Tou-can but please don´t while the baby´s sleeping

You know you’re spoiled when you start throwing pieces of banana at the loud toucans outside your window to make them shut-up. Not that I don’t appreciate the beauty of these colorful creatures, but seriously…have you ever heard a toucan chirp? No, we can’t even call it chirping. More like techno-squawk from hell.

The first few days at our jungle home, we were confused as to why the tropical birds were so tame as the three of us pressed our faces to the window pane and watched the little creatures investigate the glass. “They really like us!” we thought, as the unabashed birds fearlessly investigated our faces. Then they started to fly full-speed into the window, only to hit their beaks at maximum velocity and retreat while shaking their little colorful heads in confusion. Then we started to hear relentless tapping on all sides of our wall-less room and found the birds determinedly pecking at the glass. I started to feel like I was in a Hitchcock film, and we decided that this occurrence needed further investigation.. When we went outside to inspect, we noticed our own reflection on the other side of the pane. Hmmm…So I guess we weren’t the bird-attracting family that we thought we were. The poor lil’ guys just thought they were gonna get some from the good-looking, eerily familiar birds staring at them longingly from the other side of the window. And now that we know this, hearing the loud thud of bird beaks ramming into our walls at 4am has lost its exotic charm…

Yesterday we took the “35 minute hike” (which turned out to be 50 minutes. Rivers usually makes rough estimates by converting running speed into walking speed, without taking into account that he’s basically superhuman in terms of fitness and I haven‘t worked out in almost a year) through the rainforest to an awesome natural hot spring. By the time we reached out destination, Harper was ready for a nap, so we rolled out the foam pad we had packed, and I lay beside her while Rivers soaked in the water. It was a little too rainy and cold for me to get in yet, so I decided to wait until Harper woke up to join him. Of course, on this day Harper decided to take a record time nap of over 2 hours, and by the time she woke up, I was over it. Poor Rivers sat in the water, waiting for us to join him, too cold to get out of the water to check to see what was the hold up. So, even though we spent 10$ to take a hot bath and read a book while Harper napped, it was totally worth it. As Paul Coelho said in his book The Pilgrimage: “It is the road that teaches us the best way to get there, and the road enriches us as we walk its length.” Kind of like the toucan´s route from the tree to our window...It´s a beautiful journey until your beak gets boom-roasted on the glass.

bear suits and potentially poisonous ferns: welcome to paradise

If Harper were a sedentary Homo Sapiens, she would definitely be assigned the task of ‘gatherer‘. This I concluded as we climbed down the mossy rock steps that lead from our new house to a real (unsewag-ey) river. After walking for only a few minutes, I looked to find Harper proudly grasping a collection of jungle leaves in her tiny hands. It wasn’t until I heard the telltale gagging sound that I realized she was also tasting her rainforest harvest. Don’t worry, I quickly plunged my finger in her little mouth and retrieved a large piece of fern which Rivers assured me was “probably not poisonous...well actually, I´m not sure. But probably not.“ And this only on day 1 of our new Costa Rican adventure…

This past week we spent packing and cleaning our old place in Ciudad Colon in preparation to move to San Gerardo, a little (population 200) town at the foot of Chirripo, the largest volcano in Costa Rica. It was actually quite sad driving out of our little compound in Brasil de Mora, watching all the neighbors standing outside their homes to wave us goodbye. Most of them were probably glad that the messy, hippie gringos were heading out, but not Big Mama. No, no…Big Mama shed tears as she bid us farewell, promising that she and her family would make the 4 hour drive out to visit us. She even called us the day after we arrived in Chirripo, just to check in. What a great lady.

Our new place of residence is beautiful beyond description. I have to admit that initially I wasn’t too excited about moving to a remote village where the center of ‘town’ consists of a Catholic Church and a 20ft X 50ft grocery store. My hesitation was mostly symptomatic of the ’over-protective mom syndrome’ (ie. Where is the nearest hospital? Do they have baby Tylenol? Do they sell vegetables in case we run out of the 50 jars of baby food I stocked-up on just in case they don‘t, in fact, sell vegetables?….and other such silly questions). Luckily, all of my anxieties withered away as we set foot in our 2 story, hardwood cabin with hot running water, 2 Jacuzzi baths and toilets that flush toilet paper. Oh…My….Gosh. It’s been two days, and the novelty of hot water has definitely not worn off. As I was washing dishes after dinner yesterday, I raved to Rivs about how wonderful it was to actually have squeaky clean dinnerware. We began talking about the wonders of hot plumbing, and it took a few minutes for us to figure out if we had hot running water in Hawaii. How quickly we forget….Also, I keep throwing toilet paper into the trashcan, forgetting that these San Gerardo bad boys can actually handle the fibrous paper. Living here will be a good transition back to life in the USA.

