Our CR9-5A team: (Top L to Bottom R) Devon, Elspeth, Tyrone, Jameel, Christina, Ali, Denis, Mohan, Me, Evelyn, Kelli, Piramila, Julie, Amanda
It is another one of those moments in my life when I do not even know how to begin to explain my experience, especially of my time spent in Costa Rica for the past five weeks. After arriving in Burnaby, I still experienced a deep sense of nostalgia and disorientation. I had to cope with my strange reverse culture shock. Considering I did not have much time to miss Montreal before flying off, I missed both Montreal and Costa Rica. I know that quite a few people have been asking me about my experience, and I apologize for my temporary speechlessness to the whole thing. Now, I am centered enough to process and make sense of what I had been through.
For the months leading up to my trip, I never had the chance to give you the full specific details about the work I would end up doing in Costa Rica. Youth Challenge International kept it that way since community needs often change, forcing volunteers to improvise on the spot as they work on community-development projects. So during those five weeks, I stayed in a small sustainable-farm community called Juanilama. It is located near the central west side of Costa Rica in the province of Alajuela. Juanilama has 125 families living on dispersed farmlands, growing some crops like yucca roots, papayas, mangoes, pineapples, coconuts, and variety of vegetables. The locals sometimes go to Santa Rosa, a small town that is 45-50 minutes away by walk and bus or 15 minutes by car, to buy certain necessities (e.g. gum boots, coats, etc). But they mainly survive on the food they grow and the livestock they keep. Several people also make and sell cheese to others in Juanilama and to people in Santa Rosa.
So it was on July 10th, after a two-day orientation in Toronto and an eight-hour flight, my CR9-5A teammates and I finally arrived in San Jose around 8:30pm. We all were feeling very elated and anxious about what was to come. “People, we are in Costa Rica!”, I remember Denis exclaiming as he jumped up in the middle of the hallway. We obviously stood out as onlookers walked by and witnessed our excitement. As we made our way to customs, it was then when I first breathed in the ever-so-clear Costa Rican air. That night, it rained relatively hard. The humidity was the heaviest I ever experienced so far in my life.
Our group was small. It had only eleven participants (gender-wise, pretty equal too): Mohan, Ali, Jameel, Denis, Tyrone, Piramila, Julie, Kelli, Christina, Elspeth, Devon, and myself. All of us came from different parts of Canada, from east end to the west. And we all had our own stories to share and gifts to bring with us. On our way out of the airport, we were greeted by our group leaders, Evelyn and Amanda. Evelyn works for Reto Juvenil, a Costa Rican counterpart of YCI. She is a native Costa Rican and has worked as a leader in several other humanitarian projects in the past. Amanda is from Ottawa, and it was her first time being a group leader for YCI. For our first night, we stayed in San Jose at “Costa Rica Backpackers” hostel. Let me tell you, if you ever want to stay in San Jose, this is the hostel to be in – clean, fun, and beautiful. It felt more like a resort. One interesting thing we learned about the water system in Costa Rica was that we have to turn the knob very slightly to get hot water for our shower. Otherwise, if we turn too much, we will just get extremely cold water pouring. Another thing to note, like some other countries, we do not throw our tissue paper down the toilet.
The very next morning, we had to pack up our bags and jump onto a private bus to Juanilama. All of our equipments, non-perishable foods, and things to help set up our new home were placed on the top of the bus. Our poor bus driver had to climb all the way up there to help us transfer and secure the bins of stuff with ropes. Our ride took four hours in total. I suffered from motion sickness and almost puked merely a fifth of a way through our trip. Luckily, Kelli had some gravol with her. We arrived to the house, which was to become our home for five weeks. It was painted light-mustard yellow and red-earthy brown on the outside. Directly above our entrance, there was a hornets’ nest. Our bus also became stuck in the mud, so we and our to-be-neighbours helped the driver push his bus out of it. Mud splattered everywhere. From that moment on, we were never completely clean again until we arrived in San Jose the last day of our trip.
So there we were, gazing at our extremely small house. It was all empty. Inside, there were three very small rooms; one tiny bathroom with a broken sink; an eight-person sized livingroom; and a kitchen. Houses in Juanilama are not completely closed. They are built in such a way so that enough humid air can go through. The roof is three to five inches elevated from the walls, creating huge gaps in between around the perimeter of the house. The downside? Insects, geckos, lizards, and scorpions got in very easily. It took us two days to set up the things we needed in the house. All of us set up our sleeping bags/pads and mosquito nets the first day. All five of the men slept in one small room near the kitchen (their choice to stay that close together created a lot of interpersonal squabbles later on). Two of the women and I slept in the room in the middle of the house near the bathroom. Four others in the room near the front entrance, one in the livingroom, and one in the hallway. We really lacked space, and it was truly a miracle considering we did not kill each other in the end. The walls were so thin that we could hear each other’s conversations at night. “Man, what are you guys talking about? You have the most ridiculous conversations,” someone from the “boys’ room” once commented to me and my roommates.
