley stayed in the main part of the house, in a loft that overlooked the living room, pool, and ocean.

Our first day there was fairly rainy, but it didn't matter as we woke up to the wonderful sounds of howler monkeys, scarlet macaws, and toucans right outside our windows. We got up to find black-and-green poison dart frogs hopping along our driveway and knew we were in a good place. We spent a lot of the day lounging around, taking turns bouncing Adele (her new favorite way to spend time), and watching the birds and monkeys that would travel in the forests around the house. In the afternoon we went for a walk on the road through the forest, where we saw more monkeys and even a baby coral snake!

For meals, with the exception of the first night, we took advantage of the option of having the local caretaker's wife cook for us, and she made us a feast at every meal. It was good Costa Rican cuisine! The first night we went to the nearby hotel and had a very fancy meal to celebrate Jenna's birthday.

Our second day was nicer weather and we jumped on the chance to walk down the path to the beach. We added a sloth and an agouti to our animal list, and enjoyed some time walking along the beach. Our third day was even nicer weather, and Ashley tried her hand at surfing while David and his mom and Adele and I walked to a small waterfall. We also got lots of pool time in with the hot sunny weather.

Adele did great with the traveling and even got to a point where she was fairly used to her car seat. She still preferred being with me, but if I was able to leave her happy with others, she hardly missed me while I was out of sight. She always woke up happy and enjoyed spending time with Nana and Popa first thing in the mornings.

We headed back to QERC last Saturday and spent one last evening together before Jenna and Ashley traveled into San Jose very early Sunday morning to return to the states. The rest of us had 2 more full days at QERC, where David enlisted the help of his parents to put in some manual labor in the nursery. It was a great way to spend time together and get some more things finished up around QERC. We had to say goodbye to the Hilles on Tuesday morning, but were thankful for such a nice vacation with them!

Half year!

2010-05-16T16:19:00.010-06:00

Sarah: Happy half birthday to our sweet Adele Marie! This past month she seemed to grow up fast and seems more like a toddler in many ways than or small baby!

Highlights from the past month:
~1 new (sharp) tooth
~a second tooth just about to break through
~Just beginning to eat solid foods (loving the avocado!)
~Moving around a lot in her walker
~The few hairs she has are starting to get longer
~First time in the ocean
~First time in the swimming pool, which she loved!
~Loves catching the attention of strangers and smiling at them
~Loves when people sing to her
~Laughs hysterically when Daddy dances for her
~First unscheduled trip to the doctor (just a mild respiratory infection)
~Still loves those hummingbirds
~(Mostly) sitting up on her own
~Loves to suck on her feet

Some of our favorite pictures from the past month (see facebook for even more):

The end of good things...

2010-05-14T15:03:00.007-06:00

Sarah: Well our semester program has officially finished. Except for the paperwork and cleaning up and evaluations and documenting suggested changes for next year. :)

The rest of April flew past us, as we had activities like the river clean-up day, a day to restock the QERC reforestation nursery, a day of interactions and games with the local Costa Rican English teachers, and with visits from professors Dennis Siegfried (to teach Ornithology) and Frank Johnson (for his second trip, to do a Spanish evaluation of the students). The students were as busy as ever, trying to soak up their last moments in Costa Rica and making final memories. They were a great group and everyone seemed very on top of their work this year. We ended our time with them at QERC with some movie nights, game nights, and of course, their presentation nights. We split the group into 2 this year and invited the whole community to join us for listening to them present their research projects. We had a decent turn out both nights, and the students did great informing those present about what they had been working on all semester.

After presentations, things were truly finished at QERC, and professor Bob Lively came down to see us through presentations and our debriefing/reentry retreat with the students. We love having him come down and participate with us and share in the excitement from the semester and offer his insight and advice to the students as they prepare to return to the U.S. We held our retreat at the beautiful location of Arenal Volcano and enjoyed watching the volcano spit lava rocks all night long. We also took advantage of the location and did some hiking, and Adele tried out her swimming legs. We had great discussions with the students and they were able to reflect and process their experiences extremely well. It's such a fun time of sharing memories and seeing the full impact of this study abroad experience.

And finally, after one last night in San Jose, we said a sad goodbye to the students. It's always a sad realization that our students, who have become our friends over the course of 4 months, leave us to head back to their lives in the U.S. It was especially sad for Adele, who will miss having them to entertain her here at QERC!

David and I spent a night with Trevor and Laura in San Jose before they left Costa Rica for the entire summer, and then we renewed our visas before heading back to an empty building. However, it doesn't seem like our lives have slowed down too much with the program being over. Besides the wrap up from the semester, we are welcoming a variety of groups and researchers over the next few months that we are preparing for!

AND...David and I notified the people at SNU a while ago that we will not be staying on for another full year at QERC. We are excited for what awaits us in the States, though we have no set plans yet. We are now in the process of looking for replacements for us to begin sometime this fall. If there is anyone who is interested in this job, or if anyone who reads this knows of anyone who might be interested in the job, please please please have them contact us! You can find the job description at www.snu.edu/qerc-field-manager.

Reflections

2010-04-27T13:00:00.003-06:00

Sarah: Reaching the 30-year old mark is a crazy milestone. I've thought about my 20s a lot recently and realized how much happened in these 10 years. So to say goodbye to my 20s, here is my list of 20 (big) things that happened in the last decade of my life:

1. Graduation from Northwestern College in Orange City, IA, with a major in Spanish, minors in Cultural Anthropology and Religion, a Career Concentration in missions, and a Coaching Endorsement
2. 1 month spent in Taiwan
3. 1 summer spent in Brazil
4. 1 semester spent studying in Costa Rica, with trips to Nicaragua and Guatemala, through the Latin American Studies Program
5. Meeting the love of my life while studying abroad
6. 2 years teaching high school Spanish at Iowa Christian Academy
7. 2 years teaching 5th and 6th graders Environmental Education at Mission Springs Outdoor Education, outside of Santa Cruz, CA
8. Playing varsity volleyball in college
9. Leading 2 mission trips to Brazil and one to Mexico
10. The purchase of our first house - a rental home in Spokane, WA
11. Coaching junior high basketball and volleyball, JV volleyball, and helping out with varsity volleyball and basketball at Iowa Christian Academy
12. Buying my first car - a Saturn Ion
13. Getting married to my best friend, David Charles Hille
14. Giving birth to my beautiful daughter, Adele Marie
15. A tattoo with my sisters
16. Becoming an aunt to my niece Gracelyn, and nephews Gabriel, Benjamin, and Asher
17. My first cell phone and first laptop computer
18. Getting my braces off
19. More trips to Brazil (with stops in Argentina and Paraguay), more trips to Nicaragua and Guatemala (with a stop in Honduras) and a trip to Panama
20. Moving to Costa Rica to work as Field Station Managers at the Quetzal Education Research Center

Here's hoping my 30s are just as good!

Cinco Meses!

2010-04-16T12:38:00.008-06:00

Sarah: Adele has now reached the 5-month mark! Sure seems like she's in a hurry to grow up these days. She wants to be doing everything mom and dad do, and thinks she can drink out of a glass, talk on the phone, take medicine from a spoon. Here are some highlights from the past month:

~Adele rolled over for the first time! (causing the need for closer watchful eyes...)
~Has found her LOUD voice and went through days of extremely noisy chatter
~Prefers to be with mommy but watch daddy all day and smile huge when he looks at her
~Lots more giggling and laughing
~Prefers to be outside and loves to watch the hummingbirds
~Sleeping by herself all night in her crib (a few nights only...but those were encouraging nights!)
~Loves trying out her sippy cup with water and a very small amount of juice
~No solid foods yet, but she likes to lick our fingers after a meal
~Enjoys trying to suck the juice out of cantaloupe and watermelon
~A doctor's visit - 70th% weight, 95th% height (which explains why sh's growing out of her 3-6 month clothes...)
~2 shots, followed by a day and a half of fever and clingyness to mom
~A new found love for being naked
~No teeth yet, but a high increase in drool and frantic behavior to put everything in her mouth
~A new love for dancing with the students
~Has learned how to give slobbery face kisses to mom and dad

Here are some pictures from the last month:

Quetzal Jubilee

2010-04-13T20:26:00.002-06:00

Sarah: Arizona State University has been working on a project called The Transcendent Icon: The Resplendent Quetzal for years. It's a multi-disciplinary approach with the purpose of collecting information about the quetzal in the context of history, religion, science, politics, and art. The overall goal is to connect interested parties so there is good networking for conservation work. This year, ASU is holding a quetzal conference called the Quetzal Jubilee in Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Panama. The Costa Rica portion of the Jubilee was divided into two parts: one in San Jose at the University of Costa Rica, and the second at QERC.

David went to San Jose to participate in that part of the Jubilee, and he also gave a presentation about the research and education taking place at QERC in the name of quetzal conservation. He really enjoyed presenting, and it was a great opportunity to network with professionals within Costa Rica.

At QERC, the conference lasted all day Saturday with a variety of guest speakers and participants. We had a number of members from our community and guests from around Costa Rica show up. Presenters included Leo Finkenbinder, the original founder and director of QERC; Maarten Kappelle, director of The Nature Conservancy for all of Central America and the Caribbean and expert on montane oak forests; and Arsenio Arguero, director of Los Quetzales National Park. ASU also presented a video about their project. It was a great day and fun to host the event at our facility. It was good to connect with people and share ideas that will hopefully develop into better communication and more collaborations in the future.

Touring Costa Rica

2010-04-07T16:45:00.014-06:00

Sarah: David continues to be extremely busy, so I'll do the reporting for him. For 3 weeks, David took our crew of 10 students and teamed up with the Latin American Studies Program with their professor Trevor, 3 LASP students, and our former boss from California, Scott Smithson, who also served as a professor. The entire group traveled together on an ecological and sustainability tour of Costa Rica. This is easily (and obviously) one of the major highlights of the whole semester for our students. It doesn't come without work though; all of them would agree that the 3 weeks are strenuous both physically and educationally and with little sleep. Yet again - totally worth it!

The group started off their travels by heading to Earth University, where they learned that the mission of the university is to equip their students with the knowledge of sustainable agriculture and environmentally-friendly practices. The university is open to all countries in a tropical setting. From there, the group headed to La Fortuna, where Arenal Volcano is located. Naturally, they studied volcanology and were excited that they had incredible views of the volcano (see picture) and were able to see plenty of lava rocks rolling down the volcano during the night. Here they also had a close encounter with an eyelash pit viper (next picture), and many were very excited about that. :)

From La Fortuna, they traveled to Palo Verde National Park to study the dry forest. While everyone was skeptical showing up to an incredibly hot, dry location, they were reluctant to leave in the end because of all the wildlife they saw - agoutis, howler monkeys, white-faced cappuchins, deer, crocodiles, anteaters, and jabirus (the largest stork in the world). The first week of the trip wrapped up with a couple of nights in Ostional, where they studied sea turtles nesting on the beautiful beach and all got to see this process in action.

After a night in San Jose for a chance to take their first test, the group headed out here to QERC to study cloud forests. They got some great looks at quetzals (picture) and our students in particular enjoyed being "home" for a few nights. (I was personally happy to have David back for a short time - Adele is good company, but I also like to have some 2-way conversations once in a while!) During their time in the cloud forest, the group hiked over to the next valley over and spent some time with our friends, a family who runs a large organic farm. The group harvested bananas, helped in the coffee-making process (picture), ate a lot of vegetables, and milked cows.

Finally, the group spent the last week down on the Osa Peninsula, one of the highlights of the trip (as if the whole trip wasn't a highlight...). They were at Campanario Biological Station and got to do some hiking around the station, collect bats at night, hike in Corcovado National Park, and do some snorkeling around Caño Island (picture). As if this wasn't enough, the remote location they were at allowed them to spend their free time playing in the waves in the water right outside the station.

The group came back from their travels just in time for Easter Sunday. The visiting professor this week, Marty Michelson happens to be the religion professor and pastor, so he led our group in an Easter morning fellowship time. This week he is here teaching a class on Biblical Theology and Global Stewardship. It's a great follow-up to their travels, where they learned all about sustainable practices and now are able to talk about how it all applies to their faith. These pictures are of Marty and Adele, and Adele dressed for Easter.

Visitors!

2010-03-31T13:28:00.008-06:00

Sarah: I'll continue our semester journey after Spring Break, the last thing I wrote about with the exception of Adele. We had another week with a professor here, Dr. David Cummings from Point Loma Nazarene University. We were excited to have the involvement of Point Loma this year, and hopefully will get some of their students to join the program in future years. Dave brought along his 10-year old daughter, Sydney. It was a lot of fun to have both of them here. Sydney quickly made friends with our neighbors, who have girls about her age. Even though Syd couldn't speak tons of Spanish, the girls did fine and the local girls showed her around all over the place. Dave did a week on microbiology, and though some students were surprised, they all enjoyed it. :) I heard comments of "I didn't think I would like this week, but I really enjoyed it!" all throughout the week from various students. At the end of the week, Dave and Sydney took off for the beach for the weekend, and our students geared up for their 3-week traveling component.

I'll write more about the traveling component later when it is all said and done, but this past week has been a real treat for me. David's sister, Jordan, decided to bring her youngest son Benjamin (1 1/2 years), and come down and spend a week with Adele and me while David was mostly traveling. I hadn't been looking forward to such a long time here at QERC by myself, so the company was MUCH appreciated! The cousins bonded well - Benjamin loved Adele and was always looking out for her. He always wanted to be giving her hugs and kissing her all throughout the week, and he often imitated her as well. Adele did well "putting up with" his hugs that sometimes squashed her and she definitely watched him and tracked him the whole week. She even held her own toward the end of the week as she started grabbing better and got a hold of his hair and ears at times.

Jordan and I had a great time doing some hikes with the kids, attending the wedding of one of the Chacon granddaughters here in the valley, and staying up late at night scrapbooking and talking. At least twice a day we walked down to our neighbor's farm so Benjamin could see the goose and the bunnies (and the rest of the animals, but those were the favorites!). He is too cute and is always busy and wanting to be outside. We were thankful for beautiful weather the whole week so we could release a lot of that energy outside! It was a lot of fun to introduce them to our neighbors and of course everyone loved Benjamin's big beautiful eyes. He and Adele drew a lot of attention this week! Our apartment quickly turned into a disaster zone, and I got a little glimpse of what my life could be like in the future with more than one kid. :) I don't know how people do it with more than one kid! Jordan talked on Skype often with her husband and kids back home, and while Adele and I were sad to see her and Benjamin leave, we know they were excited to get back to the rest of their family.

4th month!

2010-03-16T10:30:00.007-06:00

Sarah: I'm sure this gets repetitive, but I can't believe how fast these months are going! Adele is now 4 months old and growing into her own little person. She is so much fun and only gets cuter and cuter.

This month we traveled to Nicaragua, spent a weekend at the beach, and had a few trips in and out of San Jose. While Adele is a good traveler, we found that she much prefers the cool climate here in our valley to the hot and humid weather at other locations!

Adele continues to smile all the time, and has even let out a few giggles. She keeps exploring her new sounds and has started to enjoy squealing in a high-pitched voice just for the fun of it. Her neck muscles are getting stronger and she can lift her head high and turn it while on her tummy. She now prefers to be sitting up or "standing" all the time so she can see and be a part of everything going on.

Adele is finally getting through the stage where she has to be with mommy all the time. She still has her moments, but she enjoys going with other people now too. It's fun to see our students take so much interest in her - it's addicting to try to get her to smile! This past month she has also preferred David over anyone. As soon as he walks in the room, her eyes light up and she smiles huge as she follows his every move.

While Adele is sleeping pretty good at night, she still only likes to take frequent but short naps during the day. It makes those 30-45 minute intervals for me a time to run around and attempt to get a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time!

