Introduction - Matagapla 2010

This year it turns out that I will spend my summer in Matagalpa, Nicaragua as the project director . I have a trip planned in February 16 - February 27 to set up some logistics, then training in March and finally summer which starts early June.

First, all the posts on here before 2009 are from my stint in Honduras/Costa Rica.

Second, the slideshow at the right will be of only Nicaragua pictures after February once I return from survey.

And third, I have been thinking about the summer quite a bit mostly because I am really looking forward to it, and also because I really want this to be a positive experience for everyone involved: from the team, to the communities, the youth (North American and Nicaraguan), locals and families in Matagapa, etc. If I am travelling down to Nicaragua, I want it to be for something positive, and of course that is why I chose to go down with Amigos. And of my many goals this summer, one is to empower the staff team and help foster an environment of growth over the course of the summer. Imagine a team where all members are capable of being project director (PD), all are empowered to make decisions when warranted and all have the confidence to step up when needed. I think knowledge is power and so one way I am going to help achieve this goal is by sharing the information that I have.

Sometimes, leaders can keep information to themselves, whether intentionally or not, and that leads to the effect of having that one person required to make all the decisions, thus becoming a crutch for the team. I believe in transparency (as haughtily liberal that may sound) and through the dissimenation of information (when applicable, because of course there are exceptions!)empowers others to make their own decisions and allows them to rely on their own knowledge to act. As the PD, I have all the information from last year at my disposal, I have contacts from the prevoius projects and I will be on survey meeting with local partners. Sharing all this information is difficult and maybe even impractical, but I will try to have most of it available for those who are interested - currently in gdocs.

Maybe I am coming into this from a different perspective, as I was a little older as a project supervisor, I was already thinking about the next step, the next growing opportunity, so I wanted to access all the information my project director had. This is why I am sharing the information now, even if no one on the team decides to read it, it is completely fine as it is not imperative, but for those who are thinking about growth opportunities, it is my goal to provide no barriers for anyone to achieve their goals!

Also, as a side note, I have been in contact with many local NGO's in Matagalpa and I am exteremly excited about the connections the team and the program will have during the summer.

Caution: Sloth Crossing

On my last day in Costa Rica when I was in the airport heading home, I was about to write about beans, how hard they are to harvest, how they are good for us and how lucky we are to have access to them with such little effort ($1 a pound!!!). But I got bored of that and instead let my mind wonder... as you will see, my mind jumps around. Now that all the volunteers have returned home and the communities are now satisfied I have nothing to write... Now I will lecture for better or for worse, because it was just one of those kind of days:

I was sitting and waiting at the airport in the food court. Surrounded by the bright and inviting lights, the sweet and delicious smells, and of course the fried and unhealthy foods. I couldn't help but look at the people around me filling their mouths with the edible manifestation of the sights, smells and sounds. Eating fries, drinking coke, commenting on how hungry they were, never satisfied. It is a strange world we live in, it is not a natural world with everyone in a symbiotic relation with the earth, but a world of over consumption, with industrialized and unnatural products.

We are a society that thrives on marketing to the consumer anything that sells with little thought of the consumer's need or anything else for that matter. The bottom line drives. Now with our new Green Revolution in full swing, why would companies not use this gimmick to sell their products? Companies are driven to market (and of course sell) to us all the best energy star technologies that they deem we are required to buy, because in this Green Revolution, it is still all about buying. It is about consumers purchasing the best item and then replace it the following year with Version 2.0. This is the only way us, the consumer, can get even more savings year after year and thus help the environment more year after year. Forget about the environmental costs due to producing these items: mining for the materials, forging the material, transporting the item. All this needs to be ignored. The items have already been made, we need to focus on the immediate energy savings that buying the bigger fridge will save us (and the environment). It uses less energy than any other large fridge around and now that's an accomplishment. Of course smaller fridges use less... Not necessary. How about no fridge? Heaven forbid! These are not possibilities. In our Green Revolution, it is about buying more, the more we buy the happier we are and the happier the planet is, period. Our Green Revolution is not about what is logical and actually, gasp, reducing our consumption to save on energy costs around the globe.

With its faults, it would be unfair not the mention what is positive about our America and foremost is the freedom. Albeit some of these freedoms are hard to obtained because they are constrained by social control. All the social norms about consumption, body image and fashion to name a few make it harder for us, the obedient pack, to act outside of the self-loathing, self-gloating and self-satiation. We are never good enough in the eyes of others, so we compensate by continually telling and reminding people about how good we are, while always yearning to have more for ourselves to catch up to our neighbor. However, even with the ubiquitous norms, we are given the choice to write about what we think is wrong in the thoughts and actions of the world around us. We have the choice to sever the ties of consumption by living frugally and to giving our share to others. We have the choice to unplug from mainstream media and ignore the expensive dress code and accessories it requires from us and to instead live a simple more meaningful life. We all know that their will be obstacles to being an individual, to be the one who can step outside of the pack and to look at a social norms from the outside, objective view to see the illogical idiosyncracies that us humans in the obedient pack are conforming to. (Eating, drinking and smoking excessively, french friends, fancy cars, diamonds, red meat, and huge houses...) Its important to live the life we want and to think outside the framework that is provided by the norms. Choosing a lifestyle is akin to choosing a religion, how can we know which lifestyle we prefer if we know only one lifestyle and have not explored others.

