It's Check Out Time...
¡Hola amigos! This will be one of my last posts, if not the last post, on the Colonia Libertad blog. Thanks for following. This time in Costa Rica has been interesting, wonderful, exasperating, challenging, and fun. I got to know my third rural community in much greater depth than either the New Mexican goat dairy or Numpaim del Noroeste in Ecuador. I was able to form bonds with families in that community that I hope will last a lifetime. And, I was able to get a firsthand taste of the difficulties of top-down organizing vis-á-vis the frustrations that I experienced while trying to teach English in a community with minimal interest in learning a foreign language.
I'd like to go over the history of this project and some of the highlights in this last post. I also hope to provide a sample of what I have learned about the culture of this stalwart people.
I found out about Project Ganas in December at a benefit dance with live music. I met Sara Sanford, the director of the project, who said that she was looking for people with teaching experience to go down to Costa Rica and live in the community. I was super excited about the prospect of returning to Costa Rica, where I had studied in 2007. After a brief interview, I decided it was for me. During the interview, I was told I had the choice between having my own house or staying with a family (a home stay). I opted for having my own house.
Of the information obtained in the interview, I wrote:
State educational resources in the area are lacking, creating the necessity for programs like Project Ganas -- a situation similar, but not identical, to what I discovered among rural indigenous groups during my 2007 study abroad. I am hoping to discover a new sense of solidarity within this community and examine their ties to one another and to the land as I continue to explore the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge vis á vis "sustainable" communities.
I had no idea. State educational resources in the area are nearly nonexistent. There is a school with four classrooms. All of the faculty except for two persons are part-time. The students receive less than three hours of education per day, including recess, which is often extended due to a lack of available staff. Materials to help the students, who are significantly behind in all subjects, are scarce. The first graders, half a year into their instruction, could not tell me the difference between five and six. The fifth graders could not explain the difference between three halves and three quarters. This is, in fact, similar to the situation faced by rural indigenous communities in Costa Rica.
I was able to form strong bonds with the community and learn about the community's agriculture. The agriculture of Colonia Libertad is "conventional," which means that they use chemicals to create healthy-looking monocrops. The people are generally aware of the environmental dangers of using such chemicals, but they are also unwilling to allow their crops to be eaten by the bugs. I have noted that the Shuar family I stayed with, the Chiriap, didn't seem particularly concerned about rainforest bugs in their family garden. I'm not sure what the differences in practice are that create the "necessity" for pesticide use, but it deserves further investigation. One obvious difference is that the "ranches" of Colonia Libertad are seen as permanent or semi-permanent spaces of food production, whereas the gardens of the Shuar are temporary and move from place to place on a cycle of anywhere from three to seven years. The Shuar also practice a swidden-fallow technique that could deter insect life from taking root. In addition, the Shuar view their environment as sacred, which the people of Colonia Libertad do not.
As for sustainability, I have noticed that since the time I began writing my thesis, environmental sustainability has become a catchphrase for just about any green label seeking to market its products to conscientious consumers. As such, it's become a topic I wish to avoid. I can say that the lifestyle of a person from Colonia Libertad is much less ecologically destructive than that of the average American (viz., citizen of the United States), but I can't make any judgments as to their overall sustainability. The Institución Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) has overwhelmingly opted for "green" power producing options such as wind, water and geothermal energy, but I'm not sure that the energy consumption of the Colonia would be sustainable if it were forced to produce its own electricity. In addition, the demand for larger televisions and more powerful personal computers is bound to drive up the need for energy in the foreseeable future. The burning of plastic and other disposable products (styrofoam, paint containers, etc.) is of moderate environmental concern. The eutrophication of the immediate water supply is evident and most likely permanent as long as the current water system remains in place. There is a nearby river, jalapiedras, which has drinkable water and is suitable for bathing. There is also a steady water supply from a nearby mountain that seems likely to remain a good source of clean water for as long as the community population does not exceed the maximum water supply. All in all, I would say that the ecological health of this area is resilient and does not overtly threaten the existence of the nearby cloud forests.
Returning to the overview of my experience with the community, my welcome to the community was lukewarm and indicative of a lack of preparation. When I arrived in Colonia Libertad, people thought that I was perhaps the famed Peace Corps volunteer. I have since met the Peace Corps volunteer and I have decidedly decided that we are not the same person. She is fantastic, though; her name is Andrea and she has done a really good job of working with the local government to determine what types of projects the community would like to have in the works. I think that this would be a good angle for Project Ganas, too. If I'd had my druthers I would have liked to begin with the Association (the local government) to see how someone of my skills could have been of better use to the community. By the time I finally did meet with the Association, there had already been some major miscommunication and I wasn't able to establish clear objectives other than "come on over to my ranch sometime to talk history."
