September 21, 2010: Our House, La Chasa

We live in La Chasa or La Antigua Chasa (more on this name later). It is a two-room apartment with a bright blue door and a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom of our very own. It used to be a soda, a restaurant, but was recently converted into three cabinas ("cabins," I guess - like little apartments). We love having privacy and the chance to buy and cook our own food. We are becoming experts in hand-made tortillas, rice and black beans.

Nate toasting his work and our newly installed mosquito-net bed, a must have for the rainy season. And the dry season. Pretty much all the time.


We do our laundry in a little Chinese-made machine, then line-dry among bananas and cows.

Lena in the kitchen, making pancakes, which are especially delicious if you haven't eaten them for six months.

This was one of our first house guests, a palm-sized toad. Lena is a mighty hunter.

Our rooms have been vacant for awhile, so we're still negotiating our use of the space with several of the previous tenants, who have included: the above toad, two tiny frogs, a dysfunctional family of at least three geckos (they do a lot of biting of each other), a spider bigger than Nate's hand which had claimed our trash can, and what appears to be every ant in Costa Rica. Please don't let this list dissuade you from visiting.  We have two mosquito nets, so you'll be totally safe. Or at least won't get gecko poop dropped on you in the middle of the night.

September 20, 2010: Diosito: On the Ontological Implications of Calling God “Little”

Nate teaching computer skills to his youngest student ever, the little girl we used to live with.

She is the cutest bebita ever! 15 months old.

(Among family and friends we have quite a range of Spanish knowledge. From a fluent brother who can trick people into thinking he is Argentinean, to a German-speaking Grandmother with little orientation to Latin languages, to everything in between. So, if you find this explanation ponderous, please bear with us.)

Spanish has a fairly well-know and rather charming ability to take a word, a noun or adjective, and modify it to make it diminutive. Take a noun like casa (house). A little house is a casita. How about a perro (dog): a little dog is a perrito. Just add –ito or –ita to a noun and you have created a whole new word and cut out the need for a separate adjective. This can refer to either the actual physical size of something (a tiny house) or how adorable it is (such a cute little house!) or both. So instead of saying “I live in a little house, and I have a little dog” a Spanish-speaker is able to get away with something akin to “I live in a housey-wousy and I have a doggy-woggy.” And no one laughs.

Costa Ricans have an idiosyncratic version of this usage. Instead of –ito, they use –tico. So a small amount is not just un poco. It’s un poquitico. If you need just a minuto (minute), you can ask for a minutico. Due to their tendency to use this form, Costa Ricans are themselves nicknamed “ticos.”

During my eleven years of speaking Spanish, I have always felt that this was a cute trick, that the creation of a new adorable word from an otherwise boring specimen is a nice creative flourish, nothing too profound, but fun. The linguistic equivalent of floral accents in a room. However recent usages by people in our town have led to doubt. It may be that something more profound is going on. Maybe by using –ito, instead of a free and independent modifier, you actually make the thing itself more itsy-bitsy because it is now inherent in the thing itself to be so darn cute and small. Further, the widespread use of this linguistic tool does what all language does: it helps shape the way we think and illuminates the cultural processes by which we see ourselves and our world. –Ito has changed in my mind from mere décor to vital ontological window.

How?

Let’s take three examples: Feíto, pobrecito and Diosito.

Feíto: The use of –ito acts as an excellent social lubricant and is key for those who need an ambassador’s skill to communicate with people who regard politeness as important and look down on aggressive or overly direct social behavior. Let’s say you need to describe accurately someone who is not handsome and is overweight. You could call him feo (ugly) and gordo (fat), but why, when you can much more politely and endearingly name him as feíto and gordito. What if you need to get a meeting with an otherwise recalcitrant co-worker but can’t risk being seen as pushy? Easy! Ask her ever so politely for just a little of her tiempecito (time). Is someone asking you to do something you’d really rather not do right now? Let them know you’ll get to it ahorita (sometime around now, or a bit later than now), and you have anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 years to get to it! You were still accurate with your words (sort of), and yet everyone is happier with you because otherwise overly harsh, direct or impolite words were softened.

