Poultry in Stasis

[Warning: Graphic description of preparing chickens below]
I may have failed to mention that my new host father raises chickens. I have gotten used to the smell, and I no longer think they are the ugliest creatures imaginable, but I am only now starting to become involved in the process of preparing them. I fetch water, or tend the wood stove, but a few days ago I got to help 'peel' them. It was the day before New Year's Eve, and he had sold fifteen chickens to people (and restaurants) in anticipation of a feast to welcome in the new year.
The first step in this process is to kill the chickens. This is done further away from the house (across the ditch where all the sewage flows) and the chickens are placed upside down into a vise. They don't tend to protest, until after the head is cut cleanly off. Then the body starts jerking every which way, and if the wings were not secured it would be very difficult to keep hold of the bird. After a while it stops moving, and blood stops gushing. The aftermath was pretty gruesome, fifteen decapitated chicken corpses twitching in a rusty wheelbarrow with a few large dollops of blood splattered around. Next the chickens are hoisted one by one out of the wheelbarrow by their scaly feet and dropped unceremoniously into a giant pot of hot water. The water cannot be boiling, because then the chicken would get cooked, but it can't get too cold either or else the feathers would still be unpluckable, so my host father tends to the flames while my host mother and the neighbor put on aprons and stand behind a long wooden table near the chicken enclosures. This entire process, I should add, takes place in full view of the other 300 chickens that await a similar fate.
After about thirty seconds in the hot water the chicken is pulled out (again by the feet) and brought to the table. Then my host mother and the neighbor begin peeling handfuls of feathers off the soggy birds. This is where I came in (after fetching random implements and beverages). Pulling the feathers off a warm, wet, dead chicken is not terribly difficult, what is difficult is pulling all the feathers off. The back and belly are easily de-feathered, the wingtips required knives or pliers. But turning the chicken back over one is surprised to find hundreds of little feathers, almost like hairs, springing up from what was previously a fully plucked chicken. I saved the neck for last, touching bloody feathers was almost too much.
Next I got to watch my neighbor clean one chicken, but then my host mother sent me inside to make more coffee. The most surprising thing I learned about chickens is that their feet are soft and fleshy, not sheathed in hard yellow scales. The smell was overpowering, a mix between wet dogs and mold, and it was hard to get the stench off my hands, even with veterinarian's alcohol. The grilled chicken we had for dinner was excellent.
[Addendum] Today two chicks had to be killed because they were diseased, and aside from never growing into chickens would infect all the others. After they wandered around out of the pen for a while the puppies took and interest in them, chewed on their wings, and played tug-of-war with them. To 'put them out of their misery' my host mom picked up a long 2x4, flipped one chick on its back, and dropped one end of the board on its head. I was completely unprepared for this, although I was able to watch the second time, and it was pretty awful.

A site for sore eyes?

I have been in my site for a week now, and I feel as though I am finally settling into the rhythms of life here. Above all, it is hot. A cold shower feels refreshing at seven in the morning. Merely reading in the shade can provoke rivulets of sweat down my cheeks. Incidentally, reading in the shade has been my favorite pastime, I downed five books this week (not counting manuals on teaching English).
On Christmas we went to a long sandy beach, and had a barbecue. The tides here feel far too drastic, the mermaid statue which was 15 feet tall and surrounded by as much dry land when we arrived was only five feet fall and standing in the middle of ocean by the time we left. Also we went kayaking a deceptively long distance, and started to paddle out over what has been called the third deepest trench on the planet. I have been unable to corroborate this, but I love the story that always accompanies it: Jacques Cousteau came and lowered a sounding rope, but he ran out of rope before he touched bottom! Its really anticlimactic and fails to prove anything. I have heard this story about seven times from about five different people. The really good news though, is that whales apparently come here to give birth, and there are fantastic places nearby with sweeping vistas of the entire gulf (Golfo Dulce).
In Puerto Jimenez I finally saw Basilisk lizards (and Caimans). We tried to make them run on top of the water, but they were having none of it until suddenly one jumped off a log and ran all the way to the shore (three feet) along the surface of the water. It was incredible.
P.J. is the nearest large town to my site, and it is also 'the portal to Corcovado' a prime backpacking/ecotourist location. This means that the supermarket there is tailored to far different tastes than most Costa Rican markets. They have almost a full complement of spices, bamboo chutes, curry paste, and SPAM. I know it cannot get much more exciting than SPAM, but they also have amazing ice cream, including the amazing flavor 'Ron y Pasas'.
I'll be teaching an English class to some community members the second week of January, so I'm now deeply ensconced in planning and reading on how to teach community based classes. Hopefully it will be successful!
[This picture is of my friends from the training community when we went Christmas Caroling a few days before we headed to our sites. It was both fun and surprising for all the Costa Rican host families we visited.]

