What´s Normal?

This is something that I’ve been wondering about for a while now but my curiosity has been intensified with my time abroad in cultures different from my own. I remember I started thinking about it when I came home for Christmas during my first year of college in New York and home didn’t feel quite like it used to when I lived there day-to-day for the previous eighteen years. I had only been gone for two months or so, but already I had adjusted to a different life. Or perhaps I was somewhere in between my old life and my new one at school. Either way, home just didn’t feel like home anymore. I think the vast majority of Americans move at least once or twice by the time they go to college, but I had never even moved houses my entire life, let alone cities or states. I think never having had that experience of a drastic change is what made the question of what it is to be normal so conscious in my mind.

It’s weird. You leave your home for the first time and you expect time to stand still while you’re gone and for everything to be exactly as you left it, but things don’t work that way. Granted, things don’t change very quickly in Roanoke and things basically stay the same, but I think I’m speaking more to the attachment you feel to a place. Also, I think that the attachment you have to a place relies heavily on the relationships you’ve developed there. I think it’s only natural that as you move from place to place, or go from high school to college, that your current friendships begin to take precedence over your former ones and relationships tend to fade over time if you don’t keep up with them (I’m not talking about life-long friends – I mean acquaintances, people you were kind’ve friends with in high school, etc.). If you don’t believe me, simply think back over the years of your life, or the periods rather (middle school, high school, college, after college), and tell me if you’ve maintained all those friendships over all those years. It’s impossible. People come and go; there’s nothing wrong with it, that’s just the way it is. No matter how bad you want to, you can never go back to the way things were before. Our childhood homes, or at least the way we recall them, are long gone. And you can never go back to high school, although I have no idea why anyone would want to!

I’ve been blessed to have had a handful of friendships endure from elementary school and middle school to today, but I feel as though that’s the exception to the rule. We all still call Roanoke home since we haven’t technically made the transition to another permanent location, but we’re hardly ever there and never all at the same time. Between college, study abroad, grad school, and working overseas, my friends and I hardly live in Roanoke anymore, but where do we live? What’s normal for us? What’s normal for anyone? What length of time is necessary for a way of life to feel normal to someone? Will I ever feel normal in a foreign country, no matter how long I stay? How long will it take me to readjust to the States? Or will I ever? I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew with this one, but I’d like to explore it for a little while, at least until my head starts to hurt haha.

I think it’s interesting to point out that, in my opinion, it’s much easier for an expatriate to feel at home in the United States where the population is very diverse than it is for a white American like me to integrate into a homogenous country. I stick out like a sore thumb almost everywhere I travel: Africa, Asia and now Latin America. Even if I learn the language, adapt to the culture, make friends, start a family or whatever the case may be, everyone would still know that I was different. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be accepted in those places, but no one would ever believe I was from there. But what people from homogenous cultures often don’t realize is that the United States is so diverse in virtually every aspect of life that you really can’t tell if someone is a citizen or not just based on how they look. I’m not sure if my argument is that I’ll never be able to feel at home in a foreign country or simply that it would take a lot more time than it would in any random town in America. I really like it here in Costa Rica; my Spanish is coming along; I’m starting to make some friends; but I’ll always be the gringo in town haha. I guess it’s not such a bad thing.

I think that I’ll be able to get used to life in the States when I return; I think the difference will be in the way I see things. I don’t think I’ll ever again be able to subscribe to the fast-paced work, work, work lifestyle that so many Americans have. I can’t claim to be completely comfortable with the pace of life down here because it’s excruciatingly slow, but I’m slow-paced by nature and I think this pace suits me better. I also think that I’ll be more people-oriented when I return. It’s engrained into us from an early age that time is money and people rarely spend as much time as they should with their family or friends or neighbors just sitting and talking because it seems like a waste of time when you could be making money. At first it bothered me when I wanted a quick answer to a question from someone and then an hour later after drinking coffee and shooting the breeze I still didn’t have my answer. But it’s nice the way people take an interest in each other here. I’m not gonna go overboard and say that I’ll be a vegetarian by the time I get back, but my family here definitely eats a lot less meat than what I’m used to, and I’ve begun to realize that the amount we eat back home is so unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I love meat and there’s zero chance that I’ll refuse to eat it, but I won’t take it for granted so much. Maybe I’ll decide to eat it less often or in smaller portions or something.