The third night (Sunday) was epic. Up until then, we did not face any huge challenge yet. We still lived peacefully. Around 10pm, as everyone was having quiet conversations and tea with each other before bed, streams of ants crawled into our kitchen through our chicken-wired window and into the “boys’ room”. So we began to complain. After an hour passed, the ants crawled up to the roof and never returned (we found out two weeks later that they were only migrating after coming out from the winter season. They were completely harmless). Then 11pm came, right when we tried to relax, one of the men screamed as a mother scorpion came into their room carrying her babies on her back. The babies dispersed and crawled around the room. Mohan, Tyrone, and Jameel helped kill the mother scorpion and as many of the babies as possible with a swiss-army knife duct-taped (my duct tape!!) to the end of a broomstick. I have yet to figure out how the guys killed the scorpions with accurate aim. One person used masking tape to tape one of the babies to the wall. I guess if you can’t stab them, you can tape them! It remained taped for the rest of the project. We just wanted to make sure that it was dead. After we rid of the scorpions, our toilet flooded. Someone forgot to stop flushing tissue paper down the toilet. People in the community laughed hard about our experience of that night the very next day. It was from that night on, I stopped keeping my diary. It was too much.
The neighbours who lived directly across from our house are immigrants from Nicaragua, trying to carve out a decent living in Juanilama. We could tell from the outside that they built their house themselves, out of pieces of wood. There was no cement flooring, just earth. Eleven to twelve people of that family were living under that same roof: the parents, children, cousins, auntie, uncle, and so on. Strange enough, we did not have the chance to meet all of the members in that household. They were nice and polite, but distant at the same time. From the way we interpreted it, it seemed as though they became used to being isolated from the rest of the Tican community in Juanilama. Immigrants, particularly Nicaraguans, are viewed with suspicion in Costa Rica. Many Ticans discriminate against them because of the media’s portrayal of the crimes Nicaraguans commit and Nicaragua’s political turbulence. One person from our group noted that it was interesting how our neighbours lived off a beaten track; whereas, everyone else had a road or path leading to his/her house.
Our typical day was packed. Here is what our schedule was like from Monday to Friday:
6:00 – 6:30am: Time to wake up and eat breakfast
7:00am: Get ready for work
8:00am (or 9:00am on Mondays): Walk for 20-25 minutes to the bridge to help with the construction of it. Alex was our boss/foreman. Three or four people of that day were to go to the ecological reserve to use machetes to cut down shrubs, thorny bushes, trees, and long grasses. We alternate between going to the bridge and reserve everyday or every two days.
2:00pm: Work ends. Time to walk home for lunch. People could stay longer to work if they really wanted to. People at the bridge had to walk up the steep road everytime. The ecological reserve was merely three blocks away.
4:00pm: Community soccer time. We could join if we liked.
5:00pm: English teaching.
6:00pm – 8:00pm: Dinner time.
9:00pm: Quiet time. Curfew sets in. Had to be back home by this hour. The little pulperia/corner store near our house closes at nine. There wasn’t much to do anyways because all the locals had to sleep early to work in the morning.
10:00pm: Bedtime.
Saturdays and Sundays were often our free days, when we could do our own thing or got invited to someone’s house for lunch/dinner. For the first part of Saturday, we had to wake up in the morning to walk 45 minutes to the bus that would take us to Santa Rosa. We go there once a week to buy our personal things. Most importantly, the food coordinators (me and Christina) were responsible for buying the fresh food for the week.
Besides the hard labour that we had to do, we had three community-development projects on the side: English teaching, Youth Development, and the Earth Charter. Each project consisted of four coordinators. I was responsible for the Earth Charter and became its head coordinator. Organizing events in an unfamiliar setting was difficult. We always had to keep in mind the ‘Tican’ time, meaning that locals can come whenever they wanted to even two or three hours after the start time. In spite of the challenges (that was why we were there!), our 'social projects' were very successful since they opened our eyes to the difficulties that Juanilama have been facing. The knowledge we gained from the events and activities we planed will help the next YCI group to sustain whatever development we and the Juanilamans have left off with.
During the last week of our stay, the community leaders held a thank-you/good-bye party for all of us. They made rice and spaghetti for that night. So scrumptious! We felt sad for leaving but immensely thankful for our overall experience in Juanilama. The community gave us more than we ever gave to them. It was from them, we learned what true community and relations mean. Of course, Juanilama needs some help with development, but which community (like ours in Canada) doesn't? The Juanilamans are very rich people in the sense that they have each other. Whenever someone needs urgent help, s/he has a loving neighbour to run to. Whenever they need hugs or some quality time spent with others, people are there. I think that is one of the biggest lessons we learned: learning to be present in other people's lives. Coming from bigger places in Canada, we often find that very hard to do. Or at least, that is how we perceive it. Our society has become very individualized and therefore isolated. No wonder there is lots of depression among people in the 'developed' nations. We can be there for people, but it's our society's concept of time and urgency that blinds us from the possibilities - from the love we are all capable of sharing. The Juanilamans' gift of (Tican) time will remain in my heart always and serves as a constant reminder of how I should approach my relationships in life. Even in times when I find it oh-so-hard to keep certain relationships, I should put as much effort into them as possible as my way of expressing my love and care.
On our last day, we packed everything up and cleaned the whole house down. Our mustard-brown house became empty once again, waiting for the next occupants to arrive. As we traveled away on the same bus with which we first came into Juanilama, we looked at the marks we left behind in the community, and reminisced quietly the moments we made together. Like gentle whispers, our memories of this trip guided us back into our lives in Canada. Now, we know of what can be.
With lots of love and immense gratitude,
Po-Yi
