Bienvenidos a Boruca

Our second stop last week was the Boruca territory.  The Boruca, or Brunka (in their native language) are another indigenous group.  Unlike the Ngobe, they've incorporated a lot more modern amenities into their lives, most likely due to their income from the tourism industry.  Their big claim to fame is their dance, Juego de los Diablitos, or the Game of the Little Devils.  They also make these beautiful ornate masks that are used for the dances, which have gotten more colorful and detailed as the tourism industry has expanded.
                    

Staying in Boruca for two nights was like a mini-vacation.  The territory was located in a beautiful spot in the mountains.  It was warmer than Las Alturas, but the showers were just as cold!  There was also always a smell of smoke -- something was always being cooked, or made (like dyes!).  Although it was a very different kind of smoke than in San Pedro -- this was a cozy, warm-by-the-campfire smell.  Here was our central meeting place (complete with hammocks) where we had all our meals and went over our project notes. 

                     
In Boruca, we had investigative projects.  My group was interviewing midwives and women in the territory who had given birth at home and in the hospital.

Before we started the interview, one of the women, Doña Marina, saw me sitting down and exclaimed, "Your eyes!  So blue and pretty!  You look like a Barbie doll in a box!" Even though they get a lot of tourists, blonde people are still out of the ordinary here.

Anyway, aside from the odd instructions, introductions, or the man showing us around the Museo de Insectos, this was really my first time extracting information in Spanish for an extended period (a few hours) outside of a classroom.  It was mentally exhausting, but they had some great things to say.  The midwife, Doña Victoria, was a pretty spunky lady and she didn't refrain from telling us anything, even when she found out that Jorge, who was with us during the interview, was a doctor.

An interesting thing of note is the fact that in Costa Rica, the verb mejorarse, which normally means "to improve oneself" or "to get better" is also used to mean "to give birth."  It could be interpreted as having the connotation that women aren't as "improved" if they don't give birth, but I like to think that it adds a healing sentiment to the birth process.

Another interesting term is the one that the Ngobe use.  In their language, being pregnant literally means "we are three."  Men definitely have a crucial role in the birth process here, at least in home births.  In Boruca, women give birth sitting, and their husbands or a man in their family wrap his arms around the woman and help to push the baby out.  Victoria described it as "transferring positive energy," and allowing men to also become an important part of the birthing process.

However, Boruca women still preferred to go to the EBAIS to get their prental care, vaccinations, and post-natal care - -they just wanted the birth to be at home.  Even in the rural community (which really felt more like a suburb after going to La Casona and Grano de Oro), Costa Rica has such great accessibility to affordable public programs.  It's so sad to hear about all the funding that is being cut for government-funded programs in the United States.

After our interviews, we went into camp mode.  First we took a small hike to a river, which has a legend behind it.  The legend is that this river spirit stole children who weren't baptized and kept them in the river.  The children stayed there so long that their butts made imprints on the rocks, and you can see the W-shaped puddles.  No joke.

Next we tie-dyed!!  A Borucan woman showed us how they make natural dyes using plants.  They use leaves to make this brilliant blue and green, and roots to make orange, with some lemon juice squeezed in to turn the orange to yellow.  We brought some white shirts so we got to tie-dye them in a pot of smoking dye above a fire -- it was really cool.  Here I am pushing some shirts around in the pot of blue leaf dye.  My tying strategy could have been better, but the dyes themselves came out great!

Arts and crafts still wasn't over -- we sat down to watch a man go over how they carve their famous masks.  Afterwards, we got to paint tiny ones.  It takes about a day or two to carve the masks, and anywhere from five hours to three days to paint one.  Ours took an hour or two -- they were only about the size of a tennis ball.

Just when I thought I was getting tired of Costa Rican food, the people in Boruca fed us so well!  We even made tamales ourselves -- rice and seasoned vegetables (and typically meat for those of the omnivorous persuasion) wrapped in banana leaves and cooked.  We also got bollitos, which are these delicious corn potato-y patties.

