San Jose

Sarah: You all know that I now go into the city for 2 nights a week to receive extra Spanish tutoring and to work part-time for the Latin American Studies Program (LASP). Here is what that looks like: every Tuesday morning David drives me up to the bus stop, about 45 minutes away, where I catch the bus heading into San Jose. Once the bus reaches the city, I get off and take a taxi into work. I stay with a family nearby on Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights, and then after work on Thursday I catch the bus back out to the valley and David picks me up at the top of the hill. Often it works out for David to join me for part of the week as he uses the time to run errands in the city, and I always enjoy that!

My family that I live with is wonderful. They are a Nicaraguan family, and they live relatively close to the office. It’s only about a 20 minute walk for me every morning and afternoon. Aminta is my mother, and I have a brother, Sergio, and a sister, Claudia. AND a really great dog, Ramon. We usually sit around and do homework in the evenings while watching TV, both in Spanish and English. They are a super laid-back family. Aminta works incredibly hard (she works for the Nicaraguan Embassy here in CR), and she’s up before all of us cooking and usually goes to bed fairly late as well. Almost every single day, after she gets home from a long day of work, she goes to put on her red sweatpants. And almost every day, she receives a bit of mocking by her children for wearing those red sweatpants! Claudia just about had a cow one evening when she went grocery shopping in her red sweatpants! They are a very loving family, and they pick on each other a lot and laugh a lot. The dog provides for a lot of entertainment as well – he seems to think he owns the bean bag chair, and will push anyone off that tries to sit on it. He has a great personality and is a really fun-loving dog.

The Spanish tutoring has been such a great experience. I meet with two different teachers, once a week with each of them. Harold and I meet Wednesday morning, and we go through some Spanish exercises using pictures or situations to get me using new vocabulary or a certain tense in Spanish. Harold keeps a sheet of paper in front of him, and every time I make a mistake, he is quick to write it down for me to see. :) Eli and I meet Thursday mornings. I always have homework waiting for me when I get into the city on Tuesday – some reading about politics, religion, or other topics – and then we use the time Thursday morning to discuss it. Both teachers draw different trouble areas out of me, and I only wish that I could meet with them every day of the week!

Work has also been going well. I work in the afternoons Tuesday – Thursday, and it’s been really great to work with the LASP staff. And I have found that I also really enjoy working on “administrative tasks”. It’s also fun being in the city. I’ve had some interesting taxi rides – most taxi drivers don’t say hardly a word, but some are fairly entertaining and seem to want to have a full conversation. One taxi driver ended up talking about how he loves languages, Portuguese in particular. I told him that I had spent some time in Brazil, and that was enough encouragement for him to speak in Portuguese to me the rest of the ride. I tried my best to respond in Portuguese, though most of what came out was Spanish with a Portuguese word thrown in here and there. He even went so far as to start singing Christian praise songs for me in Portuguese! Another taxi driver and I had a conversation about politics, languages, and economics on our ride. He actually told me he thought I was Russian…I’m not sure what that says about my Spanish accent!

Weekend Normalcy

David: Around here the weekends can easily slip into the oblivion with the rest of the week without being recognized. We don’t have anyone that makes sure we show up for work on Monday morning and stay ‘til five but in the same line of thinking there are many times that work is required of us on weekend days. For that matter, working on projects on Saturday and Sunday just doesn’t seem different from working on Monday – Friday.

Because of this, Sarah and I do our best to make a weekend for ourselves whenever we can. We sleep in, which isn’t hard. We work on whatever sounds appealing to work on. We watch movies and football and read books. On Sundays we do our best to listen to an Ipod sermon from Faith Community Church, the church we attended in Santa Cruz, CA. It is our little church service.

One of our more consistent events on the weekends is visiting the Cottage Bakery ran by Laura Saborio, our Canadian friend who is married to a tico here in the valley. They have a daughter, Erika. Laura makes world class pastries that we indulge ourselves in every weekend. She has a deck that she has turned into a sitting area that creates a neat little coffee house feeling. We always enjoy great food, beverages, and conversation.

Happy Independence Day!

Sarah: Today we celebrated Costa Rica’s Independence Day. Ana, QERC’s housekeeper, had asked David yesterday if he wanted to ride horses up to the top of the valley to the highway and watch the passing of the torch. He asked if I could come too, and her response was “Well…it’s a long way up there…”. However, I decided to brave the long horse ride and go along. The passing of the torch is a really neat tradition. A couple days ago the official torch was lit up in the Guanacaste area of Costa Rica and people have been traveling around the country, passing the torch off to different towns and cities along the way to take it to the next destination. A group of runners left this morning from Cartago at 1:00 am and the plan was to make it to the top of our valley at 7:00 am for the next handoff.