All my troubles will be out of site

I came back from my site visit on Wednesday, and not even a hot and sweaty eight hour bus ride could shake my overwhelming happiness at the place I will be living for the next two years. Glorious is too small a word to describe a walk to school where toucans and scarlet macaws flutter through the sky, while cows and water buffalo graze between rice paddies. Gorgeous does not adequately demonstrate the ocean's sudden appearance between the trees a mere twenty minute walk from my house. Gracious cannot capture a host family who are quite humble, but insist on sharing everything they have.
I am gushing, but there is little other recourse. Osa seems in many ways a land that time forgot, and then suddenly remembered just last year. There has never been a telephone system (even now), but they have free wireless internet at one of my schools, and a 3G network for the entire peninsula. The roads have always been awful, until they built an American style highway last year that connects precisely the towns I will need to go to; but not, incidentally, the rest of Costa Rica.
On Monday the school had a dinner for graduating sixth graders, and since my host mom is the school cook, and because I helped the teacher make decorations earlier in the day, I was invited to introduce myself to the community and the students. I won't say that I had remarks prepared, but it would not have mattered because the DJ disappeared and left reggaeton on full blast, so the teacher had to use the karaoke microphone to make herself heard. No one seemed phased by this in the least. What shocked them was that after shaking all of the student's hands I immediately set about helping my host mom (and aunt and cousin, who had shown up for the same days as my visit) serve food, violating apparently rigid gender norms. It was fun, and both my host cousin and the teacher had promised to teach me to dance pachata, but the DJ seemed determined to force the sixth graders to dance reggaeton, so soon two circles formed (boys and girls) and began shifting almost in beat, while the teacher danced from student to student, embarrassing them in front of their parents.
Now I am back in my training community, and the Christmas spirit has hit me in full force (as well as really cold weather, and even colder showers). I'm fighting it off with a warm inner glow, remembering the heat of the south, and knowing that soon I will be a real volunteer.
(This picture is looking down the road from the school at the "city center")

SAD day*

This last Wednesday we received our site assignments, at an event called 'Site Assignment Day', which lends itself to a rather troubling acronym, for what should be a joyous occasion. Thankfully the first thing they did was tell us where we would be sent to, in my case the Peninsula de Osa, in the far south of Costa Rica. I'll be living in a pretty small town, but it will be a very short bus ride from a larger town, Puerto Jimenez. The Peninsula de Osa is probably best known for Corcovado National Park, which supposedly contains the most biodiversity in Central America, because it is one of the few places where large amounts of North American and South American species coexist: there are apparently scarlet macaws, tapirs, jaguars, and four types of monkeys! I will be working at three elementary schools, possibly teaching in one of them, and working with teachers in the other two.
SAD took place at a country club, and since it was the day before Thanksgiving they served us an entire feast with turkey, stuffing, potatoes, hard boiled eggs with mustard where the yolk should be, and pumpkin pies. We all got sick in the middle of the night. I was terrified that it was something else that I had eaten, but in the morning the realization that it was a collective experience eased my fears.
That experience did not stop us from making our own Thanksgiving meal for our families on Sunday. I was in charge of the Turkeys, and the stuffing for inside the birds. We made two turkeys, and one was ready by the time people showed up, the other by the time people left. Luckily all the food was amazing, only my host dad complained that there were no rice and beans. After everyone had eaten, we cleared out one of the tables and the families started dancing, which quickly became incredibly rowdy. Some of the kids began using a broom as an impromptu stripper pole when the music switched from Salsa/Pachata to Spanish rap. The cleverer of the trainees snatched the broom and started a game of limbo, but that quickly devolved into less and less appropriate dancing yet again. I retreated to the kitchen to dismantle the second turkey. Both pictures are from our Thanksgiving Celebration.

*I am aware that repeating 'day' after the acronym is incorrect, but it completes a pun, so calmanse.

¡Foco!