 Ashley, Kristen, and Kayla making tamales

Here are the colors that come from the dyes -- leaves for the purple, blue, green, and red, and a root for the orange, with some lemon that turned it into yellow!

 We headed back to Las Cruces on Saturday morning down another typical bumpy, pothole-filled, dirt winding road.  As consolation there were stunning mountain views along nearly the whole way.

And now, we're back in the comforts of the civilization...the civilization of the remote biological station in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Costa Rica.   Las Cruces is definitely becoming our home away from home.

We're heading to Panama on Wednesday, so now we're cramming in our report write-ups, our readings, and other homework before this week starts.  We have two days of lectures (and one on ethnozoology!  ANIMALS!) and then we head across the border and take some boats to an island to the Naso territory (Yes, another indigenous group).  I've started my anti-malarials but haven't been experiencing any weird dreams that supposedly accompany them...I'll keep you posted.

February is almost over!  I feel like I'm cheating for not experiencing the cold mushy winter.  We've been absurdly lucky and haven't even gotten any rain while we've been outside. 

Hasta luego!

Anya

Back from Boruca

This post is going to be fairly epic.

We first went to Las Alturas, a 25,000 acre preserve in the mountains.  It's a pretty strange set-up: the reserve was bought by this billionaire from the States.  The vast majority is conserved rainforest, with an abandoned coffee plantation and a cattle and dairy farm stuck in there as well.  Most of the cultivated land is a personal hobby of his, and he grows lots of organic food.  He hires lots of workers, mostly Ngobe people from Panama, to come work the land for him, and they live in the small town of about 100 permanent residents.

 Here are our rustic lodgings in Las Alturas.  Despite how warm and sunny it looks, it got really cold (and really buggy) at night!!  I'll never complain about the lukewarm showers at Las Cruces again.  These showers were frigid.  It took a lot to psych yourself up enough for a quick rinse.  And okay, maybe I'm being wimpy because we are in the tropics after all -- it was better than the hot water running out at 47 Mason after a long run in December.

The first day we took a tour of the town, learned a lot about the plants being cultivated there, and learned that you can get facepaint dyes out of a certain kind of plant, achote, demonstrated here:

 We also stopped by the town's three-cell jail.

Jorge has something worked out with the healthcare people in Las Alturas, so that he works at this clinic while we're in Las Alturas and treats patients so that we can shadow him, work reception, and take height/weight/blood pressure.  The clinic is in "downtown" Las Alturas (consisting of this one building and a general store and schoolhouse), located in Sweeney Todd fashion next to a carniceria, or butcher's shop:

 Lots of Ngobe women came to the clinic while we were there.  In Ngobe culture, they get "married" around age 12 or 13 (I put married in quotes because they don't have monogamous unions like we do; while they use the terms esposo/a, Ngobe men can live with many different women and have children with many different women as well (although the women usually live in separate houses).  It was incredible to think that the twenty-one year old pregnant woman who came in was barely older than me and already had three children and one on the way.  Another twenty-eight year old woman had six children at home!

The patients trickled in whenever -- there were no appointments, but they were told that Dr. Benavides was at the clinic and they could come in for the next two days and get checked out.  Indigenous groups are one group that gets free health care coverage under Caja (along with children, the elderly, and pregnant women), but most of the indigenous people here had coverage from their husbands/fathers who were employed at the ranch.

A lot of cases were dietary -- three children in one family had anemia -- and one man's problems (dizziness, weakness) stemmed from lack of food (the prescription was the snacks that I had carried in my bag -- Chikys save the day).  Other appointments involved a brand new baby (two weeks old) and a pregnant mother, so we got to watch Jorge do the newborn baby exams (reflexes, cataracts) and fill out the prenatal paperwork.

