Cedro's perfect dream

livid

I cannot believe it!  The idiotic, hypocrite worthless slime that called himself our biodiesel coordinator has returned and destroyed our biodiesel bodega.  He came back to Costa Rica a week ago and snuck in last night, presumably during the two hours when we have no guard. He (and possibly others...) peeled off two roof panels, and wreaked havoc on a production system that was keeping buses green and students interested in a sustainable fuels future.  Who does that?  Someone weak and confused.  Someone who I hope I don´t see anytime soon, or ever again for that matter.  An anarchy symbol was scrawled on the wall and a screw driver was stabbed into the drywall.  I remember doing stuff like that when I was... what? 14?

The police do nothing.  The students and atmosphere suffer, and I hold my head in my hands wondering at the depths some will sink to. 

paparazzi

The new official date is November 2nd.  The official news is that we're having a boy.  Here's his second publicity photo:

Sandra seems to think he has my nose and her chin...  He is stunning isn't he? 

Dangerous Curves

As the Pan-American Highway winds north towards the Nicaraguan border, in a stretch that colors most maps a wordless green, is a small village that hosts one of the most perilous curves in Central America. Cars, trucks and Semis barrel towards this innocuous looking curve, bent on beating the border rush, and far too many fall prey to the pull of its hidden centripetal force. It has been called “Zona peligrosa” by the traffic police, and yellow warning signs with squiggly arrows have been planted on either side, but few pay heed until it is too late. When this happens, the people of Sonzopote move in.

The people of the village have a reputation throughout Guanacaste as helpful, friendly, and always ready to clean up after a spill. They tow cars from ditches with ropes, oxen and brute force, they attend to injured drivers until the cruz roja arrives to cart them off to Liberia – and most of all, they make sure that no spilled product of any sort goes to waste.

When a semi tips, caught by Zona, the product, no matter what it is, tends to evaporate, easing the clean up effort and lightening the load of the flatbed crew. Call it payment, call it buzzardry, call it justice, but the poor folk of Sonzopote simply call it “cool”. It makes for endless hours of story on porches as dusk engulfs the town and the few electric lights buzz to life. There was the time everyone had toothpaste – 40 to 50 tubes each. This ironically followed just weeks after cans of dented Coke filled pantries and stuffed the few refrigerators on the main block. Sharing is of course a virtue, both because all help out, and because just about everyone in Sonzopote is related to everyone else. There was the time canned soup became the norm for more than a month, showing up as far as restaurants in La Cruz, as well as in public school free lunches. Then there was the time everyone simultaneously showed up in eerily similar brown flip flops.

So it is my friends, that while we brought the family a carload of rice, beans, oats, fruit, seasonings and powdered juice drinks, we were able to leave with the car just as full. On our last day in town, we were summarily presented several boxes containing giant rolls of industrial toilet paper (not Bathroom tissue) and…napkins – lots of napkins. The driver is fine, I’m told, as I wipe a tear from my eye with the help of a super absorbent Scott brand product. 

drool work

            Think back to your days in elementary school.  Was there ever anything – an assignment, project, homework, etc. that struck you as a bit ridiculous?  Of course there was.  There was the repetition, rote recital, the context free factoids, dittos, not to mention endless coloring - and for what?  Well, kids, it’s still out there. 

            In Guanacaste I got my closest look yet at the machinery of Costa Rica’s education system yet.  Sitting in on a few of Bismark’s cousin’s lessons my eyes were opened further – in shock and dismay, that is.  His cousin Dahnia is 12 and in sixth grade.  She attends Sonzopote school for a whopping three hours per day, in a class that includes 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th grade.  Her three hours include lunch, national anthem, civics, and instruction in writing (handwriting practice and copying forms from the board), math, social studies (all things Guanacaste copied from the board or from a text book – three times per week), Spanish (memorization of technical terms for parts of speech) and Science (twice per week), and English.  When I later asked her to tell me about what she learned, she automatically reached for her notebook filled with meticulous notes, and started reading me what she had copied.  When pressed for opinion and reflection, she fell silent, not sure what I was asking. 

            Her text books cost thirteen dollars each (there are five of them) and are spiral bound copies of workbooks.  Many of the pages were written in, or had answers already in the blanks from a previous owner.  Dahnia’s family income is somewhere close to $100 per month.  You do the math. 

            My favorite lesson was her English class.  Each student was handed a photocopied dialogue, the classic restaurant scene.  There was no explanation of this paper at all.  They just started reading it rote - as a monologue.  The conversation went something like this: (I’m paraphrasing here)

Waiter: Hello

Customer: Hello

W: What would you like to eat, sir?

C: I would like soup and broccoli

W: Very good, sir.  What would you like for dessert?

C:  Do you have any ice cream?

W: I’m sorry, we don’t have any ice cream.

