February

As the days get hotter and the hillsides of Mal Pais get hotter, rain is becoming a distant memory here. I guess this is February as everyone has described it. It hasn’t rained here in over a month and the lush, green jungle around us is starting to turn into the same shade of brown. In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed an amazing amount of pelicans flying south over the coast. They must be migrating, but I doesn’t seem to make sense that they’re migrating to warmer places, because this is about as warm as it gets. Perhaps they’re looking for fresh water, but again, I don’t know if pelicans need fresh water to survive. If anyone knows about the travel habits of pelicans, please tell me what you know!

With the heat and the lack of rain it naturally gets dirtier and dustier here every day. Even though the road was “paved” throughout town last month, the quads and the big trucks still kick up so much dust that when they race past walkers on the curbs of the road, sometimes a walker has to pause a minute to let their sight clear. A man that works at the Israeli restaurant next door told us that Israel has so much dust that if you can live there, you can live anywhere. To be honest, quads are very hard when you're on road as a pedestrian, they are also very convenient here.

My friend Jen has a quad on loan to her for a few weeks so last night we explored a little bit, following our road all the way south (all the way, read 3 km) to a place called “Secret Beach” because it’s hidden in a little cove behind the fish market. Then we turned around and headed back north through town to Playa Hermosa, the next beach area north of Santa Teresa. If we followed the raod we were on, we would travel north up the coast, all the way to Nicaragua, supposedly, but the road is very dusty, potholed, rocky, and not well worn. A quad or a four wheel drive car is the best way to travel that road. We made it a little ways up, though, and stopped at a beautiful, flat, soft sandy beach for sunset. When we got out onto the beach and looked south, I realized that we were not very far from our beaches at all. The roads are so slow going here that it’s almost faster to travel by beach than by road. From my house, I could probably walk up to the beach where we were last night in less than an hour. We watched the sun go down from an old pile of driftwood and then headed back into town, holding bandannas over our mouths and eyes as we went.

Yesterday at The Bakery, I was taking a break outside, sitting on the patio having tea when I heard a pathetic mewing sound, the desperate sound usually associated with helpless kittens. I walked over to where Martjin and a neighbor were looking into the area between their two buildings when Martjin pulled a full grown cat out of the alleyway. He was soaked, and covered in filth, because he was in the alley where the gray water runs into the sewers. The cat was having trouble walking straight and seemed disoriented. Martjin said they thought the cat had been poisoned.

Poisoning animals is supposedly a common thing here in Mal Pais. It seems that anytime they come to an early demise, someone always blames poisoning. And I do not doubt that every once in a while, someone thinks that the stray dog population is getting out of control (as we speak, there’s a pregnant stray cooling off on the tile in my room), but our gray water runs through public streets, out into the storm drains on the sides of the road. When it hasn’t rained here in a month and the only freshwater available to stray animals is laden with cleaning solutions and dish detergents, it’s no wonder animals poison themselves trying to find water.

In the States, the fear hanging over our heads now is the issue of sustainability and pollution in our environment. Anything you use in your house is probably being made organically in someone’s basement in Berkeley or Portland, with the results of living organically hardly ever seen, or so it seems. Here, however, when I pour something down my drain, or when I do my dishes, all of that goes right down the tube to drain into the street outside my house. When I walked down the lane to the main road, I follow my trail of gray water into the street.

I was thinking about this last night as I cleaned up after dinner. In the States, I dumped all the leftover food and scraps into the garbage, washed everything else down the drain, or into a garbage disposal, which leads to some mysterious sewage system far away from me. Here, I know where everything is going, and it makes me feel like I’m not putting quite as much waste into the ground. I put my vegetable scraps into the compost and the leftover cooked food goes into a pile by the street for the dogs to make dinner out of. Maybe this is already a common method for a lot of people in the States, but in Charleston, if I had put the rest of my chicken and rice on the curb for a stray dog to eat, people probably would have gotten mad about polluting the streets, or inviting more cockroaches to the neighborhood.

A new supermarket opened up right across the street from our apartment. They have been constructing this building since before we got here, but the majority of it has been going on outside our windows for the last four months. So it opened up on Saturday and we all went in to go check it out. It’s not fully stocked yet, but I noticed that most of the new products they have now are junk foods now imported from other countries, namely the U.S. Our new super now his Pepperidge Farm cookies and potato chips of every flavor and brand. What a great influence we have here in Costa Rica.

Speaking of which, there is a presidential election coming up this month in Costa and one of the nominees actually wants to abolish the colone and establish the American dollar as the Costa Rican currency. The dollar is already the currency in Panama, so as their neighbor, I suppose it makes sense that the influence is spreading in Costa, as well. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to read that, but yet I was. Even if that doesn’t come to pass, it’s interesting that it’s being considered.

Well, I have the next three days off work and I’m trying to decide where I want to go to get out of this little town. I have a friend coming to visit in about two and a half weeks, so I’ll be seeing a lot of the country then, but I want to go somewhere before that. I figure I mgiht as well, if I have some free time! I hope everyone is doing well and I’ll try to post again in a few days!