Hello! Goodness, I have ever so much to say! Be forewarned, this will be absolutely horrendously long. I’m back in San Jose now, but I’ve been in Nicaragua for that last week and I had an absolutely incredible trip. I hardly know where to start! The Saturday before I left, I went into downtown San Jose with Brenly, Alex, Rose and Christina (girls in my program) to go to the National Yoga Festival of Costa Rica. It was a blast! Once you get in and buy a ticket ($3.50), you can take as many classes as you want, but we got there a bit late and by the time we got there the only class available was acroyoga, which turned out to be just what it sounds like: acrobatic yoga! We did handstands and flips and flew on each other’s feet and stuff. It was insane but really fun. Then, Sunday morning at 6:00 a.m. we set out for Nicaragua! It was a long trip and customs was a bit of a pain, but we arrived at our hotel in Managua by around 7:00. Our first morning, we took a bus tour of Managua. I felt kind of weird about it because we were in this bus that said “Turismo” on the side and we were driving through people’s neighborhoods and gaping at them like they were in a zoo or something, but I did learn a lot about the political and social history of Nicaragua, which is fascinating! They have statues of Sandino everywhere, and huge Daniel Ortega billboards in which he tries to convince everyone that he is still the face of the true Sandinista party, but apparently they aren’t buying it. That afternoon, we went and met with a group of about 70 former banana plantation workers who have literally had their lives (and the lives of their children) ruined by a chemical called Nemagon that was banned in the United States twenty years before it was banned here because it was found to be so highly toxic. Some of the workers worked with the chemical for up to fifteen years, and all of the workers have severe medical problems, many have died, and most of their children have some sort of deformation or mental condition. They have camped out in a sort of permanent shanty town across from the Nicaraguan Congress in order to try and force the government to pressure the banana companies (Dole, Shell, Chiquita) to provide them with medical services, which the workers can’t afford. They have been living in absolutely basic conditions (corrugated cardboard/plastic bag houses, no running water, etc) for over five years, and so far almost nothing has come of it. We went around and interviewed various people, and they were all excited to talk to us to get their story out to a broader public. It was incredibly sad, but some of the people had hope that Daniel Ortega could get something done. After we met with them, we got back on the bus to head to Matagalpa, a city higher up in the mountains (and mercifully cooler - Managua was truly the hottest place I have ever been, even including that hideous stop at Las Vegas) where half of our group met with their families that they were going to live with for the next three days. The rest of us headed to a small town outside of Matagalpa called San Ramón to meet our families, and I am so glad that I got to be there! I absolutely fell in love with the town. It was beautiful, nestled in the mountains with flowering trees and chickens everywhere and horses instead of cars. My kind of place! My family was a woman named Aracely, her husband Augustino, her sons Eric and Elvis (25 and 18) and her daughter Rosa (16). That night, I went with Rosa to watch Elvis play in a volleyball tournament, and the entire town was there. Very fun! The next morning we had nothing scheduled, so we spent the morning with our families. I had an absolutely fantastic time! Augustino let me ride his horse Paquito up and down the road – only the second time I’ve ever ridden a horse!! Then, Elvis and his friend Alberto took me and Shulpa, another girl from the program who lived down the street from me, on a hike to a waterfall, where we went swimming! There were those giant blue morpha butterflies fluttering about everywhere! I saw the largest spider I’ve ever seen in my life! It was incredible! Then we met up with the rest of our group and we all hiked up a mountain to visit a cooperative of families (UCASAN, but I don’t remember what that stands for…) working to grow coffee and perhaps start some sort of tourist operation. We took a hike around their farms way up in the mountains, and we saw howler monkeys!! It was fantastic, but also a bit scary, because they apparently didn’t like us tromping in their territory and screamed at us like they were about to come down and rip our heads off. The next day, we stayed in the San Ramzón/Matagalpa area and went to the headquarters of the Movimiento Comunal Nicaraguense and heard a talk from their President about their project, which is fabulous and works to improve public health and basic services, with a strong influence on women’s rights in Nicaragua. Then we heard another talk by one of our program directors called “Retail-led Restructuring of Agri-Food Systems in Developing Countries,” and I am a bit ashamed to say that I didn’t listen to a word of it. I was tired! But I’m sure it was fascinating. In the afternoon, we met with the Nicaraguan counterparts of our ICADS program in Costa Rica to discuss internship options in Nicaragua, and I’m torn! I don’t know where I want to do my internship – there is a wonderful one in Ostional, Costa Rica where I could work with a small reading library and help biologists with sea turtles (yesss!!), but I fell in love with Nicaragua and would also love to work with a library here. Hmm. We’ll see! The next morning, we got back on the bus and headed to Granada, a beautiful city with a lot of colonial-style architecture, though it is very tourist-oriented. It is also an interesting city to look at because it has virtually no middle class; the center of the city is set up for tourists and rich people, with air conditioning and pools, but radiating out from the wealthy center are all of these really poor barrios (many of which don’t even have electricity) and there isn’t really much in between the two. On the way to Granada, we stopped in Chaguitillo, an indigenous community that has set up a museum and a walk for tourists to go see indigenous petroglyphs. I love petroglyphs. In the afternoon, we went to a volcano! A real live huge one called Volcano Masaya. Very exciting! We got to Granada that night and stayed in the swanky tourist area in a really nice hotel called Hotel Cocibolca, which had a pool and turtles in the fountain. Real turtles! Oh boy! The next morning, we visited La casa de la mujer, an organization that works with women in the Granada area. They’re having a bit of a struggle, because they work with reproductive/sexual rights of women, but under Daniel Ortega abortion is now illegal for women in Nicaragua even to save the life of the mother, so they are no longer allowed to counsel women about abortion. It was very interesting, and some of the people in our group want to go back and do their internship there. In the afternoon, we went to a humungous covered market and did some shopping – fun, but also kind of stressful, it was huge and dark with tiny passageways and everyone screaming at you to buy their stuff. That night at the hotel, we had a talk by two men who were around during the 1979 Revolution, Francisco Jorge and Elvis Fernandez. I was really excited for the talk, but I was a bit disappointed, for they mostly just went over the bare facts of the history of the Revolution, which I already knew. But they did tell a couple of really interesting personal stories. The next morning, we woke up at 5:00 and headed back to Costa Rica, and here I am! Whew! I’m impressed if you’ve made it this far. I suppose that I don’t have to recount every single thing that I did, but I’m excited about all of it and wanted to share! So congrats if you read the whole thing! Now, I have two weeks here in San Jose to decide what internship I want to do and then I’m off for the next eight weeks on a new chapter. Love you all! Missing you! Oh, and the pictures are of a howler monkey, the Masaya Volcano, me with the Nicaraguan parents, and a statue of Sandino. Yaay!

