Beach time, Panamá, lot of fiesta, project valle escondido

If you had a house on the beach, wouldn’t you maintain it? Even if it was your mother’s house and she passed away and left the house for you and your 4 other siblings? Even if you couldn’t stand your siblings wouldn’t you at least maintain the house in your mother’s memory?
So my family took me to the beach the other weekend. I had no idea about where the beach was and supposedly there was a house and all we had to do was bring sheets. I think we ended up at an upper class Costa Rican private beach community. Upper class in the sense that all the homes were mostly vacation homes and they had security guards patrolling the community all day long, however not so much in regards to the bumpy gravel road and how run down some of the beach houses had become. For instance the house we stayed at might fall down in a few years. Long story short, sibling rivalries and stubbornness are causing the house to be neglected and it shows. At least there weren’t bed bugs. Anyways besides a semi-rundown house the beach was a nice getaway. I spent most of the weekend sleeping on a hammock and trying not to burn myself. I got pretty bit up at night and the black sand literally made me feel like my feet were going to catch on fire in the sun but other than that things went well. Crazy though how much the ocean can change day to day. I went in the water the first day and it was kind of dirty, I didn’t think much of it because the black sand would make it look like that. However our last day something changed and the water was a lot clearer and there wasn’t as much sand in it.

We came back from the beach on September 15th, Costa Rica’s Independence Day. They don’t shoot fireworks off but rather have a bunch of parades and torch relays. I didn’t get to see much of the parades as I was at the beach but my other volunteer friend told me she had someone run a torch through her town on a relay to somewhere. She lives in Cartago though, the original capitol city of Costa Rica so they crazy over there. They have a religious holiday where people walk from as far as Nicaragua to the cathedral in Cartago to worship the Virgin of Los Angeles.

Shortly after I returned from the beach I had to turn around and head to Panama for 5 days. I wasn’t due to leave the country but another volunteer had to and she didn’t want to go along so I told her I would go with her if we could go to Panama. She agreed but said we had to go see the canal. I’d seen it before but this time we went to an actual tourist area which had a visitor center and museum. Different kind of tourism for me though as there were more Latin American tourists than North American/European tourists. It is off season for tourism though so that could be why. I also was able to hear a lot of funny Spanish accents that I hadn’t heard before. I guess I’m sheltered with only hearing Costa Rica and Panama Spanish. I wasn’t too thrilled about staying in Panama City but in the end it turned out alright because I actually had to navigate the city on my own. The first time I came to Panama City I was able to meet up with cousins of my aunt (language note: I naturally wrote that in passive when it should be active, my Spanish is messing with my English!) and they took me all around so I didn’t have to navigate anything. This time however they were all busy with work so I had to do it all alone. I’m learning Panama backwards from Costa Rica. When I first got to Costa Rica I had to everything on my own cause I didn’t know anyone, now when I come I don’t have to stay in hotels anymore because I have so many other connections.

Well after touring the city we went to the country to stay with my aunt’s family for a few days. My friend Mikey totally stole the show though which I’m glad she did. Granted the guy cousins all wanted to flirt with her but even the girl cousins, aunts and grandmas all had a good time getting to know her. It was nice too that she spoke Spanish so I didn’t have to translate at all. Staying there for 2 days was probably the highlight for me. The town had a club so we went there both nights and got free drinks till 11. No crazy stories resulted from that but it did help me keep my streak alive of consecutive weeks going out and dancing. Our bus back to Costa Rica picked us up at 1am so we had to leave the club early the second night and ended up missing a wet t-shirt contest. Oh well couldn’t have been as crazy as Hawaiian tropic models wrestling in pool full of chocolate…

I have to say town festivals are getting pretty out there these days. In my original host town, a tiny little place out in the country, they decided for their town festival they would get models to wrestle in a pool of chocolate. It didn’t last long though because people started pushing to see and they broke the barrier so the dj called it off. Little ‘ol La Lucha not quite ready for the big time yet mud wrestling events I guess…

I know it sounds like all I have been doing the last few weeks is sun tanning, travelling and going to exotic clubs/parties but that’s really how its been… not really but seriously I went to probably the best surprise birthday party ever the other night. My boss at my office in Alaujela is dating an engineer from the main office in San José except it is super down low because of the whole no dating people you work with policy. I don’t know if it is policy here but they just prefer to keep it on the down low. They do so well that I almost forgot they were “dating”. Well that was until my boss decided to plan a surprise birthday party for him and we spent the better part of a day working on stuff for the party. This however was more than just hide everybody in a room and yell surprise, we were on a mission. Not only was there cake and food, but we also had music, karaoke and a piñata. Well it didn’t stop there as we bought fake eggs and filled them with candy and then when Carlos (the b-day boy) was blindfolded for the piñata we just let him have it, the whole time him thinking the eggs were real. The best surprise of the night though was when we gave him a fake gift. We had a big box wrapped up with a bow and everything and one of Carlos’s friends dressed up as a woman and hid in the box. I’ll have to try and get a picture of his face when he opened the box because it was hysterical. Having a grown man jump out of a box, wearing a wig and makeup, dressed like a stripper… just can’t be described in words.

