Block 2 - Week 2

After coming back to San José to do laundry and catch up with our host families, we headed off to the opposite coast and the Limón province, located on the Caribbean. We spent our first few nights at a lodge run by a women's agricultural and agriforestry association called El Yüe.

We put on our waders next and helped an aquatic ecologist survey a stream's health.

The next day took us to the Yorkin River at the Costa Rica-Panama border. We traveled by boat for an hour and a half to reach a remote indigenous village of Yorkin of the Bribri. We took a tour of their agroforestry system and the new tourism center they're trying to implement. We even got to ground up some cacao beans to make chocolate!!

Then we headed for the beach, spending a couple nights in Puerto Viejo.

We also visited a banana farm and the union there.

Block 2 - Week 1

After saying good-bye to the internship students, my fellow field program students and I got ready to head off to remote locations to study ecological and social issues related to monoculture and agroforestry systems of agriculture. This block was broken up into 3 one-week-long trips.

The first week trip took us to San Isidro, in the southwestern mountains of Costa Rica. We stayed close to Longo Mai with an American-born tico named Wade. His farm was like some kind of crazy garden of Eden. It was beautiful.

Then we headed to Villa Mills to stay in a lodge in the mountains. It was beautiful but oh, so cold. We didn't even feel like we were still in Costa Rica!

We went to visit schools to interview rural students.

And we got up early to go birdwatching!

And we saw a quetzal!!

Block 1 Summary

San José: This block was a lot of fun because it was just 25 American students hanging out in San José. Every day of the week we had 4 hours of Spanish in the morning followed by 4 hours of a Latin American development class in the afternoon.

Our School in San Pedro, San José

The days were long but we had a lot of fun on the weekends--we took a trip to Manuel Antonio.

Block 1 was interrupted for a week while the whole group packed up and went to Nicaragua. We had a lot of fun visiting organic coffee farms, women's associations, and exploring Nicaraguan cities such as Managua, Matagalpa, and Granada. We lived with host families in San Ramón and Matagalpa. Check out the video I made about our experiences there:

We had a lot of fun but after we got back, it was bittersweet. We were really two groups and the time had come to split: the field program people had to leave for the field projects of Block 2 and the internship students had decided on internships across Costa Rica and Nicaragua and had to leave for 2 months.

Sorry . . .

I'm sorry I've been so lax on this blog. Internet has been a bit of a problem here so I haven't been able to write the way I want to. I put together a couple of summaries about the 3 Class Blocks of my Costa Rica experience and I hope this will help clarify what I've been doing. Enjoy!