Back to the original topic… maybe there is no such thing as normal. Or maybe each person has their own ‘normal’ and I just haven’t yet found mine. Certainly it’s not normal to be a Peace Corps Volunteer or to live abroad. I guess I’ll just have to settle for being different for now. Perhaps there’s something to be said for it.

Rice, Beans and Spaghetti

On the same plate.At the same time.It’s actually a lot better than it sounds after you get over the initial shock of the blasphemy. The first time I saw it, I was pretty taken aback but now that I’ve had time to think about it, it almost makes sense. I mean rice and beans are a given with every meal here like kimchi was in Korea, so if you want something else it still has to be served with the rice and beans. After a while you realize that food is food and you just learn to eat whatever you’re given. Having said that, I actually really do enjoy the food here and it’s not a problem for me at all. It’s not always very balanced but at least it doesn’t contain all the stuff that processed food has in it. I still contend that a rice-based diet is a great way to lose weight. Don’t ask me why, but it is from my experiences. I’m not going to lose another thirty pounds like I did in Korea simply because I don’t really have that much to lose but I had already lost seven by the end of the first ten weeks. Although, I’m pretty sure I gained it all back while I was at home eating turkey, dressing and mashed potatoes and gravy three meals a day for about a week and of course all the Christmas cookies and candies, haha. I was reading a book about being a Peace Corps Volunteer and it was talking about how men typically lose weight and women gain weight during their service. The theory is that food in developing countries has a lot of carbs and men’s bodies can process carbs a lot quicker than women’s and it turns into energy instead of fat for men. Also, there is a lot less meat in the diet and I guess men typically eat more meat than women back home.

Someday I’ll have to start taking pictures of my meals to show you guys but I feel a little weird about busting out my camera at dinner time. I feel like it might send the wrong impression, like I think the food is really strange or something. Speaking of pictures, I figured out why my pictures take up so much space and thus forever to upload. My camera was set to take pictures that could be printed out at size A3. I’m not sure how big that is, but they were taking up 4MB apiece and each one took several minutes to upload. Now I’ve got it set to e-mail attachment mode or something like that and each one is only 150KB and my memory card can hold about 45,000 more pictures now than it could on the other setting. The only problem is that I can’t go back and change my old pictures to the new setting. I’ll choose a select few of the best of my old pictures to upload and then once I’ve taken a bunch of pictures on the new setting I’ll be able to put as many up as I want and really quickly, too!

I’ve started the long, slow process of working on my CAT (Community Assessment Tool). My plan was to start interviewing my family, since they would be most comfortable with me and most familiar with who I am and why I’m here, and then I was going to introduce myself one Sunday at church. The first part worked out great – I’ve interviewed my host dad, his mom and one of my aunts and I feel like I already know a lot about my community. The other great thing is that they’ve been able to tell me who can answer the questions that they don’t know the answers to. I guess in a small town like San Isidro, it’s well known who is on what committee and who the town leaders are. The second part has not gone as according to plan, unfortunately. Last week there was no service, this past week my friends and I went to the beach to celebrate a birthday, and the following week is a special service for a sweet 15. Yes, 15. Apparently that’s like a coming-of-age thing here for girls. I’m not sure how much significance it carries these days but, from my understanding, in the past it used to signify that a girl was now a woman and she was old enough to marry and have children. I think it’s changing or has already changed in the cities, but here in the country it’s acceptable for girls in their teens to marry men ten, fifteen, or twenty years older. Also, teen pregnancy is really common here which makes sense if a lot of teens are married, but still… I was talking to one of my friends about it (she’s 19) and she said that she’s one of three girls left in her graduating class that hasn’t had a kid yet. Now that could be an exaggeration and I have no idea how many girls were in her class, but that’s still really shocking. Anyway, so the next service at the church is a special one for my cousin who is turning fifteen and the only people who are going are the invited guests to her party. There’s still going to be a lot of people there, but it’s mostly family from out of town which doesn’t help me at all. My new plan is to wait until the first day of school and introduce myself to all the teachers and parents because supposedly there’s some sort of meeting the first morning. I still haven’t gotten up the courage to complete the door-to-door survey portion of the information-gathering process. I’m not sure if it’s because I feel like my Spanish is inadequate or because everyone here thinks I’m a 16-year-old exchange student. San Isidro and surrounding areas have had a lot of foreign exchange students in the past, but they have never had a Peace Corps Volunteer or an equivalent from another program. People tell me I look young for my age, but sixteen?!?

