I spent the entire month there with the ISV group and everything was pre-arranged and planned out for me. The first 2 weeks I spent working hard on a community development project and the following 2 weeks I spent playing and traveling around Costa Rica on what ISV calls the adventure tour.
My project was located in the mountains surrounding the capital city of San Jose in the center of Costa Rica in a little tiny town called Santa Cruz de leon cortes, with probably only about 1,000 residents. I really wasn't sure exactly what my volunteer project was before I left... they gave me a few ideas, but nothing concrete. Well, it turns out concrete would play a part... too large of a part, perhaps.
Students from all over the world flew into the capital of Costa Rica, San Jose, and we stayed in a nearby hotel for the night, departing for our volunteer projects the next day. There were probably 80 students total in the group that flew in when I did, however, we all split up into different volunteer groups of about 8-15 people for the first 2 weeks. After the first 2 weeks volunteering, we would all meet back up at the same hotel to be divided into 2 larger groups of about 40 students to travel with during the adventure tour for 2 more weeks.
Here's the view from the hotel in the San Jose area. Big city.
I was in a volunteer group called Proturco with 7 other girls and a project leader. Our project was to redo a cement floor at the local school. By hand. It was EXTREMELY hard work, but very rewarding. But, more on the project later. Here we are loading up in a van the next morning to travel to our project site.
However, the van only took us as far as the local bus stop. To both conserve money and energy (ISV tries to be extremely environmentally conscious) we were to use the public bus system to get to the tiny pueblo of Santa Cruz high up in the twisted mountain roads of the central mountains of Costa Rica. It was a twisty, slightly-sickening ride, but gave us good insight to what Costa Rica was like.
Waiting for the bus to come.
The buses were really packed. Lots of people using them. On the bright side, they were the equivalent of greyhound buses (nice comfy seats). Much nicer than our general bus system here.
The long bus rides were worth it to get so high up in the mountains. It was BEAUTIFUL!
This is the amazing view from right outside the school, where I was to work every single day. Gorgeous mountains, and because we were so high up and because it was the rainy season, temperature stayed in the 60s and 70s. While this wasn't necessarily what I was expecting, it was nice, for we were doing hard physical labor and we weren't devoured by mosquitoes.When we arrived in Santa Cruz, people were there to welcome us and they had a little party to get us introduced the the city and to our host families we would be staying with. I had the privilege to stay with a family of 3 Gerardo- the father, Angélica- the mother, and Jéssica- the daughter who was 10 years old.
Gerardo and I Angélica
Jéssica below
I got along with my family wonderfully. They were really happy that I could speak Spanish with them. They have had other students stay with them in the past who barely spoke Spanish, and since they don't speak English at all, they had a hard time communicating. We had fun sharing about our lives and getting to know each other. They were extremely compassionate people, some of the nicest people I could ever hope to meet. Jéssica, the daughter, and I got along really well too. She loved to play cards with me, draw me pictures, or just show me around the town. I'm a fairly decent Spanish speaker-- I could hold normal conversations with only a few vocabulary questions, but they helped me improve my Spanish so much while I was there. Learning Spanish in school is one thing, but actually having daily conversations with native speakers is something completely different.Here's a quick tour through the house:
This was my bedroom. It isn't much bigger than the picture shows--just a bed and a tall table (that you can see the corner of) that I could set some things on. Gerardo, the father, kept bees and had beehives right outside my window so that there were constantly bees in my room (i got stung once, ouch!) but I got over it pretty quick. The bees were the least of my worries after I found several spiders the size of my hand...
This was right outside my room. Laundry-ish room. In the back you can see the sink I brushed my teeth at every night. And that's probably my laundry hanging. She handwashed laundry daily! Quite the spectacular house wife.
Here's the living room. You can see their tiny TV that barely got any reception, but they watched movies on the computer in the back a lot.
There were 2 more bedrooms and a bathroom in the house as well.
My family lived about a 30 minute walk (if you walked fast) from the main town center and the school, where I would be working. So I had a long walk to work every morning. I mostly didn't mind... It was a gorgeous walk, but because the town was so mountainous, you definitely broke a sweat.
Sugarcane plants all along the right of the first picture.
Not my house, but they all look fairly similar. Lots of bright colors! I loved it.
Unfortunately, I still have a long way to walk at this point.
A sugarcane plant along my way to work. They made the tastiest drink out of this raw sugar. Dulce con leche Mmmmm!
