tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17765846802376836472024-03-05T11:48:41.608-08:00Strange CrossingUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-77096924701601625612011-04-23T20:34:00.000-07:002011-04-23T20:34:57.682-07:00We've moved!I have moved the Strangecrossing blog from Blogger over to Wordpress. <b>You can now find new Strange Crossing posts at <a href="https://strangecrossing.wordpress.com/">https://strangecrossing.wordpress.com</a></b>. All old posts and comments (everything originally posted here on blogger) have been imported into Wordpress, so if you want to read or comment, please do so there, not here!<br />
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This site will no longer be updated, and comments to posts here will no longer be moterated/approved.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-31636994915831297172009-04-27T11:54:00.000-07:002011-01-14T01:59:07.369-08:00İEso Es!<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As I begin to write this, my stomach is digesting the unfortunate beef sandwich I had to walk to the back of the airplane cabin to get, after sleeping through the passing of the meal cart. The bland yellow dessert that accompanied it, I think an attempt at lemon meringue, was a far cry from the one Alba, my friend's host mom, had made on Wednesday for the end of semester host family banquet.<br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If I do actually have any regular readers, I apologize to you for not posting in a while. If blogging has a cardinal sin, It's got to be getting so far behind in writing that thinking about all the stories you should have told becomes a bigger mental block to writing than whatever kept you from writing in the first place. I stopped writing because school got really overwhelming for a time, and am only now getting around to catching up.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
And I <i>have </i><span style="font-style: normal;">been really busy: the last few weeks included making a video about a local farmer to display at the weekly farmers' market, doing a massive lab on local water health as compared to land use and deforestation, performing an oral history project about a fifty year old Scrabble guide book one of the original Quaker settlers made by hand by sifting through her unabridged dictionary, and reading and translating studies performed by Institute students over the last fifteen years to make a booklet – in Spanish – that documents the studies for distribution among the twenty or so farmers who have year after year allowed students to perform experiments on their land without ever having seen the results of those tests, the </span><i>caferos</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (coffee farmers) of the Santa Elena Coffee Cooperative, and anyone else in the zone who interested in the research. </span> </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
Add on to that room draw, class registration, finishing my thesis proposal, and campaigning to be president of the Goucher Student Government Association from abroad, and it becomes pretty obvious why my better habits from the first half of the semester (doing yoga, teaching myself how to play guitar, going to sleep early, and writing in my blog) have gone to the wayside.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3481076174/" title="IMG_0476 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0476" height="300" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3415/3481076174_f09d22fc71_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The social tension I mentioned in my last post, which had been at a high around Spring Break, has long since dissipated, and everyone in the group, practically without exception, seemed to enjoy each other's company for the second half of the semester. I think there is something about pilot programs that has a tendency to produce amazing group dynamics; I'm not sure whether it's the type of people who are willing to risk a new program without assurances of what to expect, the environment of the pilot itself that induces a sort of open mindedness and willingness to go with the flow, or something else entirely. Either way, this group of twenty three has been really remarkable, both in intelligence and excitement about our projects as well as the ability to always find time for fun, be it playing twenty questions on long bus rides, joking with the bartender at Moon Shiva (the bar we frequent), or breaking out into rousing choruses of Beatles songs or “Build me up buttercup” as we work away the night by the light of our laptop screens at the Institute.<br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The semester has ended, and due to an amazing confluence of circumstances (a whole lot of friends graduating in May, Student Government elections, David Plouffe speaking at Goucher, dirt cheap plane tickets, and a possible White House tour) I'm on my way back to Baltimore for a week before returning to Costa Rica to do independent research. It has been an absolute pleasure spending so much time with this group of people, and while it doesn't need proving, the many tears shed over the last few days have definitely shown how much we are going to miss each other as we go our separate ways.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3481076354/" title="IMG_0482 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0482" height="300" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3325/3481076354_9f0dcd0555_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">We spent the beginning of this week presenting a wide range of projects to a surprisingly large number of people from the local community at our two-day final symposium. The presentations were awesome: almost always interesting and useful to both the students and the audience. Unfortunately, after giving two out of three presentations in Spanish (one on about 5 minutes' notice when the Institute's new simultaneous translation equipment didn't work) and getting only two and a half hours of sleep on Monday night, I spent much of Tuesday afternoon sleeping in the library instead of listening to my friends present.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3481092344/" title="IMG_0526 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0526" height="300" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3640/3481092344_34c5ede234_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">For our “Development and Social Change in Costa Rica” course, we presented oral histories of local items of material culture, included a 100 meter long tunnel that had been used 30 years ago to bring water under a hill to Monteverde's first electric generator, a massive wooden mortar and pestle called a </span><i>metate</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, used before mechanized versions existed to remove coffee fruits from their outer shells, and Hillary's and my old Scrabble guide. </span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span> </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Student in the “Field Methods in Tropical Ecology” class presented experiments on firefly mating, strangler fig soil content, and butterfly diversity, (Emma and I went overtime trying to explain all the results of our macroinvertebrate communities and land use experiment) while those in the anthropology course presented works on informal food exchange networks, cigarette culture, and raw milk trade.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;">Finally, presentations for our Environmental Sustainability class stretched from project proposals suggesting that the Institute create a permaculture garden and build two composting toilets to a research project about biodigesters, a documentary video about CO2 emissions and personal automobile use in the Monteverde area, and Sarah's and my </span><i>Cosecha de Cienca </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(Harvest of Science) book documenting fifteen experiments about shade-grown coffee, organic fungicides, and biodiversity protection on farms.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3481092938/" title="IMG_0534 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0534" height="300" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3570/3481092938_f1fded8a8f_o.jpg" width="400" /><br />
</a><span style="color: #000099; font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Elise, me, Emma, and Erin on the caminata (walkathon) fundraiser for the Monteverde Friends School. Volcan Arenal is behind us.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #000099; font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span></span><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">After the presentations on Tuesday, one of our professors stood up to make closing remarks. Pati, our extremely well-loved, absolutely insane, enthusiastic about everything but especially insects, sing alongs, and homemade documentaries, mother of a toddler, Ecuadorian resident-ecologist and professor began to recount when she first met us in San Jose, a day or two after our arrival in January. “One hundred and ten days ago, <i>hace ciento y dies dias...</i><span style="font-style: normal;">” </span><br />
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span> </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I am not the kind of writer who can put words to those feelings and emotions, for fear that doing so (and even writing this) will come off as cheesy and shallow. What followed was a bilingual thank-you-fest, with each of our professors and Janelle, the executive director of the Monteverde Institute, standing up and saying a few words about how amazing the last three months have been, flowing back and forth between English and Spanish without thought. After they took their turns, I stood up to attempt to thank them on behalf of the group, who become for us so much more than just professors. Usually impervious to tears, I felt my voice crack as I tried to find the words to thank them for being our mother-away-from home (Lynn), our motivators, and our therapists, as well as amazing professors.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
The next evening (Tuesday night we had a bonfire at Anibal's house and then a party thrown for us at Moon Shiva – we had been a substantial portion of their client base since we arrived in January) the Institute threw a banquet party for all of the host families who had taken us in, and for the first time I was struck by how much of an impact we had been making on the community. We've always known Santa Elena was was a small place – each of our host families was related to or good friends with at least a half dozen others' – but seeing the 150 people who had fed us and packed our lunches and washed our clothes and taught us Spanish all in one place talking and joking with each other for the first time since the day we arrived was startling.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
After the meal, Anibal brought out two Piñatas: the first was for all the host families' kids, and the second was for us, the soon to pack their bags students. All hell broke lose as kids and older kids alike made fools of themselves, nearly lopping off heads with the broomstick as they swung blindfolded at the piñata and the entire crowd cheered them on, yelling directions in Spanish and English simultaneously. <i>“Abajo! Abajo! To your left! A su derecha! Izquierda, izquierda! Atras! Behind you! Eso es!”</i></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
I was hit by this overwhelming sense of how lucky I, and we all, are to be able to participate in such a program and be so lovingly accepted into such a wonderful community. Even though the person standing next to me spoke English, I automatically went to translate that feeling into Spanish, but could not for the life of me remember the word “<i><span style="text-decoration: none;">suerte,” </span></i><span style="text-decoration: none;">“luck.” So I did what anyone surrounded by a new language learns to do so well: I figured out how to say it in different words.</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">“</span><i>Tengo mas que debo tener.</i>” “I have more than I deserve to have.”</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-43983261525291272212009-03-22T11:58:00.000-07:002009-03-22T12:29:40.622-07:00excerptsLike my last post, lots of short stories. Hopefully another full post is coming soon. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>1. I like chocolate now.</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Whhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? I know. I don't even know what to do or where to begin. I have so many years to catch up from.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Ok, Parents – I know you're reading this. Take a deep breath. I AM ACTUALLY YOUR CHILD. There is no more question about it. I feel like I finally joined the family I've just been pretending to be a part of for the last 21 years.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Can I say it again? I think I like chocolate. Weird.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It all started about three weeks ago, the week before our Spring Break. Lynn, our anthropology professor, is also a star baker and has baked a cake of some sort for every birthday thus far on the program. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It was Haeinn's birthday, and Lynn baked an oatmeal chocolate chip cake. After singing, we're all standing around talking and a piece of the cake gets placed in my hands. I didn't want to be rude, and telling people that yes, I really don't like chocolate has gotten pretty tiring after a decade and a half, so I said thank you and graciously accepted the slice. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I took a nibble, and realized that <i>I didn't hate it</i>. I took another one, trying to break the one-chew-avoid-the-tongue-and-swallow habit I have had so long to build up, and the damn thing wasn't that bad. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I asked Lynn – It didn't have too much chocolate, she said. I chalked it up to her amazing baking ability and moved on. In hindsight, though, that cake played a pretty important role in my life. So, mom, if you're looking to make me a homecoming surprise:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cake</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">1-3/4 cups boiling water</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">1 cup oatmeal, uncooked</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">1 cup brown sugar, lightly packed</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">1 cup white sugar</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">2 large eggs</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">1-3/4 cups flour, unsifted</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">1 tsp. Baking soda</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">½ tsp. Salt</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">1 Tablespoon cocoa</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">12-oz package semi-sweet chocolate chips</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">¾ cups nuts, chopped</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">½ cup margarine </span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">Mix the oatmeal, margarine and sugars together. Pour in the boiling water and let stand for 10 minutes. Add the eggs and mix well. Sift the remaining dry ingredients together and add to the sugar mixture. Add about one half of the chocolate chips and mix well. Pour into a 9 x 13-inch greased and floured cake pan. Sprinkle remaining chips and nuts over the top. Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. Test by using wooden pick inserted in the center. </span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">Moist, delicious, freezes well. </span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">From </span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>Great Plains Cooking</i></span></span><span style="color: rgb(0, 71, 255);"><span style="font-size:85%;">, P.E.O. Chapter AA, Wray, Colorado</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Can you tell she's a Doctor of Anthropology? I don't think I've seen anyone cite the cookbook before.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Anyway, the real surprise came on Saturday morning of Spring Break. Jesse and Genna had borrowed Lynn's inlaws' kitchen to cook a cake for Jim, our professor who two days earlier had his laptop stolen on the bus from San Jose, and some brownies for the road trip. I had a brownie on the bus as we drove away from Monteverde, and I liked it. <i> I liked a brownie</i>. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Dave's parents are in town this week, and last night they took a couple of us out to dinner. For dessert, Quinn and I ordered a slice of chocolate torte with guava. It was the first time I have ordered chocolate in... ever. Literally, probably. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I am a new man.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>2. One Crazy Floridian</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There's a small hotel near my house with wireless internet where I go work sometimes to work on the weekends when I don't feel like walking forty five minutes to get to the Institute. The truth is, I hardly get any work done when I go there, because I spend most of my time either talking with the tourists who stay in the hotel (and, if they ask, dispensing advice about restaurants and how to make the hot water work in the shower), hanging out with Freddie and Marlene, the owners with whom I have traded a bit of tech support for occasional internet use, reading online news, or skyping with people from home.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Last Sunday, however, my unproductivity was made <i>especially </i>special by a wonderful tourist from Florida. It was her last day in Monteverde, and she had about twenty more minutes to wait for her 2:00 PM shuttle to take her down the mountain. Probably in her early fifties, she was traveling alone in the middle of a three month Costa Rica tour. She plopped down next to me, open <span style="font-style: normal;">container of boxed merlot in hand, and due to how far she tilted her head back when she drank while we spoke, the liter had to have been pretty close to finished off.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">I mentioned that I was planning a trip down to Chirripó and the Osa Peninsula, both in southwest Costa Rica, and she quickly began to tell me stories about her time on Osa. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">First, the mangroves – she said – you </span><i>must </i><span style="font-style: normal;">see the mangroves. The best way to do it is by renting a kayak and taking them out on the river, assuming you don't get lost among the meandering pathways through the ten foot tall grasses. She, however, had had no problem on her trip, because she is from Ft. Lauderdale, where there are lots of mangroves. In that part of Florida, she said while making a kayaking motion with her hands (the left still armed with the box of merlot), that's how they get around.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Second, the bug bites. Beware of the bugs on the Osa Peninsula, she told me, wear 100% DEET and rub it all over your body. She had used bug spray, but only as she did in the rest of the country – on her neck and arms and legs, the only exposed parts of her body. In Osa, though, that had not been enough. As she began to explain the consequences of her underuse of repellent, she paused. I'm not quite clear what story she had been about to tell, but all she chose instead to say was, “let's just say I got bites the size of [holds up her fingers in a circle slightly bigger than the size of a quarter] in the white places of my body I don't want to discuss.” We call </span><i>that </i><span style="font-style: normal;">good imagery.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><b>3. Quetzals & Other Birds</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHVD_O5c-7m2m2JNM_bzUBUoAHpGBW5pDtYwGDzt1Mtg_2mkwCBaruwTSgGdpYwDjyr5Xy5gc-YhiG5u5Q_jXo0AXR_5QCw2KruB7jRYToe78l4TKB_sIefUU7p1UwlZQ5_vm5ZZ59wFYb/s1600-h/panama-quetzal-2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 146px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHVD_O5c-7m2m2JNM_bzUBUoAHpGBW5pDtYwGDzt1Mtg_2mkwCBaruwTSgGdpYwDjyr5Xy5gc-YhiG5u5Q_jXo0AXR_5QCw2KruB7jRYToe78l4TKB_sIefUU7p1UwlZQ5_vm5ZZ59wFYb/s320/panama-quetzal-2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5316092679652416002" border="0" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="">I saw my first quetzal two weeks ago. And my second, third, fourth, and fifth. I hiked up behind the Institute with Michael, a guy from the States who is doing research down here, and Hillary to a tree where they are known to hang out. When we arrived, we found four males and a female eating wild avocados maybe twenty feet from us. It was amazing. The truth is, they're pretty weird birds – their heads are oddly small, they look like they have little spiked mohawks, and their long split tail feathers look like the tail of a kite. But they are </span><i><span style="">beautiful </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">birds – I can see why the quetzal has been the flagship species for about a dozen different Monteverde conservation campaigns. Here's a picture (not mine – I didn't have my camera with me), but just know that it doesn't do it justice.</span></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"> I tried to go again a few days ago, but we took a wrong turn and ended up at the house of the owner of the property where this tree sits, who kindly asked us to leave. Hopefully he'll forget me by June, so I can go again before I leave.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In general, birds here are spectacularly beautiful, even the common ones that show up everywhere. Their constant calls may be the one thing I miss most when I go back to the States. Wherever I am here, walking on any road, I can hear birds singing.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I spent a day last week sitting behind Stella's, the bakery near the Institute, taking notes on the behaviors of different species of birds at a feeder for my ecology course. In under an hour, I saw Emerald Toucanettes, Blue Crowned Mott Motts, a Great Kiskadee, and a bunch of Costa Rica's national bird, the Clay-Colored Robin.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351286107/" title="IMG_0373 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3584/3351286107_6c9a3f7b6b.jpg" width="400" height="300" alt="IMG_0373" /></a><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >A Blue crowned Mott Mott at the Stella's Bakery feeder.</span><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Also last week, I was struck as I sat in class, zoning out for a moment (or two) and hearing a bird singing immediately outside the classroom. As I compared that moment to taking the final exam in Dr. Roth's Intro to IR class my Freshman year, during which a bird repeatedly flew itself head on into the window of the classroom, I remembered just how lucky I am to be here. And it was all I could do not to laugh.