NATE: This weekend was our volunteer visit – we were sent to the site of a current volunteer to learn what life as a Peace Corps volunteer is really like. We were lucky enough to go to Talamanca, where we visited two married volunteers, Nicole and Jonas, working on an indigenous reservation of the Bribri people.
The trip out was an exercise in trasero (Spanish for “butt” – check out my new vocab!) durability. Lena’s first leg was from her village, Rio Conejo, to my town, San Antonio. Then we went from my host family’s house to San Jose (about half an hour). The second leg took us from San Jose to Bribri, a 5 hour journey which took us through the Brauilo Carrillo forest, lush and emerald and almost impossible to enjoy through the drunken lurching of the bus, then Limon, and then down the Carribean coast. We met Nicole, one of the volunteers, at Bribri, and took another bus for another 45 minutes, up and down rock-addled roads, splashing through what, in the U.S. west, would probably be called rivers, but are just rivulets here, and gaping at the massive, sprawling river which separated us from Panama. We got off in a tiny town and got on a boat – essentially a very long canoe with a motor attached – to cross the river, and then got on another bus to get to our host site. Our host volunteers described it best: picture the river from Apocalypse Now. It’s like that, but hotter. We were in the jungle: palm fronds, ferns, vines choking everything, plants leaping over plants in an impenetrable tangled surge of life.
The Bribri traditionally live in houses made of wood, with no windows, sitting 4 or 5 feet above the ground on stilts, and covered with a roof of woven palm leaves, cured with smoke. The government of Costa Rica has built several families “beneficios” – free government houses – which are concrete cubes with zinc roofs that are extremely hot, collapse when there is an earthquake, deafen everyone inside when it rains (which it does quite frequently in Talamanca), and grow mold when it floods every year. I liked the indigenous houses better.
LENA: It was really interesting to get to see an indigenous culture (very separate from mainstream Costa Rican culture) from the inside. We had only a short time, but we got to see how families interact with each other, women and men walking together to the banana fields with machetes in hand, children wading through chest-deep rivers to get to the next village, and hear snippets of Bribri interspersed with Spanish. The Bribri live on a sort of reservation, and it seems that they face challenges similar to those of Native Americans in The US. There is a high unemployment rate and many people live off the land, leaving little by way of communal resources to develop their communities. There is a big problem of dependency on handouts from well-meaning national and foreign organizations with little stake in long-term solutions. The Bribri also struggle with the fact that they aren’t unified in agreement about what development should look like, how much to integrate into the outside world and what things like eco- and cultural-tourism would like like for their communities. In fact, one of Nicole’s and Jonas’ host brothers talked to us a lot about this, and asked us many questions about Natvie American tribes in the US and the challenges they face (whew! Thanks to Dave Hays for many years of Western history conversations: we just barely made it through their detailed questions. How do you say “vast historical injustices” and “disappearing cultures” in Spanish!?).
We learned a lot from Nicole and Jonas: we watched them run a meeting for a new microcredit cooperative they are helping to start and observed (and served as the exotic attraction at) an English class. We ate with them at their host family’s big elevated house every night (mmm, stewed plantains) and learned about living with ants marching across the living room; black mold eating all natural fibers; having a, yes, flush toilet that, oh no, does not flush when the rains raise the ground water level (this happens weekly); shopping without a fridge; and hand washing your clothes. They also took us to Puerto Viejo, 2 hours away, a low-key surfer town, where we ate nachos (NOT rice and beans), and Lena had her first beer in 3 weeks and it was the greatest beer ever! We also saw an eel and tiny tropical sea urchins. YAY!
NATE: Last week was a bit rough, as I had to switch host families, but it's turned out for the best. Thanks to everybody who wrote - it really means a lot to us.
Love, Lena & Nate
PS: Talking to other volunteers, we've learned that the best thing you can do to ensure any packages you send to Costa Rica actually arrive at their destination is to lie about the contents. "Books" and "religious items" always get to their destination. Just so you know.
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