Having a baby in Latin America brings some very funny moments for me. I'm sure it's the case anywhere in the world that women love to share with new moms lots of advice. But sometimes the advice I get here creates a lot of amusement. Here are two examples:

1.) Adele often gets the hiccups. Right after she was born, I was told that to get rid of the hiccups I should put a piece of wet paper on her forehead. I though this was funny, but a few different people gave me the same advice. We were at a dinner party with some Costa Rican friends and as soon as she got the hiccups, our friends told me to try it. So I did, and it didn't work. I was told this was because Adele is a gringa, not latina. Later on a Nicaraguan friend gave me the same advice about the wet paper on the forehead and I told her I had tried it but it didn't work. She told me it was because I didn't have enough faith that it would work. :)

2.) I never planned on getting Adele's ears pierced when she was a baby. Apparently that's the right thing to do in Costa Rica. And if you don't get your baby's ears pierced, it's obviously hard to tell whether or not the baby is a girl or boy. I assumed people would be able to tell based on all the pink clothing, the dresses, and the pink blankets Adele uses...but no, people will look at her ears and then ask "is it a boy or girl?" when she's in a pink dress, followed by "you really should pierce her ears so you can tell she's a girl". :)

Here are a few pictures from the last month:

Staying afloat

2010-03-07T15:47:00.008-06:00

Sarah: This is blog #2 - so if you are a devoted follower of our lives and want to read up on our Nicaragua trip, see the entry below before reading this current entry.

Each year it seems that we are more on top of things, more prepared, more organized, etc....and yet, each year we seem to be busier than the previous year! I seriously don't know how that happens. Once January hits, we are usually feeling very confident that our semester program will be easier to run because we have things better planned out than the year before. And I suppose that's true. Yet somehow I'm amazed that right about this time every year, we are wondering if we are going to keep our heads above water and make it to the end. If it's not class preparation, it's trips into San Jose, sick students, injured students, managing 10 students, helping with their research projects, keeping track of finances, and simply doing business in Costa Rica. (And this is not just because we have a baby...as easy as Adele is, it's the other components that are making our lives busier and crazier than ever!)

So a recap of the past couple weeks. After Nicaragua, everyone spent some good quality down time reflecting, getting caught up on sleep, and readjusting their stomachs to our Costa Rican diet. This is often more difficult for some students than for others! The week after Nicaragua, Dr. John Cossel came down to teach his portion on Herpetology (reptiles and amphibians). The first few days were spent here at QERC and the students enjoyed getting to know the lizards and frogs found in our forest.

However, since there aren't a LOT of herps to look for in our high elevation, for the last couple of days of John's week we headed down to the coast. We spent two nights at Dominical Beach, and did a lot of hiking and exploring in the nearby wildlife refuge. Though hot and humid at the beach, it was a nice change from the cooler climate at QERC. And of course there were some exciting herps to find - lots of lizards, a cain toad, a black-and-green poison dart frog, a gladiator tree frog, musk turtles, and a couple of caimans (smaller version of crocodiles). John was actually able to catch a baby caiman, and all of the students gladly passed around, excited for the chance to hold it. Adele and I only joined the group for about half of 2 of the hikes, but she did fairly well hiking around in hot weather!

Another highlight of the trip was an afternoon at a nearby waterhole. This was a treasure David and I discovered a few years ago, and enjoy taking anyone we can to appreciate it as well. The waterhole has a small but beautiful waterfall and a rope swing high on some rocks. It's a lot of fun to watch the local acrobatic kids do flips off the rope swing, and it was good fun for our students to also take their turn.

After Dominical, the students returned to QERC, but John and David and I went on to visit the community of Boruca, where the indigenous tribe Boruca lives. We were there for a short few hours, but it was fun to get to know their home and even more of their customs and traditions. We had a delicious lunch (eaten with just our hands) and a nice conversation before heading back to QERC. Part of the reason we wanted to visit them was to scope it out for a possible field trip in future years for the semester program.

We decided that it would be extremely valuable to include the Boruca trip as a field trip in future years, but for this year it had already been worked out that a few members of the tribe would come and visit our location and do a seminar for us at QERC. Two women and a man showed up the Sunday after our visit with them, and Monday morning gave our students a talk on their culture and traditions. They also spoke about the medicinal plants from their area and how they use the land to do weavings like bags, belts, table runners, etc. A highlight was hearing about the history of their masks and getting an opportunity to purchase some of their most beautiful work. It was a wonderful cultural experience for our students, and a special treat because not even Costa Ricans know much about this indigenous group. Many walked away with souvenirs and gifts, happy to support the people who directly made them.

This past week was a "slower" week - meaning, no professor was scheduled to be at QERC. Because of this, we designated Thursday and Friday to be Spring Break, if the students wanted to take advantage of a longer weekend to do some traveling. About half of our students traveled over to the Caribbean to enjoy some beach time. A few students stayed here with Adele and me, and we had movie nights and some good homemade chocolate baking. And the other few went with David for a one-night birding trip. They stayed with a couple who they'd met here in the valley before, and were able to get in one good afternoon and one good morning of birding. On their way back to QERC, they even spent some time at the waterhole to get in some quality rope swing time. :)

Nicaragua

2010-03-07T15:45:00.013-06:00

Sarah: This year for the annual Nicaragua trip during the semester program, Adele and I only joined up with the group for the last part. However, because David is usually running around with his head cut off, I'll do my best to report how the trip went. First let me say that all of the pictures are from the homestay portion of the trip - they were too cute not to be included!

Our Nicaragua trip started with a day in San Jose, which happened to be the Presidential Election Day. It was a lot of fun to see - elections here are quite different from in the States. People drove around crazy all day, waving flags of the party they were supporting, honking at everything, and everyone was out on the streets as if in a big party. It was great to see the patriotic nature of Costa Rica, and how festive the day felt.

We spent the afternoon at my former host mom's house, Aminta Ortiz. She is our annual guest speaker for Nicaragua, since she is Nicaraguan and grew up as an active member during the Sandanista Revolution. Her story is powerful, and was translated by her son Sergio and daughter Claudia - both of whom had their own personal information to add to their mother's stories. This is a great intro to Nicaragua, and often very eye-opening to our students, as Aminta and Sergio both had some insight into Nicaragua's history that included the negative effects of the U.S. involvement - most of which isn't taught in our own U.S. History classes.

The following day, everyone took off for Nicaragua while Adele and I headed home to host the large group of 26 people from OTS (which I briefly mentioned in my last blog post). After a loooooong bus ride, the group made it to the capital city of Managua for a couple of days. This portion of the trip included a historical tour of the city, a stop by a cultural center that reaches out to the community by providing educational opportunities, and a guest speaker who is a gringa married to a Nicaraguan. They saw firsthand the effects of recent history, caught a glimpse of the complexities of current politics, and experienced "in your face poverty" as one student put it. Because Nicaragua is night and day different from Costa Rica, it is a wonderful opportunity to experience both during a semester abroad!

From Managua the group headed to their 6-night homestay, in the small community of Candelaria. Those six days would have to be an experience that most people would never dream of doing in their entire lifetime, and it truly was life-changing for our students. They were so far out in the campo that each tiny house had 3 rooms - one bedroom, a living area, and a kitchen, with one lightbulb for the entire house. Each house had one spicket for water, and everyone took bucket showers out behind their houses. The houses had mud floors and each family had a number of animals that were free to roam in and out of the house - dogs, pigs, chickens, etc.

What the students found immediately was how giving and loving their families were. They were given the one bedroom to sleep in, while the rest of the family would sleep in the living area. Their plates were piled high with rice, beans, and the occasional piece of meat - cooked specially for them. The kids in the community were thrilled to have people to entertain them, and so our students spent countless hours playing baseball and running around in the extreme heat.

The project that the group went through was called AsoFenix, which is an organization that works with small communities to better their lives through environmental projects. Our group funded a project that provided the materials to build lavanderas, which served as a system that allowed them to collect their grey water and use it for their gardens. In addition to helping build the lavanderas, our group provided a bit of environmental education for the adults and kids in the community.

Though all students came back to Costa Rica completely jazzed about this type of experience and ready to share how their worldviews had completely changed, the homestays did not come without their challenges. Most students would agree that it was the food that may have been the most challenging. Here is an excerpt from David's journal:

"If I had to give a name to the little game I play every meal it would be 'sshhufuera' or 'van por alla'. It's not necessarily a fun game, but it is a way to help me get through what seems like the endless barrage of meals. The following rules are observed: 1.) A plate of food that is inhumanely possible to eat is served to me. 2.) The only two ways of winning is to either eat all the food and become ill due to a bursting belly or secretly feed various portions (preferably the coagulated milk or tortillas) to the numerous starving animals (dogs, cats, and chickens) who are begging for the food. The rules are simple but the game is complicated by two factors. Six people are in and out of the room constantly who I can't let see me feed the animals. And, the animals I want to have close to me so I can slip them the food at the opportune time are constantly being driven away with a leather whip and either the slurred phrase 'sshhufuera' or the loudly spoken 'van por alla'. When you put all these rules and factors together you really have to hone in your skills to beat the game. In its simplicity it takes patience and a keen observant eye. If one is willing to wait it out to completion you will be rewarded with your food in the belly of a wanting animal and not sitting idle in your stomach, beans upon layers of beans, waiting to be deposited in the latrine. Your host mom may wonder why it takes you 45 minutes longer to finish your plate of food than it does the rest of the family but glory does go to the victor, albeit secretly. I win approximately 75% of the time. The other 25% of time I walk with my head hung low and, in an act of shame, place my plate with food left on it back on the kitchen wood plank hoping my host mom doesn't think I'm 'fresa'." :)

After the homestays, the group headed to Granada for a few days of debriefing and resting up before making the long trek back to Costa Rica. Adele and I met up with them in Granada and I was thrilled with how she traveled on a bus! I was also extremely grateful for how the Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans looked out for me during border crossings and stops on the bus. We happened to be in Granada the same time as the Poetry Festival, which made it a ton of fun. There were booths set up with artisans, a parade, famous poets, and concerts both nights. We had a great time enjoying the culture, and had a great discussion on our last night to debrief the overall experience in Nicaragua. I maintain that this study trip is one of the highlights of the entire semester, and it's awesome to see our students go through an experience like that and come back to Costa Rica changed people.

Three Months!

2010-02-15T09:17:00.010-06:00

Sarah: Hard to believe Adele will be three months tomorrow, as my newborn is transitioning into the "infant" stage. We have begun putting her 0-3 month clothes away, and it's a good thing she has some really cute 3-6 month clothes because it's sad to put away her cute newborn outfits!

In the last month, Adele has continued to grow and change a lot. We all had to survive her first set of shots - David did the best out of all of us, though he had the difficult task of holding her hands down as she looked up at him with her big eyes that said "you'll protect me, won't you daddy?"

On a much happier note, Adele is an incredibly easy, happy baby. She smiles all the time, and has begun to "talk" by cooing and testing out new sounds. She will now take a break from nursing just to smile or talk to me, and it makes my heart melt every time. She's very interactive now, and likes to kick me to get my attention. And when she's on my lap, she'll stare at David until he looks at her and then she'll give him a huge grin.

This month Adele and I have started taking a daily walk down the road and back. It's a great way to enjoy the beautiful sunshine (sorry to those of you experiencing tons of snow and cold weather!) and also to greet our neighbors. I put Adele in the wrap, and as soon as I step outside she lays her head down and goes to sleep. Our friends in the valley love seeing her on a regular basis.

A few other highlights: Adele has started taking her pacifier! This may not seem to be a huge accomplishment to some, but to us it is a big relief. I realize we'll go through struggles in the future of getting rid of that pacifier, but for now we are so thankful that she's much easier to calm down in public or in the carseat by a simple paci. Also, Adele continues to improve her sleeping habits. She now takes almost all her naps by herself (besides our morning walk), and will at least start off each night in her crib. Sometimes she'll only sleep at night by herself for a half hour, but some nights like last night it's a full 5 hours before she ends up back with me.

This past week Adele and I have been in charge of hosting a group of 26 students who were here with the Organization of Tropical Studies (OTS), while David has been in Nicaragua with our students for a study trip. We survived, but are very much looking forward to seeing David this week! While here on our own, Adele and I went to a wedding in the valley and spent Valentine's Day with our Nicaraguan friend Nancy and her family.

Here are some pictures from the last month:

Semester happenings

2010-02-09T16:06:00.005-06:00

Sarah: It hardly seems like our semester has begun, and yet we're over a quarter finished with it already. We've had two professors come and go and many more to come still.

Bruce Hoagland, from the University of Oklahoma, was here for about 2 1/2 weeks. He was here to help the students get going with their research projects, and also to teach a week on Botany. The students really enjoyed having him around, and he and David worked incredibly hard during those weeks. In addition to teaching, Bruce and David spent a lot of time in the field searching for aguacatillo trees, setting up weather stations, and building an orchidarium. It was great to have Bruce here and be so productive.

After Bruce left, the students took advantage of a free weekend and headed to the beach. Most were anxious to get there, after having been in Costa Rica for a whole month and having yet to see the ocean. They took off on their own adventure and rode public buses, found places to stay, and enjoyed some hot beach weather.

Last week we had Carrie Bentley from Southern Nazarene University come for the week to also help with research projects and to teach Tropical Medicine. Her week included a day field trip to San Jose, where the Tropical Medicine class visited two hospitals - the public one called San Juan de Dios, and the private one called Clinica Biblica (where Adele was born). The students were able to talk to doctors at both locations and see the difference between public and private hospitals in Costa Rica. They had a fantastic experience on that field trip.

Adele continues to do well, and here is a video of her showing off her dance moves - in case anyone missed it on facebook!

TWO months

2010-01-22T15:53:00.012-06:00

Sarah: Last week Adele turned 2 months. Now that we are busy with our semester program, it feels like we've had Adele for much longer than only 2 months! This past month marked some big changes for her (and us). Highlights include:

~Adele smiling!
~(finally) switching her days and nights to normal
~7 plane rides
~high-pitched squeals when hiccuping
~still being passed around by all of our Costa Rican and Nicaraguan neighbors
~dealing with dry air in the States accompanied by dry skin and a stuffy nose
~meeting the rest of her family for the first time!
~attempting to scoot forward during her tummy time
~still working on sleeping on her own (3 days in a row napping in her crib alone!)
~enjoying being pulled up in the standing position
~starting to dance to her mobile in her crib
~cutting down to (usually) only one dirty diaper a day!
~tracking the hummingbirds that visit the feeders
~sleeping "through" the night (a whole 5 hours!)
~still refusing both her pacifier and a bottle (hopefully that will be a 3-month accomplishment!)

We are really enjoying our time with her and sharing her with the students and also with the community. Here are some pictures from the last month:

Enjoying bath time!

Loving her new Christmas present - her bedding.

Bundled up for a day out with Mommy

Sporting the hat that Costa Ricans love most. :)

Smile!

Being goofy with Daddy

Not sure what to think of Mommy lovin' on her...

Enjoying a day outside while Mommy and Daddy work

Another beginning

2010-01-14T14:02:00.004-06:00

Sarah: Upon arriving back in Costa Rica from our Christmas travels, we had only a day and a half to get ready for our new group of students. We frantically tried to get the building in top shape, finish some shopping for supplies and food for the next 2 weeks, and even sleep a little bit. Then it was off to the airport to meet the new group.

This year we have 10 students - 6 from Southern Nazarene University (SNU) and 4 from Northwest Nazarene University (NNU, David's alma mater) to live with us at QERC and study abroad here in the cloud forest for this whole semester. Meredith has also returned as our intern for the next 4 months. So far, the students are awesome. We spent the first week doing an orientation for them out at QERC and also in San Jose to get them a little familiar with their surroundings. Here at QERC we did some cultural activities and got them out into the community to get to know the places and the people around us. Then we took them on a bus into San Jose and split them off into groups to do a scavenger hunt which took them all over the city. They were forced to interact with the Ticos and get directions, buy things, try new foods, and use the public transportation. Though many in the group have limited Spanish knowledge, they all did well and returned to QERC enthused about their experiences and motivated to get to know the language and the people even more. Adele did great being hauled around in the wrap and passed around to new arms as she too is getting to know what life will be like during the semester program!