The CAT is a huge pain, but I actually really enjoy talking to people about San Isidro and finding out about the community from a variety of perspectives. We’re supposed to ask questions concerning health, safety, education, water and sanitization, drugs, etc. It’s interesting because some of the questions are written specifically for very, very underdeveloped areas of the world. For instance, there’s an entire section on water with questions like ‘How many wells are there?’ ‘Does anyone here know how to fix the wells?’ ‘If there is no potable water nor wells, how long does it take to get to the nearest water source?’ ‘Do you boil your water before drinking it?’ I’m sure all of these questions are really crucial in other places, but here they have water systems similar to ours back home with an organization that oversees the aqueducts and a guy that lives here that can fix them. They haven’t relied on wells in like fifty years! The first two questions were ‘Is there potable water in the houses here?’ and ‘Do the majority of households have their own bathrooms inside the house?’ The answer was ‘Yes, every last one of them.’ So I said well… I guess I won’t be working with the water and they were like why would you? We have a guy for that.

The idea is that by the end of the process, I’ll know what my community needs, what they want, and how that fits into what I can provide with my skill set and also what the Peace Corps would like for me to do. The Peace Corps has a lot of initiatives with HIV/AIDS awareness, women’s rights, teen pregnancy, etc. to name a few. If I walked into my new community without asking anyone anything and started a whole program on HIV/AIDS, only to realize weeks or months later that the problem is almost non-existent here, that would be a huge waste of time and effort. One thing that I’ve found is that the people here are well aware of the lack of recreational activities here for the children. I think it would be a really great idea to start a gym or build a playground to give the kids here something to do with their free time instead of just watching TV. And I think it would receive a lot of support from the people here, which is really important if I want my projects to continue well beyond my time here.

This past weekend, my friends from the Los Santos region and a couple others went to the beach at Manuel Antonio on the Pacific side to celebrate the birthday of one of us. We actually live really close to it if you look on the map, but the way the roads and the bus routes work, you have to backtrack to San Jose and then take a convoluted route past all the other beach towns to get to it. I think by car it’s only a couple hours but by bus it’s more like seven or eight. It was a really beautiful beach and there was also a national park with monkeys! Definitely worth the time in the bus. We left early Friday morning (I got up at 3:50 to catch the first bus out of my site) so we could get there in time to hit the beach for a couple hours before the sun went down. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but if I haven’t, the sun goes down here around 5 or 5:30 every day. The beach was really pretty and the waves were strong but not too strong; it was perfect. I didn’t even get a sunburn haha! For dinner, we found a really good Mexican place. It was so good that we ended up going back there for dinner Saturday night, also! Both nights I got two enchiladas and traded one for half of someone else’s burrito. The restaurant has their own hot sauce and it was so good that my friend, Angela, decided to buy a bottle. I thought about it, but of course I have two bottles of Marie here with me. On Saturday, we went to the national park. It was a beautiful walk through the forest and eventually you end up at a beach that’s more suited to Costa Ricans because it’s enclosed and there’s really no waves to speak of. Most ticos don’t know how to swim or the ones that do don’t know very well, so waves scare them and they’re always warning you about rip tides. My host dad even told me how to swim out of a maelstrom if I got trapped in one! At the beach, people were feeding the monkeys chips and other snacks so they could take up-close pictures. I got a short video of this one small monkey hanging upside down off of a low-hanging branch so he could grab chips out of people’s hands. On one end of the beach, this lady had hung her bags up in the branches of one of the trees on the edge of the forest. I still don’t know if the monkeys planned it this way, or if it was just coincidental, but two of them kind’ve led everyone away from the tree with the bag by running around and looking cute and whatnot. Then one of them sprinted over to the tree and started rooting around in the bags before anyone could make it back over there and stop him and he ended up with a bag of chips! He took it up into the tree and before long there was a huge commotion and you could see a bunch of leaves falling down and you could hear monkeys screaming at each other. Eventually all the chips fell down onto the rocks below and the monkeys had to gather them with their hands and their mouths and scurry back up the trees on two legs.