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">4. Great Saturday</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Yesterday, briefly, before I go try to do homework:</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Ultimate Frisbee at the Quaker School. They do it every Saturday at noon, and usually its a good mix between "big people" and "little people" playing together. Yesterday was almost entirely little people, with one or two big people on each team. Anna, a science teacher at the Cloud Forest School, played Ultimate before she graduated from Swarthmore last year and was on the other team - we did more coaching then playing, and it was awesome. </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Tried to do homework at the Institute in the afternoon, but Katie's homestay dad and Molly's homestay brother were cutting down a tree and it fell the wrong way, into the road and onto a phone pole. The whole city lost power, phones, and internet for the afternoon, complete with a small explosion and some blue flames. We couldn't do any work, so a few of us hiked to a nearby waterfall and hung out for a while. The power was still out as we walked back, so we stopped in Stella's Bakery for pastries and cheered when their lights came back on as we ate - the guy behind the counter looked at us like we were lunatics.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Went square dancing with Elise at the Quaker meeting house, which I definitely haven't done since they forced us to in Middle School. Officially, it was English Country Dancing - I felt like I was in "The Three Muskateers" and it was great.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Good day.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-65944971322014219592009-03-13T13:54:00.000-07:002009-03-14T15:22:40.317-07:00Spring BreakWay too overwhelming for complete sentences.<br /><br /><em><strong>Palo Verde National Park</strong></em><br /><br /><a title="IMG_0090 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351239923/"><img alt="IMG_0090" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3647/3351239923_750bb8c77f.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><em>Some Holyoke girls posing (similar Goucher pics on Facebook), and the view from the top of the mountain.</em></span><br /><a title="IMG_0051 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3352064584/"><img alt="IMG_0051" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3579/3352064584_038c72608d.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><br />The first dry forest I've been to in Costa Rica. Different then the rain forest, go figure. Birding at sunrise. White faced and spider monkeys dropped unripe mangoes on us. Howler monkeys howled at each other – that was cool. A hike up the backside of a cliff to an absolutely stunning view of the marshes and river that form the top of the Gulf of Nicoya. An old pier of sorts into the marsh meant an amazing view of the sunset and a number of great photoshoots. More frogs than I have ever heard in my life that night after the sun went down. The next morning, I got up to watch what I think was my first complete sunrise ever, and an abandoned pylon of the pier served as a great yoga mat for some sun salutations.<br /><br /><a title="IMG_0034 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351237377/"><img alt="IMG_0034" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3435/3351237377_730ae314b0.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;">those are white-faced monkeys; and a sunrise.</span></em><br /><a title="IMG_0220 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351272553/"><img alt="IMG_0220" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3646/3351272553_2b684aea42_o.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><br /><em><strong>Passing into Nicaragua</strong></em><br /><br />We sat at the border for a little while and I bought some booze at a duty free shop for the first time in my life: Women with hammocks on their heads and men with boxes of pirated DVDs attacked us as we sat on the curb and a young guy (Tico or Nicaraguan, I'm not sure) greeted me by saying, “<em>Que pasa, flaco?</em>” (“What's up, skinny?”).<br /><br />We stopped at a spot along Lake Nicaragua so our professors could ask if the big bus could manage the ferry ride to Hometepe, an island with two volcanoes in the middle of the lake we were going to stay on for two nights. The three guys stripped down and jumped in the water, because it was beautiful and because we could.<br /><br />The bus couldn't make it, so we had to change plans, and a week later our professor showed us an article about how Nicaragua just got enough money to <em>start building</em> a sewage treatment plant to start cleaning the hundreds of thousands of pounds of human excrement that gets dumped into the lake every year. <em>Maybe</em>, the article said, <em>just maybe</em> in fifteen years or so the lake will be clean enough for people to swim in. Great, guys. Great.<br /><br /><strong><em>Granada</em> </strong><br /><br />...is a cool city. I've been in Monteverde now for two months, and it doesn't feel like Central America in that really stereotypical salsa-in-the-streets sort of way. Granada did. Beautiful doors, old colorful buildings, cobblestone streets filled with ox-drawn carts and old Toyotas,and a central plaza and market at the base of an old and beautiful church.<br /><br /><a title="IMG_0261 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351273683/"><img alt="IMG_0261" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3649/3351273683_b4f5e9568b.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><br />Went out to an outdoor bar called <em>Cafe Nuit</em> with a few choice people; Hillary and I danced to live salsa music (she's a great dancer), then she danced with a Nicaraguan guy who actually <em>flipped her over</em>. Who's that ice skater who just, you know, does a complete forward flip in the middle of his routine with no warning? Yeah, it was like that.<br /><br /><a title="IMG_0279 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351273919/"><img alt="IMG_0279" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3471/3351273919_89891f65d3.jpg" width="300" height="400" /></a><br /><br />The next morning I walked around the city taking pictures (Also with Hillary - her pictures are far better than mine), had my Spanish complimented by a man selling jewelry in the market, and Naila, my Spanish teacher's beautiful two year old, ate the French fries off David's plate.<br /><br /><em><strong>San Juan del Sur</strong></em><br /><br />Because our Hometepe trip was canceled due to the unfortunate length of our bus, we decided at the last minute to travel to San Juan del Sur, a classic surfer-bum beach town, but without the big waves, on the southern Pacific coast of Nicaragua. Lack of time to plan meant no hotel could fit our posse of thirty students, professors, babies (two of 'em), a nanny, and a bus driver, so we split up into five different hostels and hotels, which was great because traveling as a herd gets really tiring, really quickly.<br /><br />I used my find-good-restaurants-in-foreign-countries-with-my-nose skills (thanks, mom) to find the group a good dinner spot on the beach, as the professors were all running crazy trying to find us beds to sleep in. I got mad at my friends (and the roosters that woke me up at 5:30) and explored by myself one morning, walked the beach and found a bookstore-cafe with the best banana pancakes I think I have ever had.<br /><br />I joked with an Israeli tourist about the five words of conversational Hebrew I know on a bumpy truck ride to a beautiful stretch of beach about forty minutes north of town, then spent the afternoon boogie boarding, reading, and exploring the beach. The truck back to San Juan was packed, so Dave and I got to hang off the back for the ride home – it was great.<br /><br /><a title="IMG_0284 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351274075/"><img alt="IMG_0284" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3632/3351274075_0302f5f0d7.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;">The truck to the beach, and the beach.</span></em><br /><a title="IMG_0287 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3351274253/"><img alt="IMG_0287" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3544/3351274253_f54aac130f.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><br /><em><strong>Rendezvous</strong></em><br /><p>Like most of the group, a few friends and I got off our chartered bus in Liberias, the main bus hub in the province of Guanacaste, on the way back to Monteverde. We were to take a public bus to a beach on the Nicoya Peninsula, but first we had to find our two missing travel-buddies: </p><ul><li>Brett, Quinn's boyfriend, had flown in from Goucher for the week and had taken a bus from San Jose to Liberias that morning</li><li>Sam, a volunteer at the Institute in the middle of an amazing pre-college gap year (we bonded real fast – he was a Deputy Field Organizer for the Obama Campaign in Philly) had began his two-bus journey from Monteverde to Liberias at 5:30 AM. </li></ul><p>Brett found us within an hour of us arriving, but it took us three more hours to track down Sam, who had holed up in a coffee shop in the town center to eat cheesecake and read Gabriel Garcia Marquez.<br /><br /><em><strong>Playa Negra</strong></em> </p><p>The final stop of our Spring Break, this beach was absolutely beautiful. For less than $20 a night per person, eight of us stayed at an amazingly beautiful hotel with free breakfast, a pool out back, and the first real hot showers I've had since I left the US. </p><p><a title="IMG_0293 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3352100644/"><img alt="IMG_0293" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3564/3352100644_feceae67a4.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a></p><p>On Friday we started drinking before noon, and I never got around to sunscreening my back: I ended the day not really wanting to drink or see the sun ever again, and successfully moderated the two over the remainder of the trip. </p><p><a title="IMG_0300 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3352111334/"><img alt="IMG_0300" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3423/3352111334_0f735ece57.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;">Dave, resting on his boogie board, and the sunset on Saturday night.<br /></span></em><a title="IMG_0331 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3352111956/"><img alt="IMG_0331" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3456/3352111956_7aaae14570.jpg" width="400" height="300" /><br /></a></p><p>The next two days were filled with more boogie and body boarding, homemade guacamole, amazing milkshakes and smoothies, a failed Vodka watermelon, a beautiful sunset on the beach, and a whole bunch of social tension, which pretty much makes it THE stereotypical college spring break, more so than I thought I would ever experience. I kept looking for the hidden cameras I could have sworn were filming for the next series of <em>Real World</em>.<br /><br />-----<br /><br />Now, we're back in Monteverde. We got off the bus in Santa Elena Sunday night still wearing shorts, flip flops, and sunglasses, only to find it raining and chilly as usual. We were pretty beat up (boogie boarding and tipsy tidepooling meant cut up feet and knees for me, not to mention the sunburn, and Jesse had his own rocks-and-surf injury, although he’s been blaming his bloodied stomach on a Shuma (that’s half-puma, half-shark).<br /><br />The work load is really stepping up now that we only have six weeks of classes left (and one or two major projects in each class). That's enough for now; a few more quick stories are coming soon. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-41119886626399925112009-02-28T04:14:00.000-08:002009-03-09T10:32:05.792-07:00Humble LearningI. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">La Guaria shouldn't even count as a town. On the dirt road between Santa Elena and the Pan-American highway, it amounts to four or five houses, a pulperia, a church, and a cemetery. It's one of those towns where, by the time you realize you're in La Guaria, you aren't in La Guaria any more. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I spent last Saturday night in La Guaria, at the farm of Doña Santamaria and her daughter Sandra, a wonderful twenty three year old woman who lives in Santa Elena with her husband (the town veterinarian) and Marcos, their two year old son. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Sandra is on the <i>junta directora </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of the </span><i>feria del agricultor </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(director's committee of the local farmer's market) – I think she's in charge – and is trying to promote the Saturday morning market by recruiting more local farmers, bringing school and church groups in to perform, and increasing awareness that the market even exists among residents as well as tourists. This is the third iteration of the market in the last few years; it has started and failed twice, but attempt number three has been going for a year now. I've been a few times (usually to buy mangoes, a watermelon, or empenadas) and every time I have witnessed a steady stream of English and Spanish speakers wandering around the high school gym and buying produce from the six or so farmer's tables.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Sandra and her mom sell homemade </span><i>queso fresco </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(“fresh-” or “farmer's cheese” – un-aged cheese popular throughout Costa Rica and, I think, Central America) at the market. Her mom makes the cheese at the farm we visited, with help from her daughter a few days a week and her son, who is studying accounting in Puntarenas, on the weekends. They keep chickens, cows, two hogs, and a horse.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309941798/" title="IMG_0105 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3298/3309941798_73ccd285a2.jpg" alt="IMG_0105" height="400" width="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">After the market ended last Saturday, four of us piled into the back of the family's covered pickup truck for a bumpy, hour-long drive down the mountain. Our mission: to learn about the farm, and document some part of what they do to turn it into a three minute slide show or video, which will be aired at the </span><i>feria de agricultor</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as part of a series advertising local farming and the benefits of buying local.<br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309110297/" title="IMG_0038 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3309110297_8881a3f33a.jpg" alt="IMG_0038" height="300" width="400" /></a></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309110017/" title="IMG_0037 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3604/3309110017_8c8752b339.jpg" alt="IMG_0037" height="300" width="400" /></a><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">The family was amazingly sweet and hospitable, and they opened their home to us, fed us, and allowed us to generally get in their way for twenty four hours on very short notice, expecting nothing in return. But the weekend was extremely awkward for me, painfully so at times, as we struggled to communicate, tried really hard to not be overly obtrusive, and failed pretty miserably at actually being useful.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">The weekend was one of what our anthropology professor calls “humble learning” and was the first real cultural challenge I have experienced so far on this trip. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">II.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Maybe two kilometers past the houses and the cemetery of La Guaria, a</span> nondescript gate marked the farm entrance, and the old pickup slipped and slid a final kilometer down the steep gravel road to the farmhouse. The farm was a beautiful concoction of <i>stuff</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, piled everywhere in a this-looks-scattered-to-me-but-whoever-put-it-there-did-so-for-a-reason sort of way, exactly how I imagine my attic to look in 20 years, and how I am sure my living room will look until I get around to owning an attic.<br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309939978/" title="IMG_0070 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3607/3309939978_a3a363c148.jpg" alt="IMG_0070" height="400" width="300" /></a><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Years ago, a windstorm had blown their house down, leaving nothing but the raised wooden foundation. They have since built a new house right next to the old, so the flat wooden surface that used to be the floor has essentially become the biggest private deck in Costa Rica.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3316297534/" title="100_0459 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3428/3316297534_6aa72db231.jpg" alt="100_0459" height="400" width="300" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309112215/" title="IMG_0101 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3612/3309112215_b9747e310b.jpg" alt="IMG_0101" height="300" width="400" /></a></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">We spent the afternoon getting a tour of the farm and hearing about their chicken side-business (they buy and raise chickens, a few hundred at a time, to butcher and sell in Santa Elena). We met the cows and the horse, played with Marcos (Sandra's two year old), ate mangoes and watermelon, and walked down to their soon-to-be fish pond to watch the tail end of a beautiful sunset. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309110861/" title="IMG_0055 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3519/3309110861_d93642c3d8.jpg" alt="IMG_0055" height="300" width="400" /></a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">The bumpy, rainbow-filled ride down the mountain and the lazy evening had taken our minds off the humble learning of the morning, mainly a wonderfully botched “do I kiss you on the cheek or not?!?” greeting, halted and confusing conversation about transportation and sleeping arrangements, and attempting to rearrange and cancel our other weekend's plans (we had no idea until that morning they intended us to stay the night) without cell phones or answering machines.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309111359/" title="IMG_0073 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3552/3309111359_83d477de4d.jpg" alt="IMG_0073" height="400" width="300" /></a><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The morning, however, brought it's own host of humility-inducing moments. We woke up at seven to milk the cows, but only one of us had any real experience. Sarah's older sister owns a farm, so she did just fine. The rest of us were total beginners: Haeinn and I had milked our first cow two weeks earlier when we visited </span><a href="http://strangecrossing.blogspot.com/2009/02/this-farm-isnt-organic.html"><span style="font-style: normal;">Don Evelio's farm</span></a><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">, and Amanda, despite her repeated statements that weekend that she wanted to have a milk cow when she grew up, had never actually tried to milk one.<br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style=""><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309940830/" title="IMG_0082 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3437/3309940830_06407b46e2.jpg" alt="IMG_0082" height="300" width="400" /></a><br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">The next couple of hours involved:</span></span></p> <ul><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"> me trying in vain to coax an unruly cow into the barn, only to have it keep walking away from me as I repeatedly tried to run around behind it and not just scare it further away;</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"> Sarah, Amanda, and I all getting shat upon by the cows we were trying to milk;</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"> Marcos, with the best milk mustache I have ever seen, actually walking right up to us as we milked, sticking his empty mug between the udders and the bucket we were supposed to be filling, and drinking what little milk we could eek out straight from the cow, leaving our buckets empty; and</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"> Being absolutely sure we had gotten all the milk out of a cow there was to get, only to have Sandra or her brother Eric walk up and, while holding a conversation and looking another direction, fill up a half a bucket in two minutes.</p> </li></ul> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3309111597/" title="IMG_0076 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3654/3309111597_181975aa0a.jpg" alt="IMG_0076" height="400" width="300" /></a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Haeinn and Sarah left at around 10:30 to catch the Santa Elena-bound bus from San Jose that passes by the farm each morning, but Amanda and I had other plans. After eating breakfast with the family, and then spending an hour peeling the shrimp that would be our lunch, we went back out the farm with Sandra's mom to learn how to make cheese with the fresh milk. Being only two people was a lot less obtrusive than being four, and we got a chance to watch, ask questions, and help as she separated the curds from the whey, added a coagulant and salt to flavor the cheese, laid a cheese cloth into their one stainless steal mold (now I know where cheese cloth gets its name!), and compressed the to-be-cheese liquid into the mold.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3316298128/" title="101_0495 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3481/3316298128_474810c0f7.jpg" alt="101_0495" height="400" width="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">III.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Every time we had mentioned the notion of walking back to Santa Elena, the whole Santamaria family, as well as Sarah and Haeinn, pretty much laughed at us and called us crazy. As Amanda and I finished lunch, and realized both how hot it was at mid-day this far down the mountain and just how far down the mountain from home we actually were, we started to wonder if we were crazy, too.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3315475423/" title="101_0516 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3507/3315475423_704c130eb0.jpg" alt="101_0516" height="400" width="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">We left the house at 2:15 to start the trek. We had no map and didn't know exactly how far the walk actually was, and it didn't help that we spent the one hour drive down the day before in an enclosed camper with no windows: we had no landmarks to base our progress on. It was only one road though, and if we needed to, we could flag down the bus from Puntarenas, which would pass us at some point that afternoon.