Boruca: my first visit to my new home!

Dearest Readers!

What a crazy weekend this was! The other volunteers and I went to our sites for the first time, meaning that I got to see Boruca, which will be my home from February until December.

(First off, there is a NEW album of photos from this weekend ... check them out!!)

The trip to Boruca took 13 hours and 4 bus rides. Friday morning at 5 AM, I left the house and left Orosi with Drew, Meggie, Sara, Aeriel, and Graceanne (other volunteers with sites relatively near mine). Got to Cartago, got on another bus, went to San Jose, waited in the San Jose bus stop for a good while, Meggie got on a different bus, the other 5 of us got on our bus to Buenos Aires. THAT ride was instense… gorgeous, from hot to cool temperatures, up and down mountains, SO high up and then down and down again. The driver was crazy and sped past multiple other buses at a time on blind curves. Crrrrazy. We also had to stop for 15 minutes or a half hour because there was a dump truck in front of us across the room getting filled up with dirt. Ahhh Tico life.

Here's a view from that beautiful bus ride, driving past and above clouds in the mountains:

We got to Buenos Aires, the ‘hub city’ I’ll be spending a good amount of time in this year (it’s where I’ll go to get school supplies/etc, about an hour and a half by bus away from Boruca. I say ‘hub city’ in quotes because Buenos Aires is TINY. It would be a small town by any USA standards… it’s just there here in Costa Rica it’s significant. From Buenos Aires, everyone went their separate ways, leaving me and Drew to wait for our Boruca bus to get there an hour or so later.

The bus was PACKED. There was standing room only and we luckily had insider tips from Graceanne to run to the back and fight our way in. For most of the bus ride, Drew and I were yelling random stuff back and forth to each other (we weren’t sitting together) and being amused at being The Gringos (meaning people stare at us.)

The drive to Boruca was incredible. Truly the most beautiful vistas I’d seen so far in Central America, and probably in my life, which is saying something, given that I just lived in the Alps for two years. I couldn’t get photos because the road was so bumpy and the bus so full of people and my hands so full of stuff… it’s not a far distance to Boruca from Buenos Aires, but because the roads are so steep and unpaved, the bus has to go super slow and stops a lot. But I will be hiking around the area taking incredible photos this year, of that I am sure. Drew got off after a bit, and then I was left on my lonesome in a bus full of Ticos, on my way to Boruca…

I got off the bus in a dusty square in the shadow of a large green building and roofed-over cement courtyard. There was a smiling, neon-pink clad woman with a kind face waiting for me holding the hand of her daughter. Marlen (the sister of my host father) and Sharon (her 5-year-old daughter) became without a doubt the highlight of my weekend in Boruca, and I am glad to know that they live nearby and will be there often. This way, even if I don’t click with the rest of my host family, I will have them… they’ve already invited me to visit, and I’ve promised to come over. …. I find amazing people everywhere!

Here's a picture of Marlen and Sharon:

The house is right by the bus stop, and it’s quite large:

The tin roof does not always meet the walls (in my room there is a significant gap, a good 6 or 8 inches) and there are a lot of insects, moldy places, and holes. But that’s typical of a Tico house, and it’s apparent that this family is well-to-do by Borucan standards. Not all of the houses in Boruca are this big… in fact, many of them are only a fraction of the size of my family’s house. I saw houses which were comparable in size to my host family’s kitchen (which, though large, is still a kitchen.)

Anyway… my host mother’s mother lives in a house directly next door to ours (it might even be attached) and there is a ranchero (wood, hay, and leaf-built open-air pavilion thing) there, too, with a place for cooking over a fire and with lots of hammocks, too. Overall, it’s very tranquila :)

My room is separate from the rest of the house, which is pretty cool. The family room, sleeping area of everyone else, and kitchen are in one section, then there’s a souvenir shop full of masks, then there’s my room, so I have privacy. I also have my own bathroom and shower, though my shower does not have hot water (I used the family’s shower this weekend, but may have to suck it up and get used to freezing when I wash.) As you can see from the photos, my room is square and gray, but I’m working on making it more colorful and happy. And when the window’s open, it’s got this gorgeous view into the jungle:

I'm also hanging up lots of stuff on the walls to make the room more Me:

A note about the food: when I got there I was served rice, French fries, and pasta. Not balanced at all… so I made a big deal of talking about how much I love beans, just to make sure I got some balance the next day. Luckily, it worked. I never thought I’d be so excited to be handed a plate of white rice and boiled beans, but man, are they good…

Also, Marlen made this delicious drink out of oatmeal. Just water, sugar, and some instant oatmeal, I think… but it was amazing and refreshing.

Everything is so dusty in Boruca! I got up and mopped my room of my own accord (maybe this means I’m a grown-up now?) and I think this will be an at least bi-daily occurrence.

In the early morning I went for a long walk with Sharon (the 5-year-old who by then had decided I was the coolest thing since sliced bread). We got into the school through a hole in the fence and she showed me around, pointing out her favorite places and telling me about how the school works. There are several school buildings for the different grades and subjects, all brightly painted in blues and pink/purples, connected by a maze of paths. Here's the main building:

My room where I’ll be teaching has a wall consisting almost exclusively of bars (essentially a big window) and is large and open. I like it, actually, which I had been worrying I wouldn’t.

