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.

August 28, 2010: Mother's Day.

NOTE: we're a little behind the curve on this post - it was written a week ago, but with the week of training we just finished, we hadn't had a chance to polish it up. And now, with all the thoughts inspired by IST (in-service training for the non-volunteer and/or acronym impaired), we want to write another post. So you get this one in all of it's unpolished glory. And also a beautiful picture Lena took that has almost nothing to do with the post, except that it has some mothers in it.

A modern invention of the nationalist age and the card-flower industrial complex, Mother’s Day is not celebrated on the same day everywhere. Although May is a big favorite around the world, in Costa Rica (and apparently a small part of Belgium) August 15th is the day. And it is a big day—bigger than in the US. It is a national holiday with a day off granted to state workers and some schools are closed. Sales for presents are high, as in the US, and many businesses consider Mother’s Day as their way to stay in the black until Christmas arrives. Flowers, clothes, perfumes and home appliances are all hyped in advertisements for months ahead of the day – not too different from American tastes, except for the large number of ads attempting to entice you to buy hotpants and short shorts for your sainted mother.

When we were in church on Sunday the 15th, we learned why Costa Rica chose this date. Costa Rica is the longest-lasting democracy in Latin America, yet it does not have church-state separation. The Catholic Church is the official state Church, and the 15th is the feast day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven, where she is crowned the Queen of Heaven by Jesus.

According to some of the teachers we know, there is a tradition of local schools holding big parties for their communities on Mother’s Day. Many schools, overburdened with other, more academic, tasks no longer commit the time and resources required, but my town is an exception. We were asked to help set up and then invited to attend the festivities, and, not realizing what a big deal Mother’s Day is, we did not know what we were getting into.

The first clue that we had no idea how intense this celebration was going to be was that there was a theme: Hawaiian luau. This evening, the town hall was filled with streamers, balloons, and a gigantic welcome sign featuring two large-eyed waifs in grass skirts dancing on an island and wishing the reader a happy Mother’s Day (as a side note: if the creators of Precious Moments were ever to sue for back royalties due to the unauthorized use of their work, just in the province of Puntarenas alone, they would be entitled to billions of dollars in damages). Enough tables and chairs were set up for 100 people, and in the centerpiece was a pineapple, covered with candy that had been speared with toothpicks and then jabbed into the fruit, making an already bizarre-looking fruit that much more surreal. At the front of the room, two large tables were stacked high with ribboned and sparkled loot to be handed out to parents that night through the raffle, because it is written in the constitution of Costa Rica that raffles must be held every three to 15 days.

We were given the task of greeting people, which consisted of a polite buenas tardes, making the person sign in on the appropriate sheet (one for men and one for women), and then giving them a raffle number, a piece of candy, and, finally, draping a plastic lei over their head. We ended up with over 100 people – probably 120 – but at least a quarter of the population of Portalón.

Then the madness began.

Actually, that’s a lie: the madness began while we were signing people in. The LCD projector, sound system, and a computer had been brought over from the school for use as the evening’s AV system. At some point during sign-in, everyone in the room was suddenly startled by a horrible, repetitive car crash sound effect, played at what seemed to be 5000 decibels. One of the teachers had put together a slide show, complete with sound effects and music, of what started out as a series of pictures of unusual car crashes, but which quickly devolved into a series of pictures of morbidly obese people in bikinis and cats in zany situations. This was to set the tone for the rest of the evening.

Next was the first dinámica of the night, which is just the Costa Rica way of saying “embarrassing party game,” in which we were all asked to stand up and dance. Everyone seemed fine with the standing up part, but, when it came to dancing, there weren’t many takers. At this point, the MC began haranguing the crowd over the mic, at great length and at great volume. “COME ON! DANCE! THIS IS FUN! THIS IS A NIGHT TO HAVE FUN! DANCE!” Unmoved, the crowd continued to, for the most part, watch the teachers dance. Then the threats began: “IF YOU DON’T DANCE, YOU WILL HAVE TO COME UP HERE IN FRONT OF EVERYONE AND DO THE CHICKEN DANCE!” Guards were posted throughout the room to identify the non-dancing scofflaws and drag them to the front of the room.