We were going around to the houses and the neighborhoods as well, compiling information for the Ficha Familiar.   This is basically a checklist that the ATAP (Asistente Tecnica de Atencion Primaria) normally completes.  The ATAP, as I may have mentioned earlier, is a super-technician.  He or she actually goes around to houses, knocks on their doors, and checks to see that vaccinations are up to date (required by law for Costa Rican citizens) and they are on time for their doctor's appointment.

It was an assignment that felt a bit awkward to complete, because we were basically knocking on doors and asking people to give strangers personal information.  They had no problem with revealing their health history though.  There's no way you would see this level of cooperation in the United States, but then again many Costa Ricans have trust in their health care system -- except for hospital births, which I'll get to later.

The next day, we went on a hike around Las Alturas.  From the summit, everything you can see is untouched forest (yes, even that shadowy place).  The hike was only about 2 kilometers, but the whole way was up a steep hill!  While it took about 2 hours to get up, it took about half an hour to go back down.  All in all our elevation at the top was around 2000 meters (1550 m elevation at our little cabin).

                                           
Nights at Las Alturas consisted of watching Rx for Survival and playing bananagrams (or, going with platanos, the Spanish word for banana....platanograms?).  Although we didn't have electricity or Internet, we DID have a generator that went on from 6 pm to 9 pm every night, so we only had one lecture by candlelight.

Right now our group has learned about various diarrhoeal diseases as well as Chagas disease and tuberculosis, so the hypochondria is starting to kick in.  The main casualty, however, has been the chigger invasion.  Luckily I've managed to avoid it - thanks for the DEET-ing of my field pants and socks, Mom!

In other news, I've started/am 75% through reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  I'm not wild about Mr. Larrsson's characterizations, but I can't deny that the book is incredibly gripping.  Somehow even with all our daylight hours filled up I've managed to cover 450 pages.

This is already a pretty hefty post, so I'll save the Boruca story for tomorrow!

Hasta mañana!

Anya

Adios, Las Cruces

So, more details about our research project: Coto Brus, the county that San Vito is in, has an abnormally high rate of gastric cancer.  Costa Rica actually has the second most incidences of gastric cancer in the world, second only to Japan.  We're investigating the role of nitrates and nitrites in the soil, since nitrates are  converted into carcinogenic compounds in the stomach.  As a county with lots of farming, its possible that nitrates from fertilizer could have a role in the high incidence of gastric cancer.

The cool thing is that our professors said that Dr. Ortiz, who works with OTS and practices in San Vito, uses a lot of the information from the program, so if there is anything that needs attention drawn to it, it is put into action right away.  Not to say that we'll find breakthrough significant findings with our extensive data collection of two weeks, but it's cool that the research program here is very directly stimulating public health interest in the community.

We've had a long, class-filled six days this week.  But it'll all be worth it because our next two weeks are going to be significantly less classroom-based.  On Monday we're moving to Las Alturas, where we'll be assisting at a clinic.  We'll be doing a lot of work in the roles of medical records technicians/pharmacy technicians so we can actually practice what we've learned about the EBAIS system, which is awesome.   We learned more medical Spanish (not actually that useful as conversing all the time in Spanish, because so many Spanish words are cognates to English!  Makes sense, since they both come from Latin, but I'm pretty sure that someone with no Spanish background could find his or her way around a pharmacy).

We're also going to visit the Boruca, another indigenous group.  They have these elaborate masks and dance festivals that I actually researched for my Spanish presentation in San Pedro.  We'll actually be doing homestays there, and living with families in the territory.  And then...Panama!!

I won't have Internet in the next two weeks (or electricity or hot water), which also means no PDFs assigned to read!  I'll have to budget my camera's battery power the same way that we'd have to budget those 27 disposable photos back in the day.

Also, I just finished all my reservations for spring break!!  I'm really excited for our upcoming trips and visits this month, but I'm not going to pretend that I am craving some time to sleep in, go ziplining, and chill on the beach for a week!

Hasta luego!

Anya

Annnnd we're back!

