Gabe Francis is a kiva fellow.

Make Your Own Adventure

Hi! This update includes: confessions of an introvert, a four hour drive through pineapple fields to serve papers to borrowers, near death experiences on a Central American bus, six freshly caught fish cooked over an open bonfire on the Caribbean Coast, and a fly entomologist. Pictures are up too! Costa Rica First Days,Puerto de Viejo de Límon, and San Isidro First Impressions.

My first week at FUDECOSUR, Kiva’s partner in south Costa Rica, flew by. In comparison to the stories I have been hearing from the other Kiva Fellows, I think I have it pretty easy here. I don’t have to walk 2km to buy fresh water or worry about getting kidnapped, and my MFI, though small, runs fairly efficiently. Most normal people might think this is a good thing, but to be honest I’m kind of disappointed.

Seems I have to make my own adventure here.

It doesn’t help that I am an introverted person. If left alone to my own devices, I’ll gladly spend hours alone on a computer or with a thick book. Some of my friends and family find this frustrating and those that don’t know me well mistake my silence for disinterest. When entirely the opposite is true. I crave friendships even though I am not very good at maintaining them. I like being part of the mess, but not creating it. That’s why I prefer living with roommates rather than alone, crowded places to open spaces, and big parties (even if I do sit in the corner most of the time people watching). And it is certainly why I like travelling. On the road, lonely and lost, I am often forced out of my shell and get to meet the most extraordinary of people as a result.

Take Danny Zuñega for example. Danny is a loan officer at FUDECOSUR, Kiva’s micro-finance NGO partner in Costa Rica. Although he is only 19 and just out of high school he looks much older. On Friday I spent the day with Danny driving around in the pineapple fields of the Buenos Aires province seeking delinquent borrowers to serve papers. It was my first time out of the office and, most importantly, first glimpse of life outside of the two story tall sprawl of a Costa Rican city. I was happy to be outside as my first week had felt all too much like the regular 9-5 I had thought I was escaping when I joined Kiva.

The road between San Isidro and Buenos Aires, the only two towns of significance in the area, cuts through beautiful rolling jungle covered hills and valleys full of pineapple, platano, and coffee. Vines and monster sized leaves straight out of Tarazan impose a striking border between the fields and tall tree canopy. Aside from the beautiful scenery the trip was fairly uneventful. Every once in a while Danny would veer off onto another dirt road, stop the car at a local store to ask where such a such a person lives, then we would drive another half hour through more pineapple fields until Danny found the house to serve the paper to the borrower. The last stop of the day was most exciting. By then it had started raining so hard that the bright red mud roads we were driving on turned into little red rivers. Muddy waterfalls cascaded off every precipice and flowed from the brilliant green fields. At one point, our four wheel drive car barely made it up the steep mud hill at the top of which lived the treasurer of one of our village banking committees. While Danny and the treasurer, a weathered leather skinned farmer, chatted through a cracked car window in heavy rain I couldn’t help but smile and reflect at the random direction my life has taken me. On the way home Danny dropped me off at the bus station. I was headed for a weekend trip to the Caribean Coast to visit another recent friend, David.

Catalan by birth and lawyer by training, David and I became fast friends in the Miami airport after missing our flight to Costa Rica. Like many educated Europeans David is fluent in five languages, Catalan, Spanish, Italian, English, and French. At the beginning of the year he decided he was sick of his career in tax law and wanted to go back to school to study diplomacy at London College. For the next few months he is planning to bum around Central America. 

The odds are stacked up against me for weekend trips. I’m in the middle of this beautiful country with rain forrests and beaches that are the stock setting for travel agency posters, but have to work in a remote dingy town with no transportation options other than a very limited bus schedule. Because infrastructure is amateur compared to the US, to get anywhere in this country one has to first pass through San Jose, some 2-4 hours north depending on how suicidal the bus driver is feeling on the connecting road, called Cerro de la Muerte (literally, no joke, the mountain of death). So to get to the Caribean I had to first get to San Jose. The last bus leaving San Isidro for San Jose is 6:30pm and the last bus from the Caribean at 6pm. That means I’d have to sleep in San Jose. It was on this particular occasion I met Brian.