This, of course, is the point in which Nate was dragged up to the front of the room and instructed to do the chicken dance. Not that he hadn’t been dancing before, mind you, but let’s consider the logic: just say you’re running an event. The crowd isn’t really responding, but you feel compelled by some intense, uncontrollable, pathological urge to make them dance. After threatening them with public embarrassment if they don’t dance, you obviously have to follow through, otherwise you lose face and all control over the evening. On the other hand, if you actually force someone to embarrass themselves, you may very well scare everyone away, as they flee your terrifying totalitarian dance party. The answer? Make the gringo dance. Gringos dancing is universally considered to be funny is Latin America. Luckily, Nate has been conditioned by years of high school drama and working with children and is not easily given to embarrassment, and he was a good sport in sating the appetites and curiosity of the party-goers.

The night continued on, sometimes interminably so: at least 4 more dinámicas were done, dinner was served, raffles numbers read until every single adult ticket holder received a present (somewhat defeating the purpose of having a raffle, now that we think about it), and the teachers and hosts for the evening did an amateur dancer number in spandex and luau flowers which involved a lot of booty-shaking at the audience. Some of these women were over 40, and several were not in peak condition, making even Lena look like a swimsuit model. It was one of those situations in which you would be embarrassed for the lot, but since the party was now well into hour 4, all you could do was look on with mild perplexity, hope vaguely that you would not be pulled to the front of the room to shake your white ass, and remind yourself that later you should look into the armchair sociologist theory that one culture’s shame is another culture’s entertainment. And then smile wanly, knowing it was important for the guest gringo to seem to be having a good time.

But the real high point of the evening was yet to come. It involved the enactment of a skit claiming, as stated in the introduction, to represent a “typical Costa Rican family situation.” The plot was simple: a busty and booty-heavy Costa Rican housewife works hard to do the housework and feed her family. Her wayward and shallow husband goes out drinking at the local cantina, picks up slutty women, and comes home drunk. The wife kicks him out but he returns to repent. Harmony is restored when she, and her two daughters, forgive all. Now, we actually found this particular celebration of motherhood to be entirely depressing, but it was probably the most popular event of the night (other than the free stuff from the raffle). It relied on that well-worn trope of community theatre everywhere: put the most well-known town leaders into wigs, use pillows for potbellies and balloons for boobs, and watch the audience erupt in laughter. Despite the light-heartedness of this skit, Lena had a hard time seeing anything other than an almost entirely negative depiction of a rural woman’s life. They say good comedy tells the truth, and maybe that’s why so many women, as well as men, were laughing.

July 6, 2010: Eating and House Visits and Outright Lies.

For the past six weeks, the vast majority of our time has been spent doing house visits and eating. Actually, if you were to put them in the correct order, it would be:

1. Eating
2. House visit
3. Eating
4. Abortive house visit in which no one is home even though we made an appointment and thought we were quite explicit about when we would be at their house
5. Eating
6. Eating

In that spirit, we would like to share our reflections on two cultural differences we have noted here in Costa Rica.

Open Doors Policy:

If I was to show up at a complete stranger’s house in the United States – at least in the cities I’ve lived in – stopped at their gate, yelled “HEY!” and then asked if I could come inside and talk with them for a bit, I estimate I would get the following results:

• 50% would completely ignore me, either actively hiding or pretending not to hear anything by turning the TV up even louder.
• 25% would go their front door and wave me away with an exasperated air.
• 15% would come up to the gate, ask what I wanted, and then tell me to go away with an exasperated air.
• 9% would sic their gigantic, frenzied dog on me, film the results, and then post it on YouTube.
• 1% would invite me inside.

However, so far in Costa Rica I’ve had about a 90% success rate for invitations, and the majority of this 90% also serve you a fresco (juice or Kool-Aid, only with more sugar) once you are sitting on the couch. The other 10% only refuse because they’ve already got someone inside their house who showed up, yelled, and then demanded to be served fresco, and there’s only so much fresco to go around.

The equivalent of knocking on the door and yelling “HEY!” is standing in the street and yelling “UPE!” (say it “oo-pay!”), which, as far as we’ve been able to tell, is only used when you’re outside of someone’s house gate and want to invite yourself in. The story we’ve been told – a story which is almost certainly apocryphal, because it is too cute to be true – is that there was a time when every other woman in Costa Rica was named Guadalupe, which, we can all agree, is difficult to yell. This led to a convenient shortening of “Guadalupe” to just “upe” by those who stand outside of houses and yell for people – and, because at half of the houses you would be yelling for Guadalupe, “upe” eventually just became shorthand for “let me in and give me fresco.”