Ahhh, back in Las Cruces.   How ironic that I have more reliable Internet access and more warm water in the middle of a rural, isolated biological station in the middle of a botanical garden in the mountains than in the middle of San Pedro.  We have had a power outage (it just wouldn't be college without a power outage every year....Vanji, Kristen and I missed the Tufts Parent's Weekend blackout experience so it's only fitting that the lack of power follows us to the jungle).  

Our Spanish professors, who are staying in town while they come to Las Cruces and teach us, enlightened us to the power outage: while they were eating dinner at a restaurante, a telephone pole right outside fell into the street, crushing an empty car, cutting the power, and causing all of San Vito (all twenty-seven people) to gather around.

First of all, here's a picture of the sloth, or perezoso, that we saw at Rio Celeste last weekend!  It's just another moss-looking blob in the trees, but you can see its head poking out into the sunlight!

 It's great to be back, together with everyone again, especially now that we're upstairs in the hostel-style building, so we have a whole common area to ourselves.  And literally, it is to ourselves: instead of sharing the building with another huge group of researchers, we are actually the only ones here!  It's nice and tranquil, especially on the top floor.  The only exception is the raucous birds that get all worked up at each other around 5:50 in the morning.  It was forgivable yesterday though, because outside of our bedroom window we saw a toucan!!

 There's also been a lizard sighting.  The animals seem to be a lot more fond of the second floor.

And it has been very tranquil the past few days, because we've all had so many homework assignments and projects.  I finally finished my Plantz project and presentation on the Heliconia and Musa (banana) families.  Where was the banana costume when I needed it?

We watched a movie: The White Masai, the other night.  It's based on a real story about a woman who goes to vacation in Kenya and marries a tribal warrior there on a whim, but winds up leaving the terrible situation she ended up in because she ignored basically every custom they had.  Basically the ethnobiology lesson for this semester: don't be culturally insensitive.

We're starting to delve into some great and gross lectures on diseases, my kind of territory.  Diarrhea and Charga's disease this week, leishmania next week.


Our Spanish classes have started up here: they're on medical Spanish, so right now we're back to lots of vocabulary for body parts, ailments, and drugs.  Other than that we've learned how to properly collect, press, and preserve plants for an herbarium, had lots of lectures about conducting research/making observations/conducting surveys/not being culturally insensitive.

We've also got our final research project topics.  Mine is going to be examining soil minerals and other goodies to see if there's any correlation with gastritis in the surrounding communities.  We get to use some GPS/mapping software too, should be fun.

I also have my journal club coming up next week, an assignment where we choose a topic to stimulate and lead discussion on for an hour.  Dad, you will be interested to hear that I chose water fluoridation and the surrounding controversies.  I don't know the details of the Costa Rican water fluoridation system, but I will keep you posted, as I'm sure all you blog readers are waiting on the edge of your seats.

Even with our busy schedules, there's still time for birthday celebrations.  Meghan turned 21 today and we had two cakes to celebrate! (the professors bought a cake not knowing that some of us had gone into town earlier and picked one up).   Cake here is not torta or pastel, but queque (sounds like kay-kay) -- cute.

Hasta luego!

Anya

Out of the concrete jungle

Well, I’m still not sure how I was able to survive seven years of Spanish without really knowing the correct usage of direct and indirect object pronouns, but now I will never look at a verb without thinking about the underpants of pronouns.  It’s amazing how many gaps there are after not taking Spanish sophomore year and taking a literature class last fall – three semesters without grammar needed a lot of gap-filling! 

Our intensive Spanish class is over, although it will be continued with medical Spanish classes in Las Cruces.  Our last day, after our final exam, was great: we went to the Museo de Insectos at la Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), and got to see a bunch of cool things that I hope never make their way into my bed in the jungle.

 Me with a tarantula!

We also got to walk around after lunch, looking at some earrings sold by street vendors.  They make lots of jewelry out of fruit or other natural materials– bracelets with orange peel, earrings with orange slices, necklaces out of semillas (seeds), and earrings with banana slices, which I purchased.