On the way out of the park, armed with the information that monkeys like chips, one of my friends started feeding one of the monkeys. At first, it was just one cute little monkey and we were having fun taking pictures with him. Then, one by one every twenty or thirty seconds, more and more monkeys arrived on the scene. And they weren’t content to hang upside down from the trees and wait; they started running after us on the ground. Before long there were several on the ground and we started seeing more in the trees, a lot more. So we decided to get out of there – fast! Afterwards, we did a bit of shopping, hit the beach one last time, ate Mexican again and went home early Sunday morning. We spent a little bit of time at the Peace Corps office in San Jose because we needed to put our deposits down for a rafting trip coming up in two weekends. It’s the Saturday before Super Bowl Sunday, so we’ll be staying the night in San Jose after rafting and watching the game with everyone before we all head our separate ways again. But not to worry, we’ll all be seeing each other again at the end of March for ten days in San Jose for our in-service training :) 

Feria del Café

This past weekend was the long-awaited coffee fair in Frailes. It didn’t disappoint. There were tons of activities, lots of merchandise, food and snacks, a coffee-picking competition, fireworks shows,a circus act, concerts, and even helicopter tours! It’s by far the biggest event of the year in Frailes and the surrounding areas. I’m really glad I went and that I stayed the night Saturday with my training host family so I could be there for the entire two days. I got to see most of my tico friends from Frailes and several of my Peace Corps friends as well. Unfortunately, many of the Volunteers from my training group live several hours away and couldn’t make it up for the fair.

Most of the fair took place on the soccer field, although the coffee-picking competition was in a finca and the helicopter took off from a different location. Along the perimeter of the field were stands with all kinds of snacks and merchandise pertaining to coffee and other traditional Costa Rican stuff. There were coffee cookies, coffee brownies, coffee candies, coffee pizza and, of course, just regular coffee. The coffee pizza didn’t really taste like coffee; it was just bad. There were also necklaces, bracelets, earrings and crosses made out of coffee beans. Everything seemed reasonably priced and there were several things I saw that I considered buying, but I’m sticking to my plan to buy the bulk of souvenirs towards the end of my service. That way, I’ll know even better than I do now what’s out there, what I want, how much I can get it for, what’s authentic and traditional, etc.

It was cool to walk around the fair with my friend, Tyler, from the business program of the Peace Corps because a lot of the people selling merchandise there are going to be working with him since he lives in Frailes. So he was explaining to me how they make everything by hand and how it’s environmentally friendly and whatnot. They all seemed talented and creative, not to mention ambitious, so I imagine he’ll be able to do some great things with them and help them expand their businesses over the next couple of years. One thing they would like to do is start websites and expand their market beyond the Frailes coffee fair once a year and wherever else they sell the rest of the time – probably in markets in San Jose. I’ll share any links I get from Tyler so you guys can start buying stuff made from the world’s best coffee!