Pobrecito: Pobre means poor, but a pobrecito is quite another matter. This is the term universally accepted to describe someone to whom bad things have happened and over which s/he has little or no control. Catch a cold last week? Pobrecito. Did the river flood your house? Pobrecito. Did you lose your homework? Pobrecito. Not show up to that key meeting because you forgot about it? Pobrecito. Can’t get a job because you never leave the house and why would you anyway, your mother cooks and cleans and keeps a roof over your head so there’s really no need? Pobrecito. The seemingly harmless addition of –ito covers a wide spectrum of culpability and victimization, with the effect of diffusing responsibility from said pobrecito. Whereas a Tica mother might say, “Pobrecito my son, he can’t get his act together,” a traditional mother of American Puritan persuasion might respond, “Pobrecito my hind foot, he needs to take on some responsibility and get a job while he’s at it!” Thus, the whole idea embedded in this word is the metaphor of a tiny, helpless human who cannot fight circumstances in a universe beyond his control. This has traditionally been referred to as Latin American “fatalism.” It’s a complicated phenomenon and far from universal, but suffice it to say that the seemingly innocuous phrase holds telling clues to this idea that we, at least, see manifested quite often in the Costa Rican countryside.

Diosito: Dios means God. We have actually heard the term Diosito used several times, once by a priest and once when someone was petitioning God for something. This has got to be the ultimate and most baffling use of the –ito diminutive. What does Diosito mean? Little God? Cute, adorable God? Tiny, smoothed over, no-more-fire-and-brimstone God? Just-the-baby-Jesus God? Creator God that is now tired out like an old man so He’s shrunk down a little? Can you really add a diminutive onto the Someone or Something that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving? Perhaps Diosito is a divinity you can feel more comfortable with, a more personal God along the lines of born-again Protestantism, a guy that you can really talk to and maybe play soccer with on Saturdays. We don’t know. Perhaps all we can say for certain is that the Spanish language itself offers theological possibilities that are not available in English.

There’s no better opportunity than learning another language to realize how much the words you use shape the way you view the world. One tiny suffix can make anything adorable and absolve you from any personal responsibility, as well as softening the blow of any word’s ultimate meaning. We’re working on adopting -ito into English: we live in an house-ito, do a little bit of work-ito in the Peace Corps-ito, and suffer from the tiniest bit of homesick-ito. Don’t worry, we aren’t poor-itos. We’ll always have the Spanish language-ito to keep us going.

September 2, 2010: the phone.

When I used to receive phone calls in the States, the usual order of business was something akin to:

“Hello, this is _____. May I please speak to _____?”

You may notice two things here:

1) The person calling states who they are.

2) The person calling asks for who they want to speak to.

The first public phone was installed in Matapalo in 1979, which one would think would allow enough time for people to develop some sort of system for using phones. Instead, the most common call we receive at our house goes like:

LENA: Hello?

MYSTERIOUS PERSON ON OTHER END OF LINE: Hello?

-- LONG PAUSE --

LENA: Hello?

MYPOOEOL: Hello?

-- LONG PAUSE --

LENA: Hello?

MYPOOEOL: Hello. Good afternoon.

LENA: Good afternoon.

--LONG PAUSE—

LENA: Hello?

This can go on for hours. Usually, we have to overcome our sense of indignation at having the expectation that we psychically guess the intentions of the person who called us, and ask who is calling or for whom they are calling. This is followed by another awkward pause, in which we wonder if the mystery person is now indignant at us. Then mystery person finally spills that beans by stating someone’s name in a confused voice.

At first we thought this was an artifact of answering someone else’s phone. We always felt bad that the friends and family calling our hosts were seemingly so upset that strangers with gringo accents were answering the phone that we caused a sudden inability to hold a logically ordered phone conversation (we were also frequently hung up on). We have since learned that this still happens when you have your own cell phone AND it happens when you put up flyers asking people interested in English classes to call Nate or Lena AND it happens to other volunteers in a variety of otherwise unrelated situations.