 Here we are in our class with our Profesora, Mariela, where we spent 60 hours speaking Spanish.  Some of us (Vanji) are a little more excited to be in class than others...

 Here's our group celebrating the end of CRLA classes at UCR.

Yesterday we had a lonnnng day of exploring and bus riding.  There’s a BioCursos program provided by the Organización para Estudios Tropicales, and they take care of most of the cost for us OET students to travel on the weekends.  This weekend was an optional trip, and even though sleep was looking very, very tempting, I headed on the trip, spurred by one of those “I may not be in this country again” moments. 

Sleep was looking so tempting because we had to be on the bus at 5:00 am.  It was about a 5 hour bus ride to our destination, so we didn’t come back until 9:00 pm!

We saw a waterfall, the hot springs (supposedly they’re really, really clear blue on a day when there isn’t so much rain), and animals!  Agoutis, toucans, parrots, and sloths – finally!  The hike was nice, and the waterfall was majestic.  Nothing wakes you up in the morning like the mist from a roaring catarata rushing at you in the rainforest.

 An agouti!

Also, as I predicted in my last post, I’m getting a bit of a cold.  Luckily I got a lot of sleep last night (10.5 hours, a new record!), and my mama tica is supplying me with cloves of ajo (garlic).

Mango season has officially started, so my mama tica has served mango for breakfast for the past three days!  I’m in heaven.  Right now I'm working on my plant report, on the Zingiberales order (families Heliconiaceae and Musaceae, the latter of which is the banana family!).  I feel like I'm reading a Lewis Carrol poem sometimes, with words like "pendacle," "glabrous," and "ligulate" everywhere in the literature.

We leave for Las Cruces tomorrow, and then we are ALL OVER THE PLACE for the next month.  In the next four weeks, we are traveling to Las Cruces, to Las Alturas, to Boruca (an indigenous territory of the Brunka), back to Las Cruces, to Panama to visit the Ngöbe (another indigenous group and the first that we visited), to Bocas del Toro in Panama (beautiful beaches, so I’ve heard – don’t know what we’re doing there but I hope it falls on a day off!), the BriBri territory and chocolate factory (!!!), to La Selva, the rainforest biological station, and then we have our midterm exams and go back to San José for spring break! 

Our Día de San Valentín will be celebrated tomorrow by taking a six hour bus ride back to San Vito.   I think I speak for our whole group when I say that going back to the mountains is going to be a huge sigh of relief.  Literally, because it feels like we’ve been holding our breath in this dirty city.  San José is great for immersion into Spanish, but it’s going to be great to breathe fresh mountain air again, see the stars at night, and hear cicadas instead of dogs barking.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve spent four weeks here!!

Hasta luego,

Anya

Clases y Frases

We’ve had some long days here in San José.  Our Spanish classes have been intense, with a 25-minute presentation, a research essay, and a final exam all within three days of each other.  Also everyone is getting sick – I haven’t come down with anything yet, but it’s only a matter of time once we’re all back in the same living quarters in Las Cruces.

Today we visited an EBAIS in Lourdes, a middle-class to upper-middle class barrio in San Pedro.  Costa Rican cities are very predominantly middle class; sometimes it is so homogenous that many Costa Ricans refer to themselves as living in a classless democracy, but there are of course very noticeable differences between rural and urban areas – the whole purpose of our visits to these different EBAIS locations.  (How do you like that, liberal arts friends?  This science major just used the words “classless democracy”!  Baby steps, baby steps....)   

Their whole health system is very interesting.  A lot of people in Lourdes can afford private care, so they attend appointments with a private physician and then go to the EBAIS to get prescriptions or treatments paid for by Caja (Caja Costarricense de Seguridad Social, the Costa Rican social security system that is MANDATORY for EVERY worker).   The difference in health problems in the communities is also indicative of the lifestyles of the people: as one might expect, the problems in the wealthier community aren't diarrhea from contaminated water, but those of a sedentary life style, like hypertension and cholesterol.  