Brian, a thirty year old Wall Street broker, cashed in on the high times just months before the recent market collapse. “At the time, I looked like the smartest guy in the room. But it was pure luck. All I really wanted to do was travel.” But like any brilliant quant, after six months of bumming around in Panama he became bored. His girlfriend suggested he get a hobby and so on a trip through San Jose he bought the Galileo hostel. These days he spends his days working on the hostel (he is currently on a kick painting each wall of his hostel a different bright color) and nights at the bar he built in the back room, lovingly dubbed the Rusty Pineapple. The Galileo, at $9 a night for a bunk, has become my de facto stop over while in San Jose.

At 5am I took a taxi to the Coca-cola bus station to catch the 6am to Puerto Viejo de Límon near the Panama border. If you couldn’t have guessed by now, traffic and safety rules are a little lax in Central America. The counter had oversold the bus leaving 7 of us standing for the 4.5 hour, hair rising “ride” to the coast. Without a seat back to block my view of the road I witnessed every near miss accident as our bus blindly passed into the opposing lane to get around any car in its way. Two lane curvy road with a sheer drop cliff on one side? No mind, ride the yellow divider. Foggy? Drive in the middle of the road at 110km an hour. Road curve blinds your view around the corner? Psha, that’s nothing, my bus is huge, surely the other car will get out of the way first.

Once I got in Puerto Viejo things turned for the better. I found David’s hostel and a note on his tent telling me to come find him on the beach. On the shallow beach, between palms and branches that crept out over the sand to hang in the water, I found David with his new friend Sam. Sam is from Boston and carries his blond wavy hair and Jesus-like beard with pride. He had just quit his job as actuary with Fidelity insurance for an MBA at MIT which he will start in the fall. In the mean time he is bumming around Costa Rica and Panama. Together, David, Sam, and I trekked off on the long picturesque beaches for a day of fishing. At the mouth of a cool river flowing into the lukewarm waves we met a Tico kid who taught us how to fish from the beach using a piece of string tied lasso style around a palm leaf. We used bright red crabs as bait. Catching the crabs was almost as fun as fishing. They were too fast to run after and the holes too deep to dig out. So we gathered fallen coconuts and smashed them before they could run to safety. That night we ate the six tiny fish we caught over a grill back at the hostel. Almost as rich as the fish were the howler monkeys screeching at us from the jungle canopy that spilled over the white sand. At the hostel we met a couple Tica girls, an Ecuadorian, and this brilliant, drop dead gorgeous half Brazilian - half French girl who worked in development and spoke no less than six languages. We hung out with them the rest of the night. Sunday Sam left for Boston, and David and I rented a canoe with the goal of getting out past the waves to catch bigger fish. But instead but all I caught was a bad sunburn. That afternoon I left for the long trip back to San Isidro.

Despite the sun burn the cumulative 24 hours I spent in transit between buses and two nights in San Jose was well worth it. Again the bus schedules required I sleep in San Jose. At the Galileo that night I met another interesting character. Burget from South Africa studies house flies, probably the most eclectic of professions that I have encountered so far on the trip. He was staying at the Galileo for the week in preparation for his talk on the distribution of the common house fly in his home country, South Africa at the annual house fly world conference. I mean, who knew such a thing existed? He kept me engaged in longest and hopefully the last conversation I will have about house flies. Really though, I was fascinated.

The 5am bus got me over the Cerro de la Muerte and into San Isidro just in time to arrive at the FUDECOSUR office unshowered, un-slept, and clothes spotted with white patches of dried salt water. Monday I moved into my new apartment. While I’m sad I will be living on my own and won’t be coming home to the comforting commotion, my new place is right around the corner. I plan to sneak over for dinner and movie nights often. At work this week I have been working on a few projects, including an audit of the Management Information and Accounting System that FUDECOSUR uses. Exciting huh? Leo, the director, continues to treat me as his favored son and I am now more certrain this is only because I represent a source of funding for his MFI. Last night he took me to a local bar to watch the Costa Rica national team play Paraguay. He made sure that every time my beer was half full another appeared at the table. In between beers he fed me shots of Guaro, a home-brew liquor made from fermented sugar cane that smells and tastes almost exactly like rubbing alcohol.

Tonight FUDECOSUR has a soccer game against the mechanics in San Isidro. I’ve been invited to play. If we win, I hope the celebration doesn’t include any more guaro. Tomorrow, bright and early I have a presentation to FUDECOSUR’s board of directors.

Gabe

The Rain in San Isidro

Today is the first day the roosters on the tin roof above my bed didn’t leave me tossing and turning with a pillow over my ears. Instead I woke to the stifled cries of the six month old baby Tristan. 