Here's a coffee plant. They had these growing EVERYWHERE! Most of the people working in Santa Cruz are avocado or coffee farmers and they get paid by the bag (usually) of coffee beans, so they grew as many plants as they could. Instead of having a backyard, my family had a back coffee farm. You can see the acutal coffee beans on the stem part of the bush (sorry, a little blurry). They're green now, but turn orange to bright red when they're ripe in Jan or Feb (their Summer).
Gerardo took me out to see his bees, because I asked to see. Like I said, he had a few right by the house, but he kept more out in the woods. Getting there was half the battle, but it was really fun to see his hives. This wasn't his main occupation, but he did make some money from selling the DELICIOUS fresh honey.
One of the many beehives.
But, hanging out with my host family wasn't the only thing I was there for. Ah... yes. It is time to discuss the actual work portion of my trip.
Here's the group (minus one) on the first day of work. Ah, yes. We were in for a hard 2 weeks. We had a floor about the size of a basketball court to recover with hand-mixed cement. However, that doesn't nearly cover how hard the work was. Let's go step by step.
The first step is to pick off the top layer of the old cement. This involved taking a pick-axe shovel-like tool and slamming it down repeatedly on the hard cement floor until the top layer chipped off. Needless to say, this was HORRIBLE on your hands and by the end of 6 or 7 hours of working on the first day, I could barely bend my fingers. And, we had disappointingly only covered about a fifth of the floor. We were pretty discouraged at first, but it all worked out in the end.
The second step was to paint the floor with a blue sealant (maybe the easiest of the steps). 3rd, you had to lay down metal grids, and then 4th cover them with a rough layer of cement. 5th, you had to lay down the bulk of the cement and make sure it's nice and even. And last, you had to get on your hands and knees and smooth on the thin top layer of cement with a wooden board thing. I like the next picture because it shows almost all of the steps of the process.
But the most important and taxing part of making the floor was mixing the cement itself. Hand mixing the cement. We started with 2 giant piles of sand and gravel outside the school that we had to shovel into wheel barrows to move to cement piles. Each cement pile needed 4 loads of each sand and gravel, plus a 100lb bag of cement. This then needed to be mixed dry, then shoveled into a crater-formation to be filled with water, and tediously mixed until it was the right consistency. Then, moved, again by wheelbarrow, to wherever it was needed. We made hundreds of piles probably in order to complete the entire floor. Let's just say, I definitely gained some muscle. Here's a few more pics of the process.
How did 9 girls know how to re-cement a floor you might ask? Well, we didn't really. All the while, we had 2 local residents helping and directing us, Dalio and Asdrúbal. They were wonderful and always had a smile on their face. I don't know how they put up with the 8 of us being as ill-experienced as we were for the job. Dalio was a construction worker and really was in charge of directing the work, however he didn't speak any English. Asdúrbal was definitely a lot better at laying cement than we were, but wasn´t a professional construction worker. He was there because he was one of the 2 people in Santa Cruz who spoke a little English. Though, our project leader also spoke Spanish fluently and a couple of the girls, like me, could speak some spanish. However, communication was still at times a little difficult, but we made it work.
Surprisingly enough we were able to finish the floor!! Dalio and Asdrubal didn't think we would be able to manage it, but somehow we did. We asked if we could paint our names in the corner, just so we could leave a rememberance of us, and they liked the idea so much they let us paint a huge ISV logo in the center of the floor with all of our names around it.
The whole group! Dalio on the left, Asdrúbal on the very right, and all 9 of us in the middle.Working on the floor was really hard work, but it was really rewarding. While we were working on it, the kids were actually still in school and were constantly coming to see how we were doing on it. Lots of people from around the town would come and volunteer their time to help us out. I really think that they truely appreciate all of our hard work. And, part of the ISV program cost went to pay for part of the supplies used in the construction. So, we were able to help them out both by volunteering our time to build it and in the overhead cost of building the floor itself.
We worked from 7am-2pm every day on the floor, so we had every night open. We decided to use this time constructively and hold English lessons for whoever wanted to come at night. These were really, really fun and mostly school kids attended, but some parents as well. The students have been learning some English in school, but they didn't have a very good teacher until recently. So, they had some basic English phrases, but definitely still had a lot to learn. They were really excited to learn (I mean, these students did volunteer their free time to come learn... that's pretty big for 10 year old) and we made sure to make it really fun. Teaching was probably my favorite part of being in Costa Rica. I loved working with the kids.
Teaching English didn't take up the whole evening though. We had lots of time to spend with our families, or learn about the town. We also had meetings with our group to discuss what we had learned and to discuss the differences between living a life in Santa Cruz vs. living wherever home was (most girls were from the US, but there was a girl from NE Canada and a girl from England). We got to learn how to cook some Costa Rican dishes, about the local coffee production, where the town's water came from, what a passionfruit actually looks like, how to dance, amongst countless other things. I really learned a lot while I was there that broadened my view on life. I'd try and explain them better, but this is already going to be long enough I think :) Let's just say they kept us busy.