The coffee-picking competition was kind’ve anticlimactic. I guess I shouldn’t have been expecting too much since all you’re doing is just watching other people do a menial job but I thought it would be really exciting. I thought it would be an hour or two of intense picking, but as it turns out, the competition in Frailes is the finale of a series of competitions in other places and they only pick for fifteen minutes in each location. I got there right when it was supposed to start, but for whatever reason we had to wait an hour for it to begin; like everything else here, things just run on a different schedule than what I’m used to. Apparently, not only do you have to pick fast, but you have to pick the high quality beans. If you end up with a lot of greens or leaves and twigs in your basket, you get disqualified or have points deducted or something. They announced the winners of the competition at the end of the fair. There were three places for each sex: 3^rd place received $100, 2^nd place $200 and 1^st place $300. Pretty decent considering that it would take even the best coffee pickers about two weeks to make $300. And slow people like me couldn’t make that much during the entire season, haha!

One of the sponsors of the fair was Stihl and they had a competition to see who could cut the thinnest slice off of a log using one of their chainsaws. It was called ‘la galleta más delgada,’ which means ‘the thinnest cracker!’ A lot of guys tried to cut it too thin and were disqualified when their slice broke off halfway down the log. Tyler’s host dad was one of the participants and he opted to go last because he thought the chainsaw would do better after it had warmed up a bit. I knew Papillo was pretty handy because he constructed his own house, but I didn’t think he would cut the thinnest cracker, but sure enough he did! It was really quite impressive; it couldn’t have been more than a centimeter or two thick.

I was stupid and didn’t check my camera battery before I left so I wasn’t able to take many pictures. But there’s always next year and it should be even bigger and better!

Back in the CR!

I’ve been back in Costa Rica for almost a week now and although I really enjoyed seeing friends and family back home, I’m definitely glad to be back. It was a little weird to fly back and forth like that. I’ve been to other countries and lived abroad before, but I’d never visited home in the middle of one of my trips and then returned to wherever I was. By the time I had readjusted to the States, it was time to return to Costa Rica.

While I was home, I tried as best I could to keep up my Spanish but I was definitely rusty and unconfident when I first got back. I think I’m back to where I was, but I was a little overwhelmed the first couple of days. There was just a lot going on. I spent the night in my training community and visited as many people as I could before I had to leave the following afternoon and then I was off to my new site, San Isidro. So I had to pack all my stuff and say goodbye to a lot of people and then start over in a new place. A couple days later the other volunteers in my region and I had a meeting with the regional English assessor to talk about what our plan was for the rest of the month and a half we had left until school starts. The other volunteers had met a bunch of people in their sites and held meetings and were about to start teaching classes in their communities and all this other stuff… I just felt lost. I hadn’t even unpacked yet haha. After the meeting, one of my friends gave me some paperwork that was due in less than a week. We’re also supposed to be collecting information in a variety of ways and writing a 40-50 page diagnostic on our community. In Spanish, mind you. It was just a lot to handle in a short period of time, but I’m better now so it’s all good. I still haven’t really started on any of the things that I’m supposed to have done by the time school starts, but I’ve taken a few days to relax and get my bearings before I get going and I feel a lot better about everything now.

This past week, even though it’s been hectic, has been really fun. Like I said before, I got to see a bunch of people in Frailes before I left which was really nice because it would have been a much more difficult and uncomfortable transition to go straight from home to my new site without seeing anyone I knew. I spent my first full day in San Isidro picking coffee with my host family, which I thought was fun and interesting but I can see how it wouldn’t be much fun to do every day. At first, I was picking the coffee bean by bean because I was worried about accidentally picking the green ones if I just tried shucking the entire string of them all at once. The red ones are ripe and the yellow ones are OK to pick, also, but you’re not supposed to pick the green ones because they’re not ready yet. The black ones are dried up reds and those you can pick, too. What makes it a little easier is that the green ones are still really hard and they stay on the branch a lot better than the others. So as long as you don’t pull too hard, you can get all the reds, yellows and blacks in one fell swoop without getting any of the greens. The other thing I had to get used to was the fact that it’s OK if you end up with a bunch of leaves in your basket because you can just pick them out at the end and it’s a lot faster that way than avoiding them the whole time while you’re picking. Anyway, I definitely picked the least out of everyone, including my twelve year old sister, but they all said that I picked a lot for my first time. I didn’t let them pay me for what I picked, but if I had, I would have made $7 for about 7 hours of work. That sounds pretty bad, but obviously the other workers pick a lot more and make a lot more than that. And considering that half the world is below the poverty line which is $2 per day, I think Costa Rican coffee pickers are doing just fine. It’s not exactly what I want to do with my life, but it beats a lot of other things in a lot of other places.

