Costa Rica, the contradiction
Over these past two weeks I have learned a lot about the relativity of poverty and wealth. My weekends have been spent in Costa Rica, the exotic tourism capital of white sand beaches and jungle canopy tours, and my week days in Costa Rica, the Central American plantation that your bananas and coffee come from. The contrast between the two is striking and I reel from the culture shock daily.
Two weeks ago, on a Friday, I got in a car with Leo and Digna (his girlfriend) and headed to San Vito- a tiny town buried in the rolling jungle hills four hours south near the Panama border. We were there to see about a new village bank.
Inside the social hall of town too small to have a center we met with the leaders of a local women’s club. Apparently, they had heard from their neighbors up north that there was a foundation giving out loans people like them, normal people, working people, could afford. They wanted in. It was getting dark and the rain was beating hard against the tin roof so we talked fast and loud. One of them wanted a loan to raise butterflies (its common here to release caged butterflies during birthdays and church events and celebrations, much like doves in the movies). Another, wanted a loan to buy a second saw for his workshop. Rent is expensive but with two saws he thinks he can mill enough wood to turn a profit. I sat there humbled. A simple saw could turn this guy’s life around! Sitting there listening to Leo explain the technicalities I felt proud to be part of a solution. Entrepreneurial spirit is everywhere and these people were excited that they were going to be given a chance to finance their ideas. We ended the meeting when the rain beating on the tin roof became so loud we could no longer hear ourselves speak.
If Costa Rica is a playground for middle-aged middle-income bracket tourists then Manuel Antonio beach is their sand box. The super markets are stocked with imported junk food, the buses run on time, and white costumed waiters serve mai-tais to 5-star hotel guests lounging on combed beaches. Behind them monkeys swing in the jungle vines and ahead, just past the breaking waves, the sea crashes angrily against tiny jungled islands spotting the coast. The Saturday morning that we arrived back from San Vito I caught the first local bus there.
The bus ride itself was worth the trip alone. Our converted school bus, originally from Rhode Island, zig zagged down the lush mountain canopy and along the palm lined pacific coast. Somewhere around Dominical we left the real Costa Rica behind and entered the Costa Rica of postcards and travel magazines. Real-estate advertisement interrupted the skyline. “Your piece of tropical paradise, $200,000 and up”.
At the bus stop in Quepos I met a group of cute girls from Quebec and followed them to their hostel. The place was top notch. For $10 the middle class youth of Rio de Janerio, Boston, Montreal, Trieste, and California shared bunk beds and swapped travel stories. Late at night, after a round of drinking games with Germans and Italians, I went swimming with the girls from Quebec in a pool overlooking the Pacific. Think, just the day before I was sitting in a farm town listening to a farmer explain why he wants a loan so he can afford a second saw! A saw!
The work weak was spent in bed. I fell sick with the stomache flu on Tuesday. From what I’m not sure. Alone, a thousand miles from anyone who might care, the toilet was alter and my bed my refuge.
Thursday, recovering from my lonely sickness, I caught a bus to San Jose. I didn’t exactly have an idea where I was going next, but it seemed a nice idea to escape San Isidro again. Indecisive to the extreme, in my rucksack I packed both a sweater and shorts just in case I went to both the beach and the mountains. At the Tranquilo Backpackers hostel in Barrio Amon I whipped out the trusty Lonely Planet and put my finger on Monteverde, the Cloud Forest. The sweater would come to good use after all.
I have an amazing super-power ability to sleep on buses, airplanes, and cars. The minute I sit down and the bus starts the slow rumble of the engine puts me to sleep. Five hours later I woke as the bus bounced through sink holds on an unpaved road high up in the northern continental divide of Costa Rica.
Monteverde is the jungle gym of the Costa Rican playground. Canopy tours, ziplines, guided bird watching, river rafting, and all built around one of the earth’s last virgin cloud forests. Eco-tourism they call it. You can hardly step outside without paying forty dollars. It reminded me of the tourism industry built around the Iguazu Waterfalls in Argentina. Perfectly manicured paths cut through stunning scenery, otherwise completely inaccessible.