Nonetheless, we have to be confident in our actions if they are led by compassion, we have to stand by our decisions to be nice to someone who has offended us. We need to be confident and drop our insecurities and realize that the person next to us has the same insecurities of inferiority as we do and lift these people up instead of putting them down. If we see arrogance, if we see pride, we need to see the mechanisms of defense these people are carefully constructing around themselves to enclose the true self that they are not comfortable sharing with others. We need to find their true selves and elevate them with kind words, not by fighting pride with more pride.

We can all do this, we can help someone around us and we will have changed the world for that one person. I hear many people talking about their grandiose goals to help others that are measured by numbers and figures and graphs and statistics. The person with the best numbers wins. Yet in the meantime, the people around them who are most important to them (or rather, who they are most important to) are treated poorly. This is a concrete change we can all make and instead of waiting for our ephemeral dreams that escape us further at the purchase of each new calendar and the building of new obstacles. We need to ensure those around us are happy and feel our positivity towards them now and not wait.

People selfishly say many times that they want to live for themselves right now before they change to live for others, but living for others is living for yourself. It is rewarding, meaningful, positive, fulfilling, etc. The yearning of wanting more is thwarted by these compassionant actions. So we need to ensure that those around us are happy before we go off and save the world for others far off. Let us all start with the world around us and change the world for our family, friends, acquaintences, strangers and everyone we encounter. That is saving the world little by little.

P.S. I saw a sloth crossing the road in a community. It was slow.

Random Stories

This project in Costa Rica is winding down, its bitter sweet. There is still more than a week left for me, but the volunteers are quickly wrapping up their assignments and about to head home later this week. I will have to stay around to hold community meetings to see how everything went and what not, but I have been thinking about life back at home a some and I am starting to realize how the world will never be the same. The world I left, is completely different that the world I am returning to.

First, Micheal Jackson, has died. I am not sure what I will do in my house after his death. Thriller, Billie Jean, Beat It…. I’ll figure that one out.

Second, I am completely addicted to caffeine right now, I have a pounding headache as I write this because I haven’t had a cup all day since it is the weekend and I am not being served by generous host families in beautiful communities. In these communities I drink an average of 2 cups of days, but it’s not rare to have 4 cups. Every breakfast it is served, and then again after lunch, and then since I travel between communities, it is common to have a cup before I leave one community and then am welcomed with a cup in the second community. Nonetheless, I don’t like this addiction and need to stop the coffeeeeeeeee.

That’s really all why the world has changed for me, for better or for worse.

I have been asked by several community members to sell their land to rich Americans. They told me they have land for sell ranging from 500,000 to a MILLION dollars and ask me if I know anybody who wants to make an investment. I told them I don’t, but that I will ask anyways, so if you want to buy some land in Costa Rica let me know. They say it’s a good price and “gringos” buy it for 500,000 then a couple years later sell it for a million bucks. Let me know if you are interested.

Well, I learned that Costa Rican’s are the hardest workers in America. They say they go and work in roofing, in New Jersey and always in Trenton. They work 7 days a week, they work 12 hours a day in the heat, through the cold, anytime and they get paid 15-20 dollars an hour. They work for three years, they come back to their communities and they build a nice home for about 10-20 thousand dollars. A pristine home sitting on the side of a mountain that has a view of a gorgeous landscape sitting by the river. Then they buy a car and buy more land and live pretty comfortably. But to do this, most of them pay around 7 thousand dollars, usually borrowed from the coyote at about 40% interest rate. The coyote only charges them though if they get across safely to the other side, failed attempts are free of charge. If they don’t have the money, they can put up their house as collateral. (Side story, met a lady whose husband did this, then once in the states after three years stopped sending money, last time I went to her house, it was condemned and boarded up, presumably by the coyote). Its also a dangerous trip of course across the border, they tell me once while crossing the border into New Mexico, a group of bandits with guns and knives came up to the group and robbed everyone of the money they had on them to help get by once arriving safely in the states. (Robbed everyone but the coyote of course…)

Another community member told me about his story and said as they crossed the dessert at night, because it is always at night, and its always a dessert, they heard people coming from behind so the larger group of about 20 had to split up into groups of 5 and in his group, one of his friends who was overweight and couldn’t move quickly was trying to catch up with the group but couldn’t. He said he remembered looking back at his friend wanting to help, but was not able to, so he moved on ahead and no one heard of his friend again. Another said he was in jail for 2 months because they confused him for a Mexican who had been accused of murder, after this Tico (Costa Rican) proved his identity, they deported him back home. These people who cross are young and in shape, and they are old and slow. They do it for money and they do it to see family members, but its always the guys who go. Women only go if they get a visa, but to get this prized permission, they need a lot of money in their bank account, they need to own a lot of land, precisely the kind of people they are not, because those people are less risk to stay and work as a roofer in Trenton, New Jersey and extending their stay illegally.