Hello!! First off, I wanted to say that if you’ve been emailing me most dutifully and lovingly and I haven’t been emailing back, I’m sorry! I’ve been really busy and I only have access to the Internet every couple days, and only for short periods of time. So I love you, even if I haven’t been the best at keeping in touch. Anyway, I just wanted to fill you in quickly, because this Sunday all of the ICADS leave on a trip to Nicaragua for a week and a half and I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to keep in touch. The trip sounds really exciting – we’re going to Managua, Matagalpa, and Granada and some other places that I can’t remember off the top of my head. We’ll be staying with families and attending some workshops about immigration (Nicaraguan immigration is a big deal in Costa Rica, very similar to issues of ‘Mexican’ immigration in the US), as well as some workshops about women and development. I’ll be sure to take pictures while I’m there! On Tuesday, we visited an organic coffee farm way up in the mountains (on horrible, horrible HORRIBLE little tiny roads on sheer cliffs) run by a Costa Rican farmer named Egerico Mora who is part of a cooperation of 30 different families. Egerico gave us a talk about his experience switching over to organic coffee – a brutal process. In the first year after he switched, his production fell from 25 fanagas (some sort of bag measurement, from what I understand) per hectare to only 5, and farmers can’t sell coffee as organic for 3 years after switching because there are still chemicals in the ground, so they aren’t even getting the inflated rate for the little that they are selling. At least that’s what I think he said, he was talking incredibly rapidly and using all sorts of complicated coffee vocab. We got to see a processing plant and we all got lots of free fresh coffee, which everyone said was exceptional, but I never have coffee so it tasted pretty much gross and bitter. But I did finish my cup (for you Dad!). After the talk, we all hiked up to his cattle fields, which were quite literally on the side of a mountain – the slope was over 35 degrees! I felt like I could fall right off of the mountain. We did some testing of soil and something with clinometers and pH tests to test land use capacity. I felt ever so scientific, even though I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Nonetheless, I was very proud of my field work. I even wore one of those silly little hats with the brims on all sides that you like to wear, Dad! Who knows, I may be a scientist yet. Just kidding! Ok, hope that you’re all doing well! Love you all!