I spent a considerable portion of last Sunday wondering if anyone would accept sopping wet money as legal tender. I had heard news reports of counterfeit money dissolving in the rain, and so when I made it to the bus station and bought a ticket back to Puerto Viejo I was ecstatic, if soaked through myself.
When we arrived on Saturday, after a frigid pre-dawn shower and a five hour bus ride, the sun was shining and all was right with the world. My group of Trainees quickly departed for the house we had rented, and found it to be spectacular. Warm showers, towels, plenty of beds, and a second floor hammock whose muted colors called out more loudly to me than the possible lumpiness of the mattresses.
Quickly making our way to the black sand beach a block from the house, I experienced the immense joy of diving into water that didn't seize up my chest. The beach was a long 'L' and I was so enthused by the warm water that I decided to swim across the corner, past a sunken vessel that lay a little ways off shore. As I got to the ship I could see trees growing between the sides, and cascades of vines and flowers falling into the ocean from the deck, set against the rusty hull the green was beautiful. I had little time to enjoy it though, because no sooner had I passed the ship than I myself ran aground. Thinking for several terrifying moments that I had stumbled (dog paddled?) upon an offshoot of the distant reef I had noted from the beach, I could only think of a shredded abdomen, so I supported myself on my arms and scurried forward on my hands through the six inches of water that lay between me and a long flat rock, like a primordial amphibian first stretching its appendages in the shallows of time. Unlike said amphibian however, I evolved rather more quickly once I realized that I could simply stand up, and need no longer fear getting pounded into the hard surface. Finding myself thirty feet from the opposite shore, near a sunken ship, standing fully upright, I could only laugh as I lowered myself from the rock and swam the rest of the way to the shore.
That night, as we went out for dinner and in search of a place to dance, I decided to bring my flashlight, which allowed to walk along the beach, but necessitated frequent calls of 'Foco! Foco!' to illuminate what seemed in the misty moonlight to be vicious dogs or roaring rapids, but once unveiled by my electric-blue foco took their true forms as stationary logs and tiny creeks.
The next morning, after I woke up to a chorus of birds and howler monkeys, and I enjoyed a plate of Potatoes in Jerk BBQ sauce, we headed to Cahuita National Park, wisely choosing the 'optional donation' entrance over the mandatory $7 fee station. The park was gorgeous. The part we saw consisted of a trail through the jungle shadowing the shoreline about twenty feet away. We alternated between sand and soil while trying to pass sloth-like groups of tourists and stationary groups of ticos in order to get deeper into the park. Our plans were foiled when a sudden rainstorm descended and caught us about an hour away from the last shelter at the park entrance. Up to that point I had seen 1 Howler Monkey, and no new fauna would enliven our trip, but that was pretty exciting. The rain fell in such quantities that I decided to take off everything but my bathing suit, and try to tuck my shorts and sun-shirt under my arm where they would get less wet. The theory may have been sound (I have my doubts), but in practice it was a complete failure. Every centimeter of everything I brought was drenched. The rain and the wind were so chilly that I had to jump into the ocean several times just to keep warm, and once we got back to the park entrance, the rain stopped. The man at the bus station didn't bat an eyelid when a gang of shirtless gringos showed up, holding their clothes and asking to pay with bills that, though wet, were surprisingly resistant to water. Waiting for the bus, I wrung out my shirt and my shorts, and produced perhaps a liter of water. Nobody could have had a better vacation
.

What goes up, moss come down

On Sunday my host uncle and his family invited me to go gather wool for Christmas decorations in a gorgeous location. I jumped at the opportunity to do so, because I have never had the opportunity to shear sheep, or to see it done and pick up the wool afterward. I asked for clarification, because they said we were going to the top of a mountain, and that seemed a rather out the way place to go to shear sheep, but who was I to contradict them? So we headed out after I gulped down coffee (I drink several cups a day, usually two at a time) driving through some of the other training communities, and stopping at my host aunt's familial compound. Many of the Costa Ricans I have met live in groups of houses around an older house where their parents live. I call these compounds, but there is probably a better word out there somewhere, since there are neither fences nor guards.

I was offered Aguadulce which consists of sugarcane blocks that have been shaved and boiled into a syrup, and then added to boiling water until they are nearly drinkable. Sugarcane blocks have roughly the consistency of stale earwax, and the dull brownish-gray of bleached khaki. Its not my favorite to eat or drink.

When we set out again I was none the wiser about our destination, and after several detours down muddy roads to avoid landslides (including picking fruit and vegetables from unattended gardens) we turned up another dirt road, which grew muddier and muddier as it went higher, until we veered off up a very rocky road, and then stopped. We had arrived. There were no sheep.

