Friday, April 6, 2012

Courtney's Sustainability Reflection


                                           Courtney in Copan, three months ago.

A shared vision, a common dream, similar work, recurring values-these are all things that come to mind when someone says the word “community”. Like sustainability (and like a lot of other things), I think community is a word that’s used a lot but seldom practiced (well), at least in my experience,

Sustainability conjures an image of windmills and solar panels, of green spaces and flowers and happy farm animals-essentially all of the stock photos on the covers of our books this semester. When someone says sustainability, I think about it solely in terms of the environment and fixing our environmental degradation/energy dependency.

As someone who has Sustainable Community Development as one of their majors, I feel like I should have a better conception of what sustainable communities are or should be. I guess I understand it at a theoretical level, but I don’t think I had ever seen an example of a healthy, functioning sustainable community before this trip.

The first and most important community experience for me on this trip is the community we’ve built together. I’ve been in many different group living situations before, but none with this much thought or intentionality.

Looking back, the transformation about how I feel about community has been a pretty significant experience for me on this trip. I’ve never really felt this deeply embedded in a community, at least emotionally. I guess in the past I felt like I was pretty community-oriented:  I volunteer a lot and am involved in a lot of local politics; I know my neighbors and go to a lot of community functions. I know a lot of “important” people in the Ashland community and am involved more than the average college student – I always assumed that this was enough. I thought that by contributing to the common good and fulfilling my civic duty and giving a lot I was doing my part to build a better community. I wouldn’t say that I was entirely wrong, because I think a sense of service and engagement in community is vital, but I completely discounted the emotional side of community. I have never felt comfortable enough in a community to ask for things. I have always assumed that feelings should be dealt with in the private realm, meaning with your friends or family at home and that it was pretty undesirable to be needy or to ask for things from your community.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the way we deal with our emotions as a society is pretty shitty. Everyone has and is entitled to the broad range of emotions that comes with being human, and everyone deserves an outlet for those emotions and to be supported in expressing those emotions. It was both one of the most difficult and one of the most rewarding experiences for me to be a part of building a community in which these things are allowed and encouraged to happen. There were times that I didn’t feel comfortable expressing myself and I’m sure others felt the same way, which means I have some work to do both in terms of how I communicate to other people and how I receive communication from others.

My family is pretty open to talking about how we feel, so I don’t know where I got my reluctance/uncomfortability about talking about my feelings or expressing needs-I guess it’s one of those cultural messages that’s embedded so deeply that we don’t even notice it, but I think we’re all taught from a very young age that it’s not okay to be needy and that we should usually try to feel happy all the time. I really want to work on breaking down this myth when I get home, but I don’t know how to do so without making people uncomfortable. Activities like our check-ins, discussions, the Gifting Circle and the Joanna Macy activity really helped me to feel comfortable with everyone and allowed me to express myself in new ways, but we were all willing participants in those activities, I feel like you can’t just bring a group of people together and expect these things to work.

I guess my point is that truly sustainable communities have to recognize people as whole people and provide spaces for people to grow and develop and share and help others and be helped and communicated, otherwise they won’t really be sustainable, they’ll just be more environmentally-sound versions of what we were doing before.

I think that the community we’ve built here is sustainable, even though we’ll all be leaving each other in a matter of days. I say its sustainable because even though we’ll all be physically separated, how I feel about everyone won’t change, and I’ll still continue to rely on and grow with and share with all of the people on this trip, and to me that is the essence of community.

                                Our community on our last day in Costa Rica.

In a lot of ways, some of the most significant learning for me on this trip came from my peers, and Central America simply served as the backdrop, which I guess just goes to show that usually what you’re looking for can be found at home. However, did learn a lot of valuable things from the places we visited and the people we met.

One of the first things that comes to mind is that sustainability is hard. Not only does it take a lot of work to create and synthesize and coalesce a community to be sustainable on a human level, to be environmentally and ecologically sustainable requires a great understanding of and relationship to the natural world, it also takes a tremendous amount of physical work. Sustainability isn’t just something you come to know through your head or your heart or your gut, you also feel it in your back and shoulders and wrists; through having dirt on your palms and wind in your hair and sun in your face; through the handle of a shovel and the bristles of a paintbrush. However difficult the work may be, the rewards are endless.