Manuel Antonio

Hello all! I wanted to write and tell you about my absolutely fabulous weekend! On Saturday, Alex (another girl from Grinnell), Brenly (a girl from Hampshire) and I woke up at 4:30 to catch a bus to Quepos, a small town on the Pacific Ocean. Though it was incredibly early, the bus ride was actually very exciting, for it was the first time that I was out of San Jose and in the countryside. There was a harrowing journey through the mountains that I tried my best to sleep through, but the rest of the bus ride I didn’t want to fall asleep, because everything was so beautiful! It was interesting to look at billboards as we got closer to the coast – all of the billboards for local businesses and such were in Spanish, but the billboards advertising expensive oceanfront real estate and luxury accommodations were in English. Hmm. Once we had bounced about in the bus for four and a half hours, we made it to Quepos, where we caught a bus to Manuel Antonio, a town with gorgeous beaches and a national park. In San Jose, our taxi driver had told us that he liked Quepos better than Manuel Antonio because Manuel Antonio was usually full of tourists, but we didn’t have a problem with this because a) being tourists ourselves it’s a bit hard to complain and b) it isn’t tourist season, so almost all of the tourists who were in Manuel Antonio were Costa Ricans on vacation. The first thing that we did in Manuel Antonio was locate our hotel – one of the professors at ICADS had given us a coupon for a student special, a room for only $45 or so dollars. The hotel, Hotel Verde Mar, turned out to be spectacular! It was right on the beach and our room had a little kitchen and geckos. And right outside the hotel was a tree where sloth and her baby lived! I took a million blurry pictures of them. We spent the whole first day swimming, lying on the beach and exploring the tiny little town. Sunday morning, we woke up early again to get to the park so that we could go hiking. The jungle was breathtakingly beautiful, although it was about a million degrees with 100% humidity. We saw monkeys, lizards, more sloths, raccoons, unidentifiable giant rodents, and lots of lovely birds and flowers. The park also had three beaches, so we spent a bit more time swimming and lying on the beach. I’m proud to report that I was not eaten by a crocodile, shark, or snake, dragged out to sea by a riptide, or even sunburned (very badly). Mom – I was ever so diligent with the sunscreen! I applied on at least three separate occasions. We even made it back home safely, though online it said that the bus station that the bus from Quepos came through was in the red light district of San Jose and was known as being the most dangerous station in all of Costa Rica or something. So all in all, a thoroughly successful, most excellent weekend! This morning at school, we had a festival of fruits, and I wish I had had my camera with me, for the table that they laid out for us was truly spectacular. Every kind of fresh fruit imaginable, and many that I had never ever seen before. We all gorged ourselves – I have certainly never eaten that much fruit in one sitting before. Tomorrow, it’s Costa Rica’s Independence Day, and it seems to be quite a big deal, for people have been celebrating all day today (shooting off fireworks, shouting, general air of festivity) and all schools are cancelled tomorrow. We don’t have school, but we’re taking a field trip to the mountains to visit an organic coffee farm. It should be wonderful! Anyway, this has also turned out to be very long, sorry. Missing you all! Oh, also, it takes forever to post photos here so I’ll only do a few here of Manuel Antonio - it´s really confusing to post pictures, I think that the first is a monkey in the jungle, the second is a picture of Brenly on the beach that I accidentally uploaded and can´t figure out how to delete, the third is our hotel and the fourth is me on the beach - and most of the rest on Facebook. The ones that I posted last time are of the ICADS school (all the little rooms on the right-hand side are our classrooms) and the front of my house here. Yay!

