Pen Pals

Swing on over to my World Wise Schools blog for a video of a pen pal correspondence struck up between Limon 2000 and a middle school in the Bronx.

Pura Vida

The Valley

Below is a story I wrote for our in-country volunteer publication, La Cadena. 

The Valley

 “…just like the cholos in Talamanca.”

                I grow flush with frustration, but it’s not like she’s going to notice.  How is my Spanish ever going to improve if my own host family doesn’t let me speak?  For three weeks I bided my time, waiting for this very vacuum:  an empty corredor, a silent TV, no one but Doña Ivonne and me pushing around the humid air with our breaths.  As important as the Spanish practice was, sharing my story of the Peace Corps Guinea evacuation was the real reason I waited so long.  It’s a huge part of my recent past.  It’s why I’m here, in her house, serving her community.  Shouldn’t she be interested?  Four sentences:  Ramadan, Muslims fasting through daylight hours, us volunteers sneaking lunch so not to offend, the communal eating style.  I made it to four sentences this time, probably a record.  Her eyes were glazing over even before she interjected.   Am I that boring?  Or is it the years of blaring telenovelas?  They must’ve sapped her interest in anything but Doña Bella’s latest exploits, or at least her attention sp…

                “They eat from the same bowl.  When I worked in the Valle, they used to come down from the mountain once a month, carrying a hollowed out husk to share between them whatever drink we’d serve.” 

                …or maybe that well of hardship is so deep that any faulty step—any misfired word—sends her tumbling back into sixty years of memories.  Think about what Nisha just wrote in her letter:  “…90% of my day is spent listening to people talk.  Everyone likes to tell their story, and I’m letting them.”  This woman is scrolling through a whole chapter of her past.  So let her. 

                “Wait, Doña Ivonne, you lived in the Valle de la Estrella?”

                “Fifteen years.  I worked there on a bananera.”

                “Were you with Don Carlos back then?”

                “No, this was way back aooouuuuuuuuuuu, right after I separated from my first husband.  We had been living in Guácimo.  His father would beat me and demand coffee; and he’d beat me again if he didn’t get it.  My husband did nothing to stop it.  He already wanted out at that time.  So we split.  I took Ananías and Roberto with me to the Valle and started working on a bananera.  There my neighbor Estela took care of the boys while I was gone in the fields, bless her heart, for I was out there for hours on end. 

                “Anyway, the indigenous tribes came down about once a month.  The men usually congregated at the only cantina in town.  The women would pass from house to house, demanding what they saw.  They carried what they claimed in these beautifully colored textiles that hung from their heads down their backs.  We’d hide what we could; but if I had left a shirt out on the line to dry and a woman liked it, she would point to it, waiting…”

                “And you gave it?”

                “Yeah we gave it.” 

                “Everyone just gave away their belongings?  I imagine there were some pleitos, people who didn’t want to give up their stuff.” 

                “No, actually.  It was quite tranquilo.  We did it out of respect—respect  and fear.  We were afraid of them.  Those who refused or who didn’t offer a meal would come down with a bout of bad luck or an illness.  They’d hex you.  So I’d always cook up a pile of arepas and coffee.  They’d gather in a circle.  The coffee would go into the husk and get passed around, and they’d divide everything equally between them.  Once the arepas were gone, they’d move to the next house and sit again in a circle.

                “One day, as the groups were joining back together to leave, a woman and man returned to my house.  He was older, and I could tell he was important.  He motioned me to come with them.  I was hesitant, but he wouldn’t leave.  When he pinched his fingers together and held them to his mouth, I realized they were inviting me to dinner!  I was afraid and excited all at once.  Estela took the kids for the night, and I set off with the group up the Talamanca mountains for what seemed like an eternity. 

                “The paths thinned until we were putting one foot in front of the other just to keep from falling into the monte.  Finally, it opened up at the top of a hill.  There was a small hamlet in the clearing, but let me tell you not one of the homes was more than a handful of sticks holding up a roof of banana leaves.  There weren’t even walls.  Still, you wouldn’t believe how well swept a dirt floor could be until you saw one of these homes with your very eyes.