An important difference should be noted, however: in the States, you can walk up directly to people’s houses and knock on their door. This is impossible in Costa Rica, because either

1. The house is surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire, or
2. The house is surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire which barely holds in the raging dog beast-monster guarding the house, or
3. The gate is open, but Ticos are too polite to just walk into someone’s yard without asking permission, so you have to yell first.

Rice:

Every time our host family has to leave, they are sure to let us know the house’s Rice Status. As in, “I’m going to work. There’s rice made,” or “We’re going to run some errands. There’s rice, you just have to warm it up,” or “You haven’t eaten yet? But there’s no rice!” This family can go for weeks on end without bread, but rice is made daily. As lovers of toast, we find this challenging.

As we have learned, however, rice goes with everything and it goes in everything. Here are the uses of rice as we have come to know and sometimes love them:

• Rice and beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Sometimes you can leave out the beans.
• Oh, also dessert: Arroz con leche. One of the few truly great ways to eat rice. Rice cooked in milk to make a sweet pudding with cinnamon and vanilla flavorings. As Lena’s Irish grandfather was fond of saying, “Potatoes are for dinner. Rice is for dessert.”
• Think you already have some starches on your plate and don’t need more? Think again. You can never have too many carbohydrates. Rice goes nicely with foods like spaghetti, chop suey, potatoes, tortillas, soda crackers, bread, and yucca.
• Gallo pinto, the national dish of fried beans and rice, traditionally involves a rice-to-bean ratio of at least 3 to 1. The other famous national dish is arroz con pollo, rice stir-fried with small pieces of chicken and vegetable. It is so commonly eaten that Costa Ricans call it “arroz con siempre,” or “rice with always.”
• Did you know that the Mayans worshipped arroz and called it “the food that makes corn taste bad”? I hope not, because that’s a lie.
• Rice is cooked, liquefied in a blender and added to pineapple juice to make a sort of meal-in-a-glass, a rice smoothie if you will. The rice tends to fall to the bottom and you have to mix well before serving. Very filling.
• The rice that sticks to the bottom of the pan after cooking and gets crunchy and browned but not quite burnt has a name: cancho. You can snack on this like crackers.
• When asked, many Ticos will state that their favorite food is rice. Not gallo pinto, not arroz con pollo, but rice. Think if instead of claiming spaghetti as your favorite food, you just said, “I like noodles.” Or, if instead of saying you loved cake, you always claimed to love flour. Kinda weird.
• Here, rice goes inside tamales. Next to the potatoes and corn batter, so that you have all the members of the starch family together in one little package.
• There is an egg dish, a kind of torta (like an Italian frittata) made only of beaten eggs and cooked rice.
• Did you know that arroz is an ancient Chorotega word for “makes children grow strong”? Not true!
• When someone gets sick , they are served rice water (agua de arroz). Rice is boiled in water, then strained out and the water reserved and served as a rehydration fluid. You can also leave in the rice and liquefy everything into a sort of mush. Agua de arroz is served to ill children in the national Children’s Hospital. Thus, the healing power of rice is actually endorsed by Costa Rican doctors.
• Rice goes into soup. Or you serve it on the side. And then you put it in the soup.
• Almost every family, even if quite poor, owns a rice cooker, a separate crook pot kept out and plugged in on the counter that is only for cooking rice. Huge, huge quantities of rice. An exception is older traditional cooks, but they similarly keep one pot at the back of the wood stove that always has rice made in it. As these intrepid cooks and housewives have told me, you never know when someone will show up, and a good hostess always needs to be prepared. Prepared to serve rice.
• Did you know that for the Bribri, one of the indigenous peoples of Costa Rica, the word for arroz in their tongue means “he who makes life possible and fills our loins with the seeds of our sons”? I just made that up!
• People will ask you if you don’t eat the gigantic mound of rice served to you and which takes up half your plate, or – even worse – if you try to sneakily serve yourself no rice at all, whether you aren’t sure that you would like some rice? Are you sure? Really? No rice? Really? Just a little?