This week began classes for the students. David has them each morning and is doing a research orientation with them to get their research projects going and to get them familiar with the trails and resources they have available throughout the semester. They also have had Skype sessions with professors back on campus to go over the various syllabi and get their other classes started. Evenings have been filled with homework and games and getting to know each other. We are very excited for this semester and being a part of such a huge experience in these students' lives!

La Navidad

2010-01-10T17:10:00.014-06:00

Sarah: Over Christmas we were able to go back to the States and visit our families. Because all of her paperwork was in order, it was possible to leave the country with Adele. We began our two week trip in snowy and cold Iowa, with the Gosselinks. Adele had only met Grandma (my mom) and was excited to get reacquainted with her. She was also very excited to meet the rest of the family for the first time. At the airport we were all greeted by Grandma and Grandpa (my parents - I'm clarifying because it's still sort of weird for me to refer to them in that manner!), Aunt Katie, and Aunt Rachel. Everyone took turns holding her briefly before we headed home.

Aunt Emily and Uncle Greg and cousin Ash (4 months) joined us a couple days later and we all had such a wonderful time celebrating Christmas together. It was a strange but good new scene at the Gosselink household to see cribs, bouncers, swings, etc. in the house to accommodate the babies, and we all enjoyed the new entertainment that the babies provided. It was fun for me to see my parents as grandparents - both were always wanting to hold one, and my dad in particular enjoyed taking naps with the sleeping babies. It was also neat to see my younger sisters adjust to being aunts and enjoy playing and interacting with both babies.

Did I mention it was COLD in Iowa?? There was lots of snow, much to our enjoyment, but the cold was quite a shock to our systems. Adele did an excellent job traveling on the planes, but the cold dry climate was something she didn't do super well with. She was very congested the first night, causing my parents to invest in a humidifier, and soon after that her skin began to get dry and develop rashes. I understood all too well - my body was reacting the same way!

In addition to my immediate family, we got together with my dad's family on Christmas Day and my mom's family the day after. It was fun to show off our daughter and see family members that we often only see once a year.

After Iowa we flew out to Spokane to visit David's family. We were greeted by Nana and Popa (David's parents), Aunt Jenna, and cousin Gracelyn (almost 6 years old). Adele hadn't met any of them before and loved being passed around and welcomed in new arms. It was again bitter cold in Spokane, though without any snow for the time.

On the way home we stopped by Aunt Jordan and Uncle Rusty's house so they could meet their new niece and ended up staying up rather late visiting with everyone. The following day Adele got to meet the rest of the family, her cousins Gabriel (4 years old) and Benjamin (1 year 4 months). All of the cousins enjoyed holding Adele, and even Benjamin worked up the courage to give her a kiss by the end of the week!

In Spokane we didn't have much to do, and it was really nice spending some of the days holed up inside, relaxing and visiting with the family. Adele had a little difficulty adjusting to yet another environment, but we were so thankful that there were many open arms to pass her around and help keep her fussiness to a minimum. David and I weren't the only ones who lost sleep that week, but everyone enjoyed the quality time they had to spend with Adele.

We had an open house Christmas gathering with the extended family, so many more family members were able to meet our daughter. We had the Hille Christmas at the end of our week and it was even accompanied by a beautiful dusting of snow outside. At the end of 2 great weeks with our families, it was sad to have to say goodbye to everyone. It seems it's even more difficult living so far away now that we have a daughter who wants to get to know her other family members!

Happy 1 month Adele!

2009-12-16T14:23:00.012-06:00

Sarah: Adele turned one month old on Wednesday. At times it feels like she's been a part of our lives for much longer than one month, and at times it feels like I have no idea where the time went and she should still only be a week old or so. It has been a good month - one of joy as we hold her, laughter as we watch her make funny faces and noises, and one of little sleep. :) Unfortunately, Adele has not quite mastered the concept of sleeping at night and being awake during the day.

Our small community of San Gerardo de Dota has really welcomed their new member and taken her under their wing. We've had a number of community events to go to and Adele ends up being the star of the show wherever we go. She is getting her share of being held by many different people and listening to a combination of Spanish and English all day long. It is a fun and new thing to be treated so differently by our neighbors now that we have a baby. Everyone looks out for us and is extremely friendly, even more than they were before.

Tuesday night we attended our first Posada of the year. This is an event I kind of think as comparable to Advent, only it's a Catholic tradition. 10 days before Christmas the Posadas start, and take place at a different house every night leading up to Christmas Eve, when there is a service at the church. At the Posada, people take turns reading portions of the birth of Jesus, followed by lots of recited prayers, and singing Christmas songs in between. On Tuesday, the first Posada was held at Efrain and Caridad's house, and there was a great turnout. The priest gave a brief but nice message on the meaning of Christmas and the importance of the holiday before the scripture reading and singing began. We dressed Adele up in her first Christmas outfit of the year, bundled up, and joined the community for the special event. Adele did great, and slept through almost the entire thing with the exception of a few grunts and squeals.

The last couple of days we have spent in San Jose on a few different missions. In preparation for the semester program which will begin on January 4th with 10 students, we have been taking inventory of all of our kitchen supplies and bedroom linens and towels. While in San Jose we headed to a number of different stores to price items, and ended up purchasing lots of new supplies for QERC. Our second mission was to get all of Adele's paperwork in order so that she can travel with us for Christmas. This has been a long process, and one we were afraid wouldn't be completed in time for our travels. However, on Thursday we were able to finish the process and we now have Adele's Costa Rican birth certificate, a US passport for her, her US birth certificate, and permission from the Costa Rican Immigrations office allowing us to leave the country with her. We have learned a lot about the process of having a baby in another country! Finally, we ended our trip into San Jose with a Christmas party with the LASP staff, which was a lot of fun and great to again show off Adele to our friends here in Costa Rica.

The pictures in this blog are a few of our favorites from the first month of life with Adele.

Projects

2009-12-10T11:57:00.006-06:00

Sarah: Now is the time of year that David and I are trying to get as many projects finished before the start of the semester program in January. There were a few big projects we wanted to accomplish this fall, and were somewhat dependent on getting the money approved for those projects, picking up the material for the projects, and coordinating with the workers who would be working on those projects with us. Naturally, the accumulation of all of that happened the week of Adele's birth. So, we were slightly delayed as everything was put on hold while David and I began the process of figuring out our lives as parents.

Within the last couple of weeks, we were able to get all of the material out here and our workers began to work on a few of those big projects. One exciting project to see come to fruition is the installation of 2 solar hot water heaters that will be able to provide hot water for QERC without the use of electricity. This has been one of David's dreams as QERC's hot water tanks slowly began to fall apart, so the approval of these solar hot water systems was very exciting. It is one more way that QERC is heading in the direction of being sustainable in the way we use resources. Since we have an unlimited supply of water, the elimination of electricity in our water use cuts back a lot our use of energy.

There have been a couple of workers who have been here every day working on a couple other projects for us as well. One is the construction of a car port. With the purchase of our new car, we decided that in order to take better care of the car and eliminate the wear of the weather we experience here, a car port was a necessity.

Another project is the construction of a covered laundry structure to dry clothes. Before we had clotheslines up outside and encouraged the use of drying clothes on the line, but with the rain that falls every day (especially during the rainy season!) it becomes more difficult to dry clothes in that manner. Now with a covered drying area, we can eliminate the use of our dryer - with the exception of Ana, who often has to turn laundry over quickly with groups that come through. It will be another way that QERC is able to practice good conservation ethics and use less energy.

Welcome Adele Marie Hille

2009-11-30T15:42:00.012-06:00

Sarah: Well it's time to announce the birth of our new daughter, Adele Marie. Two and a half weeks ago on Friday, David and I went into San Jose with our bags packed. We knew it was 2 weeks early, but we wanted to be prepared in case the doctor said we needed to stay close to the hospital....which ended up being the case. After a minor freak out by both of us, David and I walked around in a daze the rest of the day, as the reality of the situation was hitting us hard. We stayed with our friends Trevor and Laura over the weekend, and had another routine doctor's appointment the following Monday.

As we were waiting for the doctor, I began going into labor. As one of our fears was the fact that we live 2 hours away from the hospital, we were extremely thankful that we happened to actually be IN the hospital when labor happened! The doctor checked me out, and then sent us down to admissions to check into the hospital. After that everything went (relatively) quickly. My contractions got closer together and much harder, and it was only a matter of hours by the time we settled into the maternity ward to the time little Adele made her appearance.

Now granted...I'm NOT going to say it was easy. :) But, everything went so smoothly that we couldn't have asked for a better delivery (I guess I could have asked that it wouldn't have hurt so badly!). David did an excellent job keeping me calm and sane, and the other doctors and nurses in the room did a great job of yelling encouraging words and directions in Spanish. It was a pretty surreal experience. Adele Marie was born at 7:27 on November 16th, and weighed in at 7 lbs., 18.5 inches long.

The following day my mom (who just couldn't wait) jumped on a plane and came to visit for a week. It was her first time visiting Costa Rica and we were happy to show her our lives and our home, and were extremely thankful for an extra set of hands and her knowledge as a mother as we were trying to figure things out during our first week as parents. It was great to have her here and introduce her to our friends and support system in San Jose and in our community.

We also had a number of visitors in and out of the hospital to welcome Adele to the world. It was great to feel the support of friends during such a special time. We were especially grateful to Trevor and Laura, who let us invade their house as we were waiting for Adele to join us, and also let us crash at their place right after she was born. When we brought her back to our community of San Gerardo de Dota, we were also welcomed by our neighbors around us. It now is quite common for someone to stop by and see Adele, and fight over holding her. Last weekend lots of the women threw us a surprise "tea" as well - which is what they call a baby shower in Spanish. It was really sweet - lots of balloons and streamers, and really good food. We also got more presents - mostly blankets, since Costa Ricans seem to think babies are ALWAYS cold and need to be bundled up in warm blankets all the time.

Now David and I are settling back into some sort of a routine as we're still figuring out what our lives are going to look like with a newborn here at QERC. It's been a fun change though (besides the fact that Adele is sort of confused when it's night and when it's day), and we both really enjoy spending lots of time just simply staring at her. She's super cute trying out all her new facial expressions and her vocal chords with her grunts and squeals.

Pregnancy update

2009-11-02T10:02:00.011-06:00

Sarah: Well it's officially November, which means we have reached THE MONTH that our little baby girl will be born! Things have continued to go well for us, and I have been feeling great. And by great I mean there is nothing out of the ordinary that needs to be complained about - I'm definitely bigger, slower, a bit more uncomfortable, I grunt more, and don't always get the best night of sleep...but that's all normal, right? This first picture is of me at 32 weeks.

As our time is coming closer and closer, we feel like we are scrambling a little bit trying to get prepared. The nice thing about living in another country in a small one-bedroom apartment is that we can't spend any time on fixing up a nursery (since we don't have one) and it doesn't take much time to organize things (since we don't have the space and thus don't have a lot of baby clothes and accessories). So while we feel "prepared" for this baby to come, we've been working a lot on getting things in order at QERC and for the semester program. We can recognize the fact that our lives WILL change after having a baby....we're just not sure HOW. :)

So back to baby. We have decided to name her Adele Marie. That was one of our top two names and once we started thinking of her that way, it just seemed so right. It is exciting to have it finally decided and start imagining what her personality will be like to accompany her name. In Spanish her name will be Adelia, or even Maria Adelia as the full name. Many Costa Ricans use their middle name as their main name, and Maria is a very common first name - especially here in the valley where we live. So little Adelia will fit right in! This second picture if of me at 34 weeks (enjoying the special parking offered for pregnant women in Costa Rica!).

In preparation for little Adele's arrival, we picked up a crib from our friend Laura at the bakery here in the valley a few weeks ago, who is lending it to us while we live here. We were extremely grateful for the offer and upon setting it up in our bedroom felt a bit of a reality kick settle in. (The TV will eventually be moved...and we do have a mattress to put in the crib!) Next came the washing-the-baby clothes ritual, which our housekeeper Ana was quite excited to take part in. Since our weather has been unpredictable, she constructed her own makeshift clothesline in one of the bedrooms upstairs to hang the clothes up to dry. Ana had been begging me for weeks to let her wash the baby clothes, and once I gave her the go-ahead, she got right on it as she "ooohed" over every small piece of clothing. When it came time to take the clothes off the line to fold them, she called up her 9-year old daughter Karla who had been begging to come help organize the clothes. However, when it came time to actually put the clothes away in their own organized fashion, I told them I'd like to go ahead and do that (much to their dismay) - because I'd like to play with my own daughter's clothes too!

We've also had a couple of doctor visits in the last month, and he seems to think everything is progressing very well. At this last visit I was almost 36 weeks and he said that Adele looks like she's right on schedule to be born toward the end of November. We're still hoping she might decide to make an appearance a little earlier...but are extremely happy she is developing so well. The ultrasound guy kept saying every part of her was perfect - "su cabeza está perfecta", "su tamaño está perfecto" etc. The most fun for us on the ultrasound was being able to see her open and close her eyes, open up her mouth and stick out her tongue, and suck on her fingers. She continues to move A LOT as she rolls around all over my stomach and tries hard to stick her little feet up in my ribs whenever she gets the chance.

Also this last time in the city, our friends at LASP threw us a baby shower. It was really special and thoughtful, and we are very thankful for good supportive friends here in Costa Rica. Our good friends from LASP Trevor and Laura are kind enough to let us store some things at their house in San Jose so that when we stay with them for about a week up until the due date, or however long we will stay with them after Adele is born, we will be as prepared as we can be. This last time in we brought our pack-'n-play, our diaper bag full of supplies, and some extra personal items and toiletries we could afford to leave there for the next few weeks. Finally, this last picture is from today, and I am 36 weeks and 4 days along.

Meet Meredith

2009-10-26T17:02:00.003-06:00

Sarah: When we returned to Costa Rica from our trip to the States at the end of September, our new intern arrived at the same time. We were excited to be able to promote the internship position after having such a positive experience with Peter last year, and even more excited when one of our former students and friends, Meredith, applied.

So, meet Meredith. We first got to know Meredith during our first year down here, during the first semester program SNU ever did at QERC. She was part of the guinea pig group - the group that was able to hold onto their class schedule from SNU while living at QERC for the spring semester. To supplement their SNU workload, QERC joined up with the Latin American Studies Program (LASP) for certain aspects of the semester in order to give the students more of a cross-cultural experience. Meredith enjoyed her experience so much that semester that when the following year rolled around, she actually decided to participate in our second semester program. As the program was developing and becoming more of a formal program with actual classes IN Costa Rica, Meredith was able to take advantage of the opportunity to study again at QERC with new classes and new experiences and hardly any overlap. Through both of these semester programs (8 months total!), we were able to get to know Meredith very well.

When graduation hit for Meredith and she was still contemplating what to do with her life (and still is!), a year-long internship at QERC seemed like the perfect fit. Meredith is using this year to figure out which venue she wants to pursue and she is able to put to good use her passions while being a great asset to furthering the development of projects we have going on at QERC.

While Meredith is here for almost 8 months, she is both developing her own projects to work on as well as fitting into projects we already have going on. She often works outside in the sunny mornings to help David with the native plant demonstration around the building, and he is grateful to have the extra help. In the afternoons she has been helping with the development of the museum. We are thrilled to have an extra hand around here and are extremely hopeful that with her help we can get the museum in a very presentable state (one that we don't have to say is "in progress") by the beginning of the semester program in January. These are two projects we have been working on basically ever since we took this job and we have high hopes of seeing them to completion this year!

