Rural Stay Pt. 3

I’m back in San Jose! It’s hard to believe how quickly those three weeks went. I’m putting all of my photos on my computer while I write. I hadn’t realized how much I did in San Luis until now (and there were a handful of times when I didn’t have my camera to document the many things we did every day). To recap the last week:

On Sunday we went to yet another church to see the First Communion of Doña Faynier’s nephew. This was my first time at the church in San Luis. Not only did I get the see the First Communion of a bunch of the kids I’ve gotten to know, but it also seemed like I knew just about everyone at the church. I’m pretty sure everyone was related either to Doña Faynier or to one of my students (and I only had 10 or so). After the First Communion, we went up the mountain to Doña Faynier’s sister’s house for a celebration, which does indeed have an incredible view of the countryside. In fact, every time I walked or drove past that house I wondered what it would be like to live there. Turns out Doña Faynier spends a lot of time there! We were going to go to the Poas Volcano, but as soon as we got to the party it started to pour! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen rain that consistently intense. Everyone was saying it might be a temporeal (translates to never-ending rain - apparently it’s pretty common in October to have 10 consecutive days of rain). Doña Faynier told me that one time it rained for a student’s entire rural stay. She never saw the sun once in San Luis! Apparently the worst part was that the laundry doesn’t dry for 3 weeks. The student got a kick out of ironing her clothes dry or cooking them dry on the woodstove. Luckily, I had better luck and the rain calmed down that evening. We spent the evening at home making tortillas. I’ll admit, I’m almost a pro by now. I hope I can buy the right supplies in the US to make them.

We spent Monday at home, but took a couple of quick field trips. First we walked for a couple of hours to see… a tomato plant. Not a factory. The living plant. I thought we were going to see the tomato farm and take a tour or something. Nope! We got to the edge of the farm and Doña Faynier said, “Here we are! Isn’t this a cool plant? I’m sure it doesn’t exist the US. This is probably your only chance to see one!” I had no idea how to respond. Luckily Lucia was with us for the walk and she changed the subject very quickly. In the afternoon we went to Grecia to see one of Doña Faynier’s friend’s stores. Carolina owns a macrobiotica (natural health store). We saw the store as well as her lab where she makes everything with a team of about 15 people. One of the guys working in the store took me around to show me the different products. It was like the tomato plant all over again. He kept saying things like “Here, this is a bottle of dried oregano. I’m sure you’ve never seen this before, right?” When I told him that we have oregano in the US too, he said, “Oh, well it must be really expensive though, right? It’s better here because it’s cheap.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my mom has been growing oregano in her garden for as long as I can remember. That night was the last of my English classes. The kids all said they learned a lot more in 3 weeks with me than in several years of English classes at their school. One of them brought me a few roses to thank me for the classes. It was a pretty great feeling to know I actually helped them.

On Tuesday, we spent the whole day in the Association. That particular day we made shampoo from azul de mata (no idea what that translates to in English – literally “blue of kill” but I don’t think that exists), and some different types of soaps. I spent most of Tuesday observing and talking to the women about their work. Right now they’re working on designing new labels for their products. Right now their labels are in Spanish and English to appeal to tourists, but the English parts have a lot of errors. Since there’s no internet here, I’m going to bring some of the labels back with me to translate, and then send them the translations in a week or two.

The main production room at the Association

Storage room - it's amazing how empty these shelves look after two days making shampoo and soap

The view from the Association building overlooking their giant garden/mini farm

Preparing all of the plants for an herbal shampoo

I woke up on Wednesday with a lot of energy because… temblor!!! We had an earthquake! Temblor basically means little earthquake (this one was 5.2), but it felt pretty big to me. I woke up to a shaking bed and watching all of my stuff rattle off of the table in my room. Everyone else in my family acted like nothing happened, but I was pretty startled to say the least. It was a good thing I had energy, because we spent the whole day cooking. I thought we were cooking for some reason like a party, but it turns out we just cooked for the sake of cooking. We made bizcocho (baked balls of cheese and about a dozen different forms of milk/cream), tamales mudos (a tamale filled with beans), and empanadas filled with cheese and jelly (not together though). I think I ate more on Wednesday than I do on any given Thanksgiving, and I didn’t even eat the tamales mudos! Doña Faynier dumped a whole bunch of beef and chicken flavoring into the dough for the tamales. I explained I didn’t want to eat one because the flavoring is made from the animal fat, she jumped right in to explain to me that it’s all some sort of conspiracy and there’s actually no animal fat in the chicken flavoring. It’s all a lie. Some guy at the market told her so, so it has to be true. We just ended up agreeing to disagree on that one.

