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.

Honduras Cancelled

So word is in... the honduras la paz project has officially cancelled due to the unstable government situation. The last two weeks, our team of 10 have been travelling to the communities, meeting community leaders, finding host families, finding families to feed the volunteers who will be living in their communities. We have been telling them to organize and discuss a community project to work on that Amigos will fund once the volunteers come and the proposal has been completed... we planned training for the 70 volunteers who are supposed to show up in a couple days...

There are riots in Tegucigalpa, Chavez is threatening to send troops to support Zelayah who says he is returning to Honduras in a couple of days. The situation is unstable, although I feel it will be completely safe in the rural communities, there is a risk for the volunteers who will arrive in Tegucigalpa.

It’s funny how the supervisors, including myself, were sitting around complaining about how this ruins our project, until one of the younger supervisors brought everything into perspective when he said that he hopes that the country is safe for the communities and becomes stable soon. Its true, as much as I want to complain about how this is unfortunate for me, this is the egotistical view, and truly, its sad for many of the people in the country, and for their sake we have to hope that everything turns out alright.

Nonetheless... my few entries, will remain as such... just a few entries over the span of a few weeks, and now, I am not sure what I will do for the rest of the summer...

-That was written last night, then this morning, we got word from Amigos that they are moving us to Costa Rica, so all the volunteers will arrive there on Tuesday and we are leaving on a bus tomorrow morning! That is unfortnate for Honduras... but we are glad that we get to continue and still help in the same way this summer....

Next update will share how people living in rural Costa Rica work, it probably won´t be by selling 5 cent a pound coffee beans after months of labor... but I´ll see and let you know.

Interesting Update

Many updates since last time, I’ll write in bullets to keep everything organized because my mind is always scattered thinking...

- To scare my family even more, right after I wrote about the bridge, our car got rear ended in traffic. To keep it brief, we had to pay the guy around $20 because apparently it was our fault. Actually I was asleep in the backseat only to be awaken by screeching of tires and a thud on the back of the car when we got hit, so I don’t really know whose fault it was, but fortunately, there was only a small dent in our car so it wasn’t a big deal.

- Then after getting hit, we were climbing a hill, and it turns out that our engine mounts weren´t too good (or maybe it was because we were loaded with luggage) because a mount broke and our engine shook a lot every time we accelerated.

- With a broken engine mount, we decided to drive back and on the way in the dusk to return the car and on the main highway, there was a huge gaping whole in the side of the highway because of the excessive rain, we had to swerve into the other lane to miss driving into this hole and what would have been off the edge of the mountain. Maybe I shouldn’t mention the other car that was flipped over by this hole that I helped with 15 Hondurans to turn back over. Well, if I mention that, I should say the driver and all passengers were unharmed. But I won’t mention anything about that car.

- To note, this was all before the official start date of Amigos, during amigos, we can’t drive cars and there are other rules to keep up out of danger.

- Currently, there is also a Coup de estat and all the power is out, so my computer will die soon. Apparently, the president Zelayah wants to be a communist dictator, and the state is against that, so he may not be president for much longer (after today).

- Enough of the fun stuff.

- Communities here are wonderful and so generous. I have 4, one in the mountain bout 300 people with no electricity, one about 1000 people, a capital of the municipality, two communities around 600 half with electricity half not.

- Their main business is agriculture, they plant, groom, fertilize, harvest, dry and grind coffee beans. That is their main source of income, hard laborious work. Then they finish all the hard labor and sell the beans at 5 American cents a pound. They usually sell them by the 100 pound bushels, and the harvest (and selling) season is only from October, November and December. During this time they have to save money for the whole year, but they also grow their own beans, besides cell phone minutes, water and clothes, they need money to buy maiz, which is corn because not too many people grow that because coffee beans yields so much more money since it is eventually exported after all the middle men get their cuts. Maiz, therefore needs to be bought by most families, but prices are rising because rain has been less lately, so families have been loosing their crops.

- Another update, coup is over, new president has been signed in and there are rumours of cancelling the project in Honduras!!!! I hope not, that would be a big misfortune... Right now our project has a stand down, just like the Peace Corps in Honduras, so we are not allowed to tavel right now, we have to stay in today and see what happens, to be honest, I feel confident we will be off and running tomorrow because there doesn´t seem anything that has happened – except a travel advisory from the state department warning about travel to Honduras. I can say, I have survived a coup.

The Beginning

I have decided to start a little blog. However, even the word blog turns me off from starting one, maybe I can say online thoughts. I thnk I am better with calling it that. I feel at times some blogs or online journals can be full of self adoration and laudation, and full of ego; however, even with this being said, I still find myself intently reading these collections written by friends and enjoying of hearing what they are doing with their life. I hope in my online thoughts throughout the summer I will be able to share a different culture.

To begin, some of you may not know what I am doing this summer, especially some family members and definitely most of my friends have no idea. Not that I even care too much to share to be honest, but nonetheless I have been working for the past year and a half in Cincinnati. I have been volunteer after work many hours after work getting involved in the community and building relationships with the agencies across the city that deal with inner city issues. I found that even though I spent much time after work volunteering, I still had the urge to dedicate more time to service work. So I decided to apply to Amigos de Las Americas because it is a relatively short term project (2.5 months) and I figured I still had a chance to maintain my job, although that was not certain at the time I decided however, a fact which I was fine with.

After getting accepted, I was able to keep my job because of my great, fair and supportive manager who understands my desire to do activities outside of work. For that I have been extremely lucky as with my great coworkers who allow me to enjoy my time at the office. Nonetheless I am in Honduras now at the beginning stages of the project where I will be supervising volunteers who come down from America and they will be living in pairs in small rural communities outside La Paz, Honduras. They will be teaching health and environment issues in the community with the help of a Honduran youth counterpart in the rural community to help build leadership skills for both the North American and Latin American volunteers in an aim to help the sustainability of our projects after the departure of the US volunteers. They will also work on a small community based initiative in the village to build something that the leaders in the community find to be beneficial to the entire village. My role will be to support the project and the volunteers ensuring that everything is able to be completed smoothly, including making sure any materials required are available by working with a local NGO and ensuring the emotional and physical healthy of the volunteers are not a hindrance to the project.

I think that is a good description of what is going on this summer, I will try to write an update soon on the villages and the country of Honduras in general.

For your reading pleasure, I was driving around Honduras with fellow supervisors and we saw a cop and my instinctual reaction towards police in foreign developing countries is to avert my eyes and continue driving lest I want an inquisition on the story of my life leading in bribe to the gentlemen there for our protection. Nonetheless, due to these sentiments we were all elated after we drove right by the cop without him saying a word to us because he was turning looking the other direction. We continued forward in glee knowing we escaped yet another potential problem we would have had to deal with. As we continue forward we drive up a bridge and start sarcastically second guessing the purpose of the cop’s position and even gleefully conjecture the funny possibility that the bridge we just started driving on is ending and as we are laughing in unison about this farfetched possibility, I slam on the brakes because I realize, we were actually driving on a bridge that was ending! My coworker begins to yell and wakes up the third passenger in the back as we realized the real purpose of the cop. Instead of paying attention to cars driving into disaster, he was minding his own business as we nearly killed ourselves, and to make the matter even better, on the second bridge that all the cars were driving on, there was an open truck full of army men pointing and laughing at the situation we found ourselves in. Very shortly after, we also began laughing at what turned out to be a close encounter!