                “The largest of them was like their salón communal. There the women were preparing dinner in an enormous clay pot with three legs, shoving leña underneath.  Everything—absolutely everything—was getting thrown in.  Yucca, banana, plantains…they even slaughtered a pig and threw him in piece by piece, bones and all.  A group of men was just outside preparing the chicha.  Up to five of them shuffled around the pot at the same time, stomping the life out of the corn in a beautiful rhythm.  Finally, they covered it, saved it for another day to drink.  

“Everyone gathered around the clay pot once the sun had set.  I couldn’t concentrate for the silence. They were all looking at me.  Their knees pulled close to their chests, they waited for me to help myself, but I just couldn’t.  We stayed that way for a couple minutes, me just waiting for someone else to spare me of this anxiety and make a move.  Finally, an elderly woman reached over and grabbed my wrist, dropping my hand into the stew.  Plao!  All at once the pot was filled with hands reaching for their share.  And no wonder:  it was absolutely delicious.  When we could see the bottom of the pot the chicha started getting passed around. 

                “Except for the youngest girls, everyone was drinking from thin, dried out gourds.  An old woman grabbed an empty one with three fingers, dipping it into the vat until it filled to the top.  ‘Tome,’ she said.  I told her I didn’t drink.  ‘Tome o no se va,’ she answered.  It was then that I tried to head home on my own.   I stepped outside.  The moon was out, and I could see that there wasn’t just one path leading from the house, but what seemed like dozens fanning in every direction.  I picked one and started out.  Five minutes later I was back at the village, having made a loop without even knowing it.   There was no way I was going to find my way back.  So I went back inside and reached for the chicha that was still awaiting me, plugged my nose, and swallowed it all.  Oh man did my stomach start churning!  The woman didn’t make me drink more, for which I was thankful, because it took an effort to keep it down. 

                “After I drank the chicha the older women warmed up to me a lot.  They were very curious about me and of very good humor.  Through the one man who knew Spanish we shared our stories and jokes, pantomiming most of the time.  And that’s how the night wound down, with us laughing ourselves to exhaustion as we retired one by one to the hammocks hanging in the moonlight on the hill.”

Meet My Friend the Missionary

As our bus pulled out of the Caribeños terminal, Bec and I continued our discussion that was bound for all the gaps that eight months and 2500 miles create.  We started on the TUASA bus that had brought us from the airport to the center of San José, and walked to a rather touristy soda to sample a traditional tico casado:  rice, beans, fried plantain, a leg of a bodybuilder hen, salad, and a fresco.  They even warmed us up with olla de carne, the closest tico food to American vegetable soup, but with half a cow thrown in for flavoring.

Between the coffee stop near the Teatro Nacional and the nauseating turns of our next bus winding its way to Limón, we began filling in a lot of those gaps.  At one point Becky continued, “…and when they ask me, I just say, ‘He’s doing--uh--community development.’”  In that glorious moment when I had the stage to elucidate my accomplishments in Limón 2000, I deferred to silence.  Awkward, guilty silence.   How do I explain that, despite being a half year into this adventure, I’m still devoting the bulk of my energy to breaking inertia?

 When a stranger asks me the same question  I usually fall back on explaining the three objectives of the Children, Youth, and Families (CYF) program and examples of successful projects for each.  Be it my sustained deficiency in the Spanish language or just a general failure to get the point across, the end result usually is a nodding tico saying, “Oh, I see.”  On our next encounter the same individual will introduce me to another with, “Meet my friend Kevin the missionary.  Kevin, which church did you say you belonged to?”   

But Becky is my sister, someone to whom I’ve spoken several times since swearing  in as a volunteer last May.  We’ve talked about struggles, about my day-to-day, about people.  Still, it was a shock to me that even my own family couldn’t articulate my role as a volunteer with nothing more than her own inquisitive stab.  Beneath my pause on the bus was a lot of pent-up stress.   I’ll save that discussion for another day, since describing my job in theory merits its own bit of time. 

At its highest altitude, the Peace Corps mission promotes three main goals:

1.      Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.