I had the idea of getting some big rocks to use as bookends because there was a dearth of usable furniture in my room. I like my brain for things like this! Marlen and Sharon helped me find suitable rocks with flat sides outside, and then Sharon asked if we could paint little rocks from the stream, so I decided to combine our ideas: we went and got some colors from the little store up the mountain (which we visited several more times during the day for snacks and drinks) and then painted my new mini boulders! One says SMILE….BECAUSE YOU CAN and the other one says ALL AROUND YOU IS LOVE. The two that I’m using as doorstops say I WILL NOT TAKE THESE THINGS FOR GRANTED (I almost painted GRANITE instead of GRANTED, but decided not to) and the last one says WHY NOT? :) …I had been walking with Sharon and suddenly she started RUNNING and I started RUNNING with her and I asked her WHY ARE WE RUNNING and then the answer came to me so crazy clear: WHY NOT? :)

After painting the rocks, right as I was painting a picture frame for my room with MAN LEBT NUR EINMAL (YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE), the cry went up: Hay otros gringos en la calle! (There are other gringos in the street!) I went out to talk to them and they turned out to be a bunch of Germans!! So, I went to the bar and had a drink with them and got to talk some in my favorite language. It was awesome and they were very chill. They even came from an area close to where I lived in Deutschland. Definitely icing on my cake of a first morning in Boruca!

In the afternoon, I went and sat in the shade of the ranchero with Ligia and Paulina (my host mother’s mother) and Sharon and shucked beans and cleaned them for dinner. It was hours-long process, very tranquila:

I sat on the dirt ground and in a hammock and helped, and talked with Paulina, who is a tiny, wrinkly, ancient old person. She said she doesn’t know how old she is and that she was in Los Angeles once and did not like it because there were so many people and no one talked to each other or knew each other. I like Paulina… and I wish she’d let me take a picture of her!

Moral of the story, it was a very relaxed, easy day, very simple, not connected to the outside world, very full of life. Very much the feeling of: THIS is life. Life is living, life is this moment right now, life is living and breathing and holding hands and sprinting down rock paths towards nothing in particular, life is running water and trees and smiles and learning languages and reaching out to others and family.

Overall, my Spanish went better than I’d worried that it would. The first night, when I went and got to know some of Graceanne’s friends in Boruca, my Spanish was quite impressive, and people were complimenting it… but the next day didn’t go as well, mainly because I was talking about things I’d never talked about before. It’s getting better, slowly but surely... I just can’t wait to get to the point where I actually SPEAK it, you know?

I went to bed early, slept like a rock, woke up and listened to music. Left early in the morning, took the bumpy bus back to Buenos Aires with Drew (this time without a seat) and waited for our bus to San Jose… the bus driver wouldn’t let us get on until the bus was packed (literally, let everyone else on but not the gringos) and we were the ONLY ones he asked for money. SIGH. There were no seats so we had to either stand or sit on the floor for 3.5 hours… I spent the first while working on trying to forgive the bus driver in my head, sitting on the dusty floor with my long legs folded up in front of me, then looked out the window and thought about how awesome it was that I was in Costa Rica and about how lucky I am. I put in my earbuds and the first song was Travis Tritt’s “It’s A Great Day To Be Alive”… I passed the mp3 player to Drew, and it made him smile, too. I think we both needed some deep breaths and to stop being mad at the driver. I guess maybe he’d had bad experiences with gringos, or something…. For whatever reason, he didn’t treat us like everyone else, and it kinda hurt.

Anyway, the rest of the ride was ok. There was a nice man standing by me who talked to me about the parks in Costa Rica that were the most beautiful, and his smiling eyes made me grateful. Then there was another man sitting beside me who talked some English and told me that we would stop in Cartago before San Jose, which was perfect and shortened our trip. Drew ended up sleeping lying down in the aisle for a while, but I couldn’t nod off because I didn’t have anywhere to put my head…

We got to Cartago, walked to another bus stop, and got on a bus to the city center to catch another bus back to Orosi. This bus ride into the center of Cartago was everything the previous one was not—spacious, quick, friendly, and comfortable. The bus driver pulled over on the side of the highway to buy fruit (which was when we got the zapote) and everyone on the bus chimed in to describe the fruit for us and encourage us to get it and try it and to tell us stories and offer us a knife to cut it and laugh about how it was our first zapote:

.... zapote is similar to papaya, but looks like a potato. It's also... creamier? I dunno, hard to describe. But REALLY rich and delicious!

Then, the driver asked us who we were and why were in Costa Rica and drove us around Cartago showing us the buildings and describing them to us (by then we were the only ones on the bus). Turns out he was from Boruca :)

After the bus driver dropped us off, Drew mentioned that he was craving Wendy’s… so, as there happens to be one in Cartago, we went. I felt like SUCH a gringa, but I got a frostie because I figured it would be months and months before I had that chance again.

Finally, Wendy's behind us, we met up with some other people from our group and took the 45-minute trip from Cartago back to Orosi :)… there was definitely a feeling of ‘homecoming’, and now I truly do appreciate that this is a bigger city by Costa Rican standards. Plus, I cannot WAIT to eat Ligia’s gallo pinto again. Man oh man.

I think I want to start a project in Boruca and the surrounding areas to pick up litter. Drew’s host father owns the buses, too, so we could put up signs in them encouraging people not to throw their trash out the window (which they were doing all the time… it made me really sad.) The area’s so beautiful, but people put their trash everywhere. … it was a good feeling in my head to realize that I was not only being frustrated about the littering, but also wanting to do something about it. :)

ANYway, thank you if you actually read this! Thank you for caring. Thank you for being interested. Please check out the other photos and feel free to comment or email me!

Besos!
Raquel