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3315471977/" title="101_0520 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3424/3315471977_9a9d76e49b.jpg" alt="101_0520" height="300" width="400" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It was amazing. The dirt road, up hill the whole time, traveled along the top of a mountain ridge; our view switched back and forth between the green San Luis Valley to our east (where we hiked </span><a href="http://strangecrossing.blogspot.com/2009/02/day-i-thought-i-killed-dog.html"><span style="font-style: normal;">a few weeks before</span></a><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">) and a crystal clear view of the Gulf of Nicoya and the Nicoya Peninsula to our west. We were passed by car after car of tourists and Ticos, some of whom gave us nods of respect (we were really far from </span></span><i><span style="">anywhere</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="">) and the rest of whom just looked at us quizzically, wondering what the hell we were doing. We were offered – and we subsequently turned down – three rides (all by Ticos, none by tourists), and when the bus from Puntarenas passed us at around 5:00, we waved it on only to see our friend Hillary stick her head out a window to say hi as the bus drove by.<br /></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style=""><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3315472395/" title="101_0522 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3493/3315472395_774575037e.jpg" alt="101_0522" height="300" width="400" /></a><br /></span></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">In between what we think was almost twenty kilometers of good conversation and repeatedly gaping with awe at the overwhelming beauty that surrounded us, I spent the hike struck a pervasive spirit of fulfillment. I have spent the last five or six years noticing with envy travelers who were, in my book, doing it right: the French tourist I met in the Desolation Wilderness in California a few years ago, backpacking solo with a towel as a sleeping pad and apples and bananas for all his meals; the older couple Ben and I ran into in a Bryce Canyon, Utah campground last summer, on the last leg of their circular, eight week nationwide road trip and National Park tour; and the groups of two or three young people I see everywhere traveling their way, walking across Europe, biking across the US, or flying to Costa Rica to surf and take yoga lessons. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">This was finally me. Twenty three may be a small number of people to go to school with, but it's a huge number to travel with, and this program has reminded me how much I dislike group travel and how hard it is experience a place from the window of a tour bus. It was just an afternoon, but it was the epitome of how I want to travel, both here in Costa Rica and in the future.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3315472955/" title="101_0531 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3345/3315472955_872642ae30.jpg" alt="101_0531" height="300" width="400" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">---</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">When I publish this post, it will be early Saturday morning, the first day of our Spring Break. We're off to see our first Costa Rican dry forest and an artisan community frequented by one of our professors, then Nicaragua for two days and back to Costa Rica for a few days on the beach. More here in a few weeks.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-78318541671003567652009-02-24T11:01:00.000-08:002009-02-24T11:26:52.452-08:00Feliz día de San Valentín<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm horrible at keeping secrets, which made the first two weeks of February incredibly hard for me. In our group of twenty three there are three guys; a Valentine's Day surprise was Jesse's idea to start with, but David and I caught on right away. This was not something we could half-ass: if we were going to do something, it had to be over the top.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3288853794/" title="IMG_0657 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3208/3288853794_cf48a9ba96.jpg" alt="IMG_0657" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As if Anibal, or program coordinator, had known about our plans before we did, an overnight had been planned for the night before Valentine's Day.Our entire group would be hiking down an extremely muddy path into the Bosque Eterno de los Niños to spend a night at the San Gerardo Biological Station, a rustic two-story building two miles into the forest. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292166293/" title="IMG_0684 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3390/3292166293_fa9be6af13.jpg" alt="IMG_0684" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The hike in was beautiful, and the sun was just coming out after a few weeks of heavy rain. A few parts were a little dicey – a couple of people wiped out in the mud, while the rest of us had a number of close encounters. We walked slowly, stopping to check out nifty plants, a massive swarm of army ants, and a crazy millipede (did you know they secrete natural cyanide?), among other things. When we stopped to eat lunch, we counted monarch butterflies migrating past us on their extremely windy journey east – the cross-Costa Rica journey is impressive considering that on windy mornings I can barely keep my feet on the ground as I walk 1.5 mi to school, but not so amazing considering that some monarchs have been known to cross the Atlantic ocean as a part of their seasonal migration.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3288035427/" title="IMG_0653 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3645/3288035427_91126f8992.jpg" alt="IMG_0653" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We were led by an exuberant British guide named Mark Wainwright, who has lived in Monteverde for ten years as an illustrator and a naturalist, working with scientists in the area illustrate field guides of birds, amphibians, and mammals, researching amphibian extinctions, and leading tours for people like us. Listening to him and talking to him, content aside, was amazing and fulfilling for two reasons – he not only speaks passionately about science but has the unique and enviable ability to talk about scientific concepts and findings in English instead of whatever language most scientists like talk about them in. Even cooler, he radiated the presence of someone who was unabashedly doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life, while making enough in the process to get by. In the words of the principal of my first high school, he was lucky enough to have his <i>job</i> (day-job) and his <i>work </i>(life-work) be the same thing. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292170197/" title="mark rocks. by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3542/3292170197_1ba6b64718.jpg" alt="mark rocks." width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Did I mention that Mark has the ability to make things spontaneously appear? Yeah, make that reason number three: on a night hike through the woods that Friday, he pulled firefly larvae (5mm long worms that emit a tiny glow that turns on and off like Morse Code) and a nocturnal cricket with 8 inch long antennae out of thin air, and then walked twenty meters up a creek bed, reappearing with a tiny colorful frog no bigger than my thumb. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292170397/" title="macro mode. by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3636/3292170397_8c5b99f407.jpg" alt="macro mode." width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3288849818/" title="IMG_0636 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3595/3288849818_dc159fa46e_o.jpg" alt="IMG_0636" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">By Saturday morning, Jesse, David, and I were ready to go: we had spent Wednesday and Thursday night making twenty hand-made Valentines (and drinking excessive amounts of beer), and the twenty roses, three boutonnières, and sixty chocolate truffles had been quietly tucked onto the back of the four-wheeler that carried our weekend's supply of food to the Station. Jesse and I had visited the two thrift stores in town (called “Ropa Americana” in Costa Rica: who knew that store owners throughout Central and South America could buy old clothes given away by people in the US...by the kilo?) and bought collared shirts and tuxedo vests, Jesse had carried in his fully-charged computer (there was no electricity that morning) with a Valentine's Day playlist made for the occasion, and I had hiked in with a carefully rolled and painstakingly hand-made sign for the occasion:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292166861/" title="bed and breakfast by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3502/3292166861_5ca747f88f.jpg" alt="bed and breakfast" width="400" height="300" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>In an attempt to market authenticity, the sign outside of almost every small restaurant in Santa Elena says "Typical Food" at the bottom, except I had no idea there were that many different ways to misspell "typical."</i></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292987802/" title="trying to wake up by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3324/3292987802_618784caea.jpg" alt="trying to wake up" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We got up at 5:30 to set everything up and start cooking. Unfortunately, the heart-shaped pancakes idea failed pretty miserably, but with a lot of help from Anibal and the family who runs the Station, the breakfast itself turned was great. We avoided the kitchen, instead locking the girls upstairs as we set the table with the cards, roses, and chocolates. And that was that... they came downstairs and we served them breakfast. They were pretty surprised, especially after we had spent the last week being totally disinterested in their secret Valentine exchange that had happened the previous day. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292988108/" title="table set by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3522/3292988108_54d14c7d9b.jpg" alt="table set" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">After breakfast and another hike through the woods – we saw an Ornate Hawk Eagle (really rare – the first one Mark had ever seen) and what Mark claimed was a Puma track, but just looked to me like a pile of ruffled leaves – we were given the option of hiking out at our own pace. Amanda, Abby, Hillary and I gobbled down lunch and bolted immediately, giving us time to explore the small trail that we remembered splitting off from the main one, marked by a small sign that said nothing else but “catarata” (“waterfall”).</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292170593/" title="canopy by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3548/3292170593_d809c7cfe6.jpg" alt="canopy" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As we hiked in, I remember Amanda saying that she wouldn't be surprised to find Jesse, who had been the only person to get out before us (he has a tendency to sneak off without telling anyone), sitting at the top of the waterfall meditating. Twenty minutes later, we stumble upon one of the most hidden, idyllic-beautiful-indescribable-in-words-or-pictures scenes I have ever seen in my life. And Jesse did not disappoint: he had just beaten us to the base of the waterfall, and a few minutes later he fulfilled Amanda's prophecy (we all followed him up to the top right after I took this picture):</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292174803/" title="bodhisattva by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3532/3292174803_8dbd7a839d.jpg" alt="bodhisattva" width="375" height="500" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">After sitting at the top of the waterfall and wading in the water at its base for a while, we hiked back out and ran into Mark, the last one to leave the Station, when we reached the main trail. It was perfect: I had been hoping for a chance to talk to him all weekend, and as we hiked up the muddy hillside, I got to ask him about his life (he has an eight year old son and moved to Monteverde on a whim after college, a year after spending a semester in Costa Rica studying abroad). We talked about sustainability, American politics, and Barack Obama (go figure...), and I am proud to say that not once did I mention working for the campaign – ever since the inauguration I have been trying really hard to not make campaign stories every other thing that comes out of my mouth.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292173221/" title="so good. by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3291/3292173221_4a604f6cd5.jpg" width="400" height="300" alt="so good." /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Anyway, we made it back up in no time to meet up with the rest of the group at the trailhead. That day was the most beautiful and enjoyable I have had in a long time; to make it even better, I'm pretty sure my boots have never been that muddy in my life. At some point in the few days before Valentine's Day, I remember hearing Elise mention that her favorite question to ask at dinner parties is, “where is the most interesting place the shoes you are wearing right now have been?”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> One day, I hope someone asks me that – until then, I'll be wearing my hiking boots to every dinner party I go to.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.2in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292176797/" title="it was muddy by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3619/3292176797_001116d86f.jpg" alt="it was muddy" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3292997058/" title="the catarata crew by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3450/3292997058_b12d7060f0.jpg" alt="the catarata crew" width="400" height="300" /></a></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-638235926335340512009-02-15T11:29:00.000-08:002010-06-03T21:35:53.295-07:00This farm isn't organic.Imagine following this daily schedule:<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">4:30 – wake up<br />
4:30-8:30 – milk your cows<br />
8:30-9:00 – drink coffee, eat breakfast<br />
9:00-12:00 – prepare feed for cows, feed them, tend your small farm<br />
12:00-1:00 – eat lunch, drink more coffee<br />
1:00-3:00 – care for other farm animals: goats, chickens, and the horse<br />
3:00-5:00 – milk your cows again<br />
5:00-6:00 – eat dinner<br />
7:00 – go to sleep</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
This is the schedule of Don Evelio Vargas, the dairy farmer we met two Fridays ago. He showed us his seven hectare farm, on which live seventeen cows, four calves, a few goats, a few chickens, and one very important horse. He follows this routine every day of the week, all year long, and has been for the last twenty eight years. When his two kids were young, he would carry them out with him to the barn in the mornings, and they would sleep next to him as he milked the cows; his son could milk as well as he could by the time he was four. He keeps a small garden, uses worms to convert cow dung into fertilizer, and speaks with a sense pride about his land and his work so obvious that you don't need to speak Spanish to understand.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264700888/" title="windswept by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="windswept" height="300" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/246/3264700888_9331680ae9_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
His farm is absolutely beautiful. Green and hilly, live fences and clumps of original-growth forest divide the farm into 27 grazing paddocks and serve as windbreaks to protect the cows, his crops, and the land itself from the winds that could probably, in the absence of the trees, tip cows with no human intervention. And, like many small farmers in Monteverde (and, I hope, many small farmers in the world) his farm is “sustainable,” “organic,” and “hormone free;” except he has only been using those words for the last few years.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264685892/" title="IMG_0548 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0548" height="300" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/254/3264685892_6293270c0a_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm no farmer: the time I have spent on farms in the last month (two or three cumulative days) has been just about as much as I ever have in my life. From my city-boy perspective, the concept of buzz-words like “organic” and “fair trade” make a lot of sense, especially when products with those labels are compared to the rest of what you can buy at Safeway or the grocery section of Walmart. So much of the produce we eat in the US (and most cities worldwide, I suppose) is grown unsustainably that the need to distinguish food that is healthy, for the soil it is grown in as well as the people who eat it, from the food that isn't is pretty clear.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264686712/" title="IMG_0551 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0551" height="300" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/240/3264686712_45fbeebddc_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What do these words mean to people like Don Evelio? He isn't “farming organically” or producing “hormone-free milk,” he just runs his farm like his dad did. His cows are fed a combination of grass, sugar cane, and molasses because it produces the best milk, not because corn-fed cows are bad. The cows rotate through the 27 paddocks, spending one day on each at a time, allowing the grasses to regrow not because free-range cows are better but because it keeps the cows and the land healthy, and it has for the last two and a half decades.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263860833/" title="IMG_0552 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0552" height="300" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3522/3263860833_f96e7e63ff_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Like so many small farmers, his farm is organic because that's how he was taught; his farm is sustainable because he doesn't have seven more hectares to move on to if he screws up the seven he's got; and his farm is spray-, pesticide-, and hormone-free because, for the most part, it's his wife and his kids who eat the food that comes out of his garden.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">(In Don Evelio's case, there is one exception: as a shareholder of and producer for the Monteverde Cheese Factory, a corporation owned almost entirely by 230 local dairy farmers, he knows that if he delivers milk to the factory that has even a trace of antibiotics or artificial growth hormones, he will be fined and put on probation for a month.</span><i>)</i></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263870721/" title="IMG_0577 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0577" height="400" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/253/3263870721_54a2156ed5.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">These “green” buzzwords are our way of attempting to define a difference between the enduring reality of horrible agricultural practices that have existed in the United States for the better part of a century and an idealized vision of a more connected, more responsible, and healthier agricultural process. For people like Don Evelio, who already practice that vision, these words used to carry little meaning.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264684728/" title="IMG_0545 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0545" height="300" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/252/3264684728_b4a393b612.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
But that's changing.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
What meaning these words have stem mostly from American influence. Don Evelio may label his produce “todo orgánico” to lure the foreign tourists who buy food from at the Santa Elena farmer's market to his stand, just like the Santa Elena Coffee Cooperative (which I <a href="http://strangecrossing.blogspot.com/2009/02/la-finca-de-don-victor.html">blogged about last week</a>), which has paid the hefty fees to put the official “organic” and “fair trade” logos on their exported products so they fetch a higher price.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263873619/" title="IMG_0581 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0581" height="300" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/197/3263873619_bfc98a0472_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">More, these imported labels serve as distinctions from imported products and practices. Don Evelio might call his farm a “finca sostenible” to distinguish his farm from the massive plantations in the Central Valley run by American-owned agricultural behemoths. Additionally, he makes sure to keep his milk hormone- and antibiotic-free (additives imported from the US) so that he isn't put on probation by the Cheese Factory, a company founded by the American Quakers who settled in Monteverde in the 1950's. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">These words are still just words. Sometimes they are abused, like that massive monoculture of a <a href="http://strangecrossing.blogspot.com/2009/01/pineapple-man-is-flirting-with-me.html">Pineapple plantation</a> we visited our first week here that somehow pulled off official United States Department of Agriculture “Organic” certification. In most cases, the words themselves don't have a big effect on the producers themselves: people like Don Evelio will continue to farm sustainably with or without the label, and corporations like the Standard Fruit Company will continue to be short-sighted and profit-driven even if the “organic” label comes with a few pesky obligations.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263869145/" title="IMG_0570 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img alt="IMG_0570" height="400" src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/189/3263869145_47d3368944.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">Yeah, that's me milking a cow.</span></span> <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
I guess my point is that it's not the word that is important; it never has been. It's the culture of respect and comprehension that everything is very literally connected to everything else that is so essential: what we feed ourselves affects how (un)healthy we become, how we treat the animals we eat affects the quality of what we eventually consume, and how I work my land very directly controls how my children will be able use it when I'm gone. </div><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span> <br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
Don Evelio does not live an easy life. I don't envy him. But we can all learn a lesson from people who live like he does. My professor's partner is a birder, naturalist, and wood carver. A few weeks ago, during a guest lecture about bird identification, he said of their one-year-old son: he will understand how many things live in, on, and around trees, and because of that he will never cut down even an acre of forest.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
