Sobre la voluntaria y el proyecto

Sobre la voluntaria y el proyecto

My name is Clare Boerigter, and I will graduate from Grinnell College in May 2014, as a Spanish major. I was able to volunteer for nine weeks in Costa Rica because of the James C. Randall ’94 Memorial Fellowship, a scholarship which enhances the study abroad experience of a Grinnell student in a Spanish-speaking country each year. My Randall project involved a fusion of my three primary interests: Spanish, environmentalism and writing.

Having been fortunate enough to study abroad twice before in Cuernavaca, Mexico, I was curious to step beyond the structure of a language or university program, which led me to volunteering. I focused on opportunities that dealt with ecological issues as—following an archaeology internship in the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, involvement on Grinnell’s Student Environmental Committee, and five months as a wildland firefighter in northeastern Utah—the topic of environmentalism was and remains very compelling for me. Costa Rica, teeming with biological diversity, conservation initiatives and ecotourism, seemed like a natural fit. For my Randall project, I decided to write about my experiences, both informatively and creatively, as a way to engage with a larger audience and to better understand my own nine weeks abroad. “Lagartijas y luciérnagas” is my—hopefully—straightforward narrative of events, while my creative non-fiction piece Lenguas and my fictional story “Naomi” deal with other moments—the often troublesome, delicate, quieter ones.

In reading my blog, I hope you are able, in some small way, to get a sense of the places and the people that I met. Ultimately, the most powerful part of my nine weeks in the Sarapiquí region and at Selva Bananito were the friends that were part of them. Without the shelter and direction of a program, at times I felt like a wee lonesome rubber ducky adrift on open water: alone in a foreign country, speaking a language that was not my own, the obvious outsider—which is how I learned that, given even half the chance, people are—people want to be—kind.

…

Lenguas

A creative non-fiction account of my five weeks in the Sarapiquí region in the central lowlands of Costa Rica:

Jasmin is black hair and porcelain. She is familiar somehow—a known face, a half-remembered nose—and across her right foot, ink sprouts in leafy brocade. In the back of a Suzuki jeep, your maleta squats on the bench like a proud fat beetle and you sit hip to hip with her, all white and sweat and knees touching. Your eyes and ears are overcome—Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí in a wash of motion and rain-swept shadow, Spanish running in fast-lipped loops. You focus on the driver, on his hand as he changes gears, on the rigid break and reconnection before the stick slots into the space that has been waiting for it. Puerto runs out on you and the countryside rushes in, streams about the pista in long green streaks. You have been swallowed. Jasmin cradles a plastic sack on her lap. Like you, she is new here; like you, she does not belong.

Read (coming soon)

…

Naomi

A fictional piece about memory, betrayal and the jungle:

She had gone. Sofía had gone. The media luna impression of her body on the sheet was cold under José’s thin hands. She had not wanted to come, but she had come, and now—almost a year later—she had gone. Out in the garden, he shucked a spindly jointed caña, set his teeth to the white banded meat, and sucked. He did not know where she would go. North from the river on Cacique’s bony back, north along the edge of the palm fields, then east across the rotting bridge, twenty kilometers east by way of the road that wove like a culebra up and out of the jungle. But then? Would she leave Cacique in the finca’s caballeriza? Would she walk to Bananito on her broad black feet, sit in the back on the noon bus, step out into the salty scent of el Caribe in Limón, step out into the shadow of Heredia’s Barva?

Read

Fotos: 1. Selva Bananito 2. CECOS 3.Bambú 

El comienzo

El comienzo

It was a five hour drive to Chicago from my hometown in northeastern Iowa. Fall had finally turned cold in the Midwest, and the day hung heavy and low. Only two weeks earlier, I had sat behind the driver’s wheel, stared down an unfathomably straight stretch of Utahan highway. 144 days out West, 14 back home, and now this, another departure. Geography kept getting up on me, kept moving.

At four o’clock the next morning, I stood in line at airport security. I played with the hem on my brother’s old sweater, eyed the burn marks on my firefighting boots, made use of the little familiar things.

