Getting out of dodge, lenguaje, environmetal stress and fun facts...

-So are you ever coming back to La Lucha?
-No.

La Lucha. It was my home for six months, quiet and peaceful. A small farming community amongst the tropical forests and volcanic region of northern Costa Rica. The families are big, the children go to school and later join the farm, never straying far from home. Well that was 2 years ago and now things have changed.

Recently one of my old host brothers got a job working at a hot spring in the la Fortuna tourist zone about an hour away from La Lucha. Between work and English class four nights a week he barely has time to study, let alone sleep. I was lucky enough to catch him on his day off this last weekend in La Lucha. Despite how busy he is, he says he loves it. His job is easier than the farm, he gets paid better, and receives benefits such as health insurance and a free buffet when he is working. With his English classes he is hoping to move up in the tourism industry, eventually into hotel reception work. I can’t tell you how happy his mother is for him. Most mothers in La Lucha would rather their kid’s stay close and safe, however Magdalena (my old host mother) is part of a different breed.

Despite having seven kids and living on a farm her whole life she has been out and about selling pots and pans for Kitchen Fair and is on the Costa Rican board for boy/girl scouts. She wasn’t always like this and because of that her older children have stayed on with the farm and manage to get by with the basics, but it is never easy. Her younger children she has encouraged to get off the farm and go to higher education so they can get better jobs and live a better life, and little by little things are starting to change.

Come to find out that also one of my neighbors in La Lucha has also left to work in a beauty salon in la Fortuna. I used to bug her all the time because she didn’t finish high school and just hung out at the house all the time saying that she wanted out and couldn’t stand the boredom anymore of the town. Now she tells me little by little she is moving up to the bigger cities and hopes one day to make it to the US. She also has a younger sister who still has a year left in high school and I ask her what she is going to do and she says she is definitively getting out of La Lucha. It is exciting for me to see ppl doing what they have always talked about doing. It will be interesting to see where people are in a few years time. Now that they are in La Fortuna it´s “hey you got to come up this weekend and we’ll go dancing at the club.”

Another town I have spent a lot of time in has been a town called Santa Clara. I imagine it was similar to La Lucha about 10-15 years ago. This town is located closer the capitol city of our region and it has more going on as far as schools and retail and restaurant business’. There the jobs are better. A small percentage farm but a lot of ppl have city jobs. With the better income they are able to invest in different things, such as Costa Rican folk dancing. A group of thirty students and parents are currently participating in a folk dancing convention in Peru this week. They are very dedicated though as they told me their plane ticket was $1,000 and some families sent more than one person. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have paid that much for the plane ticket and they were taking out loans to cover the trip costs. They have to perform like six dances, each with different outfits too. To digress I was visiting the other weekend and one of the families was selling tacos to raise money for the Peru trip. I have to tell you the tacos here are nothing like taco bell or even what we typically make tacos with. Imagine putting ketchup and mayo on your taco… and loving it. Their style is pretty basic but they wrap the meat in a taco shell and then deep fry it to seal the meat entirely in the taco shell. Then they put lettuce and ketchup and mayo on it and you eat it and it is good. I can’t even describe it; I’ll take a picture of one sometime. Random trivia fact: tacos are also what the call soccer cleats.

Going along with the language trivia I find myself advancing to the next level of dominating a language. When you first start speaking a new language you think of what you want to say in your first language and then translate it and then say it in the new language. That works well until you actually begin to think in your second language, which I don’t think happens until you have lived abroad and have used it extensively. I have a handle on the language where I have no problem thinking in that language no matter where I am. The next level of dominance though is speaking without even thinking. In the past few weeks I have found myself doing this and it has been a little weird for me. Weird as in I can’t control it. Sometimes the words leave my mouth so fast I don’t even know if I’ve said everything correctly. Spanish being my second language I’m a stickler in making sure I say everything in the right tense and address the right group of people. I always listen to others speak and I catch a lot of their mistakes, however they are so fluent that people don’t realize they have mis-spoken. The best English example I can think of are the good ‘ol Wisconsinites who sometimes say yeah I seen it, when really they should say saw.

And now for my environment editorial: Last Friday I hitched a ride to La Lucha with a friend of mine Don Jaime, who is a vet/doctor and started Proyecto Asis animal rescue center in hopes of teaching ppl to live in harmony with nature and not to destroy it. He definitively cares for animals as the center has well over 100 animals either in recuperation or living there. Well we were about 15mins from Asis when in the middle of the road was a litter of 4 kittens that couldn’t have been more than a month old. Of course he stops the car and I know for sure that we are going to pick these kittens up and take them with us. There was another guy with us and he thought we were crazy but after knowing Don Jaime long enough I was not surprised at this. However when we got to Asis he proceeded to tranquilize them and then put them in a bag full of carbon monoxide, effectively putting them to sleep. Now this I didn’t see coming. The response I got was that these kittens had no mother, nobody wanted them, and if they kept them at Asis they would hunt other animals and screw up the natural habitats of the other animals. He made it clear that he didn’t want to put them to sleep, but it was the only good option as he said they weren’t going to live a very good life. Truthfully, I know he’s right.

I see a lot of stuff here that I don’t agree with. A lot of families have small little chirping birds called perrícos (mini-parrots) that they keep in a cage and clip their wings. I don’t believe these animals are meant to be domesticated. They justify it by letting them out of their cages and letting them walk around the house, however to me it just doesn’t seem right. Cats and dogs are ok, caged parrots not so much. That is just an example of a bigger cultural problem that Don Jaime and Proyecto Asis are trying to change by educating on how to live in harmony with the environment. I was visiting a farm with one of my Costa Rican friends and there were leaf cutter ants carrying leaves across the trail and she decides to put a stick in the middle of their path to block them. I just kind of looked at her in amazement like a what are you doing kind of look and I really got no response. And to think her dad used to work in a national park! Anyways I’ll get off my soapbox now knowing that it is tough to change a culture that has become accustomed to having their way with nature. I’ll put the links up to web sites if you want to know more about the mission of Proyecto Asis.


I’ll sign off with some interesting things that may or may not interest you:

-If you are a mother this is your week to be in Costa Rica. Mother's Day is this Friday and we have the day off from work because of it. Gotta love it. ¡Te amo mamá!

-It has rained everyday in Alajuela except for two days I think since I have been here. It always rains in the afternoon or evening, except for one day last week it rained from 4am-9am.

-They now sell digital cameras that have a smile mode. If you don’t smile it won’t take the picture. My boss got this camera from her dad as a birthday gift and it’s for real. I wonder how much money it was to add that feature.

-I was able to watch the Packer game last night as we get MNF on our espn station down here. I forced my family to watch the whole second half while I tried to explain the whole Brett Favre saga. They really could have cared less. They were more intrigued by the stadium and the cheeseheads.

-My host family is an Olympic fan. They were all up at 6am last Friday to watch the opening ceremony and now all we watch are the Olympics.

-I planted a tree two years ago on one of my family’s farms and I just went and saw it and it is already bigger that I am. They say it is going to really grow a lot the next five years.

-People down here say I look like Micheal Schoffield from Prison Break. I kind of do though when I shave my head; all I’m missing are the tattoos. It goes without saying that the ticas love it ;)