Gringos have come to Costa Rica to buy up a lot of the land, they buy it and then they do nothing with it, except reforest it. The community likes this, they say by allowing the trees to grow, this makes the area rain more. They like this because they don’t have cows that pollute the water stream. They like this because they usually buy land that has a water source and with the trees the water source won’t dry up. They like this because the gringos are allowing the land to replenish its nutrients instead of growing coffee beans on the same land year after year. Twenty years ago, there was no need to use fertilizer because crops were always being rotated, if coffee was grown there for two years straight, for the third year they would leave it to replenish its nutrients naturally. They wouldn’t use pesticides and would kill all the brush with only machetes and sweat. Now, to stay in business, they need to buy fertilizer for the plants to be productive enough to sell. The pesticides they use on the brush is leaving the land without nutrients. Its harder and harder, they say, to make a profit year after year.

On the way back from a community, a community member offered me a ride back to center because he had to run some errands. The errand was going to a cow auction, which he invited me to. This cow auction made me appreciate being a vegetarian, the cows were stored abnormally close together, in one bin, I saw one cow smashed so close to another cow’s rear end that his neck was at a 90 degree angle. And as I walked passed, the cow who had his friend in his rear, began to release his excrement which of course just dropped down all over the cow’s face. Due to the close quarters and lack of room to move, all the cow did was blink his eyes as this feces fell on his face. Then another pin was completely filthy, not an inch of feces free ground. Even with this, I suppose the cow was tired enough that he just lay in his own excrement. People say cows are dumb, but they must be adverse to this.

On the flip side, I learned that cow tipping is made up. Cows don’t sleep standing up and if you try to push them over, they will run. Good luck trying.

Every time I tell community members I don’t eat meat, they are at first shocked, then they always say, yeah, that’s a good thing, the meat is bad for you and its costs a lot to raise. But they always end it with, but I like the meat so much. I like to eat the flesh of animal, the muscles. I had a conversation with my brother before I left for this trip, he said animals always eat meat, it’s a natural thing in the cycle of life. I told him animals also have sex in public. They don’t have a choice, they eat meat to survive. We have a choice to eat the flesh of another living being, or not eat the flesh of another living being. We can survive either way, it’s our choice.

My job on a somewhat typical day:

Thursday night, I was in my last community ready to wrap up and come home on Friday morning to start the work on the computer and then I realized, I had forgotten to pick up these evaluation forms from my volunteers and given that I was supposed to type them up and put my comments on them before Sunday, I really had to make another round of the communities before going back to the town center. Only problem is, there are 3 buses a day 5 hours apart and the communities are either an hour or an hour and a half apart from each other.

So I wake up the Friday morning at 5:30am to catch the 6am high school bus that will take me to the next town. When I walked to the bus, the hood was up and the driver was taking the engine apart because it wouldn’t start! So I waiting around for 45 minutes with the high school kids waiting too see if classes were going to be cancelled because of the bus not working. In these towns where it would be about a 3 hour walk to high school, if its raining too hard, or the bus breaks down, classes have to get cancelled. Nonetheless, I was the only one hoping against the odds that the driver will fix the bus because I was not looking forward to the hike, while the kids around me were hoping of course that the bus would stay broken.

After it got fixed I got to the community around 8 and picked up the forms from those volunteers and since I had the forms from the first community, that meant I only had one more community to visit, except there was a bus at 1pm to the city center from a town that was a 1.5 hour walk away. The community was another 1 hour bus ride and 45 minute walk away so I wanted to leave sooner than one.

After waiting around for about an hour, the high school bus that broke down had fallen in a ditch unbeknownst to me so all the kids were walking home. Then a little later, after the bus was excavated from the ditch, I was able to hitch a ride. Then found another ride to the city center from where one of the volunteers was eating lunch, then grabbed a bus to the other community, got the forms and returned by 4pm back at home. Eleven hours I had been traveling around, ate two breakfasts, two lunches traveled on 5 buses, saw all my volunteers, returned home and had all the work for the weekend left. More or less that is what I do week after week. But usually a little more organized and don’t have to visit all three communities in the same day…

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.

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.