That concludes this edition of my Costa Rica Party tour but leads me to my next point as Carlos and I now work together on housing projects and we are pretty good resources for each other. I tell him how construction projects go in the US and he tells me how they do them here. In Costa Rica my degree Construction Management doesn’t exist, so everybody becomes engineers and they are dam proud of it. They answer the phone saying their name as engineer so-and-so. They’ll say their title but they won’t say who they work for as if being an engineer carries more weight than any company name.

Right now were in the bidding stage of a housing project of 17 houses that we are doing in San Ramon and are big struggle is finding a decent contractor. We’ve already had two site visits because only one contractor showed up for the first one and had to push our bid date back two weeks because of that. We are hoping that we get 3-4 good bids for this project. Our concern is that most of these contractors have very little experience doing this type of housing and won’t be set up for this kind of work, causing the bids to be high because they won’t be as efficient. We have one project going right now where the contractor has pretty much given up on finishing it anytime soon as he sends maybe 3 ppl to the site each day. They are already way late and there are penalty clauses in the contract but apparently the laws are too weak to enforce them in court. So here is my open call for bidders, bids are due next Friday, send them to San José. We have one really good contractor that does what he says so we use him on individual projects and little side jobs and repairs that we need done. We just need like 2 or 3 more of him for these bigger projects. Maybe that’s my calling…

Sucesos:

-I think dancing is a way better way to meet people than smoking. In college ppl would say they smoke because you’ll meet other ppl that stand around outside when it’s ten below and you can be there so they don’t feel completely insane. I have this cultural suspicion that everyone here either knows how to dance or are very open to learning how to and it is a great way to break the ice. For instance I was out with my friend and his girlfriend and my friend didn’t dance and the girl was like “yeah I dance a little” when I asked her to dance with me. She was pretty shy so I hadn’t talked to her much before but I had to at least ask her to dance. So we go dance and I spin her around enough that she gains confidence in me and then the music changed and I asked her if she wanted to keep dancing and she was like hell yeah (well the Spanish equivalent more or less of hell yeah). Turns out she danced a lot more than she said she did. Later when I was saying good bye to everyone she tells me that I’m an excellent dancer and I need to come back and teach her to dance sometime. Doesn’t always go like that but I’ve gotten to know a fair amount of people from dancing.

-I almost got stranded for the first time in Costa Rica coming back to the office with another employee when our truck’s electrical system went crazy. It literally shut the truck down and we had to disconnect the battery in order to start the car and get it back to the office. Weirdest thing ever though, like it all of a sudden became possessed, or blew a fuse.

-My host mom makes incredible pizza.

-I (still) hate the Cowboys. I still remember when we finally crushed them the season after the super bowl. I was watching the game with some cousins and we were dominating when Sharper returned an interception for a td. It was glorious but all I remember are my cousins getting upset because they would have won a bunch of money had the score remained as it was. Have to savor those moments now because it looks like were back to the early 90’s again. At least the Vikings still suck.

Nuevo Pueblo, family visit, habitat cambios, sucesos

So I’m actually not all alone down here come to find out. Well actually I knew pretty much the whole time that I wasn’t alone, it was just that I thought my compañera (friend from work) lived relatively on almost the other side of the world. Well I thought that until I went to visit her town this past weekend.

Habitat has kind of like an adopted community where they built a bunch of houses and are now trying to develop the community and they have a volunteer to help them. She is teaching English classes, helping with a folk dance team, starting a recycling program and helping with many other projects like a community child care center. It is probably the most ambitious project, but they already have land donated for it and I’m working on getting them an architect to do some drawings for them. After that it will be a matter of fundraising $10-$15 grand to build and operate the center. Anyone want to chip in? Needless to say she is the most popular gringa (person from the US) living in a Costa Rican community that I have seen, and I’m a little jealous of her because of that ;) Anyways my beach plans for the weekend got cancelled so I gave her a call and she bailed me out by inviting me to her town because they were having festivals that weekend.

It’s maybe three hours traveling to get to her town from my town but it could be another country. For one, the landscape is not at all like the jungle-scape (see pics) that most people think of Costa Rica as. The best comparison I can make is maybe to that of N. Ireland. We are up way high in the mountains above the clouds, it rains a lot, is very cloudy, green and extremely cold. And by cold I mean that people have wood stoves that they cook with but also use to warm the house. Now for my North American readers I must add that I am really over-exaggerating the cold. The coldest it got was maybe mid 50’s at night, but I’m used to mid 80’s and humid so this was a big change. It felt like camping in October. I got to wear my sweat pants and hooded sweatshirt for once and I slept with legit blankets. Not just the landscape was different but the people too talked differently, had their own phrases and were more pasty white because it is cloudy 90 percent of the time.