Another thing I learned is that a little kindness goes a long way. All of the small things I noticed that people do here, like greet each other on the streets and stop by peoples’ houses when they pass and feeding whoever comes by and watching each other’s kids did a lot to raise my spirits and give me a sense of community wherever I went. The people here genuinely care about each other and us and they didn’t have to do anything extravagant to make that known. I want to remember this when I go home so that I can make more of an effort to show kindness to the people I encounter. Every community has its problems, but I didn’t see that stopping anyone here from caring about or helping their neighbors, and I hope that’s a value I continue to carry with me.

I was also impressed by the relationship with nature most of the people we encountered had. Most were so appreciative of the resources the natural world provides, whereas I don’t think I’ve ever felt particularly thankful when I turned on the faucet. Beyond the sense of gratitude most people had for their resources, I also saw a great sense of wonder and appreciation for the natural world simply because it existed. Remembering Pablo and Mauricio’s excitement at every bird and every tree and Chico’s quiet patience and love for his land and his work makes me want to live for fully with that sense of connectedness and wonder. An individual or a community can’t function always waiting for the next extraordinary moment – you’ll  quickly become burnt out or disappointed or jaded. But if you learn to love the ordinary because there is beauty in the little things, and because each moment is different from the next and because we share these ordinary moments with nature and each other, we can build from that a better way of living.

So now when I think about “sustainability through community”, I guess I have a better idea of what it is, though it’s still hard for me to articulate. For me, sustainability through community is being in a place where people care deeply about the natural world and each other, that creates a space for people to grow and share and love, and that is a constant exchange of giving and taking with no one keeping track. I don’t know all of what it takes to build a sustainable community, but I want to try and I want to help create a feeling of community in the places I am and the places I’m going. For me, the idea of sustainability through community is reflected in the faces of Sebastian and Chico and Aaron and Pablo and all of the wonderful people we’ve met on this trip. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully communicate with anyone what I learned or how I feel about sustainability through community, but hopefully I can continue to live and learn it and show it to the places I’m going home to.

Courtney Remacle 

Asoprola Overview




Asoprola
We arrived in Altamira late at night on March 24th after a bittersweet bus ride from Kekoldi.  During the first week, we received a tour of the grounds, including organic permaculture farms, jelly and cosmetic making facilities, and a sapling greenhouse; Latin dancing and cooking classes; and a tour of local artist’s house and studio.  We got to visit yet another refreshing river and the Pacific coast, play soccer and lots of camp games with the school kids; and we worked on filling 2,000 small bags of compost dirt in order to grow fragile baby trees, a ceramics project, a small souvenir shop, and a raised bed garden at the elementary school. 

                                      An introduction to a local farm.

Our stay was both relaxing and energizing. The relaxation came in the form of tedious tasks. I’ve felt purposeless at various points throughout the trip due to the nature of the work we were doing, but I’ve gained a greater ability to see the bigger picture than I had before this trip, so feeling like a tiny piece of an immeasurable puzzle was alright with me. I’ve come to terms with the fact that no matter how great my accomplishments turn out to be, they’ll always be pretty tiny relative to all of the accomplishments humanity has made throughout history, but because I’m working along side well-intentioned individuals, we can accomplish real feats together. For now I may be just transporting rocks to build of a wall of the new souvenir store or filling small bags of dirt, but that’s helping the limited staff of Asoprola make more of their time, and the association is part of a network of millions of organizations working interdependently and in harmony to face the greatest challenge humanity has ever seen. The opportunity to stay there also gave me an example of how sustainability works through community, and part of the way communities function is that everyone shares in the more tedious work so that it gets done.

At the same time, I’ve never simultaneously felt so present and so exited to return home. Interactions with and observations of the community told me that these were good people who really care and work hard all day, every day.  Efforts like theirs are those that change the hearts and minds of the people they come into contact with and create a positive impact on the world, in this case benefitting the natural environment here in Costa Rica. There was also mosaic art everywhere we went. Naturally, I was excited to be there. Adding to the experience for me were the surprising similarities between Altamira and Kentucky in terms of  the weather, landscapes, and even the scents in the air, making me feel at home and also excited that I would soon be home for real.

                                Mosaic floor and counters in the restaurant.

Finally, my host family was nothing short of amazing. Tommy and I stayed with the Valdez family for the two weeks we were at Asaprola, and they made us feel so welcome. It seemed like they really wanted to hang out with us and share their home, so instead of feeling stressed about what I could possibly say to them, I actually looked forward to come home at night. That made any challenge I might be presented with during the day infinitely easier to face. So for me it was an ideal site for our last couple of weeks, helping me to feel happy with the trip as a whole and prepared to leave.