May it be so, for all of us.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-54861624100339876082009-02-12T09:40:00.000-08:002009-02-12T09:58:31.709-08:00Steven Seagal and Costa Rican CakeI was watching TV last night with my host family, and on the news was none other than Steven Seagal, who is visiting Costa Rica right now. He got an audience with Oscar Arias, the President of Costa Rica, and took up about 10 minutes on the 7 o'clock news. If Walter Centeno, the star midfielder of Saprissa, the kick-ass Costa Rican soccer team, visited the States, he wouldn't make the news or get an audience with the President. Just another one of those power things that reminds me how lopsided the world is. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It also occurred to me that I haven't written any <i>blog posts</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> on my blog yet – just thrown lots of essays and stories at you. So maybe I should back up a little bit.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263759179/" title="IMG_0513 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3416/3263759179_a91d956fed_o.jpg" width="400" height="300" alt="IMG_0513" /></a><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">I've been here a month now – almost four weeks in Monteverde, on top of the first week we spent in San Jose, the lowlands rainforest at Tirimbina, and Fortuna, where lake Arenal and the Arenal volcano are. I live with a great host family in Santa Elena, a town of about 4,000 where everyone is related to everyone.<br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">My host parents, Elida y Eloy, are in their early seventies – more like my host grandparents. Eloy does some work on local farms depending on the day and the season, but otherwise tinkers around the house. Elida knits like it's nothing (purses and hats with her eyes closed) and cooks for the family, which takes up a solid portion of the day when you're working with a two burner stove connected to a portable propane tank, a microwave, and only two or three pots and pans. They have four sons, mostly in the forties, all of whom live and work on a farm in Upala, a town in the northern flatlands of Costa Rica, close to the border with Nicaragua. One of Elida's and Eloy's grandchildren, Bryan, has lived with them since he was three, when his parents got divorced. He's 14, and he's totally the cool kid – short spiked hair and Adidas and Puma track jackets all the time. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3267235247/" title="DSC_0184.JPG by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3520/3267235247_8b1e830ee7.jpg" width="400" height="265" alt="DSC_0184.JPG" /></a><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Bryan is a great translator – he helps my host parents figure out what I'm trying to say in Spanish, and explains to me some of what my host parents say in simpler Spanish. He's also a good translator of culture, and I'm not talking about mine: every night as they watch TV, he's explaining the facets of Costa Rican youth culture broadcast over the airways: reality TV shows, dubbed Simpsons episodes, and the most recent episode of </span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman, serif;"><i>¿</i></span><i>Quien Quiere Ser Millionario? </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to his grandparents, and to me.</span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">This is such a different experience for me than my trip to Honduras in high school. I have my own room in the five-room house, and running water is potable and pretty consistent. We have electricity and cable TV, and Bryan has an old computer that he plays video games on (no internet, though).</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3244861483/" title="IMG_0390 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3114/3244861483_a18d7d2bae_o.jpg" width="400" height="300" alt="IMG_0390" /></a><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Motorcycles are everywhere, which makes me real envious, and pretty much all boys, as well as many girls, learn to ride in their early teens. They ride in conditions I would never dream of riding in: mud, rain, and wind like none I have ever witnessed. Some of roads I walk on are like wind tunnels: in the morning I have to lean forward as I walk if I actually want to get anywhere, and in the evenings sometimes I have no control each step over where I actually put my foot down. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263754075/" title="IMG_0473 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/237/3263754075_0fca6a0b32_o.jpg" width="400" height="300" alt="IMG_0473" /></a><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">But the views are amazing. Every morning and every night we all walk along one section of road with a stunning view of the Gulf of Nicoya and the Nicoya Peninsula, which sits on the Pacific coast. If you leave the Institute at the right time in the afternoons, you catch an amazingly beautiful sunset, different every night. I worry that one of these days I'm going to start taking it for granted – as it is, sometimes I have to remind myself to pause for a minute and just watch.<br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245682676/" title="IMG_0348 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3365/3245682676_59b1d0375a.jpg" width="400" height="300" alt="IMG_0348" /></a><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In other news, you know when you cut a round cake, it's really hard to get it to look right, especially at the center where it gets really narrow? In Costa Rica, the first thing you do is cut a circle in the middle of the cake. You cut the outer ring first, and then the inside circle. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">It works SO much better. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Or maybe I just don't know how to cut cake.</span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-12277748995518179052009-02-05T13:57:00.000-08:002009-02-08T15:02:21.306-08:00La finca de Don Victor<i style="color: rgb(0, 0, 153);">Uhh... why does this sound so academic? Every Friday, we leave the Institute to see some part of the Monteverde community/economy in action, and are asked to write a response to each field trip. This is one of a series of posts that are part-blog, part-homework, so it's a little more background-heavy than most.</i> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In Latin America, coffee = important. Costa Rica is no exception: when coffee production exploded here in the 1830's and '40's, the mighty little bean catapulted the country into the world of Atlantic trade, starting what would be a long history of commercial and cultural exchange. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><i>The word “exchange” gives the relationship Costa Rica (and pretty much every other Central and South American country) had with the rest of the world far too much credit: It connotes a certain level of bilateralism, respect, and equality that simply didn't exist. I'll do my best to not bring out my dependency theory soapbox in this post, though.</i></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264572298/" title="IMG_0412 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3359/3264572298_21ef2bd9fc.jpg" alt="IMG_0412" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></span></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Last Friday, we visited a small coffee farm owned and worked pretty much singlehandedly by a guy named Don Victor. He spoke no English, so our ecology professor translated as he showed us around his small farm and walked us through every step of the coffee process, from planting baby coffee trees to harvesting, drying, peeling, roasting, and blending the resulting beans.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Coffee is a major export in a number of Latin American countries, especially Colombia (think Juan Valdez) and Brazil, where massive corporate plantations of sun-grown coffee fill the countryside. In an attempt to carve out a quality-, not quantity-based niche for itself in the insanely lucrative global coffee market (it's the most valuable export commodity in the world), Costa Rica has chosen to regulate the plant pretty heavily. That regulation, combined with the harvest's heavy reliance on human labor over mechanization, means the big corporations active in this country are less attracted to the crop (Standard Fruit Company, et al much prefer pineapples and bananas - see <a href="http://strangecrossing.blogspot.com/2009/01/pineapple-man-is-flirting-with-me.html">this post</a>). Here, most coffee is shade-grown by smaller farmers and cooperatives, and all of the coffee production I have had a chance to see thus far has been fairly sustainable and small-scale.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263747965/" title="IMG_0428 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/238/3263747965_d62e644af7.jpg" alt="IMG_0428" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Don Victor's farm fits the bill. His farm is only a few hectares big, all his <i>cafe arabica </i>coffee is shade grown, and his not perfectly straight rows of coffee trees tend to contour around plantain and banana trees he planted as well as a number of old-growth trees that he has left untouched. His wife is an orchid collector, which he doesn't complain about because the beautiful collection of terrestrial and epiphetic (they grow out of tree trunks) flowers attracts a diverse selection of wild bees that pollinate the coffee. Nearer to his house, Don Victor keeps a garden where he grows citronella, lemongrass, ragweed, mint, oregano, spearmint, and other coffee varieties like cafe gueycha, as well as a whole bunch of other things I couldn't scribble down quickly enough to catch. As a member of the Santa Elena Coffee Cooperative, during harvest he drives some of the harvested fruit to the Coop <span style="font-style: italic;">beneficio</span>, or coffee processing facility, but he also runs his own mini production shop, drying, peeling, roasting, and blending coffee in his backyard. </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264573782/" title="IMG_0423 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/254/3264573782_9e5b54d9e3.jpg" alt="IMG_0423" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264576364/" title="IMG_0430 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/236/3264576364_b7ac09030c.jpg" alt="IMG_0430" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Shade grown coffee tastes a lot better than the alternative (so they tell me: I still haven't learned to like coffee at all), so the more sustainable production process is supported by the higher prices their coffee fetches within both the coffee aficionado and the fair trade/organic markets in Europe and the United States. The higher price not only helps coffee growers make a living wage: shade grown sustainable coffee creates corridors between otherwise disconnected forest segments, creates habitat for the dozens of species of migrant birds for whom Costa Rica is a pit stop, and absorbs carbon: two hectares of shade grown coffee absorbs as much CO2 as one hectare of old growth forest.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263745687/" title="IMG_0417 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/192/3263745687_56fe2cdf45.jpg" alt="IMG_0417" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >That's a banana flower. Each of those tiny yellow flowers will become a banana.</span><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Coffee is a commitment: unlike corn or soy, which you have to replant every year, it is an orchard crop; the same plant blooms every year. It takes about three years before a coffee plant is ready to produce its first salable fruits, so it's a big upfront investment. When the market takes a downward swing, farmers can't just up and plant another crop that will sell better, as they have invested years and years into creating ideal conditions for coffee variety they have been growing. When we visited his farm, Don Victor was in the process growing young saplings to replace some of his oldest and tiredest trees: they had been producing coffee for upwards of thirty years.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3263743847/" title="IMG_0409 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3502/3263743847_21866f7155.jpg" alt="IMG_0409" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">baby coffee plants.</span></span><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We also visited the <i>beneficio</i> (processing plant) of the <a href="http://www.cafemonteverde.com/">Santa Elena Coffee Cooperative</a>, of which Don Victor is a member. The Cooperative, a fair trade, organic coffee cooperative that exports high quality coffee to the United States using the Café Monteverde brand <b> </b>has been around for 19 years and is made up of 42 farms, all family owned. Through a partnership with some folks in Montana, they sell to a whole bunch of places in the US, as well as <a href="http://www.coffeetraders.com/monte.cfm">online</a>.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cafemonteverde.com/PICT0023.JPG"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 199px; height: 149px;" src="http://www.cafemonteverde.com/PICT0023.JPG" alt="" border="0" /></a>The Cooperative runs training, community-building, and vocational programs for their members and their member's kids, and offers educational scholarships to help families pay for high school or college. It's an amazing, positive community, but it's not easy. Tying your own income to the production of 41 other families, especially in bad harvest years (and there have been a few recently) is a big risk, and some families decide to just go it alone. The coop has recently had to stop a few of its programs, such as recycling millions of discarded coffee bean skins as compostable coffee bags.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The cooperative, and everyone in this region who grows coffee for export, are faced with the same hard questions: How do you protect yourself and your family from far away market fluctuations you can't control? Does it make more sense to cut down half your farm and start growing something else in order to diversify? Selling your coffee at fair trade prices is the only way to make a decent wage, but what does it mean that that your neighbors could never afford to buy coffee from you? And, the question that seems to be on the mind of most of the farmers I have met in the last few weeks: What if my kids don't want to work the farm when I get older? What happens then?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3264577134/" title="IMG_0434 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/194/3264577134_2cfb77aeee.jpg" alt="IMG_0434" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-36063093416426841602009-02-02T06:00:00.000-08:002009-02-02T07:30:46.668-08:00The day I thought I killed a dog.<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's a part of culture shock training 101: most people who travel south of the United States are told at some point to not be surprised when they realize that dogs are considered pests in most places, rather then members of the family. Costa Rica definitely fits the bill: dogs are everywhere, and in most cases they are dirty, unkempt, and covered in fleas. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The dogs in Monteverde, though, have got it figured out. White people like them. White people will pet them. White people might even feed them. So, dozens of small dogs trot expectantly up to us as we walk to school in the mornings and plop down next to us as we eat lunch in the grass. And more often then not, we don't disappoint.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3228134349/" title="IMG_0214 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3228134349_b79bae306a.jpg" alt="IMG_0214" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One dog in particular adopted our group the first week we were here. He shows up to the Institute most days as the first students arrives, and appears again at lunch time, almost without fail. Whenever a group of more than a few students leave the Institute, he tends to follow. Once, he followed my Tropical Ecology class into the forest with us. We named him Toto; you can probably guess why.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Toto is an ugly dog. He desperately needs to see a dentist (and probably an orthodontist), doesn't smell great, and might have a flea or two. But he likes to turn steep, damp hills into his own slip-and-slides, lay his head on your lap (or on my computer keyboard, which doesn't help my productivity), and nibble your fingers, so in the end he is definitely a winner.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3228705453/" title="IMG_0267 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3264/3228705453_0d5c5c634d.jpg" alt="IMG_0267" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This story, though, is not about Toto. It's about Leche, the other ugly dog that captured my heart, and then I almost killed. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245683116/" title="IMG_0350 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3508/3245683116_c34a51e46f.jpg" alt="IMG_0350" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Last Saturday, seven of us decided to hike to San Louis, a three hour hike hundreds (and hundreds) of meters down the Pacific side of Monteverde. On the private property of one very lucky Costa Rican family is a stunningly beautiful waterfall. After we started walking, we realized we had an eighth member walking with us – a small white dog plagued with what looks like chronic pinkeye.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3244857439/" title="IMG_0366 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3263/3244857439_9bb5052e12.jpg" alt="IMG_0366" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Dogs have followed us before – but they usually go no further than a few hundred meters before losing interest. Leche was different. He followed us, and followed us down the mountainside, waiting for us as we stopped for photo moments and water breaks along the way, without so much as a pet, let alone a scrap of food. He was still following us as the trail turned from a road into a one-track, puddle-ridden, muddy path. </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245687672/" title="IMG_0371 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3443/3245687672_6f2a81d588.jpg" alt="IMG_0371" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We finally got to a bridge that Leche could not cross. And you really can't hold it against him. This bridge was sketchy even for us. After we crossed, he looked heartbroken. So I gave in, walked back across the bridge, and carried him across. A few hundred meters later, we reached another river crossing Leche could not do alone, so my friend Quinn hauled his sorry butt over that bridge, too.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3244859597/" title="IMG_0374 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3403/3244859597_17e79ef054.jpg" alt="IMG_0374" width="375" height="500" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The waterfall was beautiful and completely secluded – we were the only seven (Eight) people there. We ate lunch, and some of us tried to swim. Jesse made it in to his ankles and I made it to my waste; only Quinn went all the way in. Leche wandered around, sometimes in sight, sometimes not.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3244860315/" title="IMG_0376 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3132/3244860315_001c881bf3.jpg" alt="IMG_0376" width="375" height="500" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">When we decided to leave a few hours later, Leche was nowhere to be found. We called for him (I'm not sure why that would have helped – we had given him the name only six hours earlier), looked for him on and off the trail, and even looked in the river to see if we saw any white balls of fluff floating against a rock. He was nowhere. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I felt like a total asshole. Here I go, messing with nature, carrying a dog over a bridge he never should have crossed. I should have heeded the voice of my dad in my head, the one that would never help me climb trees when I was a kid, because if I couldn't get up by myself, how would I get down? That poor dog probably killed himself trying to cross back over one of the bridges after he had gotten bored of us, and washed away with the river, never to be seen again.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245687018/" title="IMG_0370 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3459/3245687018_28d9970503.jpg" alt="IMG_0370" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Dejectedly, we trooped back to the entrance of the farm, where the owners reported to us that they had not seen Leche. After realizing just how steep the hill home was and getting really, really lucky, we flagged a cab that offered to take us back to Monteverde. The ride took just under 20 minutes; had we been walking it would have taken three hours, minimum.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245684552/" title="IMG_0359 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3449/3245684552_b260120e69.jpg" alt="IMG_0359" width="375" height="500" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We walked back towards our houses from the Institute. A few hundred meters up the road, we passed CASEM, the Monteverde women's crafts coop and coffee shop. A little brown puppy jumps out of the woods and crosses the street in front of us, chased by none other than Leche himself. This dog had hiked from the waterfall, over the bridges he hadn't wanted to cross, through a farm, and back along a long, long, uphill road to get home. And there he was, as nonchalantly as ever, annoying the hell out of a little puppy. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">He didn't even say hello.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-54457614905015001492009-02-01T12:30:00.000-08:002009-02-01T13:02:40.500-08:00La Reserva Santa ElenaThere are rainforests, and then there are <i>rainforests</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Last Friday, we went to the real deal.<br /></span><p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245333962/" title="IMG_0317 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3507/3245333962_7baf07413d.jpg" alt="IMG_0317" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The conserved rainforest in the Monteverde zone is not owned or controlled by the Government: most of the protected area fall into one of many private reserves that together form one of the largest protected high elevation rainforest ecosystems in the world. Even within the zone, though, there are countless different ecosystems, different microclimates. The Institute, where I take classes, is on the Pacific side of the Continental Divide at an elevation of about 1,400 meters. It's wet, but not <i>rainforest</i> wet. It rains, my clothes get wet, the sun comes out, my clothes dry. That process happens three or for times a day, and it's great.