Lucia proudly displaying her dad's first coffee harvest of the season

On Thursday we went back to the association where we made an herbal shampoo and more soaps. I spent most of the day cutting labels and packing all of the products to sell. In two or three hours I think I cut almost 300 labels. Then I moved at least 200 bottles of shampoo, followed by 200 bars of soap into their storage room. It was a really long day… As we were leaving I asked Doña Faynier if I could buy a few of their products to bring back to the states. She told me to pick out what I wanted and I would pay later. When it finally came time to pay, all of the women said they needed to have a talk with me. Everyone was really serious and I had no idea what was going on. Apparently the very serious news was that they had all talked and decided to give me the products for free, as a gift for all of my work there. I kept trying to explain that it wasn’t for me, it was for friends and family in the US, but they insisted. Now that I’ve been to Sarchi and I have the gifts from the Association, I’m fairly certain I won’t have room to bring everything back. Or my bags will be overweight. I’ll need to figure that out…

Friday, my last full day in San Luis, was absolutely perfect. I think it was the most beautiful morning in the whole three weeks. I spent the morning packing and playing with Lucia, which turned out to be the same thing. It was a slow process, because every item I needed to pack had to be “bought” from Lucia’s “store” before I could move on to the next item. Later in the morning, Doña Faynier and I met her son Jeffery in Grecia to go to the Poas Volcano! It was about an hour or an hour and a half drive, but it was really beautiful. Apparently it’s pretty rare to get a good view of the volcano because of all of the rain and clouds, but we had a perfect day. As we were taking pictures at the edge of the crater, we had a big surprise – another earthquake! We later learned that this one was 5.3, but it was a pretty long one. I definitely do not like earthquakes, and I absolutely definitely do not like earthquakes while standing at the edge of a crater looking down into a volcano. I’ll be perfectly happy to never have that experience again. There was a fence, but it was basically just a couple of logs that wouldn’t actually help if we were in trouble. Jeffery and I took a walk/hike to the nearby lake. I’ve been missing getting to walk outside in the fresh air and the smell of fall, but the 30 minute walk took care of that. I’m convinced that it was the exact same temperature at the lake as it should be on a crisp October day. There were no fall leaves to look at, but the rainforest is pretty cool too, I guess. On the drive down, we stopped every mile or so to buy strawberries or cheese from someone sitting on the side of the road. We ended up with 3 kilos of strawberries and 7 different kinds of cheese. We ate lunch at a little restaurant recommended to us by one of the cheese guys. Everything on the menu had meat, but they made me a special vegetarian plate that was absolutely delicious: avocado, salad, cauliflower, plantains, rice, beans, and French fries. The view from the restaurant only added to the perfect lunch. We might as well have been in the middle of The Sound of Music. On the drive home, we got stopped by a bunch of traffic. A big semi truck was on its side in the middle of the road. We got to watch as a couple of tractors and bulldozers attached chains to the truck and pulled it back upright. Once the truck was ready to drive off, everyone in the street started cheering and high-fiving each other. During every commercial break, there are little animated motivational clips about “community” and “responsibility.” I’m pretty sure we saw the one for “teamwork” in the making. Friday ended with the perfect surprise. An early birthday party! One by one my students showed up to the house. I knew we didn’t have a class scheduled, but none of them could tell me why they were there. I didn’t even pick up on it when Lucia started singing happy birthday to herself. She’s making stuff up all the time, I figured she was just being herself. All of my students sang Happy Birthday to me in English and brought me flowers and chocolate. We all had dinner and cake together, and they were all excited to show me how much they’d practiced their English. I can’t believe how many times I heard them practice the words “Happy Birthday,” even after the song. After they left, Doña Faynier, Jenny, and Lucia had a few special gifts from me. Lucia and Jenny gave me a small framed photo of Lucia with the words “To my Aunt Emily, from Lucia – I love you” (in Spanish of course) and a small ceramic doll. Doña Faynier gave me a small wooden box and wooden earrings. In all of the craziness of living in San Luis, I had almost forgotten that my birthday was coming up, so it was all a really nice surprise.

View from the church in Grecia

Inside the church in Grecia - it's really famous because it's walls are only made of sheets of metal (compared to all of the concrete/wood churches)

Poas Volcano

Clouds/rain moving in! Pictures don't capture the hugeness of this (or the steepness of the cliff in front of me)

Next to the volcano - maybe an old crater?

Nearby lake (almost positive this is an old crater)

Jeffery was determined to take as many photos for me as possible, but almost all of them were blurry

Surprise party!

This picture makes me laugh every time I look at it. I really felt like I was at a 10 year old's birthday party, complete with screaming, laughing, and crying children (all at once)

All in all, I had a pretty amazing rural stay. I'm still realizing all of the little differences between my family/house here and my family/house in San Luis de Grecia. I think it may be a while before I completely absorb everything from the rural stay. Today was quite the culture shock for me. My host mom and I had breakfast (I didn't realize until now how much I missed her/our cooking), went to the Feria (farmer's market - WAAAY more exciting here than in Grecia with people shouting and singing and throwing free food to you from across the stalls), and we went to walmart to pick up a few things we both needed. We spent a long time there, so I was able to really take in the millions of options there. Life in the city is certainly a different experience!