La Carpio

One of the most important parts of my internship is when we go once a week to work with a group of women in La Carpio, a squatter community (the residents don't actually own the land) of about 30,000 people outside of San Jose. The community has many Nicaraguan immigrants because that was the group of people who originally founded it in the early '90's.

La Carpio is viewed by most people in San Jose as somewhere you don't want to go because it's dangerous. It's not. I haven't spent a lot of time in the community, but in general it doesn't seem less safe than most areas of San Jose, just poorer.

Most Ticos will also tell you that La Carpio is made up of all Nicaraguans. (For many Ticos, Nicaraguans=Violence.) They are wrong. Many Ticos live there, it's just that the general population would rather live in denial of the fact that living conditions can actually be that bad for Ticos in Costa Rica.

Rather than continue describing the relationship between Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans I'll just say that it's very similar to the U.S.-Mexico relationship. Nicaraguans immigrate. Nicaraguans work in a lot of jobs that Ticos don't want (like coffee picking). Violence occurs. Ticos blame Nicas for violence. Ticos notice the presence of drugs in the city. Ticos blame Nicas for drugs and drug violence in urban areas. Ticos pay a lot for good health care and see people that they assume to be Nicaraguans in clinics. Ticos blame Nicas for stealing their high quality health care which isn't available in Nicaragua. Nicas continue to immigrate to Costa Rica because, even in shacks like you can see in the pictures from La Carpio below, Nicaraguans have better lives here than they ever had in Nicaragua.

I happened to be inside the clinic where we hold rehearsals when I took these pictures so some of them are from behind a fence.

As you can see in the background here, as if the lives of the residents of La Carpio weren't tough enough already, they are lucky enough to have high-voltage wires running through the middle of their community which is pretty dangerous. But of course, as long as the wires are there, the residents will take advantage of their presence by stealing electricity from them, which is Extremely dangerous since it involves splitting the wires that are in the air and running them into your own house.

La Carpio is also lucky enough to be a neighbor to multiple landfills (and a cement factory - health problems?) and as such they constantly have garbage trucks driving through the community. How pleasant. Of course, the passing garbage trucks don't do anything about the piles of garbage lying on the sides of the streets in La Carpio, they just drive on by, just like the majority of Ticos who continue to ignore the community.

Me with some of the women that we are working with in La Carpio.

Volcan Arenal and more...

So, we went to Arenal Volcano last weekend. But the volcano wasn't the only exciting thing we saw.

The first interesting thing that happened was that we encountered one of those people who gets on the bus and tries to sell you something or does something in order to try to get you to give them money. This time it was a man about 70 years old, singing songs with sexual implications, one of them about celebrating Mother's Day (which is coming up on August 15). This probably doesn't sound that exciting, but watching this guy sing/shake his booty was hilarious.

Next, we went on a tour of the Trail of Silence near the volcano.

These mushrooms are poisonous.

It was pretty cloudy when we got to where we could see the volcano from. The volcano was really hard to take pictures of because it was getting dark at the time and the clouds in the sky make the picture look weird, but here it is. A couple times while we were looking at it some lava fell down the side in the form of rocks. That was exciting since it was the closest we would be able to get to seeing the lava coming out the top of the volcano, but it was impossible to take pictures of because the rocks disappeared after 1 to 2 seconds.

We took these pictures at the entrance to the hot springs where we went after seeing the volcano. We had a very relaxing time there but unfortunately couldn't take any pictures without risking getting our cameras wet, so you'll just have to go for yourself.

Before getting on the bus back to San Jose the last thing we had to do was track down an elderly woman named Elsie who ran the hostel next door to ours in the town where we stayed near the volcano. At our hostel in San Jose we met another woman named Ligia (pronounced Lee-he-ah) who suggested that we stay at Elsie's hostel. Unfortunately, Elsie's phone wasn't working when we called to make the reservations which was why we had to track her down ourselves for Ligia. When we found Elsie we discovered that she was very nice and invited us inside to chat and have refreshments (unfortunately we had already eaten breakfast).

We told her all about who we were and all the details of our trip to Costa Rica and Elsie was very pleased to hear everything about us and to tell us about her life. She also told us about her worldview, how natural disasters are occurring in many places because of "contamination" caused by certain people in the world. Unfortunately, I'm almost positive she wasn't talking about pollution or global warming. Before we left her house Elsie insisted that we not only stand with her while she recited a prayer, but that we repeat every line after she said it. Meeting people like Elsie isn't all that uncommon here, I've met others previously, but it's certainly an interesting experience. They're all very polite and accommodating, but the encounters are always an adventure.

When we got back to San Jose Ligia was no longer staying in the hostel so we have no way of getting her Elsie's phone number. Oh well.

Simon Bolivar Zoo

I went to the small zoo in San Jose a while ago with someone from the hostel. It wasn't like a zoo in the U.S.

For some reason it's just not the same seeing crocodiles where there's a bunch of them lying around.

The monkeys were okay but they weren't swinging around on trees.

A lot of the animals were clearly underfed but I don't actually think it's the fault of the zoo - I think they would have fed them enough if they had the money.

Also, the side of the river that ran through the zoo was strewn with trash.