One project Meredith is developing is basically an audit of the sustainability practices here at QERC. She is picking apart each aspect of energy and products being used at QERC and developing ways we can be more environmentally conscious of our actions. We are excited to hopefully implement some of her suggested changes already this year, and suggest long-term changes for future years.

Once the semester program starts in January, we will rely on Meredith to take on some staff responsibilities to help take the weight off our shoulders. We are thankful for her help and glad that she already has the experience of two semesters under her belt in order to step up and take on a new role during the program. Aside from all the work that Meredith is contributing to QERC, it's fun for David and me to have someone around to interact with and spend our evenings with. :)

One other exciting thing for us to share is how we have created our own version of a CSA here in Costa Rica. A family that we've gotten to know quite well that live in the next valley over have a very impressive farm that is completely organic. Every time we visit them we are overwhelmed by their generosity in loading us up with fresh fruits and vegetables. We were just there visiting a couple weeks ago and asked if they would be interested in selling us a basket of fresh produce every 2 weeks. The idea is that they would drop the basket off at the truck stop at the top of the hill every other Friday afternoon, and we would leave the money and pick up the basket the following Saturday morning. They were excited about the idea of supplying us with whatever produce they had on hand, and of course we were thrilled with the arrangement as well. This past Saturday we picked up our first basket and were dumbfounded at the array of fruits and veggies we received - many of which we'd never even seen or heard of before. This load only cost us around $12.00! The family was kind enough to even supply us with some recipes for some of the food we didn't know what to do with. We are excited to continue with this new arrangement!

El Botanico

2009-10-18T15:00:00.010-06:00

David: A very important part of developing quality research and education at QERC is having talented and motivated partners who are interested in progressing the conservation mission of QERC. Over the past year SNU has developed one such relationship with a researcher/ professor from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Bruce Hoagland is a faculty member of the OU Geography Department and coordinator of the Oklahoma Natural Heritage Inventory (www.oknaturalheritage.ou.edu). Around here I introduced him as un botanico y un experto con orquideas because botany is his area of study and he is indeed an expert on orchids. Bruce spent two weeks here at QERC in February as exploratory time to see what possibilities there might be at QERC, and most recently he just departed a few days ago after spending two and a half weeks with us working on several projects. The two and a half weeks that Bruce just spent with us were full of a lot of field time, hard work, and good company. We had three main projects to work on: 1)QERC orchidarium 2)aguacatillo phenology study 3)QERCnet weather stations.

Being that Bruce is an orchid enthusiast and orchidologist by trade, the vast numbers of orchids found in our forests here in San Gerardo de Dota kept him on his toes. One of his ideas that will support our efforts of both education and research is the construction of a structure to house orchids that have fallen from their epiphytic homes and land on the forest floor. The orchidarium, or orchidario in Spanish, will be a home to place those fallen orchids and use them as an educational tool. Their close proximity to our station also will allow students and researchers to conveniently study flowering, fruiting, and pollintating of the species we will have represented. The picture above shows the beginnings of the orchidarium. Upon Bruce's next trip in Janauary we will erect the final structure to provide nice shade for the plants. The picture below the orchidarium is of one of our prize orchids that is flowering at the moment.

The aguacatillo phenology study is one that you should be somewhat familiar with as I've written about it in the past. Bruce is coming along side QERC to help us organize and streamline this study in order to produce some long-term assessment of how the topography and climate of our location affect the flowering and fruiting cycle of these important trees. You probably remember that the quetzals are very much linked to the fruiting cycle of these trees. Bruce will be a very important partner for the future in analyzing the data that has been collected over the past 15 years and ensuring that the research and monitoring moves forward in the right direction. So while he was here I was able to give him an introduction to the many trees that we have relocated in the past year. During the time we spent visiting the trees we brainstormed methods and protocols for how the data collection should be done. One bit of information I learned is that new tree growth coming off the main trunk that creates a secondary trunk is officially called a "sucker." As you can imagine we saw some skinny suckers, big suckers, and even a group of suckers. The situation would become tense when one of us would sternly state, "Watch out for those suckers!"

The QERCnet is a very exciting research infrastructure project that has been developed cooperatively between Bruce and SNU. If you are familiar with the topography of San Gerardo de Dota you know that the mountains are steep with many ridges creating many small valleys and elevation changes very quickly as you move around anywhere. As the QERCnet is continually developed more and more, independent climate monitoring stations will be set at intervals of 25 meters of elevation change in a way that would resemble someone casting a fishing net over the topography of the Chacons private forest preserve. The long term value of this for QERC has many applications in research. We will be able to see patterns in the movement of air and moisture through the labyrinth of contours in the mountains. We'll start piecing together information on the climate of micro-habitats which will undoubtedly aid in explaining why plants grow successfully where they are growing and why animals are choosing space to use utilize. One other very exciting application is that the current line of equipment we are preparing to install will start in the primary forest and move down into an area of successional growth that once was pasture land and is reforesting itself. As data is collected over the years we will be able to see how the reforestation process slowly changes the climate of the land. It's commonly known that clear-cutting natural vegetation will affect the weather cycle and it will be very exciting to be able to track this change over the years as the forest returns to normal, which could take up to 200-500 years. So there is the idea, and while Bruce was here we spent many, many hours wielding machetes in order to bushwhack our way through vegetation to find the optimum placement for these upcoming 7 stations. We made very good progress and hope that by the end of January all 7 stations will be installed and collecting data.

And finally, in the spirit of orchid enthusiasm, we leave you with some orchid pictures that we snapped at the Lankester Botanical Gardens which we visited with Bruce on his way back into San Jose.

To the States and back again

2009-10-04T16:39:00.006-06:00

Sarah: About a week ago we returned to Costa Rica after yet another trip to the United States. We spent the majority of the month of September traveling to different parts of the U.S. doing some recruiting for our spring semester program.

We began our trip with about a week in Oklahoma at Southern Nazarene University, and our time was very full with lots of meetings, planning sessions, classroom speaking engagements, student meetings, and reuniting with our former students who are still on campus. The QERC program has developed enough and we've recruited enough over the past few years that this year (the 4th year for the program) we could really see a difference - instead of trying to encourage students to participate THIS year, we found ourselves encouraging the freshmen to plan the QERC semester program into their college schedule. There are already a handful of SNU students signed up and ready to participate this year, due to the reputation of the program and our recruiting efforts in past years. The meetings and planning sessions also went extremely well and the program continues to develop and become even more organized with each semester.

Being at SNU is always a fun time to reunite with our friends - both those on faculty and also those students who are still around. We enjoyed a barbecue and a number of lunches with the faculty and had a good time of sharing what progress is happening at QERC, and our evenings were filled with dinners out and hanging out with former students by playing Rock Band, Wii, Nuke 'Em, and Go-Karts.

Though this particular trip to the States was strictly business and no scheduled family visits, my parents made the long drive down from Iowa to meet up with us one weekend while we were in Oklahoma. Even though the time went fast with them, we were really appreciative of them making the effort to see us while in the States - it makes the stretch between summer and Christmas seem not quite as long! (I have a feeling they made the drive partly due to the fact that the next time we see them we will have their granddaughter in our hands and my belly is growing steadily at this point!)

From SNU we traveled out to Point Loma Nazarene University, in San Diego, California. This quick trip (2 1/2 days) was also very full - more meetings, more recruiting, and student gatherings. Point Loma's campus is beautiful and it's always fun to walk around and be able to see the ocean from campus! We had some great positive feedback from the faculty, and they are very excited to share the program with their students in the hopes of getting their school involved either this year or next year.

From Point Loma we headed up to Nampa, Idaho, where we spent the next few days at Northwest Nazarene University (David's alma mater). This visit included more classroom speaking engagements, and of course more meetings. Last year we had one NNU student involved with the program, and due to his excitement about the program upon his return to campus and also due to the faculty support, the student response was overwhelming. We should see at least a few students participating in the program this upcoming spring, and freshmen are already planning it into their schedules for future years.

Being up at NNU is always fun also because it gives us an excuse to meet up with some friends who live in the area. We had a great time reconnecting with old friends in the midst of our productive time on campus. And as we planned having a weekend at NNU, David's parents and his older sister and her 3 kids drove down to meet up with us. Like with my family, it was a short time, but well worth it. We were thankful to see them and be able to spend some good hours of quality time together.

From NNU, we traveled over to Chicago, Illinois, to Olivet Nazarene University. This was our first time recruiting on their campus and our first time of actually introducing the QERC semester program to their faculty and students. The faculty seemed to be very receptive, and right away the student interest was high. Though we were mainly looking to set the stage for involvement in the years to come, we are fairly hopeful that we may have student participation from Olivet as early as this spring.

From Olivet, David headed back to SNU for some wrap-up meetings and I headed to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to visit my sister and her 5-week old baby Asher. It was fun to meet my new cute nephew and also spend some good quality time with my sister and her husband. As my due date keeps getting closer and closer, it was a little reality check to see what life with a newborn is like. :) I was really thankful for the time I had to spend with them while Asher is still a young baby!

Finally, I flew from Chattanooga to Oklahoma and met up with David, and we had one last night in the States saying goodbye to students and packing up our things to head back to Costa Rica. While our time in the States was both very productive and also very enjoyable, it is nice to be back in our home for a much longer stretch of time as we have lots of work to be done in preparation for January...and that whole giving birth thing. This picture is of me at 32 weeks.

The British Invasion

2009-09-04T20:37:00.004-06:00

David: It's an el nino year and that means a rainy season that is drier than normal. It's always interesting how we want what we don't have. Here we are experiencing these beautiful sunny and rainless days at QERC in the middle of the rainy season and yet we can't help but catch ourselves sometimes thinking that we wish it was raining. I think that the rain somehow places us in context of the time of year and maybe we just feel like something is off.

Despite the oddity of it we truly have enjoyed the "good" weather. For the month of August we have been able to get a lot of work done outside on both grounds-keeping projects and field biology projects. We had a backhoe on our property to help us level out a few spots that were causing some water runoff problems. The mass moving of all that dirt has given me the excuse to level off a few other areas on the lawn that will be good places for expanding our native botanical gardens, a project we hope to wrap up this fall. A little more rain would help us out with that.

I spent quite a bit of time in the field working on the QERC aguacatillo phenology monitoring project. The aguacatillos are the trees that provide a good majority of food for our quetzal population. The name literally means little avocado and that is basically what they look like. QERC has been monitoring the flowering and fruiting cycles of hundreds of these trees for over a decade. The project needs a little revitalizing in order for us to continue properly monitoring the trees, so our work was to relocate all of these old trees that were once tagged and mapped. Once they were relocated, they were photographed, GPS coordinates were taken for their location, and they will be re-tagged with a more updated system.

We have had an assistant helping us with some of these projects during the month of August. Aidan is a British high school student who set up an independent research experience with us here at QERC. He stayed with a host family in our community, worked with me in the mornings, and worked on his personal research in the afternoons. For the majority of our three years here we have enjoyed the mixture of people who have worked with us at QERC and the diversity of positive experiences that has brought us. Aidan turned out to be a little different story. Normally we wouldn't take the time to talk about a negative experience with someone we have worked with but these stories are just too bizarre and funny not to share. And it shows a little bit of the reality of our daily lives as well.

So one night around 8:30, Sarah and I popped some popcorn and were headed upstairs to put in a DVD. I went upstairs to get the DVD going while Sarah was getting the popcorn. All lights were off and I was rounding the corner from the stairs when I saw a flash of someone darting into one of the bedrooms. So naturally I frantically ran downstairs as fast as I could, came into the apartment, and slammed the door shut behind me.

I told Sarah that I thought someone was upstairs, and she thought I was kidding until she saw that my face was completely white. We were locked in our apartment, contemplating what to do, and figuring if it was indeed a robber he was probably gone off the balcony by then like any good tico who wants to steal but not get caught. So I grabbed a shovel that was outside our apartment door and we cautiously opened the door to the rest of the building. We systematically checked around downstairs and noticed the back lab door was still unlocked, which meant technically someone could have been in the building. We checked all closets, storage room, bathrooms, etc. downstairs before proceeding upstairs. Once upstairs we saw that the door to the bedroom I had thought I'd seen the guy run into was open, causing more reason to be alarmed - it was becoming more and more real that someone had been upstairs.

So I called out "IS ANYONE UP HERE?" and no answer. I walked into the bedroom, shovel ready, and at first glance didn't see anything. Then I noticed a blanket crumpled up inside one of the shelves (shelf size shown in reenactment photo) and upon a closer look I saw two legs through a hole in the blanket. I left the room and whispered to Sarah "Someone's in there. I can see them". So I called out again "IF ANYONE IS UP HERE YOU BETTER COME OUT NOW!" and still no answer. Finally, in one last hopeful thought, I yelled "AIDAN? IS THAT YOU?" All we heard was a whimpering "yeeeessssss".

His excuse was that he couldn't sleep at the family's house he was at, so he somehow thought it would be a good idea to sneak over to QERC, sneak upstairs, and watch some movies on his computer using his headphones and keeping the lights out so we wouldn't notice. I told him he was lucky we didn't have a gun because we thought he was a robber! It turns out he actually crawled out the bedroom window at his host family's house. When he returned to the house and sneaked back through the window, he woke his family up and they thought it was a robber too. Well, in the end he lied to both us and the family about why he was out, how he got out, and what he was doing. Deceitfulness and lying were recurring themes with him during his time at QERC.

In the end, Aidan earned himself an early departure from QERC and San Gerardo de Dota when we discovered that he had been stealing from us. Based on what turned out to be accurate suspicions, we searched his bags at his house one morning while he was working. We found a slough of QERC lab equipment, souvenirs, and art supplies. It turns out he had been systematically stealing from us for weeks. I went back to QERC, told him he was leaving, and we had him on a bus to San Jose within two hours. This is why it's easier to work with quetzals. :)

The good with the bad

2009-08-22T14:19:00.006-06:00

Sarah: Well we're definitely back in the swing of things since our summer trip home. Seems like a day or two after we got here, it felt like we'd never left and we were back to working hard, practically non-stop. We've been doing lots of work outside - weeding, yard work, land maintenance including having a backhoe come in and do some leveling, and David's been working on projects in preparation for researchers and professors and students to come down. On top of that, we're preparing to do some recruiting for our semester program, and the semester program alone takes a lot of prep work and time!

One exciting thing since we got back was that our friend Pam, her husband, and a few friends came on vacation to Costa Rica and spent a little bit of time in the valley here with us. We studied with Pam here in Costa Rica 7 1/2 years ago, and have only seen her a handful of times since then, so it was great to spend some time with her again. This picture is most of the group up at Laura's Bakery, visiting with Larue (Laura's cousin's husband). Pam is next to Larue.

Last weekend was also very eventful. August 15th is Mother's Day here in Costa Rica (last Saturday), so on Sunday we were invited over to our friend Nancy's house for a big lunch to celebrate. Nancy is our cook during the semester program and she's become a good friend to us over the last 8 months. We had a good typical Nicaraguan meal, cake, and spent a good part of the afternoon just sitting around chatting. Nancy and her husband Clemente have 3 kids, Belen (8), Angelica (3), and Brittany (1). Pictured here are the adorable Belen and Angelica.

We also have some sad news to share. Our friend Laura, who owns the bakery up the road and has been a good friend for us for 3 years now, has been diagnosed with cancer. It's melanoma (skin cancer), but unfortunately it is internal and has already started attacking her lymphatic system in her body. It's fairly serious at this point already, but Laura has been in the hospital this week getting a pet scan in order to find the original source, and to have surgery to remove as much (or all) of the cancer they can. We don't know the results of the scan yet, but we do know that the surgery went well and that she has responded positively. Please keep her and her husband Mario and daughter Erica in your prayers!