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245331974/" title="IMG_0306 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3340/3245331974_c3da9f0937.jpg" alt="IMG_0306" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Last Friday, we went to the Santa Elena Reserve, on the Atlantic side of the divide and hundreds of meters higher. Take a minute, and envision the most stereotypical, picturesque rainforest you can think of. This was it. It was constantly raining and there was green everywhere. Unlike North America, where moss only grows on the north side of trees, the moss here was everywhere and on everything. Maybe it's because the moss couldn't figure out which way was north: the canopy was so thick, I never saw the sun once. We got wet instantly, and we never got a chance to dry.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245329314/" title="IMG_0291 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3517/3245329314_249c70776c.jpg" alt="IMG_0291" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The Santa Elena Reserve is operated and maintained, in part, by Colegio Santa Elena, the local public high school. Students who are a part of the forestry program get credit for maintaining trails (staircases, and bridges made out of wood disintegrate within a year) and some train to be naturalists. Our guide, “Johnny,” had graduated from the Colegio seventeen years previous, and was an absolute genius. As we tramped through the forest, he cut open wild avocados to show us the larvae of bees that had made the sweet fruit it's first home, located a hummingbird's nest from thirty feet away, and called out the names and traits of what I swear were just red and orange and yellow blurs, but were apparently beautiful birds and butterflies flying by at lightning speed.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245331534/" title="IMG_0300 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3297/3245331534_79e56da379.jpg" alt="IMG_0300" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We saw a Black Guan, a large predator bird that looks like a turkey, rare now after years of being hunted and labios calientes (hot lips), a plant that produces bright red, mouth-shaped flowers. (It's also known as labios de prostituta – I'll let you figure that translation out yourselves.) We witnessed warblers, Prong-Billed Barbettes, a Purple-throated Mountain Gem, and beautiful little birds called Amigos del Hombre, “friends of man,” because they not only are not scared of humans, but actually like to show themselves whenever humans are present. We also saw two beautiful blue damselflies (think dragonflies, but cooler) mating, a three-toed sloth, (it looked like a mop sitting on a tree) and chased in vain the famed and extremely rare Quetzal. Out of the six mating calls it makes, Johnny could replicate five.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245333176/" title="IMG_0312 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3133/3245333176_422af07011.jpg" alt="IMG_0312" width="400" height="300" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3244421519/" title="IMG_0319 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3512/3244421519_90b8bcdcd4.jpg" alt="IMG_0319" width="400" height="300" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There aren't a lot of big animals in the rainforest – it's a haven for small creatures who fill specific niches in the ecosystem. Hundreds of thousands of insects keep the forest functioning. They vary from carnivores like praying mantises to detrivores that eat rotting things, enabling the rapid decomposition that gives rain forests their amazingly fertile soil (think termites, which actually have symbiotic relationships with microscopic bacteria that live in their intestines and help break down wood). The coolest are the herbivores that have come up with amazingly creative ways to eat plant matter: the tiny larvae of some species of wasps literally tunnel their way through leaves as they grow, creating leaves etched with patterns that look like advanced levels of the snake game they used to package on old-school Nokia phones.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3244425769/" title="IMG_0340 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3397/3244425769_4875bce992.jpg" alt="IMG_0340" width="375" height="500" /></a><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3244424365/" title="IMG_0331 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3431/3244424365_cb1b6a9bf5.jpg" alt="IMG_0331" width="400" height="300" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The photos, as usual, don't do the place justice. It's in this kind of light (ie, not a lot) when cameras with larger light sensors that can afford higher ISO settings without getting grainy really come in handy. I took most of mine shading my camera (mounted on it's four-inch tripod) from the rain with my hands. A few of us got to play tarzan, which definitely completed my day.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3245253594/" title="IMG_0343 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3535/3245253594_3480bd8909.jpg" width="375" height="500" alt="IMG_0343" /></a><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-12177279489034030432009-01-27T09:10:00.000-08:002009-01-27T09:29:01.015-08:00The Pineapple Man is flirting with me<p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">During our first week in Costa Rica, we took a field trip to a giant pineapple plantation operated by Dole, a subsidiary of the Standard Fruit Company, both US entities. I mean, this place was huge. 2,800 acres of monoculture with an elegant hacienda sitting in the middle where tourists, mostly white retirees from Florida, if my experience was a typical one, started and finished their $13 a head pineapple plantation tours.</p><p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3226049455/" title="IMG_0129 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3492/3226049455_a43aee967b.jpg" alt="IMG_0129" width="400" height="300" /></a></p>Our group was taken on a tour by a Tico (Costa Rican) by the supposed name of “Danny 'Dole' Rockefeller,” who spoke impressive English, always wore a grin on his face, and talked jovially with us and the workers we passed on the tour, most of whom he knew by name. All the while, I felt some deep, unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something was not right; I felt a little used, I felt a little talked down to, but at first I couldn't figure it out. And then I did: the Pineapple Man was flirting with me. <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">Now, this might have been more noteworthy, in a certain way, had be been flirting with just me. It would have been a little blatant, a little obvious especially in a place like Costa Rica, where homosexuality isn't particularly acceptable. No, this guy was a pro; he was flirting with everyone.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;"><b>Seduction, step 1.</b></p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3226929640/" title="IMG_0127 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3091/3226929640_51733a24f4.jpg" alt="IMG_0127" width="400" height="300" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">The first stop on our tour was the quality control station: pineapples, having been washed in a chlorine bath, move up a conveyor belt to three women who allow some to pass into the adjacent building, while removing the pineapples of lesser quality and dropping them onto another belt, which scooted them away. This was Danny Dole's specialty, his favorite station; he was on his game. After pleasantly greeting the women, he picked up one of the best looking pineapples from the belt, whipped his oversized machete out of it's holster, and did one of the most impressive things I have ever seen anyone do with a knife: table-less, with the pineapple in one hand and the machete in the other, he effortlessly sliced of the skin of the pineapple, chopped the sweetest part of the pineapple (the outside edges closer to the base) into bite-sized bits, and then used the tip of the knife to misalign each slice so they hung off each edge of the pineapple, easy to grab. And then he held the cut fruit out in front of him, waiting for us to taste his fruit. And we did. And then he did it again. And we ate again. And then he did it again, all the while with a sly, mischievous grin on his face. </p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3226119985/" title="IMG_0123 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3318/3226119985_22f956c3f7.jpg" alt="IMG_0123" width="400" height="300" /></a></p>After tasting what is probably the best pineapple I have ever tasted in my life, we followed the perfect pineapples into the building, where they were being sorted into three sized and boxed. Danny explained to us that the total weight of each box had to be almost exactly the same, but that the workers were so good at their jobs that they could simply feel the weight of the pineapples and sort them into appropriate boxes as they went, resulting in an endless stream of boxes of nearly identical pineapples. I swear, it was just like Penn and Teller and their damn deck of cards in Vegas. <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;"><b>Seduction, step 2.</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">Next, and this has to be one of the most fascinating machinations of the whole operation, we witness workers stapling labels of three varieties to each pineapple. White labels to be sold in the organic food section in American stores, Green labels to be sold as organic in Europe, and yellow, “Tropical Gold” labels that didn't say “organic” on them anywhere. These pineapples, Danny told us, were sold in the US as non-organic pineapples, because the organic market “wasn't big enough.” “Isn't it great?” He asked us. We're getting people to eat healthier and they don't even know it! But it's all smoke and mirrors: as always, he gives us a little bit of the truth to distract us from what's really going on:</p><p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3226026473/" title="IMG_0132 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3458/3226026473_6ca7ac6e22.jpg" alt="IMG_0132" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <ul><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">First of all, “organic” by no means means good for you or good for the environment. These pineapples were sprayed with unnatural amounts of a “natural” chemical called Etholine at a young age to cause accelerated growth, then fertilized with imported fish and bone meal. Sorry, vegetarians.</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">Second, labeling organic pineapples as non-organic is in no way a good thing. What it really means is that some economist on the Dole payrole did some pithy calculations and decided that if Dole supplied only Y amount of pineapples to the national market instead of X, they could artificially keep the price of organic prices higher to reap additional proceeds. On the consumer side, this has the immediate economic effect of restricting organic produce to the wealthy few, and the significantly more potent cultural effect of further defining organic produce as a delicacy of the bourgeois, even though each time everyone else buys a regular pineapple, there's a chance they're actually eating organic after all.</p> </li></ul> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3226840454/" title="IMG_0135 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3468/3226840454_2e142fc4a6.jpg" alt="IMG_0135" width="375" height="500" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">After the labeling, Danny took us to a massive, walk-in freezer that had two pallets of pineapples in the back, near a giant turbine that looked like the one that almost sliced Charlie into a thousand pieces when he started floating uncontrollably in the Gene Wilder version of “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” In a gentlemanly fashion, he held the door open for all of us. After the last of us tricked in, he shut the door from the outside, locked it, and turned off the lights.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">Now, how many of you can say that Danny 'Dole' Rockefeller locked you in a cooler? That's right. I feel pretty special. After a few seconds, he opened the door back up, cackled, and cracked yet another forgettable American joke. Seduction, step two complete.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;"><b>Seduction, Step 3.</b></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;"><span style="">Then, it was time for the siesta. Back in the front of the hacienda, as we waited for what Danny Dole quaintly called a “limo,” even though it was actually a large tractor pulling a 40-seat covered trailer on 4 ft diameter wheels, we were served more slices of perfect pineapple, some mysterious pineapple-based fruitcake, and pi</span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="">ñ</span></span><span style="">a coladas </span><i><span style="">in hollowed-out pineapple shells</span></i><span style="">. When the Pineapple man witnessed me taking notes on the ridiculousness of it all, he jokingly threatened to confiscate my notebook. If only.</span></p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3226782436/" title="IMG_0140 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3255/3226782436_398d5df5ba.jpg" alt="IMG_0140" width="400" height="300" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">It only goes on from there, so I won't bore you any more than I already have with stories of how special the pineapple man made me feel that day. But I will mention a couple more things we learned as we did our best to ask challenging and critical questions, even as we sat stoned on the lucid high of the massive amounts of pineapple sugar we had already consumed. </p> <ul><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">Workers who work in the fields are paid by the pineapple, and the “best workers” are capable of planting 10,000 pineapple plants every day by themselves. This equates to between $100 and $140 a week for 9.5 hour days – we never learned how many days a week they work.</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;">Of the 2,800 acres of land that made up this plantation, Danny Dole swore to us that 900 of them were left forested, “to protect the rain forest.” Almost every stand of trees we saw, however, couldn't have been more than 30 ft deep at it's widest point, completely negating any serious biodiversity protection or carbon sequestration genuine forest conservation provides. To their credit, we did witness a real, life howler monkey in one of the trees. The poor thing was probably wondering if it was ever going to see a real forest, or a mate, ever again.</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;"><span style="">Both the route our bus took to and from the hacienda and the “limo” route through the plantation brought us by a pristine soccer field. When asked who use it, Danny answered an entirely different question, saying that he was the captain of his team because he was so good and so handsome. I'm not sure who wants to play soccer surrounded by pineapples after planting 10,000 plants in 9.5 hours – I know I wouldn't. Conveniently, we had just read an article about the Costa Rican Solidarista movement of the mid-20</span><sup><span style="">th</span></sup><span style=""> century, in which workers were convinced to deunionize in exchange for perks like...soccer fields. This pineapple plantation, like most (if not all) in the country, was not unionized.</span></p> </li></ul> <p style="margin-bottom: 0.06in;"><span style="">Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want – maybe I should have just enjoyed the damn pineapple and stopped thinking so much. Or maybe I should have just taken note of the parts Mr. Rockefeller emphasized: how a good pineapple is grown, how to pick the perfect pineapple in the store, which parts of the pineapple are sweetest and which should just be made into juice, how to cut a pineapple to impress, and of course, how to turn leftover pineapple shells into authentic pi</span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="">ñ</span></span><span style="">a colada cups so </span><i><span style="">I</span></i><span style=""> can flirt with </span><i><span style="">you</span></i><span style="">. Had I done that, I would have left the plantation exactly as they intended: a prepared pineapple consumer, ready to head back to the states and show my friends and family the ways of the pineapple, just like all those retired Floridians.</span></p> <p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/puravida2009/3225961327/" title="IMG_0137 by pura.vida2009, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3505/3225961327_bcbaf1be33.jpg" alt="IMG_0137" width="400" height="300" /></a></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-15828928443994354672009-01-25T13:47:00.000-08:002009-01-25T14:42:56.705-08:00"There's a strong wind blowing, and it has nothing to do with the weather"If you know me, you probably know what I've been doing for the last six months, and you definitely know how much I wanted to be in the States on January 20<sup>th</sup>. (If you don't, I was a field organizer for the Obama campaign, and if your head is stuck in the sand, January 20<sup>th</sup> was the day we started rebuilding both the perception and reality of the United States.) Suffice it to say, missing Barack Obama's inauguration wasn't easy for me. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>I had tickets</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Not to gloat or anything, but I had two tickets to the swearing in ceremony (of the coveted 200,000 issued), two tickets to the Western Regional Inaugural Ball that same night, and two tickets to the Obama For America Staff Ball the next night, on the 21</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">st</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;">. Every single other field organizer from Pittsburgh (where I worked), my Regional Field Director, and most of the rest of the Western Pennsylvania Regional Headquarters staff, would be there. My friend Freddi was flying in from Berlin for the weekend. After sleeping off the 120-hour weeks, we were finally going to get to celebrate in style. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">I didn't go. But I did watch.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Among Ticos (Costa Ricans), there hasn't seemed to be a lot of hype about Obama. People definitely knew about him, and seemed generally to like him (more than Bush, at least), but it wasn't a big thing. My host family here watches the national news every morning and night, but the first time Barack's name was mentioned since I have been here was the morning of the 19</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;">, the day before the inauguration. There definitely wasn't the same excitement I remember experiencing in Israel last January, when a Palestinian taxi driver in the West Bank, as well as practically every Israeli I met, asked about the elections. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">So, you can probably guess that seeing this sign posted in the front window of the Monteverde Institute, when I arrived a few days before the inauguration, made my day:</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKi5XUwKYscFNe_LBbEE12ODrS75g9GvsBh-1hQNhZ5mr2DKs9ESeTp9Ve_H4s9S4LinR3M5Ka5hyphenhyphenbiA9oUZ2xi-xX1uzeFnyyeP7Q5oqmm3xrxqyNDq-fyhY-P5akIRCazLTk-ZsLqFC8/s1600-h/IMG_0203.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKi5XUwKYscFNe_LBbEE12ODrS75g9GvsBh-1hQNhZ5mr2DKs9ESeTp9Ve_H4s9S4LinR3M5Ka5hyphenhyphenbiA9oUZ2xi-xX1uzeFnyyeP7Q5oqmm3xrxqyNDq-fyhY-P5akIRCazLTk-ZsLqFC8/s400/IMG_0203.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5295353799318409346" border="0" /></a>The Institute, where I take classes this semester, is staffed and frequented by an awesome variety of people. Founded in '86 by the local ex-pat Quaker community, the Institute is both run and used by a combination of locals whose devotion to principles of sustainability mandates an unusually international focus, American citizens, Quakers, and a plethora of globally-minded scientists from all over the place. It's pretty easy to figure out which candidate they overwhelmingly supported, so I felt right at home.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">On Tuesday the 20</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;">, we arranged our classes so we had a gap between ten and two. All 23 students from our program, most of our faculty, and a majority of the Institute staff, walked to a small inn on the Quaker side and joined about 30 other English speakers to watch, laugh (mainly at the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXSobcLnWTo">botched presidential oath</a> and Dr. Joseph Lowery's amazing <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjTUSDONzvY">benediction</a>), and cheer. I was surrounded friends, some new, some old, and witnessed what all of us at some point thought would never happen. It was amazing. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Plus, I wasn't stuck in the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/21/purple-tunnel-of-doom-tic_n_159842.html">Purple Tunnel of Doom</a>.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">What I really missed though, was the staff ball the following night. Imagine: three thousand people from around the country and the world, mostly young and all in black-tie dress, celebrating their new President. The event was closed to press, so we could all speak freely – even Barack. And these were his people – folks from all walks of life who had given up their lives, some for more than two years, to work their asses off for a dark-horse candidate with an unheard-of campaign strategy, a great voice, and a strange sense of optimism. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwj65oWvxEZcycFs1B-hOBM3SYkQdOkXwSiuIccf9RRy7jDr0ma1VIJcLOYyCEYcbfUCPMPvCZ9VY5NyLS5BhdrTw4dBFSNzu0ka6Sc-kizI84ytxrQfHJhmL3SKxIeQ5RQBsBVG5U3o2z/s1600-h/staff1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwj65oWvxEZcycFs1B-hOBM3SYkQdOkXwSiuIccf9RRy7jDr0ma1VIJcLOYyCEYcbfUCPMPvCZ9VY5NyLS5BhdrTw4dBFSNzu0ka6Sc-kizI84ytxrQfHJhmL3SKxIeQ5RQBsBVG5U3o2z/s400/staff1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5295364597041357842" border="0" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Above, Barack and Michelle on stage at the Staff Ball. Below, a few of my friends afterwards. Pictures by Troy Stevenson.</span><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXk1R2ujFl2wNr9N-Z1wbS5159XlKnnuBPTevUxRNfLc8pXQPojwTmfLoG1ZVTJ9kQZ20k0LtqizKCK0iA2brnALIRP6RBMS_i8UlAtQylxptGL16NlYapqn4Wv5aSxCgiOowL6pk16K3X/s1600-h/staff2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXk1R2ujFl2wNr9N-Z1wbS5159XlKnnuBPTevUxRNfLc8pXQPojwTmfLoG1ZVTJ9kQZ20k0LtqizKCK0iA2brnALIRP6RBMS_i8UlAtQylxptGL16NlYapqn4Wv5aSxCgiOowL6pk16K3X/s400/staff2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5295364600343585378" border="0" /></a></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">When Barack spoke that night, he sounded far more exuberant and definitely less exhausted than he did on the conference calls he would lead with the staff during the campaign. But his mannerisms were the same – still (as always) well-spoken, but a human being who makes mistakes, says what he thinks, and mentions non-vetted ideas and unplanned words in an off-the-cuff manner that politicians simply cannot afford in public events. How do I know? Thanks to the wonder that is youtube.