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.

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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)

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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?

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