And to end with some great news, my sister Emily and her husband Greg had their first baby this week! Thursday, August 20th, Asher William Ford entered the world weighing in at 8 lbs. 5 oz. and 21 inches long. This is the first baby on my side of the family, and we are all very excited for them!

Summer Lovin'

2009-08-11T15:05:00.005-06:00

Sarah: Our apologies for our long absence from the blog. We spent the entire month of July traveling in the USA visiting family and friends, and are finally back in the swing of things here at QERC.

Our time in the States was relaxing and of course went by too quickly. As much as we love Costa Rica, we miss our friends and family and soak up the time we have with them. We spent the first half of July in Spokane, with David's family. The first week was the Hille family vacation up at Loon Lake, where they rent a cabin each summer. David's parents, older sister and husband (Jordan and Rusty), and their 3 kids were with us the majority of the time, and his younger sister Jenna was able to come spend a long weekend with us. We enjoyed our time as a family and spent much of our times keeping the kids entertained. :)

Our second week was a busy week in Spokane. David's parents recently moved into a new house so we enjoyed getting to know the new home, and they now live down the street from Jordan and Rusty so we saw their family almost every day as well. The long summer days that we are not used to provided some good time to eat dinner outside and visit until late. We also had David's 10-year high school reunion, which was fun as he was able to connect with many classmates he hadn't been in touch with for years. On one Sunday we had a baby shower that was great for us to be able to get together with lots of people we otherwise may not have seen! And we also took a 2-day trip over to Montana to visit the University of Montana, where David may have a potential of being a grad student at in the future. We were able to stay the night with Jenna, and were accompanied by Matt Chitwood who had flown over from Portland to spend a few days with us.

Unfortunately, I don't have many pictures from our visit to the States I'm realizing! I suppose that could be attributed to us having so much fun with friends and family in both Washington and Iowa that I didn't even stop to think about taking pictures.....right?

Following our 2 weeks in Spokane we flew to Des Moines to spend the second half of July with my family. My dad had taken off a week of work to hang out with us, so we enjoyed visiting some nearby areas to walk around. And being that it's summer, my mom only worked in the mornings, so we enjoyed pie time and movies with her. My youngest sister Rachel had just gotten back from an internship in Mississippi and was jobless, so we also had lots of time to hang out with her - playing Wii, feeding the ducks at the pond, lounging by the pool, and playing games that David made up outside. My other younger sister Katie lives near my family and works in Des Moines, so she was able to join us for Wii and outside games during her free hours and days. As a family we took a trip to a Kansas City Royals game and had a few evenings of playing Scene It.

We also had a baby shower in Iowa and were extremely thankful again for the gifts people gave to help us stock up on our necessities in a few months. It was a great time for me to see some old friends and family all at the same time. I'm also happy that one of my dearest friends Theresa lives near my family, so we got to see her and her husband Jefferson and their new baby James a number of times.

And finally, as we were traveling back to Costa Rica at the end of July, we had an unexpected bonus. We had the opportunity to catch a later flight out of Atlanta, which meant we had a long enough day in the Atlanta airport that my sister Emily and her husband Greg were able to drive over from Chattanooga and visit with us for the afternoon! Emily is also pregnant with her first baby and due in just a couple weeks, so it was fun to spend some pregnant time together.

So here we are, back in Costa Rica. Today was a beautiful sunny morning with a rainy afternoon, and all seems normal. The first morning back I saw both a quetzal and a toucanet outside the kitchen window, as if welcoming us back home.

And....

2009-07-03T00:23:00.001-06:00

We're having a girl!

To heaven and back

2009-06-22T10:43:00.007-06:00

Sarah: Last week we had the privilege of visiting one of the most beautiful places in all of Costa Rica - Playa Conchal. We have good friends here in Costa Rica, Trevor and Laura, with whom we get together every couple weeks or so in San Jose. We go out to eat or cook at their house and always enjoy a nice evening of chatting and spending time together. We've never taken a trip together before, unless it was education related through the Latin American Studies Program (where Trevor and Laura work) and a QERC collaboration. A few weeks ago we were out to eat with them and they had just returned from visiting this paradisical Playa Conchal and mentioned that we should all go up there together sometime. Upon further discussion we realized that trip had to happen soon, or it never would. Since David and I are only committed to staying in Costa Rica one more year, and LASP has semester programs in both the fall and the spring, we took advantage of summer break and made the trip happen.

We stayed at Reserva Conchal and had planned on renting a condo for 3 nights. There were good offers going on, like 20% off and breakfast included, and once we showed up we found another offer for a 4th night free. It took about 10 minutes to decide that we wanted to stay an extra free night at the place! The condo was very nice - 2 bedrooms, 2 bath, air conditioning, and a small porch off the back where we could see the ocean down the hillside below. Though as nice as the condo was, we spent most of our time on the beach and by the pool!

The owners of the condos pay a monthly fee to give them access to the club house, so we took full advantage of the club house pool, spa, and restaurant. The pool was perhaps the nicest pool I've ever seen, and most of our days were spent in and out of the water, relaxing, and reading. We also took advantage of the spa area and indulged in massages one day. Trevor and David also realized they really enjoyed sitting in the sauna at different times over the course of our 4 days. The jacuzzi and pool area inside the spa was dreamlike, and during times when the sun was beating down above us we sat in the covered area. The restaurant was extremely reasonably priced with excellent food, so we took advantage of the free breakfast and at enough in the mornings that we only had to snack on leftovers for lunch. We also tried out a couple of restaurants in the area and had delicious seafood throughout the week.

So besides the nice condo, the stunning club house, and excellent company...the beach was also unimaginable. The waters were the bluest I've ever seen, with a white sandy beach and pristine forest all around. We enjoyed some beautiful sunsets, and the water was so warm that we could swim in the ocean while watching the colors change and the sky darken above us. Trevor and Laura had actually gotten married on this beach at sunset years ago, and it was fun to be back with them. All in all, it was the kind of vacation we could only dream about, and we are thankful that we currently live in a country where we could make that dream a reality.

Herpetological Adventures

2009-06-13T19:13:00.006-06:00

David: One of the many aspects of this job that has been enjoyable is the interaction Sarah and I are able to have with visiting researchers and professors. It gives me the opportunity to expand my career experiences into several fields of ecology and Sarah always loves a good adventure that includes some wildlife. John Cossel, from NNU, is a professor/ researcher that we have been blessed to spend a significant amount of time with down here within the context of professor, researcher, and friend.

John was back in Costa Rica with his family in May. While spending a week at QERC and several weeks at other locations his many goals were research driven while also hoping for many photography opportunities. John is a talented herp (reptiles and amphibians) photographer and has won awards for his work. In fact, at QERC he is working on a photo library of the 4 frogs, 1 caecilian, 2-4 salamanders, 3 lizards, and 7 snakes that we have confirmed present at our location. Hopefully someday we will have a digital library like this available on the QERC website.

One of the most recent aspects of John’s herp research is looking at the presence of a micro fungus in the populations of frogs at San Gerardo de Dota. This is a fungus that most likely is responsible for the virtual overnight extinction of several species of frogs and toads in Costa Rica and the drastic drop in populations throughout the Americas. John is conducting a pilot study of the frogs in San Gerardo in hopes to obtain funding to expand the project for future studies. Kyle Luthman, NNU student who attended the QERC semester program this last spring, was advised by John and collected 30 swab samples of our most common frog species the Piglet Leaf-litter Frog, Craugaster podiciferous. John’s goal in his week at QERC this May was to collect 30 swab samples of a much more secretive species called the Meadow Tree Frog, Isthmohyla pseudopuma. Although the Meadow Tree Frog is secretive it acts in an explosive way during a few weeks in the beginning of the rainy season. When heavy rains create puddles in meadows and forest openings these tree frogs descend onto the forest floor to find puddles and mates. The subsequent tadpoles that are created then spend their transformative days in these seasonal puddles before changing into adults and then ascending into the trees to live the majority of the year in the canopy of the forest. Luckily for John, and just as he had planned, these tree frogs were found in puddles on a nightly basis throughout his week here. We were able to collect swabs from 30 individuals. We also were able to include some of our neighbors in the hunt, capture, and release activities. It was great to expose some community members here to this little known frog species. The majority of the 250 people that live in San Gerardo have no idea that this frog exists and is living out its life in the tree tops.

Upon leaving QERC John’s next mission was to find, record, and capture a frog called the Zetek’s Tree Frog, Isthmohyla zeteki. The destination for this mission was Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve. I say record because John has the equipment to record the tree frog’s song that it uses for territorial and mating purposes. The song of this particular tree frog has not been described to science. We were able to accompany John to Monteverde and assist in the efforts. We spent a total of 23 hours on location and had great success. The Zetek’s Tree Frog was found, recorded, and captured. This will enable John to author a note on the song description that he will be able to publish in the appropriate herpetology journals. He was also able to have a nice photo session with a glass frog called Fleishman’s Glass Frog (pictured here, not his photo as you can tell by the quality).

Sarah and I very much enjoyed the short trip to our rival cloud forest at a lower elevation in the Tilaran Mountains. The hummingbirds were incredible (check out the video) and we had some luck in our nocturnal mammal sightings. A Grey Fox bolted pass us in front of the research station and paused for a quick photo. A Prehensile-tailed Porcupine gave us a good view of its talented arboreal habits. And the owls put on a vocal show to entertain us while we were frog hunting. Hopefully it will not be our last visit to the famous Monteverde.

Three and a half exciting things!

2009-06-07T21:14:00.004-06:00

Sarah:
Ok let's start with the half.

1/2) We bought a new car! Well sort of...the university gave us money with which to buy a new car, so we happily spent their money. :) It took a couple of months of searching for the right deal with the amount of money we were allotted, but we finally settled on a '97 Hyundai Galloper. It's in excellent condition with only about 40,000 miles, and our mechanic checked it out thoroughly and gave us the thumbs up, so we went with it. We are only waiting for the paperwork to be complete, and we'll have it this week! Once we get it out here, we'll post a picture - it only deserves a "half" exciting thing because we don't have it quite yet.

1) It's quetzal party time in our tree again! This time of the year is always exciting as our aguacatillo tree right outside of our building is fruiting with the aguacatillos, which the quetzals feed off of. It's a lot of fun to look outside and see 2-3 quetzals sitting in the tree, or be making lunch and see one fly past the window. It's truly a remarkable bird. I'm posting a picture of its cute head, which doesn't show off it's long tail feathers, but gives you a good close-up look.

2) Our mural is complete and installed!! Last weekend, our muralist Mario came out to QERC to finally put up the long-awaited mural in our museum. It is BEAUTIFUL. We have already had many members of the community come by to check it out, and they keep coming back with more people to take a look. We couldn't be more thrilled with the way it turned out, and we now look forward to other details in the museum to make it even more complete.

3) And for the most exciting news in our life right now...I'm pregnant!!! (Aaack!) I'm due November 26th and we are very excited for this new stage of life. We will indeed be having this baby in Costa Rica, at a top-notch hospital in San Jose with our top-notch doctor. Pictures to come as my tiny baby bump begins to grow!

And that's "all" for now...

Part III (of III)

2009-06-01T10:57:00.006-06:00

Sarah: And finally...here's Part III.

As David and I don't have anything other than tourist visas, we are still required to leave Costa Rica every 90 days. May was shaping up to be a busy month with groups, professors, and researchers, so we needed to quickly renew our visas as soon as the semester program ended. SNU provides us with a stipend for the purpose of visa renewals, and anything we spend on top of that stipend comes out of our own pockets. Rather than doing what we would normally do - take a 12 hour bus ride to Nicaragua or Panama and find a place to stay - we decided to do something a little easier.

We had always seen these promotions for a Caribbean island called San Andres, owned by Colombia, in the daily newspaper. The deal was for 3 nights, and it was all-inclusive, including airfare, airport transport, and of course lodging and all food. David and I aren't the type to be drawn to all-inclusive resorts, and usually enjoy finding a smaller, more locally-run lodge, that gives us the freedom to explore the area and eat where we want and do what we want. However, being that our visa renewal trip came up in between the end of a busy semester program and a busy May with people in and out of QERC, we decided to go for it. We only had to pay a small fee extra on top of our stipend in order to get the complete experience. And it was worth it!

We really enjoyed a few days of complete relaxation, reading by the pool while the bluish-greenish ocean waves crashed behind us. The resort is owned by a company called Decameron, and there were a number of Decameron resorts on the island. The deal was that we slept at the one we had booked, but could take advantage of any restaurant or pool or facilities of any of the other resorts at anytime, which was a part of the all-inclusive package. Every day we explored a new pool to sit by and relax, new beaches to sit in front of, and new restaurants to try. It was just what we needed in the midst of our busy schedules!

One interesting thing about the island was that we only saw 3 other North Americans the entire time we were there. San Andres is a very touristy place to be, but for tourists from Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, etc. Being a Caribbean island, the majority of the people were of African descent, and that often means that English is widely spoken. If that was the case, we didn't experience much of it! We hardly heard any English spoken the whole time we were there. It was very fun and an interesting experience to be in a tourist location where the industry caters to primarily Latin Americans.

Upon our return to QERC, we welcomed a researcher named John Morrow and his wife Melissa. They are here for an entire month while John is working on a project for his Master's degree at Penn State. He is looking at the model of the Chacon family and how they've come to develop the valley and the decisions they've made along the way, looking closely at how the environment has impacted their choices and how they've impacted the environment in regards to conservation and sustainability. It has been a lot of fun to see his work progress as he interviews many family members and they open up by showing him old documents and pictures from the last 50 years.

We also welcomed Point Loma Nazarene University for a few days while they were here in Costa Rica for a Tropical Ecology course. Dave Cummings was the professor in charge of the course, and we have enjoyed getting to know Dave over the last year. His students were a great group and we are hoping some of them will be interested in joining our semester program in the future.

Messiah College is another group that came for a couple nights at QERC. They kept a busy schedule and were going to spend around 3 weeks traveling between Costa Rica and Panama. The oddest encounter with that group was seeing a friend I graduated college with, Craig Dalen, hop off their bus! I had no idea he even had any association with Messiah, nor that he would be showing up on my doorstep. He and his wife were along as chaperones and it was fun to catch up with Craig and meet his wife Tashya.

Finally, John Cossel from Northwest Nazarene University, is currently back at QERC with his family for a week. They have a total of one month in Costa Rica while John is doing some preliminary work with herpetology, primarily with frogs. David especially has had a good time going out at nights searching for frogs in our puddles that form on a daily basis from all the rain we are now getting.

And that's it for now! You are all caught up on our lives from the past couple of months. Actually, we do have some more exciting things to share about QERC that I will be posting about in the next few days. So be sure to check back here soon for even more fun things going on in our lives.

Part II (of III)

2009-05-30T13:24:00.008-06:00

Sarah: To continue...here's Part II.

The last couple weeks of the semester flew by, with the students taking every opportunity to go on a hike, watch a movie together, or play a game. During the last academic week they were all busy finishing papers, collecting data for their research projects, and preparing for their community presentations. At the end of the last academic week, the very end of April, the final SNU professor came down, Bob Lively. He didn't come down to teach, but to be a part of the wrap-up and debriefing process and to observe the community presentations. It's always fun having Bob around, especially since his sole commitment is to evaluate the program and talk to students about their experiences.

Commuinty presentation night is always a highly anticipated night by both us at QERC, and also by the community. Unfortunately, the weekend we had laid aside for presenting the students' research turned out to be a busy weekend for the Chacon family, who is often most of our crowd. One night there was a soccer game in an adjacent valley, so many family members were going to be gone for that night. We scheduled the presentation night for Friday in hopes of gathering as many people as we could, but that day also proved to be an unexpected day for the Chacons. It was the day that many family members came to visit with the purpose of hiking the trail from San Gerardo over to Providenciea with Efrain Chacon (the grandfather and patriarch of the family) in order to re-walk the steps Efrain took when he first came over here in the early 1950s. I think they may have underestimated how exhausted they would be after the trek, and all ended up falling asleep by the time our presentations were to begin!