Tristan’s parents, Pierre and Arine, are a dutch and belgian couple who I met through couchsurfing.org that are here in San Isidro to start a green energy company (Purasol - http://purasol.co.cr) . They have graciously allowed me to stay with them until I find my own apartment. Their tiny but comfortable house lies several blocks from my MFI’s office in San Isidro, a small town in the middle of jungle covered mountains, where I will be spending most of my Fellowship.

Tuesday was my first day of work with FUDECOSUR, Kiva’s partner in Southern Costa Rica. The office is located behind a pharmacy on the western side of the central park, directly across from the main cathedral. At first appearances the work culture seems exemplary. There are 12 employees; all of whom are fairly laid back and friendly. Each of them, and especially Leo, the director, seem to really believe in the social good they are providing. Every morning at 8:45 the employees eat breakfast together in the conference room- a tradition I love already. Employees are free to leave when they want for lunch and the day ends promptly after the 4pm coffee break. I’m not used to such relaxed hours and the past few days I’ve been caught off gaurd by them turning off the lights- which I guess is their way of telling me it is time to leave. I had expected to come in, consultant style, guns blazing, and get a lot of work done right away but have had to quickly reset my expectations. The Tico communication style is passive and I’m afraid I may have already offended the Kiva Coordinator, the person in charge of the Kiva accounts, by asking her so many direct questions. Even now three days later she still seems nervous to speak to me.

Since I have to leave work so early and there isn’t much going on here I spend my afternoons looking for apartments. Last night upon hearing that I don’t have a place to live yet Leonardo, the managing director of my MFI, and his wife took me on a three hour tour of the city. We hopped from place to place inquiring about prices. At one point in the night, tired of driving around endlessly, we passed by to visit the mother of Leo’s wife - a tiny spunky old women with a lot of heart that reminds me of my mother’s neighbor Wanda. She gave me a big kiss and shared words of wisdom over a glass of milk. By around 7pm, still uncertain if they were helping me out of kindness or because I represent a significant source of funding to their MFI (probably both), I politely asked them to take me home. Pierre already had dinner on the table, a provencal soup, steak, and salad. I went to sleep under hanging laundry, perpetually damp from the dense humidity.

Tomorrow, Friday I am going to my first borrowers committee meeting 100km south on the border of Panama. FUDECOSUR is unique among MFIs in that they use a village banking model. Meaning that rather than manage the loans to the client’s directly they give the money to an elected committee leader who distributes and collects payments on behalf of the local community. So far they have 39 of these committees throughout Perez Zeledon and Buenos Aires providences. By 2014 they want to have 50. Meeting our borrowers, the profiles you see on the Kiva website, is the part I have been waiting for most of all. One of my tasks at the meeting is to convince a coffee grower to let me shadow him all day to film a documentary for Kiva’s marketing department. I can hardly wait.

Photos are coming. Pura vida,

Gabe

Pura Vida, Mae

Here is an update I just posted on my blog. Would you please sign up for my mailing list at www.gabrielfrancis.com? It makes it much easier so I don’t forget you the next time.

I arrived in Costa Rica yesterday, a day late and without my bags- American Airlines has lost them. At first impression San Jose is rainy, noisy, and over-run with American fast-food chains. Despite the odds I am very content. It feels good to be at the beginning of a new adventure.

Costa Rica is obviously more developed the other Central American neighbors I have visited. San Jose looks fairly similar to Tegucigalpa only cleaner and without the scary men carrying shotguns. It is also evident that life is good here- the streets are full of people at all hours and stores are full of quality merchandise. In fact, the stores are so well stocked that I am now certain my 67 pound roller-suitcase, still missing in action, is over-packed. Everything I will need through out my trip can be found very easily.

Today I made my way to the city central market to try out my new camera. As opposed to just about every other place in the world I have traveled, everybody here is very happy to pose for a photo. My camera is a great conversation starter. I politely ask if I can take a photo, “Le importa si saco una foto?” and then afterwards I show them the photo. Ussually they ask where I’m from. Rather flatteringly, 9 times out of 10 they guess Spain. The Ticos, Costa Ricans, are hyper-friendly and brag incensently about how beautiful their women are. In the street the girls upon seeing a gringo with a obnoxiously large camera insist on posing for a shot and that I also write down their names. For what I don’t know. Maybe because because they think I’m a journalist or maybe in hopes that I’ll go the extra step and take their phone number.

