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.
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'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
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