Needless to say, we had a very great turn out, with about 40-50 people in attendance. Many people hadn't been to QERC before, and we enjoyed hosting them and showing them around our building. Our students did a fantastic job presenting their research, with Raul Fernandez (grandson of Efrain) doing our interpreting. It's always a fun night to see everything finally come together, and the students also were relieved to have the final academic component complete! As a celebration we had a sleepover with popcorn and a movie and leftover cookies from the presentation night.

Once presentation night was over, the students only had one last weekend here at QERC and in San Gerardo de Dota. Much of their time was spent packing and saying goodbyes to friends in the community, but they also had to get in many last card games and hanging out with each other. Some of their friends from the community came over for one last night of playing "sardines" outside and Mafia inside when they'd had enough running around. After a good last weekend with little sleep, Monday morning rolled around and the final goodbyes were said to this place.

We had scheduled a few days at the end of the semester for a debriefing/re-entry retreat with our students, and like last year, this took place up at Arenal Volcano. This year we stayed at the Arenal Observatory Lodge, the closest lodge located near the volcano. We had beautiful views of the smoke coming out of the top of the volcano and rocks tumbling down the side. It's also a great location for watching some beautiful birds and swimming in their pool and Jacuzzi while watching the volcano. One afternoon we took advantage of some of the attractions around the area and did the Arenal Hanging Bridges. We had a great time exploring and going on one last hike together, while being able to cross 6 bridges suspended up in the canopy. It put us right at eye level with some beautiful birds and made for some terrifying views (for me!) of the land far below us.

Though our time at Arenal may sound like it was all play and no purpose, that was not the case. We had scheduled 4 different "sessions" where we had lively discussions both in order to debrief the entire semester, and also to prepare the students for re-entering their home country and culture. It was a good time of recapping all of their memories, and pulling out the more meaningful experiences and worldviews that they wanted to bring back to the U.S. and implement in their lives back home. We also discussed reverse culture shock in full detail, complete with fun skits where the students tried to imagine what their lives would be like upon their return.

After Arenal, we returned to San Jose for one last night together, complete with a movie at the VIP theater where we saw a movie sitting in our own personal recliner chairs, and a nice dinner to finish. And then it was time to say our goodbyes at the airport the next morning, not only to our students, but also to Peter, who had been our intern for almost 7 months and an integral part of the semester program. They will all be missed!

To be continued with Part III...

Part I (of III)

2009-05-26T13:57:00.011-06:00

Sarah: Well it’s been forever since we’ve written a blog entry. David has been excited to write about the second half of TES, but our lives very quickly became very busy, and he was never able to get to it in the midst of everything else. I’ve decided to catch up our blog on everything SINCE that class finished, and I’ll let David go back and write about the second half when he has a chance.

So I’ve decided to split up this enormous blog entry into three parts, in order to cover everything between the beginning of April and now, and not to overwhelm any faithful readers in the process.

Thus begins Part I.

After TES, our group returned exhausted but thrilled with their experiences traveling around Costa Rica. After learning all about the different ecosystems in Costa Rica and experiencing firsthand different sustainability projects, it led well into the next professor coming down for classes. Marty Michaelson came down to teach his week of Biblical Theology in Global Stewardship, so it gave the students even more of a chance to approach the topic of stewardship in their personal lives and from a biblical perspective. After TES and Global Stew, our students were feeling quite motivated to go back and change the world, recycling one tin can at a time. :)

Following Marty’s week, the students had a full schedule. Three professors came down, Nancy Halliday, Carrie Bentley, and Sharon Young for her second time. Sharon continued to work with the students a little bit with the Entomology class, and Nancy was down to teach Tropical Medicine. Carrie is a new professor at SNU, so she came along to check out the location and the semester program. She also has a lot of experience with research, so she took the opportunity to sit down with each student and talk about the direction of their research project. Though late in the semester, those talks were valuable and encouraging to the students to finish their research strong.

Tropical Medicine was the focus for the week, with the students following the same schedule as with the other visiting professors and having class time every afternoon. However, unlike the other classes, this particular class incorporated a couple of extra elements. David and I had met and briefly gotten to know the chief of the indigenous tribe Boruca here in Costa Rica, so she and 2 other women came to visit and talk with the students about their customs and culture with a focus on how they utilize medicinal plants within their community. The workshops the gave to the students were incredible as they talked about their lifestyles, how they make a living, and the struggles they have as indigenous people being less than 1% of the population of Costa Rica. Toward the end of their workshop they actually did a demonstration of how they weave the cotton into thread and then how they use that thread to make all sorts of artisan goods like bags, purses, and belts. They are also famous for making Boruca masks, which are elaborately designed and painted in the shapes of animals from Costa Rica. The students took turns weaving, and were excited to purchase lots of handmade souvenirs from these women.

Later that week, the Tropical Medicine course took a field trip into San Jose. First stop was InBio, the Institute of Biodiversity. Here they received a lecture followed by a tour of the bioprospecting unit, which looks at the chemical properties in plants and animals and fungus to be used for medicinal purposes. After that, we headed to Clinica Biblica, one of the main private hospitals in San Jose. They received a talk from QERC’s main doctor, Dr. Longworth, and then a tour of the hospital. Everyone was impressed with the high quality of the equipment and facilities in the hospital.

The following week was the last week of visiting professors for the students. Frank Johnson, the Spanish professor at SNU, came down to finish up his week of teaching Applied Cultural Integration. The students had each done a project of their choice on an issue dealing with Latin America or Spain, and they each gave their presentations to Frank the week he was here. The other purpose for Frank coming down was to give the students a test over their Spanish ability. It wasn’t mandatory, but allowed for the students to possibly get credit for Spanish in addition to the other 15-17 credits they were receiving in other areas. Almost all students received at least 6 Spanish credits, with two of our students receiving 12 Spanish credits! It is a lot of fun to see them so excited about learning more Spanish, now that they have a desire to learn more and better communicate with Spanish-speakers they’ll come in contact with.

And for the last picture, every weekend our students continued to enjoy the excellent food and good fellowship up at Laura’s bakery. Most of them even bought a hat that they had picked out the colors for and were made by Laura’s Costa Rican sister-in-law.
I’ll leave that to be the end of Part I…

Sea turtles, Jabirus, and Ocelots...oh my!

2009-03-27T14:55:00.009-06:00

Sarah: The past few weeks have flown by. John Cossel, herpetologist from Northwest Nazarene University, was here for a week teaching about reptiles and amphibians. After that, Sharon Young from SNU was here to find bugs (not hard) and teach about entomology. This was the third of three weeks that the students had professors here on site to teach Topics in Tropical Montane Forest Ecology (the first being Dennis Seigfried from SNU to teach ornithology). All three weeks were busy and tiring for the students, but also proved to be excellent in getting them excited to learn about the critters in the forest right here around us.

After those three weeks were over began some travel time. Most of our students left on a 4 ½ day Spring Break, in which they traveled over to the Caribbean for some much-needed relaxation and beach time. They chose the Caribbean because they won’t be seeing that area of the country during the rest of the semester, and they had a great time renting bikes, exploring Cahuita National Park, and playing in the ocean.

Right after Spring Break, everyone met up in San Jose to begin the Tropical Ecology and Sustainability (TES) course. I did not meet up with them, and stayed here at QERC to host a couple of researchers from the University of Calgary while the group is out traveling. The first half of TES blew everyone’s expectations out of the water! Our 6 students and David met up with 4 students from the Latin American Studies Program and Trevor, our good friend who is the faculty member representing LASP. In only one week, they toured Earth University, hiked around Tirimbina Rainforest Center, visited Arenal Volcano, hiked around Palo Verde National Park, stopped by Casa del Sol, spent some time in Ostional, and ended up back here at QERC exhausted but on cloud nine.

Earth University is an international school for teaching sustainable development and agricultural techniques for tropical countries. The group took a tour to learn about their approach to academics and training students to return to their home countries in order to be agents of environmental change by solving global issues of poverty through sustainable development. Tirimbina Rainforest Center is a privately owned nature preserve originally purchased by a natural history museum in Madison, WI, and is now operated by Costa Ricans with the purpose of promoting research, education, and habitat preservation. The group experienced the Caribbean lowland rainforest with a local guide sharing about rainforest ecology. David claims that their guide Carla was the best guide he’s ever had in Costa Rica! The students enjoyed seeing some cool birds, poison dart frogs, and bullet ants.

At Arenal, the group studied volcanology up close and personal, and had a chance to visit one of our favorite places, Ecotermales. Hot springs are fairly common around the town of La Fortuna, where Arenal is located, and Ecotermales is a family-run hot springs that practices sustainability and conservation efforts when running their business. After a talk from a family member, our group enjoyed time to soak in the warm, tranquil hot springs. From Arenal the group spent time in Palo Verde National Park to study dry forest ecology. They hiked around a lot, studied wetlands, became enamored by the many birds (including the Jabiru, the largest stork in the world standing 5 feet tall), and hit the jackpot when they came across an ocelot on a night hike! The ocelot lounged on a branch in front of them while they were able to watch for about 15 minutes. The picture here is the only picture one student was able to take before his battery died on his camera.

From Palo Verde the group stopped by Casa del Sol, an NGO focusing on local environmental issues that involve cooking, teaching women how to use solar ovens and encouraging families to lessen their consumption of processed foods and increase their consumption of local, native, seeds and grains. The group ate their lunch prepared by the women who are a part of this operation. After Casa del Sol, everyone headed over to the Pacific coast to Ostional to learn about sea turtles. An unexpected surprise was the fact that there was a researcher there who recruited our group to help out with his research on the turtles. Two nights in a row our students broke up into 2 groups, each having a 6-hour shift patrolling the beach in search of the turtles. Once found, the group measured the turtles, tagged them, counted eggs, inserted temperature recording devices for further data collection, and witnessed the entire egg-laying process. On a few occasions this research involved picking up the turtles or wrestling with them in order to take proper measurements!

Now the group is here at QERC to study cloud forest ecology and hear don Efrain Chacon speak about the history of the valley. I’ve enjoyed time to work on my own projects and have some down time, but I have to admit I’m thrilled to have them back!

Nicaragua and other news...

2009-03-02T16:19:00.017-06:00

Sarah: A few weeks ago was the start of an 11-day study trip to Nicaragua that David and I facilitated for our students. This was a very similar trip that we did with last year’s semester program, so if things sound familiar….you’re remembering last year’s blog post. :) We went into San Jose on Sunday so we could hear a guest speaker to kick off the trip. Aminta Ortiz, a Nicaraguan with an incredible life-story, spoke to our group about growing up in Nicaragua and living under one of the Samoza’s leadership. She has a very impacting story and enjoys sharing her life and viewpoints with groups who want to hear. After she spoke, our entire group went over to her house where she cooked us Nicaraguan food and we got to hang out with her son and daughter. This was a treat for me, because this was my host family about a year and a half ago when I was working part-time in San Jose.

Monday we headed off to Nicaragua, and after a long day on the bus and a fairly smooth border-crossing, we arrived to our retreat center in Managua, the capital. We took the students on a tour of the historical sites of Managua, stopping at places like the Revolutionary Plaza where the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime, the old cathedral that was destroyed in an earthquake, and Loma Tiscapa, one of the most famous locations in Managua. It was here that the U.S. Marines trained the National Guard under the Somoza regime, and where Sandino had his last meal before he was captured and assassinated (arguably the most heroic figure in Nicaraguan history). The place is complete with a museum dedicated to Sandino. In the afternoon we took the students to what we call the “mural church”. It is a church that has all of its walls painted on the inside with murals depicting Nicaraguan history with biblical themes woven in. We also stopped by the Batahola Cultural Center, a really neat center that focuses on reaching out to the community and providing people of all ages a chance to take part in classes ranging from music to cooking. It was an inspiring place to be, after seeing such poverty all around the city.

After our time in Managua we set off for Niquinohomo, Sandino’s birthplace and the small community where our students would take part in their homestay/service learning experience. This too was the same place we went last year, and after a fantastic experience with our students last February, we were excited to return. Each student was placed with a family that they lived with for 6 days, and each family was connected with Rancho Ebenezer, the farm that our students worked at during the days. Our students seemed to enjoy their families and hanging out in the community. Their evenings were filled with countless games of baseball, soccer, traveling around by a moto-taxi, and seeing sights around the small town.

The Ranch where they worked during their days is another very inspiring place, run by a man named Francisco Juarez, whose main focus is teaching and training families to live off of only a ½ acre of land. He puts the family through a program that emphasizes education and family values, and is a process that takes 5 years before the family is complete self-sustainable. The model has proven to be so successful that the Nicaraguan government is working with Francisco to implement the program in poor communities all over Nicaragua in order to fight against poverty. Our students worked alongside the Nicaraguans for the 6 days, helping with projects ranging from shoveling goat poop to feeding the rabbits to building a primitive hut. This is a project that we get very excited about supporting, and as we mentioned last year, if you are interested in taking a group there or supporting them in other ways, look them up (http://www.ranchoebenezer.org/).

While our students were at the Ranch, David and I took the opportunity to scout some places around the country that could serve as potential homestays in the future. With the hope of doubling the number of students we have next year, we would ideally split them up into at least 2 groups. One evening we met up with a couple that were LASP alumni and working in Nicaragua. The project that they are working with sounds very promising. They help set up rural communities with sustainable energy projects, which would be a good fit for a group of our students next year. We also headed out to Ometepe Island and visited a biological research station to see if there were projects going on there for a potential group. The island was beautiful and we enjoyed exploring a little bit, but it doesn’t seem like an ideal location to set our students up for a homestay/service project. Though with many bus rides and taxis, we did feel like we got to know Nicaragua even better this year!

After the time at Rancho Ebenezer, we headed to Granada, an old colonial town to relax a little bit and have some time of reflection. We had some great discussions with our students, and after their experiences in Managua and with their families at the Ranch, it was obvious they were changed people! Their perspectives are now different and they see the world through different eyes, hopefully making them better world citizens and better representatives of Christ.

We also lucked out and were in Granada during the Poetry Festival, so there was a LOT of activity going on. All day there were booths set up, people walking around in masks and costumes, and parades going on. In the evening both nights we were able to hear some famous Nicaraguan and Latin American musicians perform concerts in the center plaza. One of the most famous Nicaraguan singers was there, and sang some incredibly inspiring songs about patriotism and Nicaragua.

We also did some touristy things with our students to give them a break from the intensity of the study-trip, including an island tour. On the island tour, we were on a boat that took us all around small islands, including one called Monkey Island – definitely a highlight!
Now we’ve been back for a week, and enough happened in just one week that I’ll summarize it as well. This last week marked the beginning of professors visiting and teaching classes for the rest of the semester. Dennis Siegfried kicked off the week with ornithology, and it was fun to see the students get into identifying the birds around here.

The most eventful part of the week happened Tuesday evening, however. We also have another professor here, Bruce Hoagland, from the University of Oklahoma. Along with him was one of his graduate students, Scott Shellenberger, who has had involvement with QERC in the past and was excited to come down and show off this special place to his advisor. Unfortunately…while they were standing outside of QERC, Scott was looking up in a tree and took a step backwards and fell down the embankment, almost all the way to the river. He probably fell 30 feet or so, and tumbled hard and injured his back pretty badly. It took many hands and a board to attempt to immobilize him and pull him out of the river, and then it was apparent that he was in enough pain that we needed an ambulance to come pick him up. The good news is that there were no broken bones or internal damage, but he was in enough pain that he was kept in the hospital for 4 nights. Bruce stayed with him the entire time, and David was in and out of the city every day. Instead of being able to stay here two weeks, Scott ended up having to fly back to the U.S. on Saturday after only being here one week.