We fished for our dinner and had it cooked for us at a local restaurant.
Lindsay trying to eat a Passion Fruit and Jenny and Mary below a huge plant up by were the town gets their water.
After the first 2 weeks were over, I still wasn't ready to leave. I had bonded with so many people in the town in the short time I was there. It really was amazing how many different people I met. It was definitely really sad to leave, but I was ready to go have fun and explore Costa Rica for the next 2 weeks.
My Costa Rican family and I The 9 of us girls
Just a cute picture of Jéssica again.
THE ADVENTURE TOUR!
After a sad but fun goodbye party, we rode the buses back to the first hotel we stayed in back in the San José area and met back up with all of the other students. 80 people is too much to travel with, so they split us up into 2 groups of about 40 people each. We had to say goodbye to our Project Leader (she had to go lead other projects) and our group was assigned a tour leader who was an awesome guy named Daniel who was a local and knew the answer to almost every question asked of him about his country. He was a spectacular tour leader. We were given our own private buses this time to take us on our tour around the country. No more public transportation! (Though, sitting on a bus for 3-6 hours, no matter public or private, is never fun...).
Some of the girls from myproject group on the bus
Here's a map of the path we took around the country.
Our first stop was the BEAUTIFUL Playa Ocotal (Ocotal Beach) on the Pacific side of the country. It was a 5 star luxurious resort with beautiful beaches and much warmer weather. It was wonderful to lay on the beach and swim in the warm ocean water after mixing cement for 2 weeks. We definitely had fun just realxing and enjoying the sun.
We also got to go snorkeling and see the beautiful marine life.
After Ocotal, we traveled to the famous Monteverde Cloud Forest up high in the central mountains. Here, we got to go on nature hikes to search for wildlife and got to go ziplining. Animals were a little shy while I was there, but I got to see monkeys, beautiful humming birds, a sloth, countless insects, beautiful birds, orchids, and probably a lot more that I'm temporairly forgetting. The landscape was, as usual, stunning.
I believe this was a spider monkey, but I was bad at telling the 4 species in CR apart. There's also capuchin monkeys, howler monkeys (which make super scary noises if you don't know what they are!), and squirrel monkeys (which I never got to see).
Me on a bridge in the cloud forest. It says the maximum capacity is 10 people for the bridge. It used to say 30 until it broke...
Beautiful hummning bird.
Me and my friend Casey hiding from the ever-present rain.
Can you find the sloth in this picture? (This picture was taken through a telescope, but our guide spotted it with his naked eye. How he found it, I have no idea.)
After Monteverde, we traveled to La Fortuna, one of the most touristy towns we visited.
The main attraction of La Fortuna is the Volcán Arenal (Which roughly translates to sand volcano). Arenal is the 2nd most active volcano in the world (number one is mano loa, the big island of hawaii). Our tour leader told us that 300 days of the year the mountain is covered by clouds so that you can't see it. However, somehow we got EXTREMELY lucky and were able to see the entire thing! In fact, we got to go see it at night without the clouds so that we could see the red lava rolling down the sides of it. SOOOO cool. I don't have a good picture of it though because the lava wouldn't show up on camera. But, I have some spectacular pictures of the mountain itself!
The view of Arenal from the city of La Fortuna. We got to do a lot of our touristy shopping here.
The view of Arenal from our hotel. It constantly has steam rising from the crater due to the volcanic activity. We definitely got to hear some loud BOOMS from the mountain and see some exciting bursts of smoke. So awesome for a geology nerd like myself.
We also got to zipline again in La Fortuna, with an added rapel down a waterfall. Zipling, for those who don't know exactly, is where you hang from wire lines that are strung up between platforms in the trees and quickly zoom down with an awesome aerial view of the forest around you. It sounds scary, but it really wasn't that bad. Mostly pure fun.
Wooo!Ziplining, however, was nothing compared to our 80 meter waterfall rappel.
You start getting hooked up on a platform HIGH above the ground. Watching others go first wasn't necessairly reassuring to my jittery nerves.
(this is my friend Lindsay, not me)
Then, after you got the guts to step off (or they pushed you off..haha) you slowly lowered yourself through a free-fall for about 100 feet before you got to put your feet on the side of the cliff and climb down another 200 or so feet.
Doesn't look scary enough yet?
No? Still not?
Try that. The picture doesn't even do it justice. It was a huuuuge cliff. There was also a really nice waterfall that we were rappelling by over to the right, but you can't see it in this picture.