David and I met at Ana and her husband Felo’s house at 5:00 am this morning, had some coffee and a quick breakfast, and hopped on the horses. Apparently it’s an old tradition to ride all the way up the valley on horses (at least for the men to do so…part way up I realized I was the only female!), so there were about 20 of us total. The women drive up with the kids and lots of coffee and more breakfast foods. After an hour and a half ride up, we made it just in time for the torch to arrive. Along with it came the runners and a bus full of people traveling with the torch. It actually felt like Independence Day, with flags everywhere and the torch preceded by police cars waving flags and honking their horns.

In addition to the Costa Rican flags being flown, there were lots of signs and flags showing their position against TLC, which is the Spanish version of CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement). This has been a huge issue for Costa Rica ever since last year’s presidential elections, when one candidate was in support of ratifying the agreement and another candidate was against it. Costa Rica is the only Central American country who has not signed the agreement with the U.S. Oscar Arias won the election last year, and although he was in support of TLC, it has been such a huge debate in the country that it has been decided to go to an all-country vote. The vote will take place in October, and it will be the first countrywide vote since Costa Rica gained its Independence. Our valley is predominantly against TLC, since they are all small farmers and TLC would bring an influx of multi-national factory farms that would basically put them out of business.

At the passing of the torch ceremony this morning, a few people spoke about the tradition and some good patriotic stuff, we all greeted each other, and then the group left for the next town. All of us from the valley then hung around the cars and all the food the women had brought up. The ride down on the horse also took about 1 ½ hours. A couple of the kids got to ride along side-by-side or in the saddle with their fathers, including Carla, Ana and Felo’s youngest daughter. By the time we arrived back to the house, our buns had had enough of being in a saddle!

This evening we went to another celebration at the school in honor of Independence Day. We sang lots of patriotic songs and watched the school kids perform many typical Costa Rican dances. After the festivities we ate lots of typical Costa Rican foods. Last year at this time we had been in Costa Rica only a few days. We had gone to the school for the festivities, but the evening wasn’t nearly as extensive as this year’s, and we of course hardly knew anyone last year! It was such a great feeling to be a part of the passing of the torch and the school celebration this evening and feel like we are accepted members of the community here. Quite the difference one year has made!

Activity

David: We’ve had some activity out here at QERC, which is great news for the month of September. September is slow and rainy for everybody around here. But, against the normal trend, we had two groups staying with us this weekend.

The first group was seven LASP students who were simply here for a weekend to enjoy the cloud forest. Technically, that makes them tourists. But because we have such a close relationship with LASP we’ve taken the liberty to host them anyway. Nevertheless, they had a great weekend and enjoyed God’s creation.

The other group we had here was a Costa Rican married couple who are working on their PhD research. Juan and Melissa have been here in the past and will return again to complete their project. It is nice to continue a working relationship with them and see their project develop. They have chosen 3-4 communities in the Los Santos area to see if they can link forest conservation to a higher quality of living for those in the surrounding communities. It is an important idea because if well done research shows a correlation between a higher quality of living with conservation of natural environments, then communities can be encouraged to pursue conservation. Melissa works on the social aspect of the project in order to determine the quality of life within each community and Juan does the biological work to determine how much land is conserved while specifically looking at bird populations to determine disturbance of the natural environment. It is a 2-3 year project.

One of our overall goals is to make QERC an educationally interactive experience for anyone that walks onto our property whether they may be students, tourists, or neighbors. We feel like we’ve made some progress in doing this and it is a fun goal to have.

One of the projects we are hoping to have done before January is the native plant demonstration. Three sides of our building have flower beds with pretty ornamental flowers. What we are doing is tearing those out, cleaning up the beds, and replacing them with native plants that represent different areas of in the forest. The idea is that we will identify these plants, with the help of some botanists at The National Biodiversity Institute of Costa Rica, and put signs by the plants that have the family name, species name, and common name both in Spanish and English. We would love to see people walking around the building looking at the plants and learning a little at the same time. And when they hike in the forest the plants will catch their eyes and they will think to themselves with great satisfaction, “I know that plant. It is part of the Laladadabingbong family.”

Anyway, in the mornings we drive up into the forest and collect plants that fit into the overall scheme of our planting plan. It has been a lot of work along the way. We’ve had to redo much of the rock border and work around the rain. We just hope that all the plants make it.