After the EBAIS visit it was back to class until 6 pm.....

My Spanish professor tried to make us understand the importance of direct object pronoun use in Spanish when it was 5:30 pm, after we’d been in classes since 8 am.  In an attempt to get our attention before our brains turned to complete mush, she made the analogy that direct object pronouns are like underwear: if you wear underwear but not pants (the prepositional pronouns), you’ll be fine, but if you wear pants without underwear, it’s a bad day for you!  Due to my chagrin of seeing pants-clad people EVERYWHERE (I’m having leggings withdrawal), I have concluded that Ticos love pants.  Either something is lost in translation, or they have a very anti-commando attitude in Costa Rica.

There’s another estudiante here in my homestay now.  Her name is Lucille and she’s from Belgium.  She’s volunteering at an orphanage here – she’s been here since September and for the past two weeks she was on vacation in Cuba.  She’s only been speaking Spanish for a few months but she knows more than I learned my first three years – kudos, CRLA.  It’s nice to have her at meals now because we can both understand each other easily.  No struggles with sharing the sole Ethernet cable yet, but we’ll see.

My mama tica continues to outdo herself in the kitchen.  Although it’s nothing like home....(I know my audience).  Anyway, she makes some pan tostado de Francia (French toast), pancakes, empanadas, the whole shebang. 

Bakeries in the city are everywhere I turn, and they just keep getting cheaper and cheaper.  You can get a big loaf for 450 colones, a little less than a dollar.  Costa Ricans also like their pastries – I feel like I am never more than 400 meters away from gooey carbohydrate goodness.

What there AREN’T here though, is hot showers.  Through the powers of expensive electricity and perpetual tropical warmth, Costa Ricans have invented a shower system that only gets hot (and by hot, I mean lukewarm) when the water pressure is low (and by low, I mean a small dribble).  It’s not something that I miss yet, but I was surprised by just how alluring warm showers are even in hot weather!

Speaking of all things plumbing, another oddity is the lack of flushability.  This may be too TMI, but if you go to Latin America you will see it everywhere, so here’s your warning: toilet paper can’t flush down the old, narrow pipes!  Everyone has to throw toilet paper in trash bags in the bathroom.  A pleasantly surprising fact and a testament to air fresheners here is that bathrooms never smell bad.

One thing that’s cute in Tico Spanish (I’m not sure if they do this in Spain, but I think they do in other Latin American countries) is rhyming phrases that don’t really mean anything.  My mama tica, for example, a lot of times will call something “una cosa mariposa.”  Literally, that means “butterfly thing,” but she just throws in the mariposa to make it rhyme.  Another example is chicos parraticos, which means “parrot guys.”

Alright, that’s all I’ve got for today.  No pictures because I was in class ALL DAY and nothing has really changed here in San Pedro (San Pedro is a region of San José, in case all the Sans were getting confusing), but this weekend we’re heading on a “BioCurso” tour with the Organization of Tropical Studies, so we’ll be heading to a volcano and waterfall bright and early on Saturday.

Hasta luego!

Anya

Back from the beach

This weekend we fully took advantage of our free day and went to THE BEACH!!

I finally got a taste of bus transportation here.  It's very cheap (2000 colones, or $4) to take us about two hours to the beach.  The bus seats were comfy, although not everyone gets a seat (we had to stand on the way back), and unlike the buses around San Pedro, I didn't feel like my life was in danger once.

 The difference from San Jose to Jacó was noticeable the second the bus stopped.  And even before then, while my ears were popping as we descended from 1200 meters elevation to sea level (amidst beautiful cliffs and, of course, more mountains).  The coastal lowlands are a lot warmer, and a lot more humid!  There weren't any clouds in the sky, and the weather was stiflingly hot.