As if those luxuries weren’t enough, yesterday morning Rivs woke me up to see a beautiful sunrise over the misty rainforest mountains through our bedroom that has no walls, just windows. Not that we’re exhibitionists, but just in case you were wondering how the lack o’ privacy goes over in our new town, our nearest neighbors are…well…I don’t know because we can’t see them, and hopefully they can’t see us. If they could, they would be in for a real treat. Have you ever watched a married couple lay in bed reading Harry Potter side by side? Hot and heavy, let me tell you…

Later that morning, when we went to investigate the constant tapping noise coming from our window-walls, we found a little blue parrot trying to get in our house. Not long after, 2 toucans arrived on the scene to check out our apparently bird-attracting windows. Later in the day, 4 more toucans of a different variety perched on the tree outside our room, scaring way the other birds (toucans are like the bully birds of the jungle. They even eat other birds’ eggs. Now I understand what Toucan Sam is ´just following his nose´ to. Jerk.) The whole day I had the “World Animals: Tropical Bird” Baby Einstein theme music in my head. Harper must have felt like she was the main actor in the show, because she was so excited all day long, even if she has to wear a second hand bear suit all day since it´s the only thing we could find warm enough for her up here in the mountains... Yup, we like this place a whole lot. (And just in case you think we’ve splurged on our new crib, it’s only $500 a month. So there.) Oh, and by the by...I did chop off the rest of my hair, in case you were wondering.

New blog

Just in case you were wondering where my intellectual writing has been channelled (because it's definitely not in this blog lately...), check out our field training blog at http://upazespectador.wordpress.com/

Harper Update

When I think about her, it's hard to believe that Harper is already 6 months old. Then I look at her ample fat rolls, hear her babbling squeels, and feel her hands curiously searching the topography of my face and realize that she's no longer the tiny, helpess baby she once was. I feel like such a cliched mom by saying this, but they really do grow up so fast, don't they? At her 6 month check-up, Harper weighed in at a wopping 18.7 lbs and measured 26 inches. Yeah, big girl. The doctor said that she's a bit "sobrepreso" (overweight). What are you supposed to do when you a have a fat baby, anyways? Deny her her precious rice cereal? No, I think I'll keep her fat (at least for now, while it's still cute.) She's in the process of growing 2 teeth, sits up well and kind of crawls backwards. Okay, maybe we can't quite call it "crawling" yet, but she can wiggle her way around pretty well. She's obsessed with Baby Einstein shows which we slyly watch on youtube because we're too broke to buy the real thing. Harper doesn't know the difference. As soon as the theme song comes on, she gets a huge smile on her face and does one of her angry-sounding happy shrieks. It's really cute. We've watched 'Baby Animals' so often that the songs are forever on repeat in my head. While out on the field training, I was singing the "Animals in the Ocean" theme song ("Hey, little fishes, would you like to take a swim with me...") while interviewing the top FARC commander. I'm such a poser journalist.

it's not you, it's me.

In the excitment of preparing to move to a beautiful mountain village at the close of the school year next week, I've forgotten how much I'm going to miss good old, run down Ciudad Colon. Despite the toilet paper-allergic toilet bowls, the cracked gravel roads that may give Harper shaken baby syndrome, the men who cat-call at anything that is not anatomically male, the chicken poop and feathers that decorate store-bought eggs, the meals that no matter how they're ordered always come out deep-fried, the relentless beans and rice that accompany every one of those fried meals (even breakfast), and the horrible giant flying beatles whose only apparent purpose in life is to become entangled in my hair in a misdirected search for light, I have kind of grown to love this place. As a matter of fact, as I reflect on my time here in Costa Rican suburbia, I've come to realize that it's not you, Ciudad Colon. It's me.

