Sigamos en la locura

Today we’re recovering from another intense week of class, although luckily, it was not spent entirely in the classroom. Today, on our only rest day, I slept in for only the third time since arriving in Costa Rica and incidentally missed breakfast, but really, I think I needed sleep this morning more than I needed breakfast.

Our learning this week consisted of a laundry list of topics including: non-timber and animal forest products, methods of data analysis in ethnobiology, basics in tropical forest ecology, bioprospecting, malaria, tuberculosis, leishmania, lab observation of the three parasites responsible for malaria, TB and leishmania and a discussion on the efficacy of foreign aid on health in developing countries. We also went out and made our own sampling plots for ethnobiology in the garden, collected samples, identified them and will analyze them in the next couple days and got some new and different exposure to Costa Rica's indigenous people.


Tuberculosis = red in a sea of blue. Do you see it?



Collecting plant samples in the garden




We visited an indigenous group on Thursday, the Boruca. This visit was an interesting contrast to the visit we made to the Ngöbe village earlier in the semester. On the whole, the Boruca have adapted very well to life in modern society while still maintaining their cultural identity. They earn their livelihood by selling handcrafts, which they market primarily to tourists. Their trademark products are hand-carved wooden masks. Traditionally, these masks symbolize demons (or diablos) and are used in a three-day ceremony that starts on December 30th, but since they started selling these masks to tourists, they have evolved from their religious symbolism. They are now painted very colorfully and often include quintessential Costa Rican symbols like tree frogs and toucans. They also weave, making purses, table runners, scarves and belts from fibers that they dye themselves with natural plant and animal dyes they collect from their surroundings. They demonstrated natural dying techniques over wood-burning fire and allowed us to dye pieces of our own clothing if we wanted.

I spotted Boruca, the town, from the road. Do you see it?



Some results



Dyed yarn, naturally



The Dying Setup




Boruca Masks, for sale



Though it’s easy to see how the Boruca have adapted to modern society and to subsequently conclude that they’ve sold out and sacrificed their cultural values in order benefit from tourists’ curiosity, there are many aspects of Boruca culture that remain intact. The native language is taught to children in school, the handcraft traditions are passed down generations and ceremonial traditions, like the balie de diablos with the masks persist. It’s also clear that, in general, the Boruca people (and their dogs) are a much healthier community than the Ngöbe community that we’ve observed. This state of community health seems to be due to multiple factors, arising from a healthier diet (more protein, less starch), a viable economic livelihood, and an educational system that sends young Boruca to university. And many of them return to Boruca to serve the community with the skills they gleaned from their education – an indication, I believe, of the strength of their cultural identity despite the pervasion of mainstream culture.

Yesterday, we entertained two Ngöbe visitors. Don Alejandro and Doña Maria are from La Casona, the Ngöbe territory that we visited earlier in the semester. Don Alejandro is a traditional healer in his village and Doña Maria is a midwife. We had the chance to ask them questions about their practices, the cultural ideas behind their practices, and how they relate to conventional medical practices. We also went out to our sampling plots with Don Alejandro and asked him what he knew about the usefulness of the trees we sampled. In the afternoon, Doña Maria opened shop selling from her collection of handcrafts including traditional Ngöbe dresses, then they roasted cacao beans for us.



Roasting Cacao



Traditional Ngöbe Dress: the latest fashion trend in our class




Last night, three of us went out to a small bar in San Vito. It was packed with Ticos and even though there were just three of us, we were most certainly a spectacle. Everyone in San Vito seems to know everyone, so when strangers come into town, it’s painfully obvious. When we arrived, there was really bad karaoke, but thankfully, the music evolved into something a little more dance-friendly which was much more enjoyable. Even though San Vito doesn’t have much to offer in terms of weekend entertainment, by the end of the week it’s almost necessary to go out and get off-station for sanity’s sake. It’s certainly nice having all of our activities in one place during the week, but the lack of variety gets wearisome – especially when there’s not much opportunity to take advantage of the outdoor opportunities available at the station. Sadly, I have not been down to the river or on any of the hiking trails at Las Cruces since we arrived almost two weeks ago, and unless I find some time today, I probably won’t before we leave on Wednesday. Goes to show just how much of our time here is already spoken for when we can’t even get out on the trails that are right in front of our noses.

