Once you’ve seen a new place, the map you remember in elementary school changes.  Pink, orange, green or yellow – no longer just odd shapes – states and countries explode into paintings of life.  Each one becomes a new realm in your mind’s eye.

After I came back from Costa Rica, my world doubled in size. My ideology exploded.  Sure I have traveled before, but not to anywhere so vastly different from the United States.  

When I mull over how I’ve spent my years, my travels are giant speed bumps on the road of my memory.  From them I can conjure up so much detail and color, energy and emotion.  I can recall distinctly how I felt while hiking in Noosa, Australia when ocean waves hit the cliff on which Kirk stood, the froth spaying his feet. In Abel Tasman, New Zealand, I reminisce about eating at a seaside restaurant with my parents, my dad laughing out loud at the ridiculously large bowl of green-lipped mussels served to us.  On our gondola ride in Venice, Italy, I’ll never forget my grandmother asking the gondalier to serenade us through the canals – he did, and succeeded beautifully. In Costa Rica, I smile thinking of the happy seven and eight-year-old girls performing a dance routine to a Latin Top 40 song blaring from a boom box, striking charismatic poses at the finale. When journeying down memory lane, I shift down real slow, absorbing every sensation-filled detail.

Here in Chicago, there is a job that makes money, a space to live, a short drive to see family.  Great public transportation and a beautiful lakeshore, more restaurants than cornstalks in Kansas, enough nightlife for the professional socialite.  All in all, what has become for me, in the past year, a rather conventional lifestyle.  Why go?

Convention is not a routine experience maker.

If there are the means for travel, why not leap at the chance?  Let the world bloom as you run through it, each country on the map sprouting from one flat shape into an entire realm: scenery, language, music, crashing, unforgettable, human, experience.

What’s so great about Australia?  Kangaroos, koalas and kabobs.  The ocean, the reef, the surf.  The Ozzies and their accents, the notion that the whole population is of criminal descent, the idea that it’s all “No worries, mate.”

I don’t plan on turning into an expat anytime soon, of course.  But right now, I would love to ride a few waves, capture some great photos, meet some interesting people, and hopefully hit a few speed bumps along the way.

In San Jose, there’s a guy named Ronald with a big heart. Every Wednesday he travels to impoverished and dangerous areas of the city giving out meals to anyone who comes with empty hands. He works with an outreach group called Christ for the City. From time to time, the Abraham Project works with this group.

On one of these trips, a bunch of us from the project volunteered to help out.

The morning of our volunteer day, we sat in folding chairs in a semi-circle at the Christ for the City headquarters. After some background about how the cycle of poverty has affected Costa Ricans, Ronald (through Caleb translating) told us what we should expect on the trip. He emphasized, especially to me, safety precautions we needed to take. These neighborhoods we’d be visiting were riddled with drug wars, prostitution and child exploitation. If the situation, for whatever reason, started to deteriorate, we had to pack up lightning fast and get the heck out of there.

Packing Up

Ronald told me that I could only use my tripod in the first neighborhood. All of the rest were too dangerous: using the tripod would make it too easy for someone to come and grab it from me. Brian, one of the interns from the project, came along with the sole mission to be my equipment bodyguard. At 6′ 3″, 200 lbs, he fit the bill. He hovered within a few feet of me at all times.

The rest of our group was assigned a job. Colleen was on salad, Laureen did rice, Mary scooped beans, and Julie poured juice. When all was done, we had served over 1,000 people that day.

Laureen & Mary serving food.

Everyone getting in line.

Schoolgirls

Ticos care a great deal about their appearance. These girls above seem fairly decently dressed, right?

Image is so important that it often trumps hunger. The woman sitting next to you on the bus may have her hair done up and her nails both manicured and pedicured, but you can’t know for sure when her she’s eaten her last meal.

Seeing these people and kids in this kind of poverty was a definite first for me. This wasn’t your run of the mill group of Chicago homeless men or “South Side” bad area. This was like something out of Slumdog Millionaire. The corrugated metal-clad shacks tumbled over hills into the far distance. Stray dogs sidled in and around kids’ legs, straining for the smallest morsel. Gurgling brown water ran down the edges of the dirt roads, trash floating along in tow.

If only these kids could get a real education, have a mentor… anything. It was the kind of place that made you feel helpless. Made you think how silly it was to “have-to-have” those matching IKEA throw pillows. Made me want to persuade every single friend and family member to take their next vacation/trip to Costa Rica and help out at the Abraham project. These are the kind of children that the project is helping – kids from these terrible neighborhoods.

If you went, I can guarantee that it would be one of the most unforgettable and wonderful experiences you’ll ever have.

See all of the photos from this day here.

The Crew

When Julie first told me about my house parents, Natalia and David, she said they were like the “cool kids” on the block. The hip, young couple in the neighborhood.

Which, in fact, is totally true.

Natalia is twenty-six and David twenty-nine. Once I mentioned how they were my “house mom and dad” and Natalia immediately refuted, “Naaooo! You and me, we’re amigas!” David then cracked a joke about how I needed to ask permission to go hang out with Julie.

Natalia bucks the Tica trend with short, short hair and maybe-she’s-born-with-it makeup. And, she loves playing Guitar Hero. Especially with me.