Jacó is definitely a touristy place, as we noticed when we didn't stand out at all!  Most people spoke English, and food was overpriced, although we managed to find a delicious restaurant (of course, hunger is the best sauce) for about half the price I'd pay for a dinner back home. 

Most Ticos I've talked to, and my of our host families, have said that Jaco no es bonita and hay muchos edificios -- saying that it isn't pretty and there are lots of buildings nearby.  This makes me pretty excited to see the famous beaches, because I thought Jaco was beautiful!

 Sorry that there's ONE BUILDING in the background with all the palm trees and mountains! 

Any beach where you can see the mountains and palm trees swaying is a playa bonita to me.  The waves were great, although there are usually some powerful currents and riptides, so we stayed pretty close to shore (but of course far enough to jump in the waves).

 It was great to think that we spent all day in class the day before, and we were going to spend all day in class the next day, but for all of Sunday we got to enjoy the sun and the nature away from the San Jose smog

Some more fun things about San Jose:

-Despite the machisimo culture, mothers/women are the heads of the house here, and the families we're staying with are listed only by the Senora.

-I am continuing to blend in well.  Meaning that I have been receiving my fair share of people calling "macha!" to me (basically means "blonde chick").   Doesn't look like I'll be mistaken for a Tica anytime soon

-The lack of street signs is still confusing.

-EVERYONE wears jeans here, in 70 degree weather -- shorts broadcast the fact that you're a gringo.  Women also walk around in heels all the time.  It's no Europe, but everyone is usually layered up and probably suffering from a lot of ankle problems.

Our Spanish classes are still fun.  We played Jenga (every time you pulled out a block, you had to command someone to do something to practice the indicative tense, e.g. "Put your hand on your head for the rest of the game," or "Bring in candies to class tomorrow" (that one didn't work so well).  We even played Life in Spanish!

Tomorrow we have a long day full of EBAIS tours, lectures, and more Spanish class!

Hasta luego,

Anya

Trip to Grano de Oro

Prepárese - Prepare yourself.  This post is about to explode with cool pictures.

I am exhausted.  We spent Monday night in Grano de Oro, a town high up in the mountains.  And of course, being so high up in the mountains is one thing that will deter many visitors, but another factor is the crazy winding road we took to get up there.  Starting at the base of the mountains, it took about 45 minutes to climb it in the Safari, one of many death-defying journeys up the narrow, rocky, unpaved roads that always snaked around the sides of cliffs.  To distract us from what looked like imminent doom from the bus window, there were lots of beautiful views along the way!

 The hotel was very nice, with all three hot meals served to us and a pool surrounded by bromeliads, fruit trees, and astounding views.  The mystery, though, was how they stay in business!  We were clearly the only ones there this time, and I can’t imagine that many tourists discover this hotel while casually passing through treacherous mountain roads.

        We saw a frog in the petals of the bromeliad by the pool!

 Here's the view from the patio of our hotel.

After some lunch, we climbed in the bus and headed to the Cabecar territory, the territory of an indigenous group (called, as you might have guessed, the Cabecar).  This group of about 10,000 people lives in an area about 1000 square kilometers -- it's very sparsely populated and with all the mountainous regions, there are no real community centers or gathering places.  The main town is Grano de Oro, where there is a primary and secondary school, an EBAIS, and some houses.  The main form of transportation is horses (they can navigate far better than any car, or student-filled bus).  Here I am, with the mountains in the background:

The EBAIS that we saw was very bare-bones.  Everything is written in both Cabecar and Spanish -- since the Cabecar are so isolated, they've kept their language very intact and have a strong retention of their traditional culture.  There is electricity, but only to power the radio and the refrigerator.  One of our resident professors, Jorge, worked there for a while.  He and the other physicians slept in the same building as the offices -- it is a primary care facility-type building, but can also function as a hospital in cases such as pregnancies.  Jorge even delivered a baby on this table!