Looking ahead to this coming week, we’ve got several assignments due, including our final research proposals and our analyses for our ethnobiology sample plots. Our research group will also be going out to a Finca Sana on Tuesday evening to observe the data collection for the survey we’re going to help analyze. On Wednesday, we’re leaving Las Cruces for San Jose to spend the night before heading to Nicaragua for a few days at 4 am on Thursday morning. Following a few days in Nicaragua, we’ll be traveling to OTS’ field station in Palo Verde National Park in Guanacaste. We spend another handful of days in Palo Verde where we’ll take our midterms (yes, midterms) before they let us loose on fall break on October 11. The next two weeks will be busy, and will go by fast for sure. It should be interesting, and I’ll do my best to post accounts of our adventures in these places.

And here I am, sitting at the top of the waterfall where we ate lunch in Boruca. Just as evidence that yes, I am in Costa Rica and no, I'm not always behind the camera!

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Putting the Intense in Intensive

Our first week back in Las Cruces has been full. Full of lectures, full of reading, full of discussion as well and conception and organization of our research ideas into proposals. Our days are long, with class from 8 am until 8 pm (sometimes even 9 pm) six days a week. Admittedly, we get short breaks throughout the day, but when class adjourns for the last time at 8:30 pm and only then do we have the chance to start our fifty page reading for the next morning, it feels a little overwhelming sometimes.

Everything we're learning is fascintating. We had a really good discussion on ethical research. We are considering the validity of non-empirical medical practices in other cultures (cool, related article here). We watched a video about the public health rock stars who were on the ground working to eradicate small pox in the 1970s. We've been hearing lectures on all sorts of tropical diseases and delving into plant identification and collection techniques and cultural sensitivity issues in ethnobiology.

Clearly, the volume of information we've received this week is rather large (I've taken 35 pages of notes since Tuesday), and this is great in the sense that there are lots of interesting points to ponder, but at the same time, as a slow and methodical learner, I have found it difficult to really absorb what I'm learning on a deeper level (the way I like to learn), because there simply isn't time to sit and ruminate on what I learn because we are always moving quickly on to the next subject, the next topic of discussion or the next activity.

Just days after arriving in San Vito, I found myself missing immersion into Tico culture that was characteristic of our home stays in San Jose. I crave the challenge of being in a place where I cannot fall back on my English. At this stage in my acquisition of the Spanish language, the only way I'm going to improve is if I don't have the option of reverting to English in order to communicate my thoughts. Studying with American students has been great; I enjoy my classmates a lot. I'm thankful to have people here that I can communicate easily with when I need to, but this experience, in which we exist predominantly in a buffered cultural environment (a Gringo bubble, so to speak) has also reaffirmed my desire to experience a culture by immersion into it. I envision this desire being fulfilled in the future through service in the Peace Corps.

Among other things, I'm starting to miss certain foods that are staples of my diet at home. In the past week, I have craved macaroni and cheese, hamburgers, pesto, pasta in general and temperate fruits (peaches, berries and Minnesota apples). Rice is getting old. It's a treat when the ladies at the dining hall serve pasta at the station, and today for lunch, they made fresh homemade pizza. Muuuuuy rico.

Since it takes so long to upload videos onto my blog posts, I decided to try another strategy to let you see short videos I've taken while in Costa Rica. My solution: YouTube. Enjoy.

Also, I added some more photos to my Photobucket page yesterday and added some titles and descriptions to the ones that were already uploaded. See the entry below for the link. I don't think you need me to post it again, do I?

Photobucket Link

I've loaded a bunch of pictures up on Photobucket.com. They're not all posted yet, but I'm working on it. The volume of pictures I've taken in my first (almost) month in Costa Rica seems a little excessive, but hopefully you will enjoy them!

And hopefully this link works.

Finale in San Jose and Back to the Sticks

We arrived back in Las Cruces yesterday afternoon after a long and uneventful bus ride from San Jose. It is good to be back at the station where our class is living together again, we have reliable internet in our house and we just walk downstairs to go to class. I am sharing a room with my dancing buddies, Rachel and Victoria, and am looking forward to two weeks of this rooming situation. However, we awoke early this morning to take showers and brush our teeth only to find that water didn’t come out of the faucets in any of the showers or the sinks. Welcome to pura vida in the sticks – hopefully we’ll have water again before day’s end.