Since missing my first connection in Miami due to a long delay at Laguardia I’ve been hanging out with a Spaniard named David from Barcelona. We are very similar and it has been good to have a friend to share the experience with. My Argentina connection, that’s where I lived last year, continues to show returns. Argentinians are everywhere and always so supremely friendly once I start talking about how I love their country. For example, at the airport David and I met Tomas, an Argentinian from Palermo in Buenos Aires, who followed us to our hostel where we spent most of the night at the hostel bar drinking their home-made cocktail, the Rusty Pineapple.

Things are more expensive than I anticipated. The average meal costs 3,000 colones or $6. Food is predominantly rice and beans accompanied by various meats, eggs, and garnish of potatoes or fruit. To drink Ticos ussually take a fruit shake of one the local exotic types- guanayaba, ces (still don’t know what this is), or mango. It rains lightly each afternoon and last night there was a thunderstorm. Even when it isn’t raining the sky is filled with dark grey clouds that threaten to douse rain at every moment. The Ticos say this is normal for the rainy season and I’d better prepare myself because in the south where I am going it is worse, especially through October. Surprisingly I haven’t been bit by one bug yet even though I see plenty flying around.

Tomorrow I will catch a bus to San Isidro del General where the main office of my MFI, FUDECOSUR is located. A Dutch couple I found on couchsurfing.org has volunteered their house until I find a place to live. Monday is a holiday so the first day of work will be Tuesday. I feel very under-prepared but Kiva says this is normal and that my only job the first week is to make a good impression.

When saying hello or goodbye, the Ticos ussually throw in a “Pura Vida” meaning literally Pure Life. So, Pura Vida, mae. Que te encuentres bien.

Gabe

What to pack for Costa Rica?

Here I am sitting in my New York apartment, 40 hours away from a three-month journey into Costa Rica, and I haven’t packed a thing. My apartment still needs to be boxed up and put into storage in anticipation of my subletter’s imminent move in, bed needs to be sold on craigslist, my clothes need to be washed before I can pack them, and I still haven’t shopped for the business casual attire I will need to wear at my micro-finance partner, FUDECOSUR.

To calm my nerves, here is a list of items I thinking to pack. Am I missing anything?

Clothes:

• 3-5 short sleeve button ups
• 2 full sleeve button ups
• 1 tie
• 3 slacks
• 1 jeans
• socks, underwear
• dress shoes, water proof hiking boots, soccer cleats (for pick up games), sandals
• 3-5 light t shirts
• running shorts
• 3 pair shorts
• rain jacket
• sweater
• light jacket for hiking

Electonics

• Meraki wifi node
• macbook pro laptop
• Canon S90
• Canon 7D + lenses (recent purchase)
• 2 320GB portable hard drives (for photos, music, misc)
• camera accessories and charges
• misc cables (mac adapters, ethernet etc that are hard to find in CR apparently)
• voltage converter

Misc

• day tote bag
• 20 gallon waterproof bag
• mosquito nets
• lots of DEET
• toiletries
• headlamp
• sunscreen
• extra contacts and glasses

Books

• On Love and Other Demons by Marquez in spanish
• Cloud Atlas by Mitchell
• Timequake by Vonnegut
• The Snowball: Biography of Warren Buffet (halfway finished)
• Collected Works of Jorge Luis Borges
• The Great Fire Poems by Gilbert
• Costa Rica Lonely Planet

37 Brushes to Paint the World

Here is a preview of a blog post I have written to announce the KF12 class for the official Kiva Fellows blog. It should premier next Friday here.

Hello from beautiful San Francisco!

 As member of the upcoming Kiva Fellows class 12 (KF12), I am excited but exhausted. Although Kiva Fellow class 11 is still in the field a new class is already preparing to follow in their steps. Last week 37 new Fellows of KF12 graduated from an intense week of training.

Over the week KF12 marched through crash course trainings in finance, social performance measurement, media training and more. Our class includes investment bankers from Wells Fargo, technologists from Google, lawyers, Fullbright scholars, and Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia. Each of us has set aside our jobs to volunteer in harsh conditions as diverse as the mountains of Moldova to the savanna plains of Sierra Leone. In my case, I’m taking a sabbatical from a job at Google to document entrepreneur stories in the cloud forests of southern Costa Rica, some of whom are accessible only by motorcycle and machete. Adventures aside, by the end of our fellowship we will have a hands-on experience of micro-finance unparalleled in the world.

Please join me in congratulating the upcoming Kiva Fellows class 12. We leave in just a few weeks and I can’t wait to hear the stories.

Introducing the Kiva Fellows Class 12 (KF12)