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 :)