This weekend didn’t prove to be any less busy, as we welcomed a group of 17 LASP students out to our facility. They had a great time hanging out with our students, and our students did a fantastic job “hosting” them by showing them the trails and exploring the forest with them. Some of our students even convinced some of their students to go with them down to the waterfall and jump off a rock into a small (really really cold) pool of water! It was a good mix of relaxation for the LASP students, and entertainment for our students. Saturday evening our next professor came in – John Cossel from NNU, to teach herpetology to the students. We were excited to have John back at QERC, and while we are hoping that he is able to find many snakes and lizards and frogs for the students to study this week, we are also hoping for an uneventful week this week!

All fun and games

2009-02-02T15:39:00.002-06:00

Sarah: Well the students continue to enjoy the beginning of the semester here in San Gerardo de Dota. Four weeks of Spanish classes have already passed, and all the students really enjoyed the two teachers we brought into the valley to teach. The teachers were interactive and came up with lots of games and activities that made for fun Spanish classes – lots of speaking, and plenty of karaoke! It’s hard to believe that we’re in such full-swing now that their Spanish classes have already come to an end. We hope that it has given the students a little bit more groundwork and confidence to be able to communicate more effectively in another language, especially with their neighbors and new friends.

All of our students have been set up with a “host” family in the valley, and each of them has eaten dinner at least once with their new family. We provide that experience in order to create more opportunities to practice their Spanish and see what family life is like here in the valley. Each family is different, which provides a lot of variety when the students compare their dinner experiences. Often the initial dinner can be a bit awkward, but overall we hope the host family set-up is a something positive for both parties – for our students to feel welcome even more in the community, and for the families to feel like they are a part of what is going on at QERC.

Many community members are excited about having young North Americans in town, and almost on a daily basis there is a Costa Rican walking through our doors wanting to hang out with someone. On a regular basis our students are playing Mafia – both in English and Spanish, playing soccer, and getting outdoors at night to play Hide-and-Seek or enjoy a bonfire with the neighbors. This past week we were all invited up to the Christian campground up the road to participate in rock-climbing. The campground has an indoor facility with a number of different walls, providing an experience for any level of rock-climbers. Two Costa Ricans joined our students, Natalia Chacon (one of our neighbors, a granddaughter of Efrain), and their Spanish teacher, Paula. Everyone had a blast and it was another good way to get to know some more neighbors up the road.

The Beginning...all over again.

2009-01-20T14:12:00.016-06:00

Sarah: Whew! We are now truly in the FULL swing of things at QERC. January always marks the busiest time of year for us, and it never seems to surprise us how busy that really is each year. In 2 short weeks, we have welcomed 6 students for our semester program, and hosted 3 separate groups for a short-term stay at QERC.

We returned to Costa Rica the day before a group from Southern Nazarene University (SNU) came for a stay at QERC. This group was an astronomy class, with the majority of the class taking place on campus in Oklahoma, and ending with a trip to Costa Rica. Each night they set up a telescope outside and we all got to view various constellations and the moon. On one night in particular we invited members of the community over to view the moon, and had quite the turnout. It's always encouraging to activity going on at QERC, especially when it includes such positive interaction between students from the U.S. and local Costa Ricans!

While the astronomy class was here, our semester program students showed up to begin their 4-month stint at QERC (more about them later…). Since the groups overlapped a couple nights, we encouraged our semester-long students to jump in on astronomy activities. One such activity was an early morning up at Cerro de la Muerte. This was supposed to be a star-gazing activity, but the clouds had rolled in by 4:30 am and instead we enjoyed a beautiful sunrise, looking out to the Pacific Ocean from the top of the peak.

The other two groups that have been here in the last 2 weeks include a large group from Spring Arbor University (SAU) in Michigan and a group from Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU). Since SAU was such a large group, we worked it out for David and me to take our semester-long students into San Jose for an orientation while our intern Peter hosted the group out at QERC. OBU is currently here for a few nights out of their 1 ½ week trip to Costa Rica. Again, it’s fun for us to see so much activity going on here at QERC!

So now back to our semester program students. We have 6 students this year, 5 from SNU and 1 from Northwest Nazarene University (NNU), in Nampa, ID. It is the first year we’ve opened up the program to other universities, and we are thrilled that we have an NNU student, along with an NNU professor who will be teaching one of the classes here. The 6 of them arrived in Costa Rica on January 5, which gave us a week of orientation before classes started for them. David and I led them in a variety of activities her at QERC, hoping to get them familiarized with the culture and the community. They are excellent students, all very excited about the language and cultural opportunities.

To help integrate them into the community of San Gerardo de Dota, we sent them on a type of scavenger hunt, with the intention of forcing them to introduce themselves to people and making them visible to the locals with whom they’ll be interacting in the future. We also set up a “Mafia Night”, where we invited some of the younger people in the community over to play mafia with our students. This quickly turned into a highlight, and we now have Ticos knocking on our door practically every day with the hope of playing again! Since the first game, we have played mafia with the younger Ticos a total of 5 times. They are all on their summer break, so we are trying to take advantage of hanging out with them while they are not away in school.

At the end of our orientation week, we did a separate San Jose Orientation, with the purpose of allowing the students to become acquainted with the bus system to and from San Jose, and helping them feel comfortable finding their way in San Jose if they ever wanted to take a day trip out of the valley. We rode the public bus in together, and then they were split up into two groups to do another sort of scavenger hunt, allowing them to explore some of the more common sites downtown. They had a great time, visiting various museums and taking taxis and buses, and taking advantage of the good local ice cream store. Since it seems to be a rare occasion that David and I have our camera with us when running errands in San Jose, I’ve included pictures taken by the students of some of our favorite places in San Jose as well. The first two are our students exploring in their groups, the first group at the National Theater and the second at the Central Market.

We stayed at the Nazarene Seminary in San Jose, which was a peaceful location within the city. One night we also had our friend Alex Grant, former LASP staff, come speak to our students and do a cultural activity with them. It always seems to be a good idea to have a Costa Rican talk about his own culture, especially when that Costa Rican also truly understands the U.S. culture! Our students did great with their time in San Jose, and we now feel very comfortable with them traveling back and forth and spending time in San Jose safely, if they choose to do so. These couple of pictures are of one of the beautiful parks in downtown San Jose, and the yellow building is the National Museum. The next group of pictures is of the National Cathedral (inside and from the outside), and my favorite homeless man in San Jose, who has been playing the same song on his guitar for many years.

Probably the most exciting thing that happened while we were in San Jose was the earthquake. While our students were out exploring the city in the early afternoon, David and I were driving around running errands (our car was at the mechanics, a common occurrence). All of a sudden the car started shaking, almost as if we’d been hit from behind. But then we saw a big public bus in front of us, also shaking side to side. We started seeing people fleeing from buildings, some crying, and others embracing. The whole thing lasted at least a dozen seconds, which is a very long time in that sort of a situation. Our students reported similar experiences, even seeing buildings shake. The rest of the afternoon there were smaller after shakes, and parts of downtown were blocked off because of a cracked window or a little bit of cement fallen from the building. Thankfully, for us it was only an exciting afternoon, since the quake hit farther north from us. There were a number of deaths reported due to landslides and collapsed houses, and people were stranded in their small communities until help could reach them.

After our time in San Jose, we returned to QERC for the rest of the weekend, showing the students the joy of Laura’s bakery that’s only open on Saturdays and Sundays. Classes started first thing Monday morning, and after only a week, it seems that everyone has settled into a bit of a routine. They have Spanish classes in the afternoon, and are enjoying the two Costa Rican teachers they have had so far, who make class time enjoyable by doing all sorts of interactive games and exercises. The other classes kicked off with a Skype session with the professor in charge back in the States, and that too has seemed to go well. It has been fun to see the students truly enjoy being here and take advantage of opportunities to spend time outdoors hiking, or playing games with the local community.

Feliz Navidad!

2009-01-12T16:55:00.009-06:00

Sarah: It's been almost a month since we've written on here, and there is a lot to say about the past month! We'll try to do a few blog entries in a row to catch back up. First, our trip back to the States. When David and I agreed to stay in Costa Rica for a third year, we decided it would be important for us to visit our families more than once a year, and were excited that it worked out for us to be back for Christmas with both families.

When we left Costa Rica the weather was just starting to turn toward summer - the sun was shining every day, the building was staying warm, and people were staying outside playing until late afternoon. All of the school kids have their summer break from mid-December until February, so lots of kids were around, hanging out and playing outside. David and I were excited about summer beginning, but we were still hoping to see some snow back home for Christmas...

We had NO idea what we were hoping for! The night we flew into Spokane, a huge snowstorm was just hitting. That huge snowstorm turned into a record for a 24-hour period in Spokane - 23 inches in that short amount of time!! The snow didn't stop with the 24-hour record, either. It continued the entire week we were there, with our total ending up over 40 inches! We had a great time both inside and outside - when we were trapped in the house, we'd sit by the fire and watch movies, and when it was "warm" enough to go outside, we went sledding near Jordan and Rusty's house with our niece Gracelyn (4 1/2 yrs) and nephew Gabriel (3 yrs). Not only is the snow a lot of fun, but it was absolutely beautiful with all of the pine trees around.

During the week we also got together with lots of family and some good friends. We were able to see some family members from both sides of David's extended family, and had many days of delicious, big home-cooked meals. Christmas Eve was a special time with David's family - spending time together, opening gifts, and then all of us kids sleeping in the same room upstairs. Christmas Day we opened stockings, and spent the rest of the day in our pajamas, eating more good food and relaxing together.

Our Christmas didn't stop there, however...the next day we flew to the Gosselinks to celebrate Christmas with my side of the family. December 26th turned into Christmas Eve, and we had a wonderful big meal together and watched our favorite Christmas movies (Claymation Christmas, anyone??). The following morning we woke up to open stockings and gifts, and the biggest surprise of all is that my older sister Emily is expecting a baby next August! David and I are excited to have another niece or nephew, and my whole family is excited to have the first grandchild join the family. It was a very special few days, to feel like we truly celebrated Christmas with my side of the family as well.

Later that day our Christmases continued with my mom's side of the family, and the following day we celebrated with my dad's side of the family. It was great to see everyone and spend the holidays together. The next couple days we took advantage of the winter season and went ice skating and sledding. Emily's husband Greg and her stepson Hunter aren't exactly pros at either, being from the south, so it was fun to treat them to some real winter activities. It was great family time, and sad to see Emily and Greg and Hunter leave. David and I finished out our week there by getting together with some good friends in Iowa, and getting as much family time in as we could before returning to Costa Rica.

After New Years we returned home to Costa Rica to a very busy time of year! More updating to come in the next few days about our busy start of 2009. :)

Peter Bosch

2008-12-13T23:19:00.005-06:00

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.

2008-12-06T13:51:00.017-06:00

*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

2008-11-19T15:40:00.014-06:00

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

2008-10-28T12:49:00.001-06:00

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

2008-10-19T18:00:00.005-06:00

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

2008-08-05T19:09:00.006-06:00

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

2008-07-27T23:39:00.009-06:00

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

2008-07-15T12:45:00.008-06:00

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

2008-06-27T09:43:00.001-06:00

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.

The Wedding

2008-06-20T14:11:00.010-06:00

Sarah: The last couple weeks I have spent in the U.S. of A. My older sister, Emily, was married to Greg Ford this past weekend in Chattanooga, TN. I flew up about a week and a half early to be of help with last-minute details, and also for some good quality sister time and bonding time with my new brother-in-law. Emily and I had a great time together, with many long days of running errands and finalizing everything before the big day. She was my maid-of-honor, and I was her matron-of-honor. We realized it had been a good number of years since the two of us had spent some quality time together, and we took advantage of our time together with lots of talking and catching up! It was also great for me to spend time with Greg, since I had only met him once over Thanksgiving last year. To get everything done, Emily and I would get up in the mornings and figure out a plan of attack for the day, put our game faces on, and go strong until meeting up with Greg for dinner. It was a lot of fun to be there during the hustle and bustle of wedding frenzy.

The rest of my family drove in the Tuesday night before the wedding and we all helped out with projects like assembling the programs and tying ribbons on the bubbles. Wednesday night we had a Gosselink Family Night, complete with Italian sausage sandwiches, games, ice cream, and walking around downtown. Though that also marked the beginning of even more busyness, it was great to have my family around. David also flew late Wednesday night, and I was really glad to see him too!

Thursday night we had a Girls’ Night Out with Emily – dinner downtown, walking around and hanging out, and spending the night in a hotel room. It was good for her to catch up with some of her friends who were coming from out of town, and good for us all to meet each other, since we all play a special role in Emily’s life but don’t all know each other well. David went out to eat with the guys that night and got to meet the groomsmen and the other usher (David was an usher as well). Since Greg is from the south, most of his friends and family have a thick southern accent. David said at one point during the dinner he realized that he could have understood a conversation completely in Spanish better than the conversation going on with such thick southern accents!

Friday Emily had a brunch for all girls who had a role in her wedding, and then we headed over to the church to begin decorating. This took us all the way up to the rehearsal/rehearsal dinner, and then all of a sudden it was the night before the big day! Greg’s 13-year old son, Hunter, was his best man, so Hunter and I got together Friday night to write our toasts together. Neither one of us was too keen on the idea of public speaking, but it was good to sit and work on them together.

And finally, Saturday came and went. Everything seemed to fly by! Emily was calm, but very excited. I stayed the night with her on Friday night and she came into my bedroom Saturday morning jumping on the bed chanting “I’m getting married today!” It was bound to be a good day. Emily said later that everything was perfect – just the way she wanted it to be. That’s a good thing to hear from the bride, after she’s spent months planning and dreaming up the perfect day! The wedding was beautiful and Emily was a radiant bride. The forecasted rain even held off, and Emily and Greg were able to drive off in their new convertible!

After a fairly short clean-up time, David and I went out to eat with my family and hung out with them the rest of the evening. They left early the next morning, but David and I didn’t fly out until Monday evening. We ended up getting together with the other usher, Ken, and his wife Renee on Sunday evening. It was great to be able to hang out with them and form a new friendship with a really neat couple. And finally, after a very long night of travel (due to fog, we landed in Panama and sat on the plane for an hour and a half before getting cleared to go back to Costa Rica), we arrived back in the country early Tuesday morning.

Tropical Storm Alma

2008-06-09T10:34:00.010-06:00

David: We recently were hit, and hit hard, by a storm that formed over the Pacific that gradually escalated into Tropical Storm Alma. Alma is the Spanish word for soul and this storm definitely showed a lot of soul to us. Here at QERC we sustained over 15 inches of rain in three days. At one point we had 4 inches in 2 1/2 hours. Other parts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua received more than that. The Panamanian-American Highway between QERC and Cartago was closed for two days due to trees and landslides but between QERC and San Isidro it is still closed because the highway is just flat out gone in certain spots where slides took the whole thing. Apparently there were several hundred people stuck on the highway between two landslides for at least 2 days without food.

Here at QERC we endured the storm with no major damage and we were able to watch a powerful display of the force of water. The Savegre Valley was a mess. The river was so high that between here and the trail to the waterfall the river was up over the road at three places. In fact, right across from QERC the river was over the road and pounding into the bank of the property across from us. Logs striped of any kind of foliage were careening down the water on the road. The river was touching the bottom of the Hotel Savegre's bridge, about 3 feet over Fernando's bridge at Los Ranchos, and it completely took away the last swinging bridge before the big waterfall. The river was so powerful that for about 5-6 hours straight we couldn't see them but we could hear boulders under the water being pushed down the river and pounding into other boulders. Every time that would happen the whole building would feel the vibrations of the impact. It was like hundreds of little earthquakes. At one point I was outside watching the river during the height of our rainfall and I saw an Alder get ripped down up stream and it was past me in about 1 second and gone. It would have been instant, or at least guaranteed, death for anyone that fell in that river.