I lucked out as the town was having a festival so they had carnival games, dances and a bunch of good food cooked up. No tacos, but the churros and tamales were pretty good. Saturday night we went to a small house party and everyone was chill and we were watching the Costa Rican equivalent of Dancing with the Stars. Well that ended and then they got out their sound system and started playing salsa music, something I’ve never heard at a house party. We danced a little and later they switched to club music and brought out a broom stick to dance with (or to be a stripper pole). It was getting close to my turn to dance with the broomstick when I made probably my best cultural save ever. Not being a big pole dancer I somehow turned it into a limbo competition. Everyone loved it and totally got into it. The game ended when we started trying to jump over the stick and it broke. (I wonder how they are going to explain that to their parents.) Mikey (la compañera) and I just kept chuckling to ourselves as we had never been part of such a lively limbo competition.

Sunday was pretty laid back however they were supposedly having a parade, which never arrived but they had a dance which was ok. It was ok mostly because Central American dj’s never shut up. They can’t let music play more than a minute without cutting in and interrupting or advertising stuff. It wasn’t even good commentary, mostly “Who wants free beer?” or “Raise your hand if you like girls.” So annoying, ay por el amor de Dios cállese y deje que la música se oiga (For the love of God shut up and let us hear the music). Anyways I now have another place in Costa Rica that they told me I can visit whenever I want.

Last Friday was a very interesting day as I went with three other Habitat employees to visit a very poor family in Northeast Costa Rica. The journey itself was pretty cool as we had to go over mountains and we passed some waterfalls and got some pictures. For me it was just fun to hang out with co-workers and be the only foreigner. It is funny though as everyone knows a little bit of English and some more than others but there are English words that are pretty much part of Costa Rica, or at least Habitat Spanish. For instance when we would pass by a waterfall or something cool everyone would say “Take a picture”. What, sorry and next are also other words that have gained acceptance in the Costa Rica language. Anyways the family we visited was the poorest family that I have seen in Costa Rica. We were way off the beaten path to even get to their wooden house. We went paved road to stone road to dirt road and then had to walk 100 meters (300ft-ish) to the house. The family had six kids the mother had cancer and the two youngest twins were noticeably malnourished. We brought them a whole bunch of clothes, and food and got them started in the process for getting their own home. There is a big donor group coming in December to help build and pay for this families house as there is no way they could afford their own home. There isn’t a lot of work and it is sporadic so as a family they might only make $6 a week. What is even sadder is that the work they do get I think is cutting down trees for lumber companies. Luckily this family had city friends that had been helping them get by month to month by bringing them food and supplies. Hopefully this story has a good ending 6 months from now as one of the older boys really wants to continue studying so hopefully he can get the help he’ll need. The walk from their current home to school is 3hrs so there really isn’t much chance that any of the kids will have a very high education level and will end up repeating the cycle of living in extreme poverty for generations to come. I’m confident Habitat will be able to help them out though.
In other Habitat news my jefa (boss) accepted a new job with the International Habitat office in San José and will be leaving us for good in November. They are going to pay her literally double what she is making now so I can’t blame her. Since I’ve started here about three ppl have left for other jobs and it has been because they’ll be earning double what they make at Habitat. So it goes in the life of non-profit orgs. My job is shifting a little bit also. With her departure I’m going to be focused on developing processes for Habitat construction projects. It’s hard to explain but we have to submit estimates to the banks that give us the housing vouchers and they want to make sure the money is being spent as efficiently as possible. So I’ll probably be buried in more estimates but I’ll also be working out of the San José office more often and there will be other day trips to go on. I currently work in the Alajuela office which is tiny-er so it will be nice to get out more often and head to the big house.
That’s all for now, is summer really over?

News and notes (updates):

-I’m pretty sure Obama will dominate, or Costa Rica is extremely liberal. The Republican convention didn’t get hardly any tube time in my casa (house). I even told them it was going to be in my old college town, but tropical storms take precedence.

-Speaking of tropical storms we are all messed up because of the indirect effects of the storms. We have big time flooding going along the pacific coast, so much that my beach plans have once again been cancelled. I don’t get it, the Caribbean coast isn’t getting any rain and they are closer to the storms.

-Alajuela’s soccer team La Liga, my favorite team here played such a bad game last night it made me upset. They almost give me Costa Rica National Selection team jitters but they played so bad I might disown them. They didn’t complete more than two consecutive passes the entire second half. I’m half glad they lost because they didn’t deserve to win. It’s not hard to pass the ball back and forth more than twice. It’s like a handoff in football, not that hard or risky. Speaking of football Americano…

-Is it Sunday yet? My football fever is in full force this week. I tried to avoid it up until now but I honestly can’t wait for the season to start. I think I’ll learn my lesson being out of the country during football season. I think ESPN deportes will be my savior though as I was able to watch last night’s game from my house, so I’m optimistic.