David has a motorcycle. One of those need-for-speed Honda getups. I have, yes Mom, taken a ride on this thing – and man, did we fly. It was one night when David offered to give me a lift to Julie’s, which is a fifteen minute walk from the house. David said, don’t worry, we go slow. So of course, we scream up and down the hills, zipping through the blocks. I was hanging on by the whites of my knuckles and had molded my feet as best I could around the foot peddles. No sooner than we had started, we arrived at Julie’s front gate with a short skid of the tires. I jumped off the bike and yelled, “David, you said SLOW!” David said something to Julie in Spanish. She says to me, “Lauren, you were going like 40 MPH tops.”

A productive Saturday.

Nice & Shiny

Smile for your close-up.

Natalia and David (and me at the present) live in a cozy 2 bed/1 shower house with a combo dining/livingroom. The exclusively tile floors spill out of the front door and mesh into the concrete of the covered garage area. All of which is enclosed by tall fencing and barbed wire. Oh the barbed wire. Just about as easy to find in Costa Rica as a taxi in Manhattan.

Natalia & David's

Kitchen & Dining/Livingroom

My Bedroom

Then there’s Rasta.

Oh Rasta, mi amor! (Sorry Kirk.) Rasta is part neighborhood mutt, part family dog. He floats around our street and a little beyond, but seems to be devoted to one of three houses in a tight group: mine, Olga’s across the street, and Candice & Aaron’s. Here’s a map:

Every day after lunch, when the heat is reaching its peak, Rasta comes galloping down the road toward our gate. I let him in, and he wags his big fluffy tail in helicopter motion, longing for a good massage. He’ll sleep on the cool patio tile until I head off for my afternoon shift at the project.

Rasta on the patio.

Rasta always gets our leftovers. One day Julie and I were making the trek from my house to hers. Rasta was trotting alongside us. I had a little shortbread cookie in my hand. I broke off a piece and threw it to Rasta, and he proceeded to sniff it – and nothing more. “Rasta!” I said, “I gave you the big half of my favorite cookie, and you don’t even eat it?!”

Apparently, he’s well taken care of by more people than we know, and has quite the refined palate to show for it. He’s a certified heart-stealer.

I gave Rasta a bath on Sunday. I hope he knew it was out of the kindness of my heart…

I don’t think he was amused.

Sometimes late at night I need to go use the wireless internet at the project. The gate is usually locked, so I sit on the ground just outside. The glow of my laptop both reveals and underlines the fact that I’m a gringo with an expensive piece of technology. Perhaps not the most ideal situation. Rasta, however, will accompany me on these not-so covert missions. He sits with me in the dark and I stroke his back with one hand and type with the other.

And the list has begun. The Everything-I’m-Going-To-Miss list.

I was not the only gringo, Julie and Brian were along for the trip too. The church that was supposed to have the youth group perform ended up cancelling on them, so they performed on the beach for passersby instead. They attracted quite a crowd. Unfortunately, I don’t have any photos because I shot the drama with my video camera. On our way out, though, I took these night photos of Puntarenas from the bus:

Randy (as Americans insisted on calling him when he lived in the States) made us some coffee. No ordinary coffee, however. A special blend dripped though a mesh bag to perfection pot of coffee. That’s right, coffee made without a Mr. Coffee maker.

I almost never drink drip coffee without a little bit of milk if I can help it. Everyone was drinking it black though, so I decided to give it a shot. It wasn’t bad, although really I couldn’t say how it compared to a house blend from the grocery store. Certainly better than a giant plastic tub of Folger’s or Maxwell house, to be sure.

While we drank our coffee, Randy’s chorus of songbirds churned up a melodic storm. He had about a dozen birds, each in their own cage, some in the backyard and three in the front patio/garage.

EEEeeeerrreet. “Hear that?” asked Randy. “Sounds like a squeaky door, eh? It’s the birds!” They literally sounded like a pair of swinging rusty gates. Julie and I turned to each other, fooled looks on our faces. Clearly we both had thought lubricating oil was needed nearby on some hinges. I’ve never heard a bird with a song like that before.

After cafecito, we filed out to the backyard. It was walled in with concrete blocks, typical Tico style. We walked to the far side, stopping short of a red door.

It was like walking into a rugged Secret Garden. On the other side of the door we stepped into the wild. In front of us a tall mountain soared upward. A mildly visible path was beaten into the ground. Coffee plants sprang up on either side. A few red bulbs hung from their branches. John Mark plucked one and cracked it open, showing me the beans inside – dewey green like a caterpillar.

“Weird!” said Julie, “I didn’t know that’s how coffee beans grew, I thought they just came brown.”

We climbed up and up, over rocks and under fallen tree trunks. I was huffing and puffing, talk about not being in shape. After an hour or so, we came to a high meadow, breaking into a view of Cartago below. A breeze blew free in the absence of trees, and we sat on some boulders to take in the landscape.

Blooms with a View

On the way down the other side of the mountain, we past a finca. Literally meaning “farm”, a finca is actually a plot of land on which squatters live. Often they will protect crops growing there and tend to plants of their own. In return, the owners of the land refrain from kicking the squatters out. The finca houses are some of the most interesting. Ingenuity and innovative uses of building materials abound. Often this kind of thought strikes me: How is that shack still standing after that fly just landed on its roof?

The hike ended up being 3 or 4 hours long. Randy’s wife so kindly made lunch for us that was even ready by the time we trudged back into the house.

Once I was home later that afternoon, I embraced the siesta.

(See all of the photos from this trip at the photos page or my flickr site.)