Sammy Meador

Kekoldi Overview

Hello friends and family!

The sunshine is the root of all happiness here in Costa Rica. Every person you meet greets you with warmth and smiles. We were fortunate enough to spend about two weeks with indigenous people of Costa Rica in a place called Kekoldi.  Every morning we awoke to beautiful bird songs and fresh bread/doughnut things that we covered with as much nutella as you could imagine. We awoke in paradise, and fell asleep to the pitter patter of rain on a tin roof. Although sometimes it was much more then a pitter patter, the essence of a nighttime lullaby never ceased. Our days were full of adventure. We hiked through the tropical forest to a hidden waterfall oasis. The locals told us the water would be cold but compared to the Maine coast, lakes, and rivers I am used to, the water was quite warm.  Never in my life have I felt anything so naturally powerful. When the waterfall beat upon my back I had to make sure I didn’t loose my footing and plunge into the white water below. We hiked back to be greeted with a feast fit for kings.  Kekoldi fed us way too good. They stuck to traditional Costa Rican food, but flavored it like a bold Emerald Lagassi and a comforting Paula Dean. Rice, beans, veggies, palm hearts, and pasta never tasted so good.



            Our guide Pablo, a Costa Rican Biologist and Forester, was so passionate about nature he dedicated his life to studying birds, focusing on birds of prey. His ipod is not filled with artists and albums but instead 4 gigabytes of different bird species and their songs. Kekoldi is the bottleneck for aviary migration, and is the 2nd best place in the world to watch the raptor migration. They have a 5-story look out tower in which well known biologists visit to study various species of birds and their migration. We were lucky enough to witness these bird tornadoes. Birds of prey are soarers. This means they fly using the hot air thermals. They soar from one hot rising air mass to another, spiraling in circles up so high in the sky they have enough momentum to soar down to the next to repeat the process until they get back to North America. At one point, we saw a fleet of 10,000 migratory raptors spiraling into the sky. Words cannot express what an amazing site this is. Kekoldi is also home to native birds of every color, brightly colored poison dart frogs, Katy-dids (which look like flying leaves), Central American Bush Masters (the most venomous snake found in all of the Americas), Scorpions, Bullet ants (holding the most painful sting of any creature on earth), Boas, 3 inch hornets, giant June bugs (and yes they suck at flying here too), Beautiful butterflies (Blue Morpho being my favorite), 2 toed and 3 toed sloths, and tarantellas (Which I was “lucky” enough to get up close and personal with… I had one IN MY HAIR!! Yeah, hands down the most scared I’ve been in my life. I sure as hell will never forget that).

                                  Pablo introducing us to one of his reptilian friends.

            On the flip side, relaxing on the beach of the Caribbean Sea and stepping foot in a warm ocean made everything okay. Kekoldi has it all. It’s a shame these indigenous people had to fight for land that has always been theirs. Fortunately, we have a reason to go back. Everyone in the group planted their own tree. I made a promise to mine that I would come back and see how it has grown. Sorry guys, my tree is going to be bigger than yours.

I’ll be seeing you all soon!
Pura Vida! Leeann

p.s. Love and Miss you Mom and Dad

Visit to Yorkin

So the faithful crew begrudgingly left the beaches of Gandoca to head to the remote community of Yorkin on the Costa Rican and Panamanian border. While the two communities are less than 10 miles apart as the crow flies, the journey took about 5 hours.
            We piled into a couple 4x4 taxis and headed down the long dirt road through banana plantations to get to the main road. At about the midway point, we reached the precarious twisted bridge, which we were all hesitant to cross. The driver thought it would be a good idea for us to get out while he drove across, so we jumped out and walked over the bridge before the taxi passed. Amazingly, the bridge did not give out when he crossed and we all hopped back in and continued on our journey. We finally arrived at the main road to catch the bus to Bri Bri.