Our stay in Las Cruces is going to be interesting, but busy. We picked up Hector, our ethnobiology professor yesterday on the way to the station. We start with his first lecture this morning and our activities for the rest of September include some interesting ethnobiology-related field trips to herbaria and indigenous communities. We also are going to be nailing down our topics for our first set of research projects this week. Dr. Ortiz, the health director for the Coto Brus area who brought us to see the barracks in the coffee plantation and to the other Ngöbe territory is going to construct a list of possible research projects that we can choose from if we don’t already have one in mind. Its a really cool opportunity to have his input. He really understands the health needs of this area, and if any of us execute projects that he suggests, we’ll be providing him with data that he can actually use in the future. Its very cool to be in a place where we have such a reliable connection to the community and its needs.

Although I’m very excited to be back at Casa Wilson, living with my classmates again, it was bittersweet to leave San Jose. I was just getting adapted to getting around by bus and taxi, getting to know the geography of the city a little better and feeling more and more comfortable with my host family.

On Saturday, I celebrated my birthday Costa Rica-style by going to school. Yes, we have school most Saturdays. In the morning, we drove to Heredia to visit the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBIO) that maintains a park with a butterfly garden, snake, frog and tarantula exhibits and areas that represent the various ecosystems found in Costa Rica. They collaborate with researchers and volunteers in order to catalog and document the diversity of species found in Costa Rica, and they have a free database available to the public via their website. While we were there, we visited the butterfly garden, saw iguanas just cruising around the park, saw snakes, tarantulas and poison dart frogs (all in cages). Some really cool stuff – and they brought out a baby boa constrictor for us to hold, and Mumsy, no joke, I held the snake all by myself :) You would have either been proud or screaming. I don’t know which. I have proof.



Our afternoon was spent at the OTS office listening to lectures about viruses and bacteria that cause diarrhea and discussing issues in vaccine distribution around the world. We were learning about diarrhea in preparation for a lab that we are going to start this afternoon. Mariace stopped at the San Vito hospital last night to pick up some caca for us to test in lab today. Should be interesting. We also had birthday cake at the OTS office on Saturday – it was sad to cut up such a happy looking pastry.




I went out to dinner with a couple girls after class. We went to an Italian place near Universidad Costa Rica that my host family told me about. We ate really tasty pasta and pizza – a nice reprieve from la comida tipica of Costa Rica. We all shared a piece of cheesecake for dessert. The girls sang to me for my birthday, and when the waiter heard, he brought over a candle, put it in our half-eaten piece of cheesecake, lit it and took pictures for us.



The highlight of the day was, naturally, going out dancing at Castro’s. Rachel did my hair for me and we met up with most of the class there. It was a really busy night at Castro’s. At one point there was hardly any room to move on the dance floor, but it was still a blast. I danced with a really nice Tico for most of the evening. It was definitely a birthday to remember, and a good way to bid farewell to San Jose before returning to the sticks of Coto Brus.

After arriving in Las Cruces yesterday, we had some free time to kick around the soccer ball a couple of guys bought in San Jose, and after dinner the group went into town for the Independence Day festival in San Vito. There was crowd gathered in the street in the center of town and they were sending off groups of kids to carry the torches to the nearby towns to symbolize the torch-carrying that brought the news of independence all the way from Guatemala. People in the crowd brought homemade lanterns, and after all the send offs happened, there was music playing. We started dancing in the middle of the crowd of Ticos and quickly become the center of attention with people circling around, taking pictures and watching without joining in. They were clearly missing out on the fun, although we got one Tica to join us.

18 Hours of Veritable Costa Rica: Written September 6, 11:00 am

The last 18 hours have been full of good Costa Rican experiences. Yesterday was Maria, my host mom’s birthday. She spent the latter half of this week preparing for the party she was hosting to celebrate with her friends and family. She moved all of the furniture out of the living room, cleaned the floor and set up table and chairs for twenty (or so) people. She planned to feed her guests tea, bocas and then a meal of chicken lasagna, salad and a cake from Giacomin (famous Italian pastelería in San Pedro). We had class at OTS all day, so I arrived late to the festivities, but when I arrived, I asked where I could dish up a plate of food for myself. Maria told me not to be silly, to sit down and to wait for the waiter to bring me my plate of food. I sat down with Caroline, the British woman who rents the apartment next door (who was thrilled to see a friendly English-speaking face when I arrived). I enjoyed my meal with a glass of wine and absorbed the spirit of the celebration until the mariachi band walked in. They played a selection of songs, took requests and got Maria and all her friends singing and dancing along. And a little later, Marcela busted out her belly-dancing outfits and demonstrated for everyone. It was quite a spectacle I wasn’t expecting at all. It was no wonder that José and Mauricio, Maria's husband and son had escaped to another room in their house. Kind of a hen party. Oh, and the cake was fabulous.

