Picture Update from the Trenches

This is just a short little update to share a snap shop of the pictures from the summer and of the communities and volunteers. I wasn’t taking any, but then my sister sent me an email asking for some, so thats why I brought my camera around the communities and hikes to share the pictures. And to have pics of the volunteers for a final presentation, now that I think about it..

Things to look for, a bat that is in one of the rooms where I am offered to sleep. A protest about the lack of medicine in the public hospitals. An awesome river. And generally great things.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2784300&id=8302765&l=5f85457f2c

Tico Land

Costa Rica is a beautiful county and is much more developed than Honduras, the difference incredible. Nonetheless, the volunteers are doing good work for the communities that they are in. The three projects are to make a restroom at the soccer field, a beautification of the soccer field and to make a pantry at the soccer field. The reason all three towns (an many others of different towns) have chosen to improve their soccer field is as one proposal mentioned, “the soccer field is the source of the biggest income is for our community”. This is one aspect that I found very interesting about these small communities in Costa Rica (100, 200 and 600 people in my three communities), that almost every Sunday there is a soccer tournament at a different community’s soccer field every week so that all the communities get a fair chance for people to go and purchase food items and drinks during the event. This is how the community raises most of their money and how they have built churches, expansions to the school, community centres, eating halls, etc. They mentioned to me they look out for each other and respect when someone decides to hold tournaments so that no community is competing for people.

Another interesting thing that I learned here is about Costa Rica´s healthcare system. Most of the people that I interact with in the community are self employed since they rely on sustenance farming as their occupation, and are eligible for public healthcare offered by the government for 3000 colones, about 5-6 dollars a month. With this health card that they receive every month, they get 100% free doctor´s visits and free prescription drugs as well. Currently, the hospital does not prefer them to go there as there are medical centres called EBAIS in the small towns. The EBAIS operate by spending 2-3 days in a larger community and then visit the surrounding communities on rotating monthly basis so that at least once or twice a month each community gets a doctor that comes to their community to receive affordable healthcare. The reason though that I learned about this is because on Monday there was a pretty large demonstration (about 300 people) who came to Perez Zeledon, the capital of the region, because the state was saying that they are going to close down every EBAIS in the region. The reason the government has decided to close down these public healthcare branches is because of funding due to the economic crisis. On top of this, in this region all the pharmacies are employed by technicians and not by licensed pharmaceutics which means that across the regions, immediately, there were not allowed to dispense any medicine. (I am not sure if this was due to new legislation, or if it was just recently discovered)

Nonetheless, it now takes over there weeks to receive medicine, rather 22 days. (Costa Rica has the custom to count the days in a week by the number of weeks times seven and plus one. So 8 days means one week, 15 two weeks and so forth. I believe it comes from the fact that if you count the calendar and start the day you are on as day one, and reach the next week, it is 8 days but it is a incorrect because if you use that logic to say in 2 days, that would mean tomorrow, which would be very confusing!) Nonetheless imagine going to the doctor today for a serious illness and the doctor prescribes some antibiotics to be taken immediately and 22 days later, you can receive the pills, because they have to come from the 3 EBAIS that pay pharmaceutics to work at their locations. Nonetheless, the protest yesterday requested the Minister of Health to issue a statement today, so we well see what happens, and the public says there will be a large protest if the answer is not one that is pleasing to them! Imagine getting kicked out of Costa Rica too for large public demonstrations!

Costa Ricccaaa

Costa Rica is completely different than Honduras. It is the most stable country in Central America and is very well developed with 95% of the country having electricity. The houses here are incredibly nice and instead of re writing the information that I have been working on, I will share an introduction of a report. This report describes one of the three communities that I have volunteers in and I gave it to the volunteers before they go to their community:

This is an agricultural community where everyone seems to own land where they plant mostly coffee beans, however sugar cane, rice and beans are also staples here. This is a relatively new community as I met one grandfather who has lived there for 50 years and bought the land where he lives for 20,000 colones, now his land is worth over 200 million colones because of globalization. Although this seems good for the family at first, it turns out that this means that land has now become unaffordable and it has become impossible for their family to buy more land and grow their farm as their family grows. Foreign currency has been over paying land in the surrounding areas so farm owners will no longer sell to locals because they are holding out to get paid with the valuable dollar. When he lived there 50 years ago, he was one of the few in the community, but now it has grown to about 100 families and bout 30 families. The youth in communities such as this have been dropping out of highschool, so the government has offered scholarships for youth to stay in school, this has created another small issue in rural towns because there is a fear that the youth will all be exported out to city centers for work leaving few to take care of the fields.

All the houses that I entered had a filter for their water, so all the water in the community is potable, and also since 95% of Costa Rica has electricity, all of this community also has electricity. The homes in this community are all very nice and very new looking and it is because many of the families in the community have traveled to North America to work, mostly to New Jersey and mostly for roofing. On top of the help from foreign currency, the government has a program that “poor” people can apply for to receive between 1 – 5 million colones. Usually the houses take a little more build so people put in a few more million colones to complete the house to the size they want.

Costa Rica, as noted in the above description of one of my communities, everyone has cars, bathrooms and cell phones. The volunteers are going to experience something much different than if they had still gone to Honduras. But what I want to mention is another thing I noticed, even though Honduras is much poorer than Costa Rica, there is cell phone coverage even in the most remote village in the mountains that I traveled to. While in Costa Rica, even with all the development, cell phone service is much harder to obtain. One reason I can think of is because Costa Rica, until very recently, has had only one cell phone provider which is a nationalized company, but in Honduras, there are many companies so there are reasons for them to build towers around small towns to win over customers, whereas in Costa Rica, the companies have not had to please all their customers because until recently the customers have not been able to change to any other company. Just something that I thought was interesting.

To briefly share about what is going on with me over here, the volunteers arrived about 4 days ago and they all went to their communities Sunday. For one of the communities I had to travel with the volunteers to the community because since everything has been at the last minute, communities have been dropping and we have had to rush to find others at the last minute and I had one of these communities where it was the first time for me to go there and I was traveling there with 3 volunteers who were going to stay for a month. Usually we go months in advance to make sure everything is set up, and I had already had 2 communities drop, I was a little nervous... Buuuut, for the two communities that dropped, it would have been their first time to have volunteers. Although it was the first time for this new community to have volunteers, they lived next to a community who has had Amigos volunteers for 5 years so fortunately they were very aware of everything about the program. This made the first day (yesterday – Sunday) a great day and everything worked out smoothly and I am sure the three volunteers there will have a great time. Now my role for the rest of the summer is to visit each community during the week to make sure everything is going smoothly with the projects and to ensure the health and safety of the volunteers. I am very excited about the rest of the summer as I have 7 amazing volunteers that I am looking forward to visiting in 3 beautiful communities.