I would have liked to have learned a lot more about the history of the Colonia. I feel that I was able to learn a good deal about the culture and a rudimentary amount of history, but I would have liked to have had time to really explore in-depth the histories of individual people. I honestly feel that attempting to organize English classes in the community was such a waste of time. The people would have appreciated a person interested in their personal stories much more. I feel that when and if I come back to the community, I will make sure to dedicate some time to recording the histories of the community's members.
My first conversations with the community members were about religion. Religion forms a central part of the ontology of Colonia Libertad. There are two options for religion: Catholic, and Evangelical. People were surprised to learn that I had religious dietary preferences that they were unfamiliar with. Everyone in the community believes in God as the primary reason for the existence of everything they see and as the driving factor behind everything they experience, a fact that I found mildly annoying at first, but learned to accept. (I am an agnostic with some lifestyle habits left over from years of religious searching.) I even learned to say "Que Dios le acompañe" as a salutation when leaving, which means "May God go with you."
I found the stay in the community to be much different than I had imagined. For one thing, it was hotter than 100 degrees just about every day during March and April, and it was impossible for me to adjust to this steady high temperature. I was constantly dehydrated and often sick. There was not internet; I learned to travel to nearby Guayabo to be able to make my blog posts and keep in touch with friends. Eventually, I learned how to activate my iPhone in Costa Rica in order to spend less time away from the community. 3G phone service is the primary mode of access to the internet within Colonia Libertad, with Nokia being the preferred brand (Nokia makes internet tethering extremely intuitive). I became known as a technical go-to person, a guitar player and teacher, a singer and an adamant English professor. I felt that things in the community were going quite well.
Pet peeves of mine were the constant doubts about my living situation (detailed in prior blog posts) and the lack of a concrete schedule for teaching classes. I came to really like the night group, because at least they always met at the same time, even if they didn't always come to class. I became really good friends with the police across the street from the school, and they became my nightly audience as I played off all the songs I know on the guitar one by one. Eventually I was able to find a fan in Guayabo and I was able to cool off a little bit. I also got accustomed to the Colonia Libertad dialect of Spanish. I learned that a teja was 100 colones and a caña was 1,000. I learned that "si la güila se cae, se va a romper la choya." (If the little girl falls, she's going to break her head.) I learned that "al chile" means "la pura verdad" (the whole truth). I can now maintain a conversation with anyone from this area.
I've already talked enough in other posts about leaving the school and moving in with a host family, so I don't see any point in belaboring the subject. When I was told that I couldn't continue to teach the school students that I came here to teach, my opinion about the whole project changed irrevocably. Honestly, I should have just stopped trying to teach English at that point and started doing a bit of history or ethnography. The last three months could have been put to much better use. And truly, as a male in this community, in order to be seen as part of the community you have to get up in the morning and go do something that has to do with farming or community infrastructure. It took me a while to learn this, and once I learned it, it sort of frightened me. I knew that, with my flat feet already taxed from walking on rocks all day, and having suffered several sprained ankles already, there was no way that I was going to be able to do physical labor. This is exactly what makes me doubt the integration of differently-abled persons within subsistence farming communities, although I am told that there are communities that do it quite well.
And so, I was halfway wrong about the community's "work ethic." I was working mostly with youth who seemed to be apathetic and interested in material wealth, but I didn't get to know the elder generation until I moved in with a family and was able to observe their lifestyle. When I did, I came to the conclusion that the community is in crisis, and not just because of a lack of Western academic education. The spirit of the community seems to be dying, or at least undergoing major transformation. The twenty- and thirty-year-olds either have major developmental problems (e.g., alcoholism), are involved in work that does not involve agriculture, are raising children, or have permanently moved out of the community. The teenagers do not seem to be interested in agriculture. Hence, the community as it stands today may have a certain amount of economic and/or ecological resilience, but the outlook for the future is not what I would consider hopeful.
I'm going to leave it there for now, I may try to post again in the near future with some pictures (if I can find a decent internet connection) and a few last words. In the mean time, if you're looking for more reading material, you can check out my guest blog at mexmigration, a history and politics of Mexican Migration blog. I will also be opening up a personal blog to share my thoughts about searching for a job in the recession, which might cover more than one geographical location and will deal with the continued difficulties faced by a recent college grad trying to find work (me). I hope you'll check it out.
Until the next time, then!
From Escazú, Costa Rica
Chaim S. Eliyah
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