Maria’s guests left around seven, which gave me the chance to go meet my classmates at the bar down the street to watch the Costa Rica vs. Mexico soccer match. I heard about this game a couple weeks ago from Maria. I immediately wanted to look into trying to get tickets to go see it live, but Jorge told us that all the tickets sold out two months ago because Costa Rica-Mexico is such a bitter rivalry. It’s so fun to be in a place where people actually care about soccer. All day long we saw people everywhere sporting red and blue national team jerseys. Taxi drivers drove with Costa Rica flags waving out their windows. Many restaurants and businesses hung banners or flags proclaiming their pride for their team. People generally admitted that Costa Rica’s chances of winning were not terribly high (Mexico has won the majority of their previous meetings), but in many cases, that did not put a damper on the country’s enthusiasm for its team. Turns out that Costa Rica’s defense got severely outplayed by Mexico’s strikers and they were never able to generate any particularly strong attacks, but really, it was fun being at the bar with the game playing on all of the TVs with people cheering for their team regardless of the game’s odds.

After the game was over, I went out dancing at Castro’s with Rachel and Victoria. We went out on Thursday night, but had to leave just as things started picking up in order to get enough sleep before our 8am class on Friday. With a rest day today (Sunday), we were free to stay out a little later last night. Castro’s is a super fun place to go – there is a huge dance floor with Latin music all night, every night, and people are there to dance. It’s great fun. I’m reaping the benefits of dance classes at the language academy, and I even picked up some cumbia last night, which was so fun. Like I said before, it’s really great to go out with a small group of friends because when we go, we don’t feel like obnoxious tourists. Sometimes we’re the only Americans there, and that’s really cool.

We only have three days left of language school (a very good thing, in my opinion) and just one week left in San Jose before we return to Las Cruces next Sunday (I think). I need to be sure to bring my camera with me this week, so I can capture important aspects of life in San Jose (language school, my Costa Rican family and their house, bus rides home in insane traffic, crappy drivers in general, la Universidad Costa Rica, Mall San Pedro – which is quite a monstrosity, but right down the street from language school, all of these things) to share with you.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Today was a better day in language school - probably the best yet, in fact. The quality of the day was definitely associated with the amount of time we spent in the classroom with barred windows (aka la cárcel). We spent two hours over at the Universidad de Costa Rica, practicing our interviewing skills in Spanish. This exercise brought me back to the work I did at DMU this summer - feeling like I'm preying on unsuspecting victim, but the Ticos at the Universidad are so cooperative and happy to help, even when I stumble over my words in Spanish. Its nice to be outside during the day and to be interacting with Ticos and absorbing the environment at UCR.

After trying to coordinate evening activities among our class as a whole, trying to keep a group of 19 classmates together, happy and safe at San Jose bars and venues is more work than its worth. I think people are starting to realize that going out in smaller groups is a little less obnoxious. In smaller groups, we don't become the gringo majority in any given bar. Last night, I went with a friend to the Jazz Cafe in San Pedro. The walls of the place are lined with grisly busts of famous jazz artists, but the live music last night, although good, was not actually jazz. We chatted with another English speaker who was volunteering in a San Jose orphanage, and we were all thoroughly amused when the band busted out the Beatles' Come Together.

We have yet to find a good place for Latin dancing. All of the bars we've seen either don't play music for dancing or play reggaeton, which is not my style. My host sister told me that none of the jovenes (young people) dance salsa or merengue, but I don't care. My classmate, Rachel, who has been doing research at La Selva all summer and is basically ready to become a naturalized Tica has a little bit of conocimiento (knowledge) of the Latin dancing scene in San Jose, and a couple of us are meeting tonight to check it out.

Random fact: The guy that teaches dancing at the language academy is a contestant on the Tico equivalent of Dancing with the Stars, which is less surprising when you consider how small of a country Costa Rica is, but still.

This video is one I took when we visited the Ngobe village in Coto Brus a while back. I was sitting in the sala of the medicine man's casa, trying to listening to what he was telling a group of my classmates. While I was doing this, one of the many chickens that wander the village, walked into the sala, poked around for a minute and then left. At the time, I was amused by the wandering chicken and decided to record a video. The cool thing about the video is you can hear the medicine man talking in Spanish in the background. The image of the wandering chicken and the sage advice of the local medicine man are an interesting juxtaposition.

*Note* Video upload took too long before they kicked us out of language school. I will upload it to this post another day.