I’ve almost made it through my first week! It’s been a bit overwhelming – my brain is a fried from the effort of translating everything in my head into Spanish, so this is likely to be utterly incomprehensible. Bear with me! Every morning at 7:30, I walk to the ICADS building in San Pedro (part of San Jose) with another girl in the program named Alex in time to get to Spanish class by 8. I tested into a class with three other students and a marvelous teacher named Gabi who makes all of our lessons into games, but our teacher changes every week so I won’t have her for long. At noon, all of the students (there are 17 of us from different schools around the US) are then released into San Jose for an hour to go get some lunch. Every day, my host mom packs me a sack full of fresh mangoes, pineapple, strawberry and banana (the fruit here is completely amazing and we eat it for every single meal!), so I usually just go to the grocery store and get a sandwich. After lunch, we have a class called Latin American Perspectives on Justice and Sustainable Development from 1-5, but the first few afternoons we went over a lot of orientation information, so I’ve only had two days of the class. Every day we have a guest lecturer, and so far it’s been really interesting. On Tuesday afternoon, all of us were shipped off to downtown San Jose on a bus sans directors with a scavenger hunt type activity in an attempt to force us to get a feeling for the city and the bus system. We were in groups of three, and my group was fairly miserable at city navigation and mostly wandered about aimlessly, but we had a good time. We went to the post office to buy stamps, one of the POPS restaurants that are absolutely everywhere to get ice cream and a fish market to look at the sharks. The sharks had no heads, and therefore no teeth – rather a disappointment. But still, sharks! Oh, on a random note, the program directors told us that the beaches here are unlikely to have many sharks but that the crocodile population has been booming. Also, riptides have drowned something like half of all of the people who have gone swimming this rainy season. Happy swimming! Anyway, Tuesday was the birthday of a girl in the program, so that night most of us went to a bar near my house called Ciros and drank Costa Rican beers that all seemed to be called “Imperial” and tried hard to fit in, but the bartenders kept laughing at our attempts at Spanish and playing the Spice Girls. I fear that I shall never be mistaken for a native. Ah well. It was very fun, but we all stayed out until 1:30 and then had to get up at 6:30 for class. Blech. The rest of the week has been fairly uneventful as days in Costa Rica go, which is to say quite eventful, but I am very tired and don’t want to write much more. On weekends, the ICADS program doesn’t have anything planned in the way of group tours, so we are encouraged to make our own travel plans if we want to explore. This weekend, I’m planning on taking a bus to a rainforest next to the Pacific Ocean called Parque Nacional Carara (I think) on Saturday morning with four other friends and staying until Sunday afternoon to do some hiking and sightseeing. Buses here are very cheap – taking the bus all the way to the coast only costs something like three dollars! One of the program directors recommended to the park to us and told us that we could stay in nearby Tárcoles in a run down old house that was likely to have moldy pillows but be very cheap – perfect! Anyway, this has gotten quite long and, as promised, entirely incomprehensible, so I better sign off. Hope that everyone is doing well!

Arrival!

Hello!

I’ve made it safely to Costa Rica! My flights went surprisingly well, considering my hatred of flying: everything was on time, I only had to wait ten minutes at my connection, and on my second flight I sat next to a little boy named Salvo who kept sharing his KitKats with me. After I navigated myself through customs, my bag was the very first one I saw at baggage claim and Don Fernando was waiting as promised to pick me up. The only snag was that I wasn’t able to call home (sorry Mom!) because I didn’t have time to look for a phone card and my cell phone doesn’t work here after all (Mom – it gets no service, it just keeps saying “searching”). Anyway, Don Fernando herded me and another ICADS student named Matthew into a rickety old yellow bus and drove us to our host families. The road situation is a bit crazy - at one point, he took a wrong turn but simply drove down and through a ditch to get back onto the main road. It is very hot and humid here but incredibly verdant and beautiful! There are palm trees and mountains everywhere. And cows. And people riding horses all about public parks! This is something I hope to partake in. Anyway, Don Fernando dropped me off at my house, which I took some pictures of and will post if I can figure out how to. The family is extremely nice, but it was a bit intimidating at first, for there were dozens and dozens of them all talking at once and introducing themselves – I don’t remember any of their names! In addition to the throngs of people, they have a little dog that looks like a Chihuahua with very long legs named Mini and a cat named Satcha and a parrot named Carolina (they keep warning me that she bites) and three other birds with incomprehensible names. Thus far, my Spanish has proved to be rather patchy – I told one of the women living here that I liked her garden and she took it to mean that I was some sort of master gardener and I think that I may have accidentally agreed to skip my group trip to the beach this Saturday in order to transform her trash heap into a florid paradise. Luckily, no one in the family seems to care that my Spanish is hopeless, they just smile at me and offer me more food - as soon as I got here, they pressed a big bowl of arroz con leche (like rice pudding) into my hands and an hour and a half later, they served me a large dinner of fried rice with chicken and vegetables and fried yucca – delicious! Immediately after dinner, they told me that I must be exhausted and scolded each other for keeping me up so long and ushered me into my room and closed the door. However, it was only 7:30 and I wasn’t not sleepy at all and I’d already finished my only book (aaahhhhh!!!!), so I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, so I decided to write my first blog post! There isn’t any internet in the house, so I won’t be able to email anybody or post this until tomorrow. I hope that you aren’t panicking about me, Mom! Love you all!