Before we had our meeting, the regional assessor took us to a coffee co-op for a tour of the facilities. Coffee is a huge part of the culture here, so it’s important that we have a good understanding of the process. The more we know about coffee, the more we can relate to the nationals and thus the more willing they will be to work with us and befriend us. I had already experienced the first few parts, which is picking the coffee, measuring who picked what by emptying your sacks into boxes called cajuelas, dumping the boxes into a big truck and then taking it up to one of the receivers. At the receiver, the coffee slides out of a chute in the back of the truck into a bigger box that equals ten cajuelas. Two of those boxes equal a fanega. Someone has to keep shoveling the coffee towards the chute and once the box is full the worker at the receiver closes the chute and pushes a button so the bottom of the box opens up and the coffee falls into a huge pile and sits there until another truck comes to take it to one of the coffee co-ops. The guy at the receiver keeps track of how many times you fill up the box and then you get a receipt. At the co-op the coffee goes through a number of other steps to prepare it for roasting. There’s a machine that separates the part of the coffee bean that they want from the parts they don’t and from there the two piles go off in different directions. None of it is wasted, however, because they found ways to make good use of the entire bean. They figured out that they can make ethanol gas with the liquid part of the bean and the husk can be used as fertilizer. The actual bean continues on to be dried in the sun which takes about a week. And if it rains, everyone has to run outside and gather up the coffee as fast as they can. I’m not sure why they don’t just bring out a tarp or construct greenhouses or little pavilions made of clear plastic or something like that, but I guess they know what works best. After the beans are all dry, they put them inside for a few days to recuperate and they have to control the humidity in the room to ensure that the beans are as good as they can possibly be. Don’t ask me why they need to recuperate or how sitting in a huge pile in a building helps but it’s a step in the process so… haha. Then they’re ready to be roasted. They roast the majority of the beans to a medium roast because it’s the most popular but they also do light and dark. There are also four flavors of coffee in Costa Rica and the flavor depends on the altitude in which they were grown if I remember correctly. They are chocolate, vanilla, floral and the other I don’t remember. All in all, it was interesting to see the process from start to finish and I must say that even though I almost never drank coffee back home I’m getting to the point to where I drink at least two cups every single day here!

This past weekend there were fiestas de verano (summer parties) in my site. It’s not really supposed to be summer down here because we’re in the northern hemisphere but they call the dry season summer and the rainy season winter. These summer parties are a lot like county fairs or carnivals except with dances at night. There are a lot of farm animals (cows, sheep, goats, hogs, etc.) and a lot of carnival games and food. They start the dances around 8 and at first it’s kind’ve traditional and a lot of older couples dance for an hour or so but after they leave they play more modern music and the dance has more of a club atmosphere. The first night, on Saturday, none of my friends from Frailes were able to come, so I ended up dancing some with my host sister and her friends and a little with my brother and his friends. We didn’t leave until around midnight which is super late here because we normally go to bed around eight or nine so we can get up at five and be in the fields by six, but these parties only happen once a year so everybody stays up for them. Yesterday, a few of my friends came up for the fiesta and we hung out for a little while until the tope came. A tope is a group of horses that rides from a good distance to its destination at one of these fiestas. Then they have a horse show before they sit down for dinner. After dinner, there is live music and dancing.We decided to leave after the tope and drive over to a bigger city and see what was going on at their party. There was a lot more stuff to do and there was an outdoor concert, as well. It was a cover band playing the most popular songs from Latin America, none of which I knew, but it was still fun.

Today I haven’t really done much of anything except write this post and I finally got around to downloading my pictures onto my laptop. By the time I publish this, I should have some pictures up on Picasa and the link will be on the right. Enjoy!

P.S. It´s going to take me a while to get a substantial number of pictures up... the upload time is really slow