So we have come to the conclusion that a legit PC project could be teaching rural Costa Ricans to initiate and professionally carry out phone calls. We’re only being somewhat tongue-in-cheek; because the irony is that a growing industry here in Costa Rica for the up-and-coming working and middle classes is… customer service call centers!

September 2, 2010: Pictures from San Jose.

In the Mercado Central (the traditional market in downtown San José).

How we get around.

Lottery vendor (chancero) walking in street.

In the workers' cemetery.

Family outside of the La Merced church.

Interior, La Merced church.

September 2, 2010: Police, the fuzz, the heat, 5-0, etc.

Costa Rica has 500 different types of police officers. There are the Fuerza Publica (the closest to what people in the States think of as “police”), Transit Police, Tourist Police, Municipal Police, the OIJ (Organización de Investigación Judicial – the people who actually investigate crimes)… actually, that’s all I can think of right now. To restate: Costa Rica has five types of police officers. That we can remember.

Anyway: police are a big deal in our town. Where we live, there is only one police station in the whole district. It’s a two-room wood building without windows painted a sad institutional blue. This small outpost is all the law and order there is in for 3000 or so people. Inside are three police officers, and, theoretically, two are always on duty while the other sleeps.  In practice, sometimes more than one is asleep, sometimes they’re all awake, and sometimes no one is there at all. They sometimes have a motorcycle, but it’s usually broken, which means the officers limit themselves to patrolling the 100 yards between the station and the pulperia down the street, where they can buy a coke.

They seem like decent guys, but you never get the chance to know them, because they’re rotated out roughly every week – a policy apparently instituted to keep corruption at bay. They also have a difficult job, patrolling a huge area without transportation which has seen a huge uptick in drug trafficking in the last couple years. That said, they are also a constant source of complaints in the community. The stories range from the common – the police are called but never show up, the police are called but never answer their phone – to the ridiculous: someone recently discovered a pair of addicts throwing rocks at their house, apparently in retaliation for being stopped from robbing the kitchen earlier that day. When the police were called, they said that A) it was a pretty long way to the beach, so they didn’t think they could make it out there, B) there’s not much they could do if they were there anyway, C) the best thing to do with crackheads is to take them out to distant, abandoned fields and beat them, which they, as police, are really not supposed to do, but D) they highly recommend that everyone else do it.  I’ve heard similar stories from several people, which makes me worried there is some confusion about the difference between participatory democracy and vigilantism here.

Security is a growing concern in Costa Rica – a recent national poll ranked it above jobs and the economy – and there is a fear that it’s only going to get worse.  We’ve been told that a member of the Fuerza Publica can’t actually arrest anyone unless they’re caught in the act (if they’re outside the house holding your TV, you have to call someone else to investigate the crime), and the byzantine sentencing laws make it really hard to actually send anyone to jail. This is a country where there is no institution responsible for even mid-level property crimes and, it is estimated, 98% of all crimes go unpunished.

Yet we feel remarkably safe. I’m the last person to say that police need more power, and I come from a country with a larger jail population than the total population of most other countries, a country that condemns children to life sentences, and a country that – in some states – mistakes revenge for justice and gives the state permission to kill its citizens. I actually like a lot of what Costa Rica tries to do in terms of communal security, in organizing towns to prevent crime through keeping kids active and happy and watching out for each other, or the fact that, unlike the rest of Central America, Costa Rica has a healthy democracy, one which uses government spending as a way to ensure a relatively fair distribution of wealth. All these factors help prevent high crime rates. Our experience here is a testimony to how important the rest of the community is to safety: you don’t need that many police when everyone knows each other, when there’s a sense of community and common interest.

It also helps when a key value of your culture is to be tranquilo: calm, relaxed criminals can only do so much harm.

On a loosely related note, whereas the stereotype of the fuerza publica is that they’re largely ineffective, the stereotype of the transit police is that they’re corrupt. This has been exploited brilliantly by the Costa Rican artist Banton, whose video is below. You need absolutely no Spanish to understand what is going on in this song – which is hugely popular here – and, if you get lost, just listen to the funny voice of the transit cop and watch the midget dance.