C: How about an apple then?

W: Yes, we have apples.  I’ll bring you one.

C: Thank you

W: You are welcome, sir. 

C: I like apples.

W: Very good, sir.

The class was told in Spanish that they had to memorize this dialogue.  It would be worth 40 points towards their quarter grade.  The 40 points were subdivided as follows: 10 points for pronounciation, 20 points for memorization, and the final 10 points for bringing in an apple the next day.  Seriously.  25% of the grade was to come from bringing in a fruit that does not grow in Costa Rica and cannot be found in Sonzopote.  An apple here costs around 300-400 colones, and can only be bought in La Cruz, some six kilometers away.  I asked Dahnia later how many of the kids in her class had parents with cars, and she said flatly “two”.  That’s two out of twenty.  How about them apples?

            

guanacaste image album

Here I offer a smattering of anotated photos from our recent trip to Guanacaste.  I invite anyone, but especially the Squidbag to turn them into black and white art. 

Take a gander at this beautiful bird!  This goose was the obvious king of the yard.  I thought he looked a bit like Billy Idol...

Here's the happy couple making their way across the lawn-turned-river by the heavy tropical rains that punctuated our visit.  Shortly after this photo was taken, I had to stop the gander from choking on a child's sock.

We made home baked corn tortillas and bread.  From scratch in this case meant picking corn, hand grinding it into masa, mixing in cinnamon and cloves, and cooking it over an open flame.  The head pictured belongs to Sandra's mother Juanita, who refused to look at the camera.

In goes the corn, out comes the masa and the "leche", which we later mixed into the dough to sweeten it (a technical term which means "add sugar to").  I couldn't help letting Another Brick in the Wall get stuck in my head while laboring over the grinder.

Bismark was a huge help during the whole process.

On our third day in Guanacaste, we took a trip to the seaside pueblo of Cuajiniquil, where Sandra lived with her mother and sisters for a few years.  At the docks, brown pelicans stood by and waited for fishermen to abandon their posts so they could swoop in and enjoy whatever they left behind. 

Not much to do here on a hot lazy afternoon, so we invited some chicks over for beers...

At the beach, I took some time to explore and found a colony of hermit crabs that were busy decimating a red snapper that had washed ashore. 

Hermit crabs don't tend to nest onshore, but the beach was pockmarked with crabholes nonetheless...

I think my camera's presence made this one a bit nervous. 

This is the price one crab payed for not looking both ways before crossing the beach road...

Here's the view out from the beach road towards the mighty pacific. 

This is Clifford.  Clifford lives with Juanita and has been tied up for the last two years.  We keep trying to gently tell her that this is not good for the dog, but she just laughs and shrugs us off.  No Animal Police in CR...

Oh Pooh!  This one got hung out to dry!

have a lovely weekend.  More to come soon. 

poverty

Poverty is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as: Deficiency in amount; scantiness.  After spending my second school vacation in as many years in Sonzopote, Costa Rica with Sandra's family (regular readers may remember that we first visited last November), I have come to a few new realizations about the nature of poverty.  First: the "deficiency" or "scantiness" refered to can apply both positively as well as negatively, depending on the attitude of the individual.  so many of us are taught from square one to want what we don't have.  It gives us something to work towards, and keeps us motivated, or so goes the thinking... It would make sense that those that have little would have instead more profound material desire and spend more time obsessing over what cannot be obtained.  However, I have seen again and again that this is not always true.  I, having grown up in a material society, have the knee jerk reaction of asking what the family needs every time we plan a trip.  I find myself saying "I want to give your mom a present, what could she use?"  It's a question that is as much a part of me as my blood and bones.

Sandra always smiles patiently and gives the same answer: food.  It's that simple.  She doesn't want or need a toaster, a blender, a DVD player (okay, they have one of those which Sandra brought years ago) or any other modern convenience. 

The Costa Rican branch of Habitat for Humanity just built Sandra's mother a new house.  She had spent years living in a tiny shack with no running water, telephone or flush toilet.  The old pit toilet is the only remaining reminder of that old house, and it now serves as a drinking trough for the various fowl that roam the yard.  The new house is nothing fancy, but it does feature poured concrete walls, an electric stove, a shower and toilet as well as several real honest to goodness electric bulbs.  She wants for nothing in this world and was overjoyed by the ten pound sack of rice, the beans, oatmeal, salt, Lizano sauce, and watermelon we trucked up from San Jose just for her and the family that move in a constant stream in and out of the house.

No, there is no poverty here in Sonzopote.  We eat.  We sleep.  We grind corn into meal.  When the guitar came out and the stories and laughter filled the air everyone, down to the two year old Andres in his soiled hand me down diapers, stopped to listen; for therein lay the treasures that no bank vault can hold, that no desire can touch with the flame of jealousy.