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">So here you go, videos of Barack Obama speaking at a closed-press event. The first video covers the first five minutes of his speech, the second covers the last eight. There are a couple more minutes in the middle there I haven't found – he jumps from reason one to reason three – so I guess I'll never know the second reason why we won. </p><br /><p><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/29ndHF-dBqY&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/29ndHF-dBqY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></p><br /><p><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/I28jHeBIgsY&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/I28jHeBIgsY&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object></p><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">To top it off, Arcade Fire played a set, including <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJEx3Kuu80w">Born In the USA</a>. C'est la vie.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">In other news, at the inauguration watch party I was introduced to the yoga teacher who worked for the Obama campaign I mentioned in my last post. Unfortunately for me, she's in her fifties, with kids my age. Oops. It was really, really hard not to laugh.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">----<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Translation of the Day: </span>Llamarse - to call one's self. Not a particularly exciting word, I know. If you've taken even one week of one Spanish class sometime in the last five years, you know that that's how Spanish speakers say, "My name is...." It's a different grammar structure, though - "me llamo Mateo" = "I call myself Mateo." I bring it up because I had a moment (I don't know if it's worth calling an epiphany) the other day on my 50 minute walk home from school. It struck me that, had <span style="font-style: italic;">Moby Dick</span> been written in Spanish, the infamous first line, "They call me Ishmael" wouldn't have been anything special. (You never find out if that's his actual name or not. Or so I'm told - I didn't get very far past the first line of the book: I hated it.) "Me llaman Ishmael" = "They call me Ishmael" = "My name is Ishmael." All the same; no special meaning.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">How did this come up? I have no idea.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">----</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Blog title from this <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jermaine-dupri/president-obamas-first-bi_b_160706.html">huffpost blog entry</a>.<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-38124543134302587992009-01-19T12:29:00.000-08:002009-01-25T14:45:54.095-08:00Bienvenidos a MonteverdeWhen it rains, it doesn't just rain down – it rains in all directions. Down, sometimes, but more often side to side, and on occasion, up. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but it was Jesse who put words to the phenomenon: it's not that it rains, it's just that I walk through clouds on my way to school.<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflies/3215508679/" title="IMG_0217 by ethan q, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3130/3215508679_6e991cd163_m.jpg" alt="IMG_0217" width="240" height="180" /></a><br /></span> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Welcome to Monteverde, elevation 1,300 meters, (yes, I'm starting to think in metric) Costa Rica. I've been here for ten days now, and I still can't get over it. I had a moment today, in front of all of my “classmates” and two of my “professors;” I just started laughing. This can't be school – it's too perfect. My backyard is a cloud forest, we go on field trips practically every week, and our “program orientation” involved two volcanoes, a four hour nature hike through a lowlands tropical rain forest, salsa dancing, a boat ride, a jeep ride, and one very restful afternoon in a natural hot springs pool. Across the road from the Monteverde Institute, where I'm taking classes, lies a cheese factory that makes homemade ice cream, and up the road about 100 meters is a yoga studio with classes taught in English. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The yoga teacher? An American ex-pat who has lived in Monteverde for years, but returned to the US for a brief stint to work for the Obama campaign. I haven't met her yet, but I've already fallen in love. Unfotunately for me, she's already married.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3393/3216358580_5ab29b5d5a.jpg?v=0"></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflies/3216358580/" title="IMG_0221 by ethan q, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3393/3216358580_5ab29b5d5a_m.jpg" alt="IMG_0221" width="240" height="180" /></a><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What made me break down and laugh, though, is by no means the coolest item on this list, but definitely the most unexpected: every Saturday at noon, there's a pickup game of Ultimate Frisbee at the Friends' School up the road. I don't think I'm ever coming home.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3115/3216356056_192c7bb79d.jpg?v=0"></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflies/3216356056/" title="IMG_0225 by ethan q, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3115/3216356056_192c7bb79d_m.jpg" alt="IMG_0225" width="240" height="180" /></a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">-----</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">On that note, welcome to my blog. Some of you read my “strangecrossing” blog entries while I worked for the Obama campaign. Now that I am not an official representative of our new president, I can write publicly, so no more emails. I'll be writing here when I can, as I spend the semester in Costa Rica and then travel south to Peru in June. Thanks for reading!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">-----</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3355/3216351532_f03c6b8f5c.jpg?v=0"></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflies/3216351532/" title="IMG_0205 by ethan q, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3355/3216351532_f03c6b8f5c_m.jpg" alt="IMG_0205" width="240" height="180" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The Monteverde Institute sits in front of a small patch of grass and a number of small tropical plants and trees. The one, low-lying, quarter-circle, green building is surrounded by tall evergreens of the tropical variety. (Give me a couple of weeks, and I'll be able to tell you their names.) Close by is the Monteverde Reserve, a private highlands rainforest reserve protected from logging and development for the sake of conservation, education, and scientific research. Up the road is the Quaker settlement of Monte Verde (that's where the Ultimate is), and in the other direction is the town of Santa Elena. Home to a few thousand people, a few bars, a youth hostel, and one “discoteque,” Santa Elena is where I, and most of the other students in my program, live. Nearby are a few other privately owned rain forest reserves, including the Santa Elena Reserve, where we're going on Friday, and one almost as well known as Monteverde: El Bosque Eterno de los Ni<span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;">ños</span>, the Eternal Forest of the Children, purchased in the 1980's by a Swedish kindergarten after a bake sale. I guess land was cheaper then.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3121/3216354330_194cab7cc4.jpg?v=0"></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflies/3216354330/" title="IMG_0245 by ethan q, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3121/3216354330_194cab7cc4_m.jpg" alt="IMG_0245" width="180" height="240" /></a></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">All this is part of what as known as the Monteverde Zone, which sits just over the continental divide – when I pee in the woods, it ends up in the Pacific Ocean. It will be my home for the next four months, as I study topics of sustainability, development, ecotourism, and ecology with twenty two other students from Goucher and Mt. Holyoke University. I have no cell phone, and internet access can best be described as inconsistent. Everyone rides motorcycles or quads, which is unfortunate because Institute rules prevent me from doing so as well. The walk from my host family's house to the Institute takes about fifty minutes, and my classes start at eight every morning. If you even give one of the multitude of flea-ridden dogs a friendly look it will follow you for kilometers. One small little black dog has adopted our class – whenever groups bigger than five leave the institute grounds, it either follows behind or leads the way, depending on it's mood. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And that's it, so far. I already have a thousand thoughts I want to record here, but I tend to overwhelm even more when I write then when I talk, which is saying something. So check back often, keep reading, and leave comments! It makes me feel like I'm at least a little closer to home.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Translation of the day</span>: Kilovatiohoras = Kilowatt-Hours. One of those things you would NEVER think about translating.</p><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3120/3215498051_b90017f47d.jpg?v=0"></a><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflies/3215498051/" title="IMG_0239 by ethan q, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3120/3215498051_b90017f47d_m.jpg" alt="IMG_0239" width="240" height="180" /></a><br /><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Adios,</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">~matt</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-17580691758720357462008-12-23T22:37:00.000-08:002009-05-22T12:51:52.048-07:00a belated thank you<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic; color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">emailed to Southside, South End, and West End volunteers on December 23.</span></span><br /><br /><div class="photo photo_right"><div class="clear_right"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8OYPRwTR9WaCJDZQP52R18NwNmwd0izpeRoJNS_2GOJ9C68df0gbh2azimEnpsGb8V4eujKdWaQucc4uleFS_CpDF-9vYj79dfPdglaNfWJiJOIH7l-oPIgoEptN8DqmM_agQhRcsIFYK/s1600-h/hope.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 136px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8OYPRwTR9WaCJDZQP52R18NwNmwd0izpeRoJNS_2GOJ9C68df0gbh2azimEnpsGb8V4eujKdWaQucc4uleFS_CpDF-9vYj79dfPdglaNfWJiJOIH7l-oPIgoEptN8DqmM_agQhRcsIFYK/s200/hope.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5305029304373174706" border="0" /></a>Dear volunteers and friends,<br /><br />You are my Obama family and this note of thanks is long overdue. Thank you for taking me in. Thank you for welcoming me into your city and neighborhoods. Thank you for offering me beds to sleep on, for lending me your cars, for buying me food, and for offering me caffeine. Thank you for opening your houses to strangers whom you have never met, for trusting me, and for sticking with the cause. Thank you for yelling at the TV with us during the debates, for crying with us during the speeches, for organizing thousands of door hangers, for knocking on more doors than you can count, for toting your children with you when you worked, and for making the South Side office the cool place to be. And most of all, thank you for opening your hearts, giving so much of your time to this movement, and never, ever losing hope.<br /><br />We all worked long and hard for this victory, and every single one of you deserves to be reveling in this moment. So, congratulations! We could never have done this without you.<br /><br />On Election Night, President-Elect Barack Obama reminded the nation, "This victory alone is not the change we seek; it is only the chance for us to make that change." I said something similar a few nights later at our post-election gathering: This fight is not over. On the contrary, it is just beginning.<br /><br />Hopefully, in the days after the election, you received two important emails from the campaign:<br /><ul><br /><li>The first email invited you to complete a volunteer survey about your experience with the campaign. If you have not taken the time to complete it, please do so now. National campaign staff are taking survey responses very seriously as they plan our next steps.</li><br /><li>The second email asked you to host or attend a "Change is Coming" house party last weekend: December 13th and 14th. At these meetings, which happened nationwide, volunteers, staff, and supporters discussed what THEY wanted to see happen next, now that the campaign is over and Barack prepares to take office. If you did not attend one of these meetings, worry not! There are many opportunities to talk about next steps in the survey above, or email your thoughts to me: I would be more than happy to pass them along.</li><br /></ul><big><b>Up next: Code name 'OFA 2.0'</b></big><br /><br />While the campaign is over, the movement for change and renewal has just begun. The opportunity to make a real difference in not only our government's domestic and international policy but the American psyche has always existed. We have always been able to fight for equality for all Americans, demand the end of an unjust war, organize for a healthcare system that works for patients and not insurance company CEOs, and call for a second look at our government's spending priorities.<br /><br />But now, and for the next four years, we've got a guy on the inside.<br /><br />Staff from all levels of the campaign have been working diligently since November 5th (I know? Can you believe it? I slept…..) to build an organization that will channel the amazing energy we have found in ourselves and nourished in our neighbors into the coming years. Right now, we're calling it "Obama For America, 2.0". We don't know what it will eventually be called, what legal presence it will have, or what the organization will look like. But we do know this:<br /><br />Our victory proved that grassroots organizing works at any scale, big or small. Volunteers on the ground have always been and will continue to be the most important part and the driving force of this movement. Remember those neighborhood teams? Those house meetings? They're not going anywhere.<br /><br />While every iteration of OFA 2.0 will be different, much like the campaign's appearance and methodology differed state to state, across the country we will focus on:<br /><ul><li>Electing progressive candidates to every office, local to national</li><br /><li>Lobbying current elected officials to promote items on Barack's legislative agenda, such as universal healthcare, a worker-centered resolution to our economic crisis, and repairing our public school system.</li><br /><li>Local service, volunteerism, and civic engagement.</li><br /></ul><big><b>So, what can I do now?</b></big><br /><br />Ah hah! I thought you might ask. Look forward to more news and emails about OFA 2.0 in the coming weeks and months, but don't be afraid to start organizing now. We are facing some of the biggest crises this nation has ever seen, and we're all going to need to chip in if we're going to make it through.<br /><br />What you can do right now:<br /><ul><li>Visit change.gov, the official website of President-Elect Obama. On the site, you can participate in discussions on healthcare and civic service, read about the most important items on Barack's agenda, and learn about ways you can get involved.</li><br /><li>Plan or participate in a service project before Inauguration Day. Congress has transformed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, this year January 19th, the day before the Inauguration, into a national day of community service. To honor Dr. King's legacy, the President-elect and Vice President-elect and their families will participate in activities dedicated to serving others. Wherever you are on January 19th, I urge you to volunteer and serve.</li><br /><li>Start to organize now. There is no need to wait for the official OFA 2.0 roll-out or even for the Inauguration. Host a house meeting. Invite all the wonderful volunteers you met over the last few months. Talk about ways you can change your neighborhood and change Pittsburgh. Write letters to your Representatives and Senators urging them to work quickly to implement Barack's agenda as well as the issues that are most important to you.Volunteer at your local school or food bank. Interested in seeing how some Pittsburgh volunteers are working to keep the movement alive? Check out <a href="http://www.pittsburghhopes.org/" onmousedown="'UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this)," target="_blank" rel="nofollow"><span>http://www.pittsburghhopes</span><wbr><span class="word_break"></span>.org</a>.</li></ul><br /><big><b>Thank you.</b></big><br /><br />Thank you for moving our country forward. Thank you for being a part of something amazing. And thank you for being a part of my life. I had a wonderful time in Pittsburgh, and already miss you all.<br /><br />If you need anything or have any questions, do not hesitate to email me.<br /><br />Happy holidays,<br />~Matt Cohen-Price<br />your Southside/South End/West End Field Organizer<br /><span> matt.cohen-price@obamaalum</span><wbr><span class="word_break"></span>ni.com</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-88352666863430953922008-10-03T22:27:00.000-07:002009-01-21T12:28:39.350-08:00Whoa, it's been a while<span style="font-size:-1;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">Hey guys.<br /><br />So, in what little (no) free time I've had since July 28, I've felt pretty guilty about not writing to you all.<br /><br />This one will be brief. PA is insane.<br /><br />My sad attempt at relating the last two months and next 32 days of my life will come in a couple of brief bullet points.<br /><br /><br />1.<br />The other night, I got an extra large black chai tea from the coffee shop down the street from my office. After a second glance at the counter, I bought a packet of Emergen-C as well, poured the orange-flavored fizzy powder into my sugar-less tea, and drank it. It was disgusting. Add a shot of whiskey, and you have my life in a beverage.<br /><br />2.<br />It ain't much, but check out this unedited <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/matt.cohenprice/ObamaPics#" target="_blank">slideshow</a> of two recent events - the grand office opening and debate watch party at our recently opened Pittsburgh South Side for Obama Field Office. I'm one of the two field organizers working out of the office. The second is a few pictures from a project I've been working on since the summer - putting together a community mural in the turf I organized during the summer - the Hill District. Also, re that event, find this <a href="http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/brettbrownell/gGxVq2" target="_blank">slideshow </a>on the PA Obama website. The pictures are way better (from our regional Media folks). It's posted on the <a href="http://www.pabarackobama.com/" target="_blank">pabarackobama.com</a> website.<br /><br />3.<br />There's a great article on <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/" target="_blank">http://www.fivethirtyeight.com</a><wbr> (the best polling website ever and completely addicting) today - its a comparison between Obama and McCain field operations. Find it <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-st-louis-county-missouri.html" target="_blank">here</a>. It's about Missouri, but it's a similar story here.<br /><br />4.<br /></span></span><span style="font-size:-1;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">While their field operation might not seem like much right now, that doesn't mean we can just sit tight and read polls: when you read about McCain giving up Michigan, remember where they are sending those staffers. Here. PA. Western PA. Why? Because of <a href="http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/zito/s_588130.html" target="_blank">this article</a>. "How to Win Pennsylvania"? Allegheny County. Pittsburgh. The South Hills, in fact. Oh wait, that's my turf. Shit.<br /><br />Here are some excerpts from the article:<br /></span></span><span style="font-size:-1;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><br /><br /></span></span><span style="color:#000099;"><small><span style="font-family:Gill Sans MT;">Since this year's Pennsylvania primaries, many people have been schooled on the mechanics of how Democrats win this state. Call it the "Rendell rule": Stack up high numbers in the Philly collar counties, hold the losses to a minimum in the other 60, and try to win Allegheny for good measure.<br /><br />...<br /></span></small></span> <p><span style="color:#000099;"><small><span style="font-family:Gill Sans MT;">Pennsylvanians don't see McCain in the "failed Bush policies" category by which Democrats try to define him. Instead, they see a war hero, a brand that resonates in the blue-collar areas where their unions are trying to persuade them otherwise.</span></small></span></p> <p><span style="color:#000099;"><small><span style="font-family:Gill Sans MT;">"He is a guy you can depend on," said Tom Miller, 54, of Lancaster, a registered Democrat who is very comfortable voting for McCain. "He has had no problem bucking his own party and he does not ask me to make sacrifices that he isn't willing to make."</span></small></span></p> <p><span style="color:#000099;"><small><span style="font-family:Gill Sans MT;">Add the stereotypes that some voters hold about black candidates and Obama dilutes the Rendell rule.</span></small></span></p> <p><span style="color:#000099;"><small><span style="font-family:Gill Sans MT;">So, where can McCain offset traditional Democrat voting blocs?</span></small></span></p> <p><span style="color:#000099;"><small><span style="font-family:Gill Sans MT;">In Allegheny, Bucks and Chester counties, where a large number of those voters live.</span></small></span></p> <p><span style="color:#000099;"><small><span style="font-family:Gill Sans MT;">To win Allegheny, McCain must win the entire South Hills area minus Mt. Lebanon. He also must win the new suburban areas around the airport, as well as the Mon Valley, where poorer working white voters live. He can easily sweep the North Hills as well as the small river towns.<br /></span></small></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:-1;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size:-1;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">That's it for me. 12:30 on a Friday night - back to prepping for tomorrow's canvas.