Taking off was always the best part. Layover in Florida, the rippling blues of the Caribbean. Then descent, as though I was being absorbed into green, into broad leaves, into voracious and wriggling life.

Costa Rica, I thought, following the signs in the San José airport. It had been like looking at nine weeks of blank space: I couldn’t begin to imagine it, so I hadn’t tried.

And now, here, the blank space began to take form, to fill itself in, to become.

…

My initial ticket read October 30, 2012; my return was marked January 3, 2013. For more than two months, Costa Rica was to be home: a week in Heredia, five in Chilamate, three at Selva Bananito Lodge and Preserve. Bienvenidos.

In Chilamate, a pueblito in the lowlands of central Costa Rica in the Sarapiquí region, I volunteered at CECOS, el Centro de Aprendizaje para la Conservación en Sarapiquí, or the Sarapiquí Conservation Learning Center (SCLC). A non-profit organization, CECOS opened as a learning center in the mid-1990s and has been working to bring opportunities to local Tic@s ever since—from English as a Foreign Language classes to community charlas (discussions) to becas (scholarships) for high school and university students. As a short-term volunteer, I was involved in a little bit of everything: from planting trees as part of our reforestation project to writing and editing documents in English to lending a helping hand (or foot) to local Sarapiquí instructors at cooking and dance classes.

La oficina de los voluntarios overlooked the green Sarapiquí River; blue-jeans frogs made themselves at home on the scattering of senderos; at my host family’s house at night, I could hear the gray- and white-skinned lagartijas chirping through their reptilian throats. Rain fell hard and fast in Chilamate, a thunderous overtaking that submerged sidewalks and molded boots, and then for a few days, the sun would settle up high in the sky and the aves would open their wings, feathers fanned in bright streaks of color. Then my host brother Pancho would recite 
names and migratory patterns to me from his carefully kept birding book, whistles trilling in his throat.

Three hours away from Chilamate—south of Limón on the Caribbean coast, 10 miles from Bananito Sur on a wending, river-crossing road—stood Selva Bananito Lodge and Preserve, the site of my second internship. An ecolodge surrounded by the selva, I spent my first weeks there as part of the human minority: three Tic@s and one macha (blondie) to fifteen horses, four dogs and one cat—not to make mention of the culebras, perezosos, aves, murcielagos, escorpiones, grillos and other non-domesticated, but certainly present, animals. I cleaned rooms with the women; I hauled downed manú wood in from the jungle with the men; I cleared brush back from reforested trees with the quick whack-whack of a machete; I drove a metal carving tool into wood with a martillo to make new placards: No alimente a los caimanes / Don’t Feed the Caimans. I played bol with the Nicos who worked on the neighboring finca, and with the arrival of tourists, spoke English upstairs in the dining room, Spanish downstairs in the kitchen, serving and eating, walking up and down and up and down, neither turista nor trabajadora, but some strange species in-between.

They wanted to teach me words—Gato and José, Anita and Meche and Gris—they wanted me to know araza, the pucker-mouthed yellow fruit, and tacos, the spikey-soled fútbol cleats, and caballeriza, the sweet-smelling stable, all sweat and horsehair. Tolda for bug net, almohada for pillow, paño for rag or towel. Walking back from bol, the mud outline of the balón a perfect imprint on my white shirt, Gato pointed to the lights flicking on and off in the rising darkness: luciérnagas. Like lagartijas, which Pancho had painstakingly taught to me in Chilamate, Gato listened to me roll the syllables around with my tongue, correcting my sounds. Almost every day after, he would turn to me and ask: “y los insectos que brillan, ¿como se llaman?” 

“Luciérnagas,”  I would respond, letting the word grow from down in my lungs. 

“Eso Clare,” he would say, grinning, “eso.”

Fotos: 1. Caribbean views 2. Jungle livin' 3. Welcome to CECOS! 4. View from el rancho at the Selva Bananito Lodge