2.      Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

3.      Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

The cross-cultural elements that the second and third goals  imply are quite naturally a byproduct of our being in a foreign country living with a foreign family.  Every single day we walk through our communities under a microscopic of cultural analysis, and every phone call back home carries with it an element of comprehension on the part of those receiving the call.  There are measures to gauge how much we’re doing to promote understanding of Americans (Goal 2) and bring the culture back home (Goal 3).  For example, Peace Corps has set up a wonderful program titled World Wise Schools that connects a volunteer with a specific classroom in the States.  Still, despite the Peace Corps’ efforts to boost the importance of these two goals, they often fall into the background noise.  Emphasis, as one may assume, is unequivocally placed on Goal One. 

Here in Costa Rica we have three main projects:  Rural Community Development (RCD), Community Economic Development (CED), and Children, Youth and Families (CYF).  That is to say each program has its own specific Goal One purpose, CYF’s being:

Children Youth and Families living in difficult environments are empowered with the education, skills, and resources necessary to guarantee their rights under the Convention of the Rights of the Child, and to assume positive roles in the healthy development of their own lives, of their communities, and in the world of work. 

Kindergarten students pose outside before heading to lunch

That’s a mouthful.  When measuring outcomes and reporting, we tend to break it down even further, stating that Children Youth and Families in our communites will: 

1. Increase and apply life skills and healthy living practices to be better equipped to meet life’s challenges – e.g. sports clubs, life skills workshops, cooking classes, children’s rights workshops, scout programs
2. Be active citizens, trained to engage in voluntary service and development activities in their communities – e.g. service days, service learning projects, fundraisers, recycling programs
3. Be prepared with the academic and professional formation needed to succeed in the world of work – e.g. tutoring, English classes, study skills workshops, linking youth with working professionals, world map project.

Dig deeper and you’ll find sub-objectives and outcome indicators that further divide the CYF project's objectives.  I’ve spared you the details and instead listed a few examples of what sort of activity would fall under each category.  With such broad objectives pretty much anything we do can be lumped into at least one of the above.  The range of potential projects can be rather overwhelming.  In an ideal world they would strike a small area of overlap, between the goals of our Peace Corps program, our own personal skills, and the wants and needs of our individual community. 

And how do I determine what my community wants and needs?  My first three months at site were devoted to nothing more than performing a community assessment, which involved document reviews, interviews, personal observations, surveys, and focus groups.  All this information was compiled into a document that identifies the available resources in the barrio, its needs, and the available opportunities for development.  Our program’s focus is obviously on children and youth, so most sections (e.g. health, education, available in-community resources) attempt to also focus on need or opportunity from a youth perspective. 

Despite its hiccups and snags, the process was actually quite enjoyable.  It was an excuse to get out and meet other people in the community, as well as a structured scavenger hunt of facts that will eventually help us with our work.  Limón 2000 has an interesting history.  I probably never would have learned it had I not had an excuse to be so necio, to dig deeper and deeper into someone's past.  I’ll do a little story-telling in the future, but I’d rather not break up this dry, uninspiring entry with something exciting.  It’ll wreck my flow. 

The challenges presented themselves in the expected places.  Finding where valuable information was hidden—if it existed—required a lot of perseverance; and even if I was pointed in the right direction, my Spanish often prevented me from pulling the thread entirely.  There had to have been countless times when  a fact was given or a sound opinion offered, and I just didn’t grasp it for lack of vocabulary or the strain of a sustained conversation in a foreign language.  School documents tended to be heavily opinion-based, and extracting statistics from them proved to be more of a mining activity than strictly a ‘take it for its word’ one. 

Hardest of all was breaking down the myriad conversations into a comprehensible set of paragraphs that reflected the neighborhood’s viewpoint on various social issues.  It seemed that every topic had those with opinions on both extremes.  Teenage pregnancy?  “Not a problem!” says my counterpart.  “We held a number of workshops in the past to address this issue and have seen a significant reduction.  The only pregnancies in the colegio have to do with girls from outside of Limón 2000.”  Says the Catholic priest, “Last year there were eighteen teenage pregnancies in the barrio.”   Laughably, in just the following week a girl was rushed out of school with early labor pangs, collapsing in the street as she was trying to make her way home.  My counterpart drove her to the hospital. 