Refusing to pay for a tour guide, Friday morning I walked 8km up hill to the entrance of the nature preserve. I paid $17 to enter the park and for four hours wandered through the muddy paths. I found out why they call it a cloud forest. A perpetual thick fog leaves the leaves glistening and the moss neon green but prevents you from seeing more than 3-5 meters in any direction. The trees are tall and pre-historic looking with large vines and enormous leaves hanging from them. Large blue butterflies whisk about and these tiny white hovering bugs that look exactly like ferries floated everywhere.
Although I had originally scoffed at the though of hiring a guide, this is probably one of the places I should have doled out for one. I marched around the paths, wide eyed and happy, but ignorant of the history and the wonder in which I was but a tiny spec. I learned later most of the wildlife in Monteverde is endangered and unique to the area. This forest is one of the only places left you can see the resplendent Quetzal, the mayan bird of legend. There are hundreds of unique species of poison dart frogs, monkeys, and such that I didn’t notice either.
But I did see a lot of hummingbirds. Here is a video from the hummingbird sanctuary just outside the entrance to Monteverde park: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhOC9ZKY72w
Saturday I had planned to leave for Arenál, Costa Rica´s most famous active volcano, but late Friday I got a call from one of my coworkers at Kiva who was in town for a conference. He had decided to come visit me in Monteverde. Since there isn’t much to do in Monteverde if you don’t want to spend lots of money, I sat around the tiny town of Santa Elena reading books, napping in the hammoc, and eating 1,800 colon sandwhiches from the friend chicken shop across the street. Rob, from Kiva arrived late in the day and we hiked around the town a bit. At night we visited this frog museum where a little Costa Rican girl toured us around a pitch back room shining flash-lights on glass aquariums that contained all the frogs I hadn’t managed to see in the wild. Sunday morning I caught the 6am bus to San Jose and put my super-power to work. 8 hours later I was back in San Isidro where it was raining.
With most of the office work finished, at last!, I can finally get to the fun part- field visits with our loan officers. This week I visited two the communities of Platanares de Brunca and Santa Rosa de Brunca. These excursions usually means 2-3 hour drives through Costa Rica´s back roads of pineapple fields and jungle. I am learning that it’s brutest form, village banking is actually little more than a group of local farmers with a notebook and a cash box. It is hardly glamorous work. I sat around while Danny, our loan officer, collected payments in dirty wads of cash from the borrowers.
The highlight was towards the end of the day when a farmer came in asking for a loan to buy two cows. I got to see for the first time a new loan signed to Kiva. I explained to Manuel what Kiva was and what the internet was and how his picture and loan would be put on a website for all the world to see. His eyes dodged around the room the whole time. He was really nervous and I wonder if he understood what I was talking about. He was just a simple guy who wanted a loan for a cow- what’s all this noise about computers?. When it came time to sign his name he became very ashamed. He couldn’t write. He was oh so embarrassed and I felt terrible for him, watching his hand tremble as the pen touched the paper. He apologized over and over that his signature wasn’t any good, that he had never gone to school.
The next day in Santa Rosa I visited a second village bank. It was very similar to the first meeting, except this time I had come prepared. Before leaving the office I had brought print outs of the Kiva website and of the profile pages of four Kiva borrowers in the community. One of them happened to be there that day. As I explained that people all over the world had contributed to his loan, I pointed to the pictures of those people on my printed paper. He loved it! At one point he became very emotional and his eyes started watering. He was so happy that people as far away as Norway and Colorado cared about him! The village bankers were impressed too. They had been giving out Kiva loans for over a year but had never actually seen the website. To them Kiva was just a name they wrote down during the loan paperwork. But to actually see the pictures, to hear it explained, and to be able to ask questions about the process was an eye opening experience. They kept saying how beautiful, how beautiful it is that this exists. They wanted to know if people on Kiva would like to help them build a potable water system for their town, which doesn’t have running water.
Here is Melvin’s loan on Kiva: http://partners.kiva.org/lend/180590
At night I ate dinner at Danny’s house. We ate plates full of platano verde tacos. His mother is one of my new favorite people.
Thanks for reading.
Gabe
