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