            The town of Bri Bri is the developed hub of the Bri Bri tribe and territory. It has a few amenities including a grocery store, a motel, and a rather dilapidated bathroom (which you needed to pay for, by the way). The group trudged down the streets in the rain to the alternate bus stop for the more local bus. Picture your average municipal bus lumbering through the busy streets of your favorite city. Now, picture that very same bus, driving on unmaintained dirt roads that you wouldn’t dare take your mother’s ‘Camry’ down.  That is the exact bus we found ourselves crammed into, trying to maintain balance. At every dip in the road, the bus would slowly scrape along its rear end and we would all cross our fingers that it didn’t get stuck and require our manpower. At one such happening, Leeann, cranking away on her disposable camera, found it an opportune moment to throw herself over me to take a picture of one of the hundreds of small trickling steams along the way. But after what seemed like an eternity (probably 45 minutes), we had reached the launch point for our next mode of transportation.
            We walked down a path through a large valley to come upon a river with three slender looking riverboats afloat. Each was carved out of a single tree trunk with a 20hp Yamaha mounted on back. After the drivers bailing the vessels, we climbed aboard, about 5 in each, and headed down the Rio Yorkin for the ride of a lifetime. With the motor in back and a ‘poler’ up front to push us through the shallower sections, we slowly glided upstream through dense and remote rainforest. The Rio Yorkin lies on the border of Costa Rica and Panama, and snakes in and out of each country. Within minutes, a torrential downpour began and the low, foggy clouds blanketed the peaks. It was an unforgettable ride. We passed small cliffs spotted with dozens of sleeping bats, and heard screeching Mealy parrots flying over the canopy. Trees leaned over the river, dangling vines that would occasionally brush our jacket hoods. Once in a while, a kingfisher would swoop right past the boat and make a dive for the water. It was an experience I had wanted the whole trip and one that I will remember for a lifetime.



            After about an hour, the boats slid up to a steep, grassy slope where we scurried ashore to find ourselves at the remote river village of Yorkin. After a day of what seemed like travelling half the world, I plopped down into the soggy grass and stared into the distance. Oh, the miles we had covered. When our friend/guide Alex arrived, I couldn’t help but ask him how far Gandoca was from there. He pointed to a peak a few miles away and said, “Oh, Gandoca is just over that mountain.”
-Zach


Monday, March 19, 2012

Chocolate making in Yorkin

                                       Boat ride to Yorkin, Costa Rica, site of an ecolodge 
                                     run by indigenous Bribri people and of chocolate making         
                                        
Chocolate
Me: Let me tell you about the wonderful and mysterious process of making chocolate. This amazing plant starts out in an unexpected form, which few fellow chocoholics even know. A pod. Unlike money, it really does grow on trees!
Pablo: But wait, didn’t the ancient Mayans actually use Cacao seeds as money?
Me: Uh… yea, but that’s a whole other story. Anyways, chocolate, or cacao, is a pod which grows on a tree. In each pod are rows of seeds covered in a slimy membrane.
Pablo: Ewww!
Me: No, it is really tasty actually, but the seeds are what are  sought after.  People harvest the seeds, and go through a process of fermenting and drying in the sun giving a deep flavor which is emphasized by a final roasting.
Pablo: And then it’s chocolate?
Me: No. Then you have to remove the husk of each seed, which resembles a peanut skin.
Pablo: Sounds boring.
Me: Yes but here they use an old technique of laying the dry seeds in a wooden platter and use a huge round rock to grind them up.

                                                       Neal grinding the cacao beans

Pablo: A rock?
Me: Yup.
Pablo: You’re kidding.
Me: Nope. That removes the husk and then they toss them up in a swift motion allowing the lighter husks to blow away, leaving behind crushed cacao nibs.
Pablo: Sounds magical alright.
Me: Then they use a hand-crank mill to grind the nibs even further into a dark creamy paste.
Pablo: Chocolate!
Me: Well… Sort of, 100% chocolate! Then you mix in other tasty things like sugar and banana. I like it with cayenne, coffee beans, ginger, or shredded coconut, but there are lots of things that go really well.
Pablo: Wow. So…. Where can I get some?

Willow Beier
What makes something spectacular?  A “You don’t know what you’re missing” kind of event?  Does it need to be flashy: fireworks on New Year’s Eve?  Should it be well advertised and highly anticipated: the Super Bowl?  Could it be in the middle of the night when we’d all rather be in bed?

In Gandoca, Costa Rica our traveling community spent two sleepless nights with the rangers and researchers of a sea turtle conservation crew.  Countless kilometers of Caribbean shoreline have been preserved by the government so that wildlife projects such as this can protect the livelihood of inhabitants much too soft spoken to protect themselves.  And so, with those inhabitants in mind and at heart, we found ourselves aroused from snooze with the news that a Leatherback Sea Turtle had surfed her way on shore from the depths and had begun her seasonal egg laying ritual. 