All of my time in this town I've either been uncomfortably pregnant or very much a mom in graduate school. These two factors have made it easy to pick out the negative aspects of living here while ignoring the beauty around me. So what if the only affordable cereal here is Corn Flakes? Who cares about the yappy mutts that all must have come from the lineage of one very potent weiner dog? It really doesn't matter if men feel the need to initiate their car alarms every time a woman walks by, because at the end of the day I get to sit on Big Mama's front porch with my baby while my husband accompaines the song of tropical birds with his guitar as we watch the sun set behind banana trees. And in those moments, I forget that the river in our front yard is actually a steady stream of sewage.

What the FARC?

For field training, our class was split into 4 groups: 2 NGOs and 2 Journalist teams. Our mission was to report on the ongoing conflict between the Colombian military, the revolutionary guerillas (FARC, ELN) and the drug cartels. Although we were physically located on the Nicaraguan border, in simulation we were in Tumaco, Colombia. Yes, the lines between the real world and simulation were often blurred... Like the time I attempted to extract revolutionary information from a very willing army officer who offered me grapes and pears, only to later find out that he had no clue about the simulation at hand. Ooops. Delicious fruit, though.

So...it's been nearly three days since I've returned from field traning, and I'm still waking in the night thinking that the guerillas, military or drug cartels are coming to get me. The most difficult thing about being in a conflict zone (even a pseudo-conflict zone) is that there are no "good guys". On the first night of training, the al-Jazeera team was arrested by "Fuerzas Militarias", the host organization in charge of our security. As local journalists, three team members and I had to drive for miles to an unknown village and debate with local police for the release of our colleagues, after being thrown out of our cars by machine gun-donning military men to be patted down for weapons. Luckily I keep all of my heavy artillery in my underpants, so we were allowed to pass. The rest of the week followed in the same vein, as we constantly had to check our backs everywhere we went. If I had interviewed revolutionary guerillas on tape, I had to hide the camera SIM card in inappropriate places, like my bra, before returning to the military base. When contacting the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), I had to deny any relationship with the military, which was rather difficult considering that our only source of protection came from governmental armed forces. Actually, when traveling by boat to meet the FARC commander, I was found suspicious of being a spy, and was killed. Don't worry, they brought me back to life a few minutes later, which was kind of dissapointing given the beautiful ocean I was planning to haunt while my colleagues were conducting interviews. Oh well.

It wasn't all excitment, fun and games, however. One day we spent 4 hours learning how to deactivate landmines, only to be informed at the end of a long, instructional seminar that the way to deactivate them is to call expert landmine deactivators. So if you ever encounter a field surrounded by yellow tape reading "Danger: Landmine Zone" decorated with skull-and-crossbones, call your local landmine authority. Despite that anticlimax, I did learn a lot of useful things, like how to tell the difference in sound between an M-16 and an Uzi. (P.S Guns are LOUD. Airsoft did NOT prepare me for that.) I also discovered a lot about my emotional fortitude (or lack thereof) as I was asked by a FARC leader to take a child soldier home with me. Yup, I brought him home with me (imaginarily), only to later discover that I had endangered our entire convoy by assisting the enemy. Oops again.

In all, it was an amazing experience. I missed my lil' family like crazy, but the more I got into journalist mode, the less my heart hurt. When I came home, Harper gave me a huge smile with her gummy mouth + 1 tooth. And despite my greatest fears, she definitely didn't forget me. So I'm slowly readjusting back to normal life, although part of my mind is still somewhere out in the Costa Rican jungle, fighting alongside FARC for "the People".

This is where we stayed. The bedrooms were luxurious compared to the doorless, toilet paperless bathrooms.


These are deactivated landmines found on the Nicaragua/Costa Rican border


This is Chepon, who followed our team from the military base 10km into the jungle as we navigated by compass, map and Jose-David (see below).


This is a really great shot of a FARC soldier killing a drug lord. Sorry about the hand obstruction.


This is Jose-David, our FARC guard who accompanied us on our 10 km hike to a massacred village.

Welcome to the Jungle

I've re-emerged from the jungle, and am slowly readjusting back to civilian life. I say slowly because every time Rivers drops a dish in the kitchen, I hide for fear that the FARC guerillas are coming to get me. I'll give a more extensive report of my week-long saga, but for now let's keep the suspense going by saying that I successfully retrieved a team of al-Jazeera reporters from Colombian jail. Oh- and I was killed twice.

To be (very) continued.