10/04/2013 Go Forth To Serve

We are finally volunteers and in site. Our town is the pueblo of Pejibaye (Some argument by the people on how it's spelled.) a valley surrounded on all sides by enchanting mountains. I can't believe I'm lucky enough to wake up to this view every day. We are about 3 hours to the East of San Jose in one of Peace Corps' tourist development sites. My program is community economic development so I'll be working with local businesses to increase their income and trying to generate tourism here. Let me tell you this place and the people make it easy.

They have established some interest in starting bed and breakfast businesses one of which is the house where we live!

Over the next few weeks I'll be giving you some of the insights to our work and to the area.

Us with our work partner at the local high school.

The Local Catholic Church.

The women of the sustainable homes project.

Association of Development in nearby Plaza Vieja.

Some local art.

This waterfall is 15 minutes walking distance from our site!

Our town!

Hang gliding anyone?

10/02/2013 Swearing in Ceremony

Come watch us swear in on Wednesday October 2 at 9am Costa Rica time (same as mountain time I think)

https://conx.state.gov/costarica

If it doesn't work try it with http instead of https. I'd also like to thank all the staff at Peace Corps who are staying on duty to support us despite the government shutdown.

See you there!

09/08/2013 Site Assignment Day

Hi Everyone, I thought I would help my husband CJ by posting to tell you about our experience with site assignment.  We traveled with all of our Tico 26 group to a Country Club in Heredia.  Iphones were pumping 00s and 90s music in the bus, people were laughing, talking, dreaming, and everyone was smiling like it was Christmas Eve.  How exciting to find out where we would be living for two years!

When we walked past tennis, foosball, and other sport courts to an area with (my favorite) three pools!!  We entered a little cabana meeting area and there was a giant map of Costa Rica in front.  Our project staff set to work putting little tags on the side of the map and getting folders ready with all of the information we would need to know about our communities.  Since it was Manuel's birthday, he went first, being blindfolded, spun in a circle and then we as audience had to scream left, right, up, or down, until he found where his marker was.  Next was Marlee.  And then they asked for one of their married couples and we volunteered.  My husband was blindfolded and I closed my eyes.  We held hands and listened intently to what our friends were telling us...are they saying right? left?  We don't understand!  And then all of the sudden, I felt the tag and told my husband to stop, we have it.  He took his blindfold off and we discovered we're heading to....

Pejibaye!!

Our location is in the mountains, south of volcanoes, famous for a fruit with the same name.  Many of our friends are heading out to beaches, mountains, farming communities, and a few are heading to the outskirts far north and far south in border communities.  We're joining a group of professionals that have already established themselves in many communities in Costa Rica, working hard to improve the lives of individuals by enabling others to see the inherent skills, assets, and abilities present in these small communities.  We hope to do the same!  

Much more to come on our site after we visit it, but we were able to enjoy the pools, meet some of the amazing volunteers in Tico 24 and 25, eat hamburgers at a BBQ, and share an evening of fun with our friends in San Jose.  We had even more fun sharing our site assignment with friends, family, and of course, our Tico host family.  It has been a truly magical experience!

08/26/2013 Tech Week

Just finished tech week. It was a blast! I went with a few of my Community Economic Development friends to San Francisco de Palmera, San Carlos Costa Rica. Don´t bother trying to find it on google earth. It´s small enough to not be on there. For those who know the geography of Costa Rica it´s about 4 hours north of San Jose by bus, one of which is down a gravel road.

Once there we met with Isa, one of the volunteers from Tico 24. They have been in site a year but Isa has only been in this site a few months due to a transfer. I was lucky enough to stay with the President of the local Empresa de Credito or EC.(Think of it as a bank for the poor or community bank) It was a special treat for me because I´ve been considering the posibility of working with or creating a similar EC when we get to our permanent site. If you have read ¨world without poverty¨ by Muhammed Yunis you get the idea. She´s a wonderful woman and a great local entrepreneur who has set up an American clothing store in the front of her house and funds a lot of the local businesses in the area. She has three boys in high school to boot and her husband works in another city.

Gabe and I taught Shirley, the treasurer of the EC how to use microsoft excel to do her book keeping. She had been using it for years but someone had set it up for her and not taught her how to use the equation functions so we showed her how she could use the program to auto update all cells when she creates an input. I thought she was going to kiss Gabe when she figured out how much time she would save. Gabe is going to be a rockstar in my opinion. Like most of the other volunteers he is young, in his early twenties but he already has fortune 500 experience and has pretty fluent Spanish. He can also run a 4 and a half minute mile.

We also conducted a DICE tool with another local business. We interviewed one of the local sodas (restaurants) using this business analysis tool. We were working with another volunteer James and the owners. James has 20 years experience with sales and when Gabe started into the questions James immediately picked up on their body language and could tell they were uncomfortable. I thought it was great that he pointed that out to Gabe and I and we settled down into a series of icebreaker questions.

I think the happiest moment of the week was working with a micro entrepreneur who had her own cake business. Two other volunteers, Chris, and Andrew and I guided her through the process of a SWOT analysis. She listed as one of her weaknesses 'fear' and we took it upon ourselves to explore the sources of that fear which led through failure, lack of money and lack of customers to the idea that more advertising would be advantageous for her business. We told her that fear is a normal part of starting a new business and that it is usually a good motivator to get entrepreneurs to adapt to their environment. Hopefully she takes that to heart and stays on the move.