Note the ladder on the right side that you had to climb to get back up. Let me just say that after a terrifying rappel down a cliff, the only thing that is MORE scary is climbing a chain ladder back up to the top. We had a 'security line' in case we fell, but I wouldn't have completely trusted it. My arms were so tired by the time I finally reached the top again. Rappelling down that waterfall was one of the scariest things I have ever done! Though I might not do it again, I'm still glad I got to do it.
After La Fortuna, we traveled to the Caribbean side to the town of Tortuguero which is only accessible by boat. So, we all clamored onto a long flat motor boat and powered through the swampy river channels of the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. We arrived at a beautiful bungalow-type resort that was really relaxing, quiet, and peaceful. In Tortuguero we got to see the ocean again, though we couldn't swim in the Atlantic because tides were much more dangerous as well as more shark-like fish. Wanting to not drown and keep all my fingers and toes, I decided to stay on the sand. We also got to take a couple tours of the canals in kayaks and motor boats. I got to see some caemen, turtles, parrots, tucans, bats, iguanas, plenty of monkeys, and many other animals. However, because here the terrain was low elevation and swampy, it was HOT! (but I was ready for the hot!).
Tortuguero is famous for its Sea Turtle population, so we got to learn a lot about the endangered species there. Several of the volunteer groups worked with sea turtle protection, so they were already pretty familiar. But, those who had cement floors to make instead of sea turtles to save got to enjoy learning about the amazing turtles.
After Tortuguero, we were to travel to Selva Bananito- an eco-lodge buried in the jungle of the south-eastern side of Costa Rica. The eco-lodge was only accessible by an hour long, slightly unpleasant tractor ride. After a crazy enterance, we arrived at small 4 person cabins complete with mosiquito netting, hammock
s, and beds.
They were pretty cozy, but without electricity. All of the wood to make the buildings was either recycled or found naturally fallen in the jungle, they used recycled rainwater for showers and drinking, had organic farms-- everything was quite ecologically conscious. It was pretty cool to experience. We got to take a fun horseback ride through the overgrown banana plantation with poison dart frogs jumping around the horses feet, visit a lovely ginger garden, and swim in a small reservoir. Gorgeous.
Below is a beautiful ginger plant
That was really fun. We also were taken on a guided hike through the very extreme think jungle. It seemed almost everything there could potentially kill you. There were the bullet ants the size of your thumb that were named bullet ants for a reason- their bites supposedly felt like being shot. The army ants, who held vicious paths through the forest and would start to attack anything in its way, the peccarie, mean wild pigs who, in the past, kept our guide up a tree for hours (we smelled the peccarrie and saw their tracks towards the end of the trip), numerous biting insects and spiders, nettled trees.... I walked through that jungle clutching every single part of me not touching a single thing. A little unnerving. But, all was fine.
The view of the jungle before we entered.
Our guide showed us the kerosene tree. He took his pocket knife and made a cut in the bark of the tree, then lit the sap on fire! Really cool. And put out safely, of course :)
This was called a monkey ladder. Just a cool bit o' tree.
And me killin' it in the jungle. Or trying not to be killed....
After out intense hike and horserides, we were ready to relax on our hammocks.
After Selva Bananito, we were off to our last 'stop' the Río Pacuare. We would spend 3 days along the river white water rafting and climbing up waterfall. An excellent end to an excellent trip.
(Some of the next pictures were taken by professionals, lest you be confused by my ability to be in 2 places at once and still have a dry camera).
Jonathon, our guide in the back, Michelle, Jenny, me, and Lindsay in the left picture.
Don't worry. We never flipped over. Just got a little flooded.....
The lodge we stayed in for 2 nights along the beautiful Pacuare river.
Plenty of waterfalls.
We rafted into the lodge the first day and spent 2 nights there. The 2nd day, we didn't raft, but instead hiked up a river in the canyon sliding down watefalls and swimming in amazing, cool, refreshing pools. Ahhh. I want to be back there.
We worked a little too, though. We got to cook!
Then the next day we rafted out! The Pacuare river is rated one of the top white water rafting rivers in the world due to saftey, quality of rapids, climate, and scenery. It was gorgeous and so much fun! We got to do up to class 4 rapids, which is fairly decent. Keeps you on your toes.
All done!!!
And so concluded my adventure to Costa Rica. After rafting, we packed back up in a bus and traveled back to the San José area to stay our last night in Costa Rica back in the same hotel in which we had spent our first night. Goodbyes were incredibly hard- especially for the now tight-knit project groups, but everyone was ready (in some ways- not all!) to go home.