<br /></span></span></p> <span style="font-size:-1;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">~matt</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-81489267327961390912008-07-28T12:26:00.000-07:002009-05-22T12:44:48.686-07:00I shed Blood for Barack ObamaOn the final day of the Organizing Fellowship's three day training, which seems like an eternity ago, another fellow commented to the room that he would die for Barack Obama. The comment garnered murmurs of assent from a few other fellows and staff, including myself. And it's true – I think I would. I don't believe that Barack is perfect or superhuman, nor do I believe that all America's problems will be solved when we elect him on November 5<sup>th</sup>, inaugurate him on January 20<sup>th</sup>, or even build him a library in 2016. But I do believe that he has more potential and power to start us moving towards solutions right now than I ever will, so yes – I told myself that I would put my life on the line if that is what it took to elect Barack Obama in November. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The thing is, I always thought it would happen in an epic, heroic fashion, like taking a bullet for him, tackling him to get him out of the way of a Manchurian Candidate-esque rogue Secret Service agent, or getting run off a Missouri highway in a rainstorm by a racist southern trucker. It ended up being nowhere near that exciting.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Nonetheless, it's true. I bled for our next president. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The story itself isn't all that exciting. It involved a windstorm, a flying festival tent (those folding, white-topped tents under which you set up popcorn stands and all your best photography), and a conceivably misplaced but definitely well-meant attempt to put myself between the tent and a few poor souls looking in the completely wrong direction and one very nice car. End result: before I could catch the tent, the tent caught me... in the forehead. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The thing about foreheads is they don't have very many nerves – I felt the tent hit me, but I didn't feel much of any sustained pain at all. The other thing about foreheads is they don't really stop bleeding. So, as I caught the tent and worked with a few other festival goers to hold it down and fold it up, I failed to notice that I actually had a head wound and was bleeding profusely. The gash ended up being decently deep, and I spent Sunday afternoon, high voter registration time, watching the old version of Batman from a bed in the UPMC Shadyside ER waiting to get four stitches above my left eye. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A coworker of mine (being from Oklahoma, he happens to know a bit about windstorms) told me afterwards that he hoped I learned my lesson – when large objects start flying, run away from them, not towards them. Unfortunately, the only lesson I think I learned from the experience is that if I ever really need a few hours off, the easiest way to get it is by getting injured. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I got the stitches out on Friday, and besides for a ½ inch gash healing over my left eyebrow that may or may not scar, I'm doing just fine. The experience was, however, my first real in-country experience with not knowing whether my health insurance would cover a necessary medical visit, oddly applicable to this election.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">---</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One of the quirks about organizing is that you start to get pretty good at reading people's politics without ever actually talking to them. I've spoken with so many people about voting and the election in the last six weeks that I stereotype their political views before, or while, speaking with them. I have come to the subconscious conclusion, for example, that all black men over fifty are registered to vote. The political arguments for this stereotype are obvious: because either they themselves remember not being allowed to vote, or their parents spent a majority of their lives not voting and burned the need into the minds of their children, it is purely a matter of principle. And my experience on the street has only legitimized the stereotype. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">These reads can be detrimental to my work (I must make a conscious effort to not allow my preconceptions to alter who I speak to and who I don't), but at many times they are extremely helpful: every day, I get better at phrasing questions and channeling discussions in certain directions based on the perceived political beliefs of the voter (or non-voter) I am speaking with in order to build connections that allow for discussion and persuasion.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Sometimes, however, I am dead wrong.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A few weeks ago, I attended a neighborhood house meeting, planned and run by a friend and co-fellow, of elderly folks mostly living in a retirement complex in Pittsburgh's neighborhood of Oakland. Everyone there was over fifty, and most were at least sixty-five. The subject of concern was a man who, despite his age (I would guess around sixty), was in extremely good shape. He buzz-cut kept his balding silver-gray hair looking clean and professional, and he wore white Champion athletic socks, clean sneakers, and a short sleeved shirt tucked into his shorts. Before the organized discussion, I overheard him mention to someone else that he was a long-time snowbird – he voted in Florida, where he spent every winter. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This man was clearly a Republican – I couldn't figure out why he was at the meeting. He looked like he lifted weights daily and biked on a stationary bike for two hours a day watching Fox News. He probably drove a pickup truck and owned at least three guns. (Not that any of these things would bar him from being an Obama supporter – it just made it a whole lot less likely!)</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As usual, when the organized part of the meeting began, each person in the room took a few minutes to introduce themselves and tell the group why they had chosen to come. (This is an integral part of Obama-style community organizing, how we won Iowa, and why the campaign brings so many different kinds of people together.) When it finally became this guy's turn to tell his story, he began speaking intelligently and in detail about how the last eight years have deeply affected the United States' international moral standing, the misinformation that sent us into a poorly-planned war we should never have started, and the immediate need of electing Obama, someone who was already changing the face of American politics and who represented a huge step forward for the country. He didn't stop there, however: his two biggest heroes, he told us, are his own Democratic Representative from Florida Robert Wexler and Rep. Kucinich (D-OH), because of their unwillingness to stop fighting against the illegal actions of the Bush White House. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">He has volunteered at least twice a week since that meeting, and will continue to do so until he starts volunteering in Florida when he moves down in October. He completely made my day, and has served as a reminder that this campaign can truly find supporters in every corner. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">---</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As you probably know, Barack Obama has been spending the last week or so rallying support abroad, including making a quite epic speech at the Siegessaeule in Berlin in front of 200,000 people, his biggest crowd yet. (If you have not seen the 23 minute speech, you should see it or read the transcript <a href="http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/berlinvideo/" target="_blank">here.</a>) Besides for sounding amazingly presidential and giving me goosebumps as is customary, the speech was unusually symbolic for me in a few ways. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">First, I got to listen to a crowd of Europeans chant, "USA! USA! USA!", something I'm not sure has happened since the end of World War II and which I didn't really expect to happen in my lifetime. And, 200,000 people!?! Last I checked, the vast majority of gatherings that large in the last decade anywhere in the European Union have been Anti-Bush protests.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Second, by talking seriously about global warming and climate change, he brings legitimacy to the issues. Climate change needs to be addressed NOW, but far too many Americans continue to believe is bad science and/or progressive fear-mongering. (to give McCain credit, he is talking about climate issues too, but as he just <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/26/AR2008072601891.html?nav=rss_politics" target="_blank">reversed his position to defend offshore drilling</a>, I'm not sure how serious he is and believe he is only talking about it because Barack is talking about it.)</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Third, just days after the Iraqi Prime Minister essentially endorsed his withdrawal plan, Barack spoke about fighting for democracy with food and aid, as we did during the Soviet Blockade of Berlin in 1948, and becoming again a moral beacon for the world that we once were. Believe it or not, we might actually have found a Democratic political leader who can be "strong on defense" while advocating for nuclear disarmament and peaceful diplomacy, with our enemies as well as our allies.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Finally, while he gave the speech on Thursday, July 24, I did not get to watch it until Friday afternoon. Between the actual speech and my watching it, I was offered a paid job on the campaign. For the last six weeks, I have been working full time as an unpaid "Organizing Fellow," but that commitment ended a few days ago. Don't get me wrong: ever since I first volunteered before the Maryland primary, I have felt a part of this campaign and movement. But watching that speech on Friday, I could not stop repeating to myself, "I work for that man." Let me tell you, it's a mighty cool feeling.</p><br />~mUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-20061792091414872672008-07-14T12:23:00.000-07:002009-01-21T12:25:28.653-08:00VignettesCampaign life runs together into one, constant flow. In part, this is due to the massive amounts of people you meet every day, phone numbers you collect, data you report, and meetings you attend. But a far deeper (and simpler) root is simply that there is nothing to distinguish units of time from one another. I don't know what happened 'last week' or 'two weeks ago' because I haven't had a weekend with which to distinguish weeks since I got here. And while I do sleep (some), days are so long I have caught myself or been caught saying "yesterday when you…" when I meant to refer to something that happened just that morning. November 4<sup>th</sup> is approaching so quickly (only 3.5 months!), yet November 5<sup>th</sup> seems eons away. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm convinced that the first thing you lose working for a campaign is facial recognition and name memory. I was registering voters with my Field Organizer the other day (yesterday? I don't know…) when someone came up to us and shook his hand. "Kirby! I haven't seen you since the primary!" She continued, eventually saying something along the lines of, "you'll be happy to know my brother's surgery went fine and he's in recovery." After five minutes of holding his own, Kirby separated from the conversation so we could continue our registration efforts. As we walked away, he leaned over to me and said, "I have NO IDEA who she was." </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Side note: If you're reading this and under thirty, I know what you're thinking. Yes, my boss' name is Kirby. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read <span style="color:#0000ff;"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirby%27s_Dreamland" target="_blank">this</a></u></span>. It suffices to say that the irony runs deep, especially because until the fellows showed up, Kirby had no idea he was actually a bouncy, pink Nintendo bubble-creature who could suck up other Nintendo-creatures' powers.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The second thing you lose working for a campaign is any sense of chronology whatsoever. I remember a solidly good fraction of the last month, but have little perception of the order in which it occurred. Memorable moments are just that: moments, no longer in context. So, the duration of this post is vignettes, a few of the tidbits I remember from the last few weeks. The names are all aliases.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: bold;"><i>Mr. Franklin</i></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I work in two neighborhoods, as I mentioned in my last post. The Hill District, a poor and overwhelmingly African American neighborhood in which all 15,000 residents know each other, and Polish Hill, a poor and overwhelmingly white neighborhood, in which all 1,500 residents barely say 'hi' to their neighbors. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One Hill District resident called me (I'm not sure where he got my number) and began complaining about misuse of office space and inattention to the Hill District during the Pennsylvania primary. To be fair, the campaign is well aware that the Pittsburgh primary campaign was not a great one, and many important people and neighborhoods were overlooked. His complaints turned into trying to rent us office space, and as it was 11:30 pm and I was trying to cook dinner, I cut him off, asking if he would meet with me in person the following day. He gives me an address, I give him a time, and I go back to preparing my hearty and original meal of pasta from a 5 lb bag and red sauce from a 60 oz plastic jar of 'Prego.'</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The next day, I show up first to the address, a locked building on the main street of the Hill with grates on the door and A few minutes later, a cab comes down the street, flips a U turn in the middle of the block, pulls over, and the driver beckons to me to get in. After a split second of hesitation, I throw my backpack - which has my life (computer) in it – into the back seat and get in. It's Mr. Franklin, an 81 year old man who has lived in the Hill District all his life. He owns a cab company, by which I mean he drives his own cab. There's a large sign on the side of his building with the words "Eagle Taxi" and a phone number painted in cursive script. Dial the number and you'll get his wife, also in her 80's, who will use a CB radio to direct Mr. Franklin to wherever you may be. Mr. Franklin treats his radio like he were an eight year old kid, which is exactly how I would treat a CB radio if I had one. (Probably why I think he's such a cool guy.) He will ONLY call it his "communications system," never just a "radio," and raises his wife to ask when supper will be ready by calling, "Unit One to Base." It's the best thing ever.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">He is amazingly proud of his independence; he does everything himself. He keeps his cab and trucks (this 81 year old has two moving trucks and does shipping and hauling, too) "repaired himself." His house, and the added deck and garage? He "built himself." I eventually found out that what he meant by these statements was that he did everything on his terms. Not at the whim of a money-hoarding mechanic, he hires mechanics to come to him to keep his vehicles in tip-top shape. He did not build his house in the literal sense, but it was built under his watch, and he owns it in the clear. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The best part: two years ago, he was flown to Los Angeles to try to hold his own on "The Price is Right." I did not believe the man until he showed me the massive, 4-foot check for $2500 that lives behind his dresser. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Now, I am working with some local artists, contractors, and community members to get kids to paint a huge Obama mural and hang it on the side of one of his buildings. The icing on the cake: it was Mr. Franklin's idea.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span style="font-weight: bold;">Marie</span><br /></i></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Unlike the Hill, it's not easy to find Obama supporters in Polish Hill. Marie was one of the few (eight, actually) names of supporters from the Primary in the volunteer tracking system the campaign uses. She graciously offered to host a Unite For Change House Party, and I worked with her to plan the small event and invite neighbors and community members. This 72 year old woman spent two evenings walking around her neighborhood with me and knocking on doors, inviting complete strangers into her home for a potluck. The day of the potluck, of course, she cooked enough food to feed all twelve guests. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">A part of the House Party programming was essentially story-telling: each guest was asked to explain to the group what brought them to the party and to their support of Obama or any other candidate, with special emphasis on the host (Marie) and the organizer (me). Marie had been scared about sharing her story in our meetings beforehand, and had on my urging a few times practiced by telling me some of what she hoped to say. What came out the night of the party was completely different. This woman had grown up in quite racist Kentucky and was in her teens at the end of World War II. When racially integrated platoons would return to the army base near her town, black and white soldiers alike, who had just spent months or years fighting and dying side by side, would walk into the restaurant where Marie waited tables. She wanted to serve them, but her boss, "Mr. Roy," would not have it. Marie, a white teenager who everyone called "Peanuts," would get into public shouting matches with her boss about not serving the black war heroes. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">To me, this story is great for three reasons. First, of course, a 17 year old Kentuckian had the cajones to talk back to her boss about the wrongs of segregation. Second, her nickname was "Peanuts." Third, she felt comfortable enough in a room full of strangers to <i>tell us </i>that her nickname was "Peanuts."</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Marie is a trooper, and is going to make a great neighborhood team captain.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: bold;"><i>David Shapiro</i></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Field organizing is probably the most humbling thing I have ever done in my life. By that I mean the job has a tendency, just when you think you're having a great day, to trip you and then have the nerve to rub your fallen face in the mud. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">Moreover, it is humbling to be surrounded by people who have truly given their complete selves to this campaign. I'll be honest: I thought I was all that when I decided to take a semester off to work for the campaign, but I am surrounded by people who have given so much more and taken so many more risks to be a part of this movement. David is just one example.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">David works for the campaign as a field organizer. He's a Philadelphia Jew, which means he pronounces his last name "sha-PI-row" instead of "sha-pee-row," which I still haven't gotten used to. He is blatantly honest to a fault, loves Barack almost as much as he loves all sports anywhere, and has made the profound sacrifice of buying and wearing Pittsburgh sports team paraphernalia and hiding his Phillies gear in his closet. A lawyer in his late twenties, David has spent the last few years working for one of Philadelphia's top litigation firms. In the weeks before the Pennsylvania Primary, this lawyer put in eight hours a day on the campaign doing whatever they needed him to do, <i>after working a full day at his law firm</i>. After the primary, he was warned that if he left to work for Barack, there would be no job waiting for him when he got back. He quit anyway, and then volunteered for a month with no guarantee the campaign would actually hire him.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-style: normal;">I was at the bars with some of the staff a few nights ago, and I told David that he was the biggest asshole I had ever wanted to be friends with. He took it as a compliment, which is exactly how I meant it.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: bold;"><i>Steve</i></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I met Steve, an older man who has lived in Pittsburgh all his life, waiting for a bus one night at 9:00 or 9:30 at night. Dressed in old boots, and stained khakis, his collared light blue uniform shirt was tucked in yet unbuttoned to the bottom of his rib cage. He cleans PNC Park, where the Pirates play, after every home game. It takes four or five hours each night, he told me, depending on the crowd that night. He is extremely hunchbacked, to the point that I took as unspoken truth that he has been picking up other people's trash for a long, long time. He doesn't get to watch the games, but after this many years, I doubt he would want to. Yet each night, he takes a bus to the ballpark about half way through the game, not to return until the early hours of the morning. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">I mention Steve only because he doesn't fit into any important, sought-after political demographic, he will never be on tv, and no one will ever write a book about him or anyone like him. He is practically invisible, both politically and socially, yet because of the job I do, I got to meet him. And he made my day.</span></p><br />----<br /><br />In other news, I think I might have a job after the fellowship is over! More on that later....<br /><span style="color:#888888;">~m</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-61849339182398032962008-06-27T12:21:00.000-07:002009-01-21T12:23:07.602-08:00Eight Days a Week<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Talking to some friends before I left the Bay Area, I remember discussing the segment of the book/film, "Into the Wild," when Chris, the main character stops on a farm somewhere in the Midwest and works a harvest season with Vince Vaughn. (Ok, so I watched the movie, not read the book.) A college graduate of a wealthy family, he hadn't done a day of "real work" in his life. I'm proud to say that that isn't true for me – I have done a few days of real work in my life, and I might even have a couple of weeks worth of it under my belt, if you count my summer in Honduras and two trips to Post-Katrina New Orleans. I had brought it up because another one of my many visions for my own future had popped into my head- my want to take time off from whatever I am doing and do a season or a year or a few years of real work, work that involves daily physical labor. For some reason, I have the expectation that it will round me out as person – maybe that's just a testosterone thing, or perhaps I've read so much Calvin & Hobbes in my life that Calvin's dad has actually convinced me that it would "build character." Either way, while I may not be harvesting wheat or pouring concrete, I am indeed working my ass off. And I love it. Kind of.