Site assignments are next Friday! Wish us luck!

08/09/2013 First Session in Spanish

I just gave my first session in Spanish. It was on the subject of calculating compound interest rates. A lot of  Ticos quit school around the second or third grade and they lack the skills to calculate interest and understand what a bad deal it is to have 24 to 35 percent interest accruing per month. Its a major way that companies take advantage of people here. Anyway I thought it went pretty well except for my halting Spanish. My friend Dan freakin nailed it. My wife has a lot of experience with public health and she did her talk on the advantages and proper use of condoms. You would think that would be a pretty standard thing to learn but Costa Rica is heavily Catholic. Still if they are going to avoid a major overpopulation problem and reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy then its an important thing to learn in my opinion.

Speaking of getting adjusted to Spanish, Im currently writing this in an internet cafe using a Spanish keyboard. Things are not quite in the right place and Im struggling with making it give me the punctuation I want so sorry to those of you who are correcting my grammar. Its not really my fault. We also were lucky enough to have a project fair here where one of the subjects we covered for economic development are the absolute negation of private funds for Peace Corps projects. We can apply for grants but it takes a soul crushing 6 months or more for that stuff to come through so we will be into the second year before I could get any programs started on my own. I have some ideas of how I can get local Ticos who want to fund projects sooner than that to raise their own funds but we will have to see how it goes. I hate to think that a great business idea would have to go by the wayside just because we have to wait for the government. On the other hand local lenders can be unscrupulous. See above comment on interest. If I do have to wait a year I hope we get a beach site. Heres hoping. Damn I really need to figure out how to work this keyboard...exclamation point.

07/31/2013 Zarcero

                                          "The Church in Zarcero"

Just got back from visiting a married couple also in the Peace Corps. Jameson and Emecha are serving in the town of Zarcero. It's a town about an hour NW of San Jose. Talk about beautiful! It reminds me of that "hills are alive" scene in the Sound of Music. It sits at about 6000 feet and is known for it's cheese and milk products. We went for a little walk in the mountains on the first day with Carlos who works for the local government. By little I mean 15 kilometers up one side of a mountain and down the other side. The park was  Juan Carlos Blanco national park and it was gorgeous except for the rain, and the slippery rocks.
Emecha made hambergers for us. It was a heavenly taste of the US to celebrate our second week here. We also had these delicious Costa Rican milkshakes that are made with tropical fruit. So far we've had the opportunity to try momachinos which in the Philippines are known as Rambutan. It's one of my favorites. Imagine a grape wrapped in a porcupine.We've tried Cas which are little green fruits that taste like a weaker, sweeter grapefruit. We haven't had guanabana (doo doo doo doodoo!) but we will soon. If you come down we suggest the mangoes, mora (like a blackberry) and pina (pineapple). We got to see them teach an English class to young entreprenures who want to serve as guides for local agriculture and park tours. J and E have had a lot of success creating biodigesters and starting a business based around them. (If you know what a biodigester is you know why being around them isn't awesome.) The church was awesome as well. There is a park in front of it made by a local artist. All sorts of animals and shapes are carved in the bushes. The artist was supposedly recruited by Disney but he turned them down because frankly, who wants to leave Zarcero?  In any case we really enjoyed our trip and it has given us a lot to think about with respect to our future work site. Zarcero has no problems with bugs and a mild climate. It's also safer than some other towns and has a lot of local business work in agriculture. I'm personally still leaning towards a site with more tourism but a site like Zarcero is amazingly beautiful.

                                              "Our amazing hosts Jameson, Emecha and Karma."

                                         "Makes the church back home feel a little smaller."

                 "Look an ice cream shop two doors down from another ice cream shop... for an economist it's a failure to differentiate products... for me an my wife it is... FREAKIN AWESOME!"

"Your not tripping. This gardener is just that cool."

                                                   "How did the artist know we would be here?"

                                       "The hands of the master."

                                          "The rain in Spain falls mainly on me."

                                           "Selfie."

                                        "I've been asking my wife for years to stop and smell the flowers."

"10 miles in the mountains we hiked. It was like Lord of the Rings. This was prior to the impenetrable forest."

                                             "Carlos the energizer bunny and our wives."

07/22/2013 First Visit to San Jose and Interviews for Project Placement

So unbelievably happy and grateful to be here in Costa Rica bonding with TICO 26! We've only been in country a week and already I feel like I've known some of these people for months. Yesterday we went San Jose for the first time and saw all the some of downtown. Some of the more beautiful buildings include the Teatro National, Museo National, Cathedral National among others.

                                                          The National Theater

The "Clinica Biblica" is the main hospital where we as volunteers get health care. I'm told it's as good as anything we have in the states and from what I've seen I can believe it. Costa Rica is one of the places that US expatriates go for "health tourism" (i.e. things we cannot afford in the US medical system.)

My wife and I are staying to Dona Flora (Dona is a way of expressing Mrs. in a professional setting) She reminds me a lot of my grandmother in the Philippines. She and Don Franklin have a beautiful family. This is her with two of her many grandchildren.

Today we are receiving interviews for site placement. It will be the first time we get to sit down and express what type of place we want to work in here in Costa Rica. Since my area is business development I'm hoping to get a place that has a lot of tourists and entrepreneurs who want to sell to those tourists. I hope to also get an opportunity to do micro-finance as it would be a good way to establish a career in small enterprise development.

Wish me luck!