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.