The storm let up on Thursday night and on Friday it was beautiful and sunny so we got out to check out the damage around the valley. Our valley road, which is our only road in and out of here, was closed for about 2 days due to trees and one big and several small landslides. We were without power for 2 days.

At QERC we were close to a few problems. At the height of the storm on Thursday, water was draining off the back property down to where the rain gauge is. There was so much water coming down that it formed a creek about 4 feet wide on our back lawn. The creek flowed to the corner of the building and split going on both sides. At the height of the rainfall we had water on all four sides of the building flowing completely against the building at about 2 inches deep. QERC was literally surrounded by a moat. The only door you could walk out without directly stepping in the creek was our apartment door. I was really worried it would come in the doors but the level started going down once it was about an inch from the bottom of the door frame. That would have been a muddy mess to clean up. The stream that was split by the building partly just flowed down the front grass area and joined other water to create a creek flowing down the road past Rolando's, Carlos's, and down to Pablo's. The water that didn't flow down there rejoined on the west side of the building and all flowed off the embankment right across from our apartment. There was so much water running off there, and also one of the gutters from the roof exits from under the ground right there as well. Unfortunately, all of that water, combined with an area that Pablo says was a lot of back fill from construction, with no large tree on it, created a fairly significant landslide into the river. This was the scariest thing for Sarah and I. The landslide slowly kept growing as the storm persisted. It is now stabilized but it is only 15 feet from the edge of the building.

Return of the Finkenbinders

2008-06-01T23:10:00.001-06:00

Sarah: Though the busyness of the semester program is now behind us, May has continued to be full of activity and visitors. A few days after the students left, Leo and Zana Finkenbinder came to QERC with a group from Olivet Nazarene University (ONU). As you may remember, it was Leo and Zana who have the long history here in the valley and were the ones who actually built QERC. They hadn’t been back to the valley since they retired a few years ago, and Leo has since come out of retirement and is helping develop an Environmental Studies program at ONU. We were excited to have them here to follow around and pick their brains on the history and science of this valley, and a bit nervous with their return since we had made quite a few changes to the place since they’d been here.

Our visit with them was wonderful – they were complimentary toward the improvements we’ve made and the direction we are going with QERC, and we were able to learn a lot from them about their visions they originally had for the building and the way QERC was utilized. As it turns out, many of David’s ideas for the place coincide exactly with the visions Leo had, so David was able to run a lot of ideas past Leo and receive good input.

It was also a very good and much-needed visit with the Chacon family for Leo and Zana. Because of the long-standing history with Leo and Zana, it is them whom the Chacons trust and respect the most when dealing with QERC. Leo and Zana were able to see David and me as a positive addition to the staff, and in return, relay that to the Chacons. We have felt like we’ve had a good relationship with the Chacons for a while now, but with Leo and Zana here, it gave that extra confirmation, and in some ways symbolized the passing of the torch from them to us. We look forward to Leo and Zana returning with more groups to QERC in the future to continue that relationship with them.

After the ONU group was gone, Dennis Siegfried came down with a couple of professors from Oklahoma Baptist University to do a quick tour of a few places in Costa Rica, with the hopes of setting up their own trip sometime. We enjoyed having them at QERC and brainstorming with them on ways they can utilize QERC in the future.

Right after they left, we went to the airport to pick up Ted Bader. Ted is a donor and major fundraiser for QERC and has been a part of the project since it first got started. We also met up with his son, Sam, and Sam’s wife Candace. All three are here at QERC right now enjoying some relaxation time and a break from their busy schedules in the U.S.

Field Research and the Empty Nest

2008-05-17T10:36:00.011-06:00

David: For the second time in our lives Sarah and I are empty nesters. I have a feeling that someday in our lives we'll truly know what that means but I can honestly say we kind of know what that means. All of the SNU students returned to the U.S. on Friday the 9th, over a week ago. It hasn't been exactly quiet around here since but nonetheless it has been very different. Needless to say, they are greatly missed and we often think about how their transition back into the homeland has been.

After we all returned to QERC from the 3 week Environmental Science Concentration the students had 5 weeks to take one more QERC course, finish up there distance learning courses from SNU's campus, and finish their research projects. It proved to be a busy time for all but it was great to see them work hard and finish well.

The QERC course was Biblical Theology and Global Stewardship taught by a member of SNU's theology faculty, Dr. Marty Michaelson. In the end it was one of the most valuable learning experiences for the students and a great class to compliment the issues looked at during ESC. One book that was part of the student's text was called Serve God, Save the Planet by Matthew Sleeth. If you want a thought provoking read on God's call to be stewards of the Earth I'm sure every one of the students would recommend this book to you.

As the students were busy finishing up data collection I stayed quite busy with two research projects involving jays and bats. One of our students, Meredith, was implementing a survey of bat species at different elevations and habitats. As adviser/assistant, Meredith and I were partners in bat catching crime for a good four weeks. We spent about 2-5 hours on 5 nights a week setting up and taking down mist nets, patiently and impatiently waiting in the pitch black, untangling extremely angry bats with very sharp teeth, and identifying the captured bats to the species using a dichotomous key. Sarah joined us a few times and also was an integral member of the identification team back in the lab. The project turned out to be very successful and laid the ground work for more in depth chiroptology (bat) research in the future. In total we caught 11 bats representing 6 different species. The majority of them were insect eaters but we caught a few fruit eaters and one nectar eater. One life lesson learned while assisting on this project is that listening to jaguar vocalizations on your Ipod while sitting in the pitch black is not a way to become relaxed in nature.

The other project that I dedicated several hours to was the nest description of a bird called the Silvery-throated Jay. It is a beautiful jay species that is endemic to the Chiriqui Highlands of Costa Rica and Panama. It is a under studied species and no scientific records have been taken on their nests and breeding habits. While Scott Smithson was here for ESC he discovered only the second nest known to the scientific community. In order to do my part for science I took part in several observation sessions at the nest. The gist of the work included hiking 1.5 km into the oak forest and lying on my back for 1-5 hours taking notes on all activity at the nest. It was an enjoyable experience and over the course of several sessions I was able to observe a large array of activity that will hopefully be combined with observations from a few others and put into a scientific manuscript.

One final activity of the semester was a "debriefing / reentry retreat" for our five remaining students. Sarah and I know how important valuable closure and reentry preparation is to bringing a cross-cultural experience full circle and we were enthused to provide this for these students to the best of our ability. We were pleased to be able to take the students on a retreat to the Volcan Arenal area. It was a great location to relax, detach from QERC, and begin an important reentry process. Our goal was to help the students pull out the life lessons from the semester that they felt were worthy to take home with them and then begin giving them the tools to integrate those life lessons into their lives back at home. This can be a very challenging, but rewarding, process. Often those who have experienced a cross-cultural experience return home feeling as though they have changed, matured, and grown and then find it very hard to reconcile those changes to who they were before they left and who friends and family view them as now. The integration process can be painful but ultimately very rewarding. Anyway, we had a great time beginning this process with the students and hopefully they feel like they are more prepared for being home. We felt like it went very well.

Part II

2008-04-19T10:37:00.006-06:00

Sarah: I’ll help pick up the story from here since I got to join the group for the last week of the travels. (See entry below for David's Part I.) After a day of rest and recuperation (and laundry!) in San Jose, we traveled to Ostional, a beach on the Pacific Ocean to learn about environmental and community impacts of nesting sea turtles, and also about conservation done by the local community as well as national organizations. Ostional is one of the two beaches in Costa Rica where an arribada occurs on a fairly regular monthly basis. An arribada, meaning “arrival”, is when thousands to hundreds of thousands olive-ridley sea turtles come up to nest on the beach over the period of only a few days. The reason these particular sea turtles take part in this ritual is unclear, and this phenomenon has only been occurring in the past 60-70 years. For the first 48 hours during an arribada, the community is allowed to harvest the turtle eggs, since these eggs have no chance of surviving with the thousands of sea turtles who will come after them and dig their eggs up in the process of digging their own nests.

Though we tried to time it right, we missed the arribada by only a few days most likely. However, we did go out with a local guide at night and were able to see the entire process an olive-ridley nesting. Two highlights for me were the sunsets on the beach (and David surving while the sun went down), and the howler monkeys right outside the window at the house we were staying. The family David and I were with had a bunch of mango trees, and the monkeys would sit in the trees all day, lazily eating mangoes. Every morning we were woken up by their loud roar, sounding as if they were inside the bedroom – which wasn’t too far from the truth!

From Ostional we went to a place called Casa del Sol for a day/night. This place is incredible the way they do all their cooking by use of solar ovens (good food too!). We learned a lot about being good stewards of the Earth and how to go about doing so. In the afternoon we were taught the ins and outs of composting, and were able to spend a couple hours helping build and turn compost piles. All of the dirt made from the compost goes toward their own gardens, where they grow their own foods and herbs.

Our last leg of the trip was spent in northern Costa Rica, on a volcano chain called Rincon de la Vieja. We stayed at an eco-lodge, with no electricity in any of the rooms. Here we studied volcanology, complete with a rough but very cool hike to the brim of an active volcano. When we finally reached the top and were looking inside the volcano, it was like looking at a fake backdrop. The lava was a bluish color, and we were only allowed to stay at the top for 15 minutes because of the sulfur gases. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life! During all the hiking we did over the course of a few days we were lead by a mountaineer who had lived in the area all his life, so he was able to teach us about specific plants and what medicinal or other benefits they had. We also got to see two eyelash pit-vipers up close and personal, and spend some time sitting in hot springs, where the heat is produced by activity from the volcano underground. And though we were all excited about our travels and everything we saw and did, everyone was thrilled to make it back to the comforts of home at QERC at the end of the class.

Whew!

2008-04-19T10:25:00.005-06:00

David: Sarah and I just finished a game of 7 up-7 down with some of our students and this afternoon we watched some episodes of L ost. I know that this may not seem that exciting but it sure felt great. I have been going strong for over a month now and things are finally settling down a little bit.

The main reason for the busyness has been the Environmental Science Concentration. SNU’s eight students joined four students from LASP for a three week course studying tropical ecology and sustainability. I co-lead/co-taught this course along with Scott Smithson and Natalie Villablobos from LASP. I took part in this course last year and was thrilled to be a part of it again this year. The goal of the course is three-fold: 1) expose the students to the diversity of life throughout all of Costa Rica’s biomes (give them some “WOW” experiences in God’s creation 2) visit and observe several different and diverse approaches to conservation and sustainability 3) challenge the students to integrate their faith, personal life choices, and global environmental stewardship. It sounds like a big task but in reality Costa Rica makes is a perfect place for this purpose.

We started the course here in San Gerardo de Dota and QERC studying cloud forest and paramo ecology and looking at the Chacon family’s attempt at sustainability through forest conservation, ecotourism, trout farming, and agriculture. We left from here to south central Costa Rica in the San Vito area on the border with Panama. Our purpose was to visit a forest restoration research project being conducted by a researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her project is attempting to look at restoration ecology for tropical forests in the attempt to aid forest regeneration. One reason her project stands out as different is that she includes a social aspect in partnering with local sustainable coffee farmers.

From the San Vito area we left for almost a week to the Osa Peninsula to study the lowland tropical rainforest. This was my 4th time to the wild Osa Peninsula and my 3rd time visiting Campanario Biological Reserve. Campanario is a special location where rainforest meets ocean and you think you can’t find anything that looks more like paradise. On the other hand it is hot, humid, and full of insects. Those are some fun things that come with some of the best tropical forests. There is some give and take. In fact, one our students was actually bitten by a boa constrictor. Talk about having a good story to tell the parents. Our time at Campanario was inspiring as always and for me was highlighted by having a very close and prolonged encounter with a sea turtle while snorkeling.

Before leaving the Osa we spent a night at Sirena Ranger Station in Corcovado National Park. Our main goal was to see wildlife since this particular spot is well known for an abundance of it. It lived up to its reputation. We saw all four monkey species, one sloth species, two species of peccary, crocodiles, coatis, an opossum, and three individual tapirs. And that doesn’t even count the birds we saw.

Visitors

2008-03-13T10:54:00.012-06:00

Sarah: I have been putting off writing a blog entry because David has been in the process of writing one about our recent trip to Nicaragua, but so as not to wait any longer, I’ll write one now and let him backtrack later and catch you faithful readers up on our Nicaragua adventures.

We are well into the semester now, and after our trip to Nicaragua, 3 more students joined the original 5. We are enjoying the extra activity going on around QERC and are excited to see our numbers grow. Students have been busy working on research projects, classes from SNU, and finishing up their Applied Culture and Integration class here in Costa Rica. We had one visiting professor from SNU here for a week who helped finish up that ACI class, Dennis Williams. He has a long history here at QERC and it was great for us to talk with him about the progress and future of both the semester program and also other developments.

A bit of exciting news for me to share is that my dad and sister Rachel just spent a week with us here in Costa Rica. It was very special for me to have them here to show off where we live, hike around on the trails in the valley, and spend some good hot time at the beach. The first part of the week we spent here at QERC, enjoying the morning sunny hours, and relaxing the majority of every day. We all took a hike down to the waterfall one day, my dad and I hiked through the cloud forest one morning, and another day Rachel and I rode horses to the peak of some of our trails. Mostly, it was great to just have them here and be a part of our lives here in Costa Rica.

The second part of the trip we had even more company. Chad Frosland, one of David’s best friends from college, joined us at the end of the week. We all drove down to the beach together to soak in the sun and hit the waves. First we drove to the top of Cerro de la Muerte, the second highest peak in Costa Rica, and had a clear enough morning that we could just barely see both the Pacific and the Caribbean coasts. We were even able to see the waves crashing down at the beach at Manuel Antonio, which was exactly where we were going. We took another pit stop at a favorite stop of David’s, a swimming hole with a rope swing. He and Chad took turns swinging into the water, while my dad and Rachel and I took pictures and enjoyed watching the many Jesus Christ lizards on the rocks around us.

Finally we made it to the coast, which felt like paradise. My dad, Rachel, and Chad all felt like they were in heaven with the blue water, palm trees, and hot sun after coming from such a cold and snowy winter in the states! We stayed in a beautiful and comfortable hotel right on the beach, complete with a refreshing swimming pool. Most of the time we were at the beach we spent going back and forth between the ocean and the pool. :) One morning we spent inside Manuel Antonio National Park, and had the opportunity to see a number of coatimundis, agoutis, iguanas, a sloth with babies (from far away), and lots of white-faced capuchin monkeys up close and personal. We had some great monkey encounters as they jumped all around us, feeding on the trees, and crossing the paths on the ground in front of us. One even stepped on David’s foot as it was jumping across to the other side!

One afternoon Rachel and I got massages on the beach, complete with waves coming up underneath us. While we were relaxing, David and Chad rented boogie boards and hit the waves. Chad had never been boogie-boarding before, and they had such a great time tumbling through the waves and riding them into shore. Another highlight was watching the beautiful sunset a couple nights right over the ocean.

Our last morning we spend a few hours mostly on the beach, soaking up the last bit of sun we could before heading back into San Jose. On the (long) drive back we happened across a large number of scarlet macaws flying around and hanging out in a tree by the road. We also stopped at a river and saw TONS of crocodiles – I counted 27 at one time!

After our last dinner together, Chad and David drove back to QERC and I stayed with my dad and Rachel the last night and accompanied them to the airport very early the next morning. It was a sad departure, but a really great week with them. Chad just up his week here with us at QERC, and it was good to have him also experience our life in Costa Rica. We too walked to the waterfall, and David and he got some time up in the cloud forest. We enjoyed getting some quality time with him and were also sad to see him leave.