Health Problems

So I have contracted a parasite, or at least that is what is generally believed to be the cause of my discomfort. And its kind of cool I felt a little out of the club not having one before because its kind of like a souvenir or battle scar. And I think I got it in the very cliched way of being tempted by an apple.

I also have an eye infection, because my family lives on a busy road that is not paved so dust coats everything daily. Its amazing how much of their lives is devoted to responding to the effects of the dust or putting water on the road to suppress it.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to go to Gaundoca this weekend where my friend is studying leather back turtles, so I hope to be able to see one. Apparently they get in a kind of trance when they go to lay their eggs and look like they´re crying because they are secreting sea water.

I´ve decided to tell the gentlemen in on the port i´m married with two kids, its not unheard of for a 21 yr. old and  it would just save me having to make up other kinds of excuses.

I´m very happy here, but am looking forward to going back,

Lauren

From one coast to another

I am studying by myself now which is really intimidating given my poor level of spanish but I´m studying the cruise ship industry so locals are so responsive when ever I speak my bad spanish to them because I am not a cruise ship passenger.

I am looking at how much the cruise ship industry actually benefits the port city of Limon on the Caribbean because the cruise ship sponsored excursions tend to keep all the profits circulating with foreign investors instead of benefiting the locals.

Its amazing that I can travel from one ocean to another in the same week, actually the same day if I was so inclined. My parents and I were just on the pacific side and I burnt my back and my mom was actually around to tell me that was a bad thing.

I hope you are well and will have to do a better job at updating.

love,

Lauren

 

So this past weekend I went to a christian rock concert that was free due to some international funding so there were thousands of people there. It was really fun and an interesting contrast from seeing La Boheme an opera in Italian about artists in Paris with Spanish subtitles the weekend before (i´m suprised i understood as much as i did). Oh yeah and operas for only ten dollars are pretty sweet.

Last week we went to Coope San Juan which is one of the few cooperative (collectively owned land) success stories that produces pinapple. I´m so in love with fresh pinapple cut with a machette. They also had some rainforest there which was really cool to walk around in all be it a little dangerous but in the end besides a lot of mosquito bites the only injury was my friend Sage who was stung by a bullet ant (roughly the size of a half dollar)

Missing you always,

Lauren

We went to a precario this past wednesday which is sort of like a hooverville of Nicaraguan immigrants. They have one person who taps into an electric cable and distributes it else where costing approximately $16 per month, by comparison most ordinary Costa Ricans in the area pay $8 and it costs $50 a month to rent a house that resembles the tree house Elizabeth and I very poorly constructed in our back yard.  So the people are very obviously being taken advantage of. The good news is that theres a man named Don Fernando who built a cafeteria and makes sure that everyone has some basic food.

The Nicaraguan woman we spoke with didn´t have a right hand because a firecracker was thrown into her house when she was 13 and when she tried to throw it out it exploded.

It was a hard but good day.

Lauren

This past weekend has a been a lot of fun. We went into the Talamanca Mountain range and learned about Blackberry production, which began when they declared the woods a national park and cut off people´s livlihood of coal production.

It was up so high that ocasionally a cloud would come through and we would be shrouded in fog on a sunny day, but it was pretty sweet too.And we went bird watching (there are more species of birds in Costa Rica than the US  and Canada combined) and I spotted a Resplendent Quetzal, which you just have to look up because its so magnificent.

An older man in  our program was robbed at gun point over the weekend, but he didn´t take a taxi late at night, which i will always do.

I managed to put so pictures up of my family and their backyard so you can see i´m suffering :)

Lots of love

Lauren