Speaking of pregnancies, women in this territory head to Grano de Oro (the bustling metropolis of the mountains) a week before their due date so that they can stay at a shelter where food and beds are provided before going into labor.  However, there are always surprises -- inside the EBAIS there was an article on the wall that said, "No sabia que iba a tener trillizos!" = "I didn't know that I was going to have triplets!"

We walked around the territory a little while longer, and ended up at a beautiful look-out point.

Just another day of class in the jungle, no big deal.

Back at the hotel, it was naptime for the puppies.  This has nothing to do with anything we learned, but the puppies (belonging to the owners of the hotel) were so darn cute!!  (even coming from a cat person).  Most of the dogs around here are lean and mean, and seem to serve primarily as guard dogs rather than pets.  The cat-calls around San Jose are not nearly as prevalent as the dog-barks!  At least in my neighborhood, there are tons of dogs pacing around the gate, growling and barking at passerby.  The poor things are locked up all the time, but to end on a happy note, these puppies were frolicking outside in the mountains until naptime:

The next day started out with a delicious breakfast (waking up at 6:30 is no problema anymore.  I've adjusted alarmingly fast -- it must be the bright Costa Rican sunlight that is out by 7:00 am!). We then boarded the faithful Safari to scale some perilous hills.  Check it out:

The point of this field trip was to get an idea of how difficult it is for indigenous peoples to have accessible health care.  One can imagine that it must be tough to hike for hours up those steep hills (we hiked part of the way and the Safari split time taxi-ing two groups -- walking all the way wouldn't have gotten us there and back in the timely manner that this program depends on).  But there's also mud that swallowed up our boots, steep rocks, and narrow, poorly maintained trails to deal with.  AND this is with sturdy boots (many indigenous people don't have shoes), and with a group of twenty-something students who aren't eight months pregnant or suffering from diarrhea!

We saw some pigs along the way (another cute non-sequitor):

...and then we made it to the Puesto de Salud, or Health Post.    This is so isolated and so small it's really easy to see why so many indigenous people prefer traditional (as opposed to western) medicine -- it's so much closer!  The Puesto de Salud, as you can see, doesn't have high-tech equipment either.  It's made of local materials and doesn't have electricity (big surprise).  While it's easy to see the inaccessibility of healthcare here, Jorge pointed out that an equally striking thing is the efforts made by Costa Rica to provide healthcare to these remote areas.

There was just enough time for a celebratory photo before we began the mud-filled hike back down.

You can see how the mud claims its victims.  Here we are, helpfully giving assistance (a.k.a. staring and taking pictures) as someone goes down.

Lunch tasted wonderful on the way back.  We did some serious hiking, and we had earned our gallo pinto.   But there was one more sight to see before we left Grano de Oro: the first snake sighting of the semester!  And this one wasn't just chilling on a log until one of us stepped on him, he was wrapped around a tree!  This was one giant snake -- speculation has it that it was a boa!!!

Today was slightly less full of crazy animals and intrepid hiking.  We're back to classes at CRLA, and although it's tough to shift gears from our English excursions to Spanish school, I can feel my habilidades improving.  I made a breakthrough with my family this evening: my papa tica (host dad) asked his daughter to talk in English, because I couldn't understand her fast talking.  Well, that was when I realized that he had been so quiet around me because he didn't think I wanted to speak Spanish!

Upon further investigation it turns out that many of the other students they've had were serious buzz kills, and wanted to speak English, not Spanish.  So after clearing it up that yes, I wanted them to speak Spanish so I could practice, I had an hour-long conversation with the daughter of my mama tica, which was great!  She lived in the US (in North Carolina) for a while, teaching Spanish as a high school teacher, so she understands why I want to immerse myself in Spanish (what I wouldn't understand is people who go to CRLA here and want to lapse into English with their Latino host families!)

Tomorrow is another day spent completely at the Costa Rican Language Academy.  We get to sleep in until 7:30 -- ¡Que maravilloso!

Hasta luego!

Anya