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We received a massive training packet on our first day of training two Saturdays ago, and a few pages in I found a page titled "a typical day for a field organizer." The sample day started at 6:30 AM with either bus-registration (riding the commuter bus routes trying to register voters) or visibility (to a bad field organizer, this means standing on a street corner with a sign. To a good field organizer, this means bringing coffee for the volunteers you have recruited to stand on a street corner and hold signs). The day ended at 10:30 or so – evenings are usually taken up by phone calling, which ends at 9:00 pm – then there's an hour and a half to do data entry and prepare for the next day. I found the whole sheet kind of bemusing, as they also told us that the Fellowship was a 30 hour a week requirement. That would mean it was only a two day a week job, and that's including an hour lunch break! </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Go figure, 30 hours is just the bare minimum.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The last two weeks have been crazy. Lots of up, and while I love the purpose that I am working for and love working for a purpose that means so much to me, even more down. This job is HARD, and its something that I have very little experience in. The last two weeks have really been a case study into how we (or at least I) learn, to some extent, through mimicry. I like to watch once through and then repeat, building on what I have observed. This is how the New Orleans trip happened – I used my experience as a participant to help figure out what could be done differently, better, for more people. Without that first experience I would have been swimming in the dark, which is exactly the feeling that has characterized much of the last two weeks. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So, what am I doing, anyway? I am in a group of four Organizing Fellows assigned to what are known in Pittsburgh as the Hill District and Polish Hill. We're supposed to, well, organize.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A brief aside: The Hill District, (or just, "the Hill") currently one of the poorest and most violent neighborhood in the city, shares the characteristics of many inner cities – 90% black and filled with Section 8 and other Public Housing projects, it is in an area that could be and should be quite nice or at the least often traveled through – it is right next to downtown, in the center of the city's geographically defined borders, and, on a hill, it has great views in all directions. Instead, just like Baltimore's inner city, inaccessible due to a beltway that allows commuters and travelers to bypass completely the poor areas of town, or New Orleans' Lower 9<sup>th</sup> Ward, which is a twenty minute drive from anything that might even resemble a freeway, the Pittsburgh infrastructure is designed so that visitors to downtown or those traveling through the city never have to and never get to see the Hill. It is really too bad, too: the neighborhood is a cultural mecca, once home to a strong Jewish and then Irish population, Satchel Paige's Negro League baseball team, the bars and clubs that launched many of America's great jazz musicians to fame, and August Wilson. Poor and black, the Hill is natural Obama territory, and was therefore completely oversaturated with voter registration efforts and literature before the primary. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Polish Hill, next to the Hill, mostly white, and working class, <span>is a completely different story. A massive and historic Roman Catholic church looks over the small community, which is surprising </span><i><span>still </span></i><span>filled with lots of Polish people. It seems to be comprised almost completely of people who have lived there their whole lives, and renters looking for cheap, short-term housing. White and blue-collar, Polish Hill went completely untouched by the Obama camp during the primary season. </span> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span>One </span>community leader told us that, although the two communities are literally across the street from one another, they "barely know each other exist." And it seems to be true. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Ok, back on track. What's my job? They told us to organize, and gave us not all that much more than that. If you get emails from Barack, (he sends them to me all the time, and text messages; I'm just that cool. Text 62262 if you want them too) you know there are over 3,000 "Unite For Change" house parties happening across the country tomorrow, Saturday. Those are us – the parties are, for the most part, organized by Fellows like me scattered across the country. But beyond the short term goal of the parties, and the never-ending task of attempting to locate and register unregistered voters, our job is to lay the groundwork for the massive field operation that is is the Obama campaign, just getting underway. Essentially, we have six weeks to completely canvass our turfs (in our case, 25 precincts) to locate local resources, hubs of community organization, neighborhoods of support and nonsupport, volunteers, and volunteer leaders. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">----</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Before I wrap this up, a word about community organizing. If you have watched the news in the last ten months, you know that Barack spent a chunk of his post-college youth as "a community organizer on the south side of Chicago." With that background, and the power of the populist movement that makes up the base of his vast support network, the campaign has taken on a wonderfully community-based feel. The line between field organizing, the political term that refers to the on-the-ground portion of an electoral campaign, and community organizing, the act of working with communities in an apolitical fashion to unify them around a common cause, has become blurred. But it has not disappeared. Community organizers enter communities to serve a perceived need defined by the communities themselves. Maybe a neighborhood lacks a grocery store, or two rival ethnic groups are fighting over a few jobs, keeping wages low, instead of working together to demand higher wages. While success may be achieved through political means, the end result is always less political than it is local, ideological. On the surface, field and community organizing appear extremely similar, but a deep chasm separates them. Field organizers may use the same tactics – recruiting volunteers, knocking on doors, making lots and lots and lots and lots of phone calls, talking to elected officials and unofficial community leaders, etc – but we are inherently political and come to the communities we work in with an agenda (electing a president) that we, not the community, set. In this way, we violate the first rule of community organizing. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">---</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Remember that training manual, with the page about the typical day of an organizer? There should be another page, specifically for the typical night of an organizer. In the world of campaigns, only three kind of nights seem possible. There's:</p> <ol><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">the "stay at the office until the wee hours of the morning then crash" night;</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">the "go home at a reasonably normal time, like 9:00 pm, then be anti-social for a few hours and crash" night; and</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">the "hit the bars and get up waaaaaaay too early to go back to work the next morning" night.</p> </li></ol> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> If my limited campaign experience tells me anything, the prevalence of night number 1 will stay about the constant for the next 5 months, but as we get closer to November, there will be fewer and fewer night number 2s and more and more night number 3s.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And on that note, let me wrap up one of my few remaining night number 2s and attempt to get a few hours of sleep before I get up for my fifteenth day of continuous work. That number is just going to keep getting higher and higher....</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">---</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Up next: How I almost got hired, but then wasn't because they'd rather not pay me, shaking Barack's hand and why it was so disappointing, and wondering in amazement for hours on end how it happened that in a town called "Unity," Hillary and Barack actually split the Democratic primary exactly 107 votes to 107 votes.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-50011457178154316922008-06-19T12:17:00.000-07:002009-05-22T12:18:11.294-07:00"Chapter 6: Hope"I came up with the title for this blog post about a week ago, on the side of a highway in Illinois. I actually can't give myself credit for coming up with it – that was the doing of (...guess who!) Barack Obama. It had been raining heavily all day, and we had just spent an hour sitting on the shoulder, waiting for the engine of Ben's '97 Jetta to, essentially, dry off. <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">After losing a day and a whole lot of money to a mechanic in Boulder on Wednesday, we spent Thursday driving from Colorado to the tiny town of Devil's Elbow, Missouri, where Ben's Grandma and some uncles and cousins live. There were no real hiccups in the drive, accept that IT WAS REALLY LONG, STRAIGHT, AND FLAT (the boring half of Colorado, all of Kansas, and half of Missouri = 14 hours) and I got the only speeding ticket of the road trip, a $150 gift from a Kansas State Trooper. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Our radar detector worked great, make no mistake – it was complete user error. It beeped, telling us that it sensed a weak "Ka band" broadcast – one of the more common bands for radar detectors – but it beeped in an odd way, convincing me it was on a weird setting. So I tried to "fix" (fiddle) with it while driving down I-70 at 90 mph. You don't have to know me well to know that's the kind of mistake I would make. I was pressing too many buttons to notice the trooper's signal getting stronger until he was just sitting behind me with his lights on waiting for me to notice him. But worry not about my poor driving habits: you don't really have to watch the road in Kansas, as it's so straight you could tie the wheel to the door and take a nap. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">---</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Missouri was a whole new experience for me, and great – completely green everywhere, with a big river (called something that struck me as very southern, "the big little river" or something) meandering through town. Ben's grandma is one of the sweetest people ever, a German immigrant who fell in love with an American soldier posted in Germany after WWII, and a damn good cook. We went innertubing down the little big river at 1:00 in the morning with Ben's cousins, and got far too little sleep for Friday's drive: Missouri to Pittsburgh, which we had hoped to do in two days, would be another supposed 13 hours. It ended up taking 17. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We got a great start Friday morning, but it didn't last long. I took the first driving shift, and about five minutes into the drive it started raining substantially. I'm minding my own business at 70 mph in the right lane of the two lane highway when a big rig with Arkansas plates flies by me at about 95 mph. I don't read anything into it – we're on a downward slope and I figure he didn't want to get his brakes wet or something – until he merges into my lane, cuts me off, and promptly slows down to 65 mph. "Jerk!" I merge left and try to pass him – he merges left, cutting me off again, slowing down to 60 mph. I try again to pass him, in the right lane this time, and then again in the left – he just straddles the two lanes, and my insults quickly turn from printable to not so respectable. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Right then, I am struck with the brilliant notion that the world wouldn't be all that different if Ben and I were dead in a ditch. I egg the truck into the left lane, then drop down to third gear, accelerate behind the tractor-trailer and dart right, half in the right lane and half on the shoulder. 70 mph – 80 mph – 90 mph – at this point I have passed about 2/3 of the truck, and beginning to congratulate myself on my tricky aggressive driving. Too soon – he merges back into the right lane, which I am half in, all but running me off the road. Breaking, honking, and swearing with all my might, I am forced completely onto the shoulder as I slow down and return to my subordinate position behind the truck. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Yeah, so I thought a 10 year old compact just out of the shop could beat an 18-wheeler driven by an angry racist (we figure this was all incited by our four Obama bumper stickers) in a rainstorm. My mom calls me stubborn. I call me principled.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If only it was over: 30 seconds later, the engine loses power, not to start again for an hour and a half. After a tow from the local friendly AAA, a mechanic took a peak and finding nothing wrong, told us to try starting it up. It started, with no trouble at all, and we left Devil's Elbow for the second time, at 11:00 instead of 7:30. After traversing Missouri, Illinois, and most of Indiana, the rain gets heavy again. As we listen to Barack Obama read "The Audacity of Hope" to us (books on tape = best road trip EVER), the engine loses power again. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">After putting skills of deduction to work, having a long-distance conference with my all-knowing father, and utilizing picture messaging for the second time in my life (the first time was a picture of a broken car part sent to my dad, also), we come to the conclusion that Ben's distributor is cracked, and when water gets under the hood (first spray from the racist trucker, then the heavy rain) it shorts out the electrical system that normally sends power to the spark plugs. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">An hour later, the distributor has dried again, and we start the car. As I pull back onto the highway, Ben starts the book again. Barack reads the last few words of chapter five, and then says, "Chapter Six: Hope." Needless to say, after seven days that included finding out we had positions with the campaign on the other side of the country, planning a road trip, packing, driving across four states, sitting at a mechanic's for a day, driving across five more states, and getting into a fight with a big rig, it captured the moment.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">---</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Since Friday (we got in at 12:30 am), those words have continued to capture the moment: training was lunacy, three 10 to 12 hour days learning about Pittsburgh, community organizing, how to throw a house party, PA's voter registration policies, primary results, and a whole bunch of campaign secrets which I'm not allowed to tell you. Then they set us loose, with little to no direction. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">During a break on Monday, the last day of training, I overheard another Organizing Fellow (that's my job title) ask a staffer a question about our extremely limited resources. The staffer replied, "it's a bit of a shoe-string operation right now." </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The Fellow responded, "yeah, but with a borrowed shoe-string." More on that, and my first few days, later.<span style="font-size:130%;"><b><br /></b></span></p>~mattUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1776584680237683647.post-1139917860832328512008-06-13T11:05:00.000-07:002008-06-13T11:07:36.497-07:00zen and the art of being americanWritten June 11. Postdated due to lack of internet. Pictures to come.<br /><br />Reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” as I drive across the country is a total trip – not only am I drawing connections between the philosophic discussion and my (extremely limited) motorcycle experience, but am following the author on his road trip as I pursue my own. Now, his trip through the West was weeks long, on the side roads, and he was traveling to travel, and ours is one week long, on far more interstates then we would like, and with a most definite destination (and deadline) in mind. But nevertheless, small similarities arise. For one, there's lots of time for quiet, introspective, philosophic thought, of which I am greatly appreciative, as my last semester at school involved next to no time for introspection or quiet. <p></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Secondly, I am finding very true his observation that, when you are tied so closely to your route, your speed, your destination, your vehicle, and your fellow passenger(s), there are good days and there are bad days. Monday was a good day – 750 miles through the Sierra Nevadas and across the Nevada desert on route 50 – the loneliest highway in America – we put Ben's radar detector to good use and traveled, well, above the speed limit (note my comma usage), ended with setting up camp in Bryce Canyon, Utah, meeting some very pleasant travelers setting up camp next to us (an older couple, also from the Bay Area, they were on their last leg of a 5 week trip), and drinking Budweiser. Day two was most definitely not a good day – the check engine light had turned on late monday, and it continued to haunt us, as did interesting noises and weak acceleration, as we drove from Bryce, in SW Utah, to Boulder, Colorado, where we were to spend the night at my friend Annalise's house. Day three, today, was simply a very expensive day – we never left Boulder, and Ben ended up spending a solid chunk of his life savings (which, like my own, isn't very much at the moment) fixing his car.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let me backtrack a little: for those of you who don't know, I am at the moment driving from Oakland, California to Pittsburgh, PA, with my high school friend Ben Dalgetty. Saturday morning at 9:00 am we will begin the Obama campaign's Organizing Fellowship, a six week volunteer program where, as far as we understand it, fellows shadow paid field organizing staff, learn what they do, and prepare to work for the campaign. If they like you, they hire you after the six weeks. Ben, who is participating in a campaign semester through his school, Occidental college, does not have to return to school until after the general election. I just submitted my Leave of Absence paperwork to Goucher today. Both of us are planning on getting paid jobs with the campaign and working through the general.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As I've been traveling, I've noticed some things (which I would say is generally a good thing):</p> <ol><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I'm not sure which state it is that officially goes by the motto, “big sky country,” but in most of these western, non-coastal states, it is damn true – the sky just seems bigger and grander in Utah and Colorado. It is so empty, and so beautiful. Even the Nevada desert is stunning in its own, albeit nuclear wasteland sort of way (yes, that's “nuk-li-er,” not “nuk-u-lar”). And the stars.... don't get me started. The night sky from the middle of nowhere, with next to no light pollution at all, is a completely different thing.</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Drinking Budweiser always makes me feel American. But drinking it next to my tent in a national park just takes it to a whole new level. Plus, despite what my beer-connoisseur friends might say, I have a soft spot for it.</p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">On the topic of national parks, why is it that there are ALWAYS more foreign tourists there then Americans? I swear, I saw twice as many non-Americans hiking in Bryce than good old patriots. (we squeezed a short hike in before we left through some amazing rock formations called hoodoos...) Driving through so much empty space reminded me how important it is to conserve its beauty. It's not untouched, of course – we traveled on good roads, hiked worn trails, and our campsite had running water and plumbing nearby – but it is one of the few places left where humans, who after all are just as much a part of “nature” as anything else, being natural and carbon-based and all, don't simply overtake everything around them and bend it to their will but participate in their surroundings as just one group of respectful denizens. And I worry, that with so few spending time in these areas (and therefore often forgetting to participate in nature), that the imagined importance of this not-really-all-that-empty space will fade and groups of motorcyclists, families in rented motor homes, circles of tents, and kids traveling to work for presidential campaigns will turn into more air-conditioned suburbs and big-box stores. </p> </li><li><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If I lived out here, away from cities and on a ranch or a farm, I'd be a Ron Paul fan too. Seriously though – city life, just like any life I guess, gives you tunnel vision – gay marriage is important, fixing our schools is important, and taxes, to an extent, are just fine as they fund necessary public services. Simple, right? But driving along these roads and seeing two mile long dirt driveways, barns, houses, cabins, “keep out” signs, and pick up trucks actually used to haul things and not as testosterone-proving fashion statements reminded me it's not so simple. One image from monday especially stuck with me: we passed a man at one point while on route 50, repairing a section of his miles-long fence. He was standing on a rutted path next to his four wheeler, which he actually uses to get around his property and fix things, as opposed to just doing wheelies, scaring deer, and pissing off the neighbors, as there were tools hanging off all sides and utility bags strapped on the back and front. Who knows what he was fencing in or out, as there were no cattle in sight, probably just defining his territory as his own for reasons that I will never understand. Or maybe I do know – he was separating him from me. The point is, if I lived out here, doing my own thing, working my land or raising my horses or livestock, I'd probably vote for Ron Paul, too.</p> </li></ol> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I think that's all for now. Tomorrow we hit the road again, needing to make up some time. It'll be a 12 hour day, crossing Eastern Colorado and all of Kansas, hopefully to arrive at Ben's grandparents' house in Devil's Elbow, Missouri by dinner time. </p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0