                                  CELL students walking Gandoca beach during daytime

In two parallel lines we walked behind our guides with all of our flashlights flicked off and only the cloud-filtered grey light of the moon to make out the silhouettes of the beach wood and each other.  Down the way one could see the brief illumination of a red light, as if cautioning on comers to slow down for what was ahead.  Coming still closer, doing our best to twinkle-toe away from the playful impact of the torrent’s rolling white foam at our sandy but still dry shoes, the only silhouette worth noticing now was surreal. 

A few paces away, sprawled on the shore, head facing the coconut trees that were bowing towards the ocean further up the bank, was something spectacular.  There were no new year’s fireworks, but in the slurry of those coconut trees hovered thousands of fireflies like free-floating ornaments celebrating the arrival of new pearl-colored spherical hatchlings.  Or they could have been insect-sized photographers flashing in the peripheral of the tropic stadium that was erected as we all surrounded this leather-hided creature swaying its hind fins back and forth, left and right, over and over again like two pendulum line backers digging away at a salty chamber beneath the sand; yet another of nature’s many incubators.  She went on like this for, I was told, an hour, but what amount of time can measure a prehistoric event such as this?  And it really was pre-historic.  A happening that precedes history.  It was like watching an aquatic dinosaur coming back to the same stretch of beach that she emerged from as a palm sized Tortuga millions of years ago… 

And I wish you could have been there.  You don’t know what you’re missing.  It’s so hard to miss something when you don’t know what you’re missing.  This thought was given to me, which is to say, it was not my own, while we witnessed the leatherback swirl back around and in no rush whatsoever (it is a turtle, remember) pull her way back towards the unbounded pool that binds us all.  Head flat on the volcanic sands, front fins forward.  Slap, slide and pull.  Waves crashing.  Slap, slide and pull.  Crash.  Slap.  Slide.  Pull.

Foam.    

Tomas Newman         
After parting ways with our host families in Sabana Grande, we travelled to Selva Negra, literally “Black Forest,” a scenic, self-sustained ecolodge and organic coffee, veggie, flower, and livestock farm in the Nicaraguan cloud forest. During our one and a half week stay, we received a tour of the grounds, including explanations of the coffee production process, an encounter with some excited baby goats, and a view of their on-site vermicomposting operation, which is part of a system that produces seven million pounds of compost annually. We talked about barriers to communication, spent time being one with nature by doing a solo in the woods, and shared our feelings about each other in the gifting circle. Mausi, one of the owners of Selva Negra, gave us a history of the place, complete with explanations of how they once fled to the United States after being chased by the Nicaraguan government, and of how she came about her expansive comic book collection. We discussed how to make a living, what constitutes a healthy appetite, how to form and improve communities, and the Universe Story; and we also got schooled by Willow and Tommy about belly dancing and the history of hip-hop, respectively.

                                    Selva Negra children helping prepare the vegetable garden

 Most notably, though, we spent roughly half of our time designing and building a school playground and organic veggie and herb garden for the children of the coffee pickers employed by Selva Negra. After the tour of the grounds on day one, we got to have a look at the site, and then Karen, one of Mausi’s daughters, and her husband Don debriefed us. We set to work the next day sharing ideas and mapping the possibilities for a layout. The following morning, we presented our plan to Karen and Don. We worked hard Tuesday through Friday, and Saturday morning we finished the project by painting our tire creations with the kids. The final product included a lochness monster (which we named Larkspur, after Neal’s mysterious wife), a music center, an underground telephone, the gardens, and a tire island in the center of it all.

                                                Kids and Leeann testing the new tire fort

 For me personally, building the playground was the most rewarding project we’ve worked on thus far. I think the difference was that we had a hand in the decision-making. The creative process of designing the playground was enjoyable in and of itself, but it would have been less so if we didn’t know that we had the authority to bring our ideas to fruition. We really were going to build this playground, at a site we had seen and felt, for kids we would soon meet. We talked about the importance of giving workers an understanding of the complete operations of a company, accompanied by some degree of executive clout, during our discussion on making a living. I saw that sentiment come to life in myself and in our community. It was so very gratifying on Friday, when the kids ran out of the classrooms and went wild on their nearly complete new playground, to see what started as a problem converted into laughter and exhilaration. For our group, it became a realization of what we can accomplish together, and we did it without spending any money or consuming any new material. I love it. It was a powerful demonstration that there’s hope. We didn’t save the planet by building a playground and a few raised beds, but we certainly made a step in the right direction, and that’s created a ripple effect that will continue quite possibly forever.

                                                     The completed playground project

Sammy Meador