So why such a broad range of opinion?  I’m still trying to figure that one out.  Obviously teen pregnancy can’t be simultaneously a non-existent issue and a rampant social issue plaguing the barrio.  Violence and crime in Limón 2000 can’t be both receding  and as bad as they ever have been.  Neither is there a contrast in socioeconomic status between one side of the barrio to the other, which might explain broad shifts in opinion.  Are people lying to me, then? 

Unfortunately, dishonesty does turn out to be an element of the equation.  While reviewing a list of interview questions for a house-to-house survey, my counterpart advised me to cut certain questions that were unlikely to elicit an honest response.  These questions mostly had to do with food or available resources to the family.  “They’re going to lie,” she said.  “They’re going to exaggerate their situation because they think you might be able to offer them handouts in the future.”  This is quite true, as Limón 2000 has a rather heavy dependency on subsidies, scholarships, and other forms of assistance.  The event at my school that draws the largest crowd is always the day when IMAS comes in to take applications for becas, a monthly paycheck the government hands out for schoolchildren living with a single parent or in an economically depressed household.  

Entrance to Limón 2000

In the early days of my time in Limón 2000 I was skittish about walking around on my own.  This is obviously a natural response for a foreigner in a new environment, but it turned into a complex for me.  Limón 2000 has a reputation in Costa Rica for being a rough neighborhood.  Even a few months in, after I had gotten to know my fair share of people, I continued to struggle with my own perception of personal safety.  Where is that line?  Where’s the split between paranoia and precaution, and how much am I compromising my early task of integrating into the community by stressing about it so much? 

Part of that internal struggle had to do with conversations with my host mom.  It’s one thing to tell me, “Take off your watch, because you don’t want to be wearing anything that calls attention to yourself,” and another to say, “Don’t go running in [neighboring  community] Río Blanco.  You’re going to get jumped or shot.”  I felt I had no choice but err toward self-preservation early on.  But as time wore on I realized that Doña Ivonne’s tales of gloom and doom were often extreme extrapolations of a very compressed past.  For example, a gringo getting jumped on the road to Río Blanco in 1998 equates to a present danger today. 

More fitting than ‘lie’ might be the phrase ‘liberal exaggeration’ or ‘filling in the gaps’.  I can’t blame Doña Ivonne for being a little overprotective of someone for whom she feels personal responsibility, nor is my counterpart’s case (denying the presence of teenage pregnancy in the school ) a behavior isolated to tico culture.  In the U.S. we also seek to legitimize our hard work; we also pray that our backward glances will verify forward movement.  But it’s frustrating as a foreigner to sift through all of these declarations, especially when my assignment for the first three months was to collect facts.  And, as an overwhelming majority of volunteers will attest, facts can be pretty hard to come by in this country.  For example, the sergeant at the local branch of the Fuerza Pública (police) pointed me to the Limón headquarters for crime stats in my neighborhood.  So I decided to take the bus into town and ask if a document existed that captured this information.   I was advised to consult the Organismo de Investigacion Judicial (think FBI) down the street.  An hour in the waiting room later the desk clerk at the OIJ called me forward and explained that I’d need to speak with the police to find that specific information.  How about those teenage pregnancy stats?  Every local health clinic is required to create an annual statistical report…except ours, apparently.  And Doña Ivonne’s knowledge of goings-on in the barrio is generally limited to her communicating with a handful of adults who come over to visit; the opposite rarely, if ever, occurs.  

Absence of fact begets greater dependence on personal opinion.  I guess that’s the absurd conclusion I’ve reached at this point.  But does it really make a difference?  All one has to do is walk through the neighborhood to sense the social problems that exist:  to see the dilapidated steps of a house, to smell the pot smoke and the raw sewage as they course their way through the streets, to feel the eyes of the out-of-school youth on your back as you pass.  Still, I’m feeling more and more comfortable here.  It’s not facts that have created that increased comfort; and it won’t be facts that convince my host mom that leaving the house more and participating in the community will heighten her own sense of security.