Attempting to cover my surprise, I smiled patiently while my host uncle handed me an empty sack, and then proceeded to walk off the side of ridge we had ascended in the car. I followed him when my host aunt told me to, and we were quickly descending through pretty dense vegetation. When I ran into a tree trunk with my body, the trunk simply fell away because the trees were so moist. They were explaining that the wool we would be collecting was different here because it came in different colors. I was again confused, but I was no longer expecting sheep. Soon we stopped in a flatter area covered in moss. My host uncle picked up a handful that was both red and green and shoved it in his sack, and then told me to do the same. Quickly revising my expectations, I jumped in with élan, only suffering a fright when my wiggling fingers tricked my eyes into believing they were venomous grubs. That was embarrassing.

It was much more fun than working with sheep (I imagine). There were tons of different types, and many different colors, and apparently families here cover doorways and nativity scenes with lana or musgo. It gives a very nice feeling, if completely different from the Yuletide I was expecting.

On the way back we drove on some of the roads that were destroyed by the recent rainstorm. My host uncle would stop over parts where the tarmac was hanging two or three feet in the air, and his daughters and wife would scream and scream while he turned around and looked at me with a glance of utter delight. This picture is of me standing on a portion of tarmac that had no ground underneath, and you can see the remains of the roadway several meters below.

Fanmail from some Flounder

As I write this I am watching an Atletico game, and Atleti is winning. Peace Corps has placed us on alert, and my town has been sealed off by landslides. A few hours ago we got electricity for the first time since last night, and the water is still only coming in fits and bursts, and is not potable. Its started raining heavily again, so its probably only a matter of time until we lose electricity again. All in all though, this has been a very good week.
I stayed with my mentor over the weekend until Tuesday, and I had a blast. He is living in a rural community about 7km from Panama, and about an hour and a half from the nearest semi-urban area. Time based distances are the norm here in Costa Rica, because the type and condition of the roads, is far more important than the actual distance traveled. For example traveling from our training communities to San Jose takes about an hour and fifteen minutes, whereas the same distance in another direction takes about half an hour.
[The team Atletico is playing has a player named Moldskred.] The trip was basically a two day job-shadow, but that was far more enjoyable than going to yet another week of training. The host family of my Mentor was incredibly sweet, and it was their daughter's birthday the day I arrived so we had cake and sang Happy Birthday. The next day we went to the botanical garden, where we wandered through a labeled wilderness, admiring plants and agoutis. Agoutis look like coconuts with a rodent head and miniature deer legs. They sit on their haunches and nibble on fruits and nuts that fall from the trees, and are adorable.
[Moldskred just took another (poorly called) free kick that went wide, and suddenly the picture flickered in and out, and came back with ghosts shadowing the players.] The next day we went to a coffee plantation and beneficio, and this time we walked through the indigenous encampment. Panamanian and Costa Rican Indigenous peoples inundate coffee based communities during picking times, which have three phases and last about three months. The coffee berry, I should add, is bright red, tastes like honey, and the pit inside smells nothing like coffee before it is roasted. The indigenous workers bring their entire families from the reservations and stay for the coffee season before going back. They dress far more nicely than the average Costa Rican, the men wear slacks and button up shirts all the time, and the women wear gorgeous traditional dresses, and are usually either pregnant or surrounded by very young children, or both. Their living conditions were cramped, with 200 people crushed into tiny rooms in four long buildings. The buildings were divided by canals dug into the dirt, full of trash and mud, and lined on either side with wood stoves creating more smoke than heat because all of the wood is soaked through. We talked to a large family, and everyone's eyes were red and watering because of the smoke roaring around every corner. The men were the only ones who talked, and they were, understandably, far more interested in telling us about their scars from fights the night before than talking about their livelihood or religion.
The bus ride from home was long and wet, and the day after I came through they closed road. So I was lucky the trip was scheduled when it was. This weather is causing landslides and floods all over the country, and it seems like there are many weakened bridges and landslides between us and our trainers, so events will be canceled or postponed. [Moldskred's teammates include Lustig, and Skjaelared, and they just tied the game.] This morning (Thursday) we walked up to the nearest landslide (15 minutes) and we were there while a young man decided to test whether electricity was flowing through the distended electrical cable to see if he could ride through on his motorcycle. Before we could get to the other landslides though, we received orders to stay put and wait the weather out, so now I am watching Atleti play, and rejoicing that we are safe and dry.

¡GOOOOLAZO DE ATLETICO DE MADRID!
Atleti just won the game in the 85th minute!