Preparing for the journey

15 August 2010

Hello friends, family, and any weird stalkers I might have so far (I have a machete),

I hope this first blog post finds you all well. As many of you know, my husband Koki and I are moving to Costa Rica. We plan to start an environmental education/research center and sustainable farm on our land in Los Alpes de Venecia in San Carlos (northern Costa Rica). Check out photos, etc. on our facebook page. While we were preparing for this adventure this summer Koki and I were also team-teaching Ecology and Spanish with Upward Bound Math & Science. It was a wonderful experience for us and for the students and very validating - this is what we want to do with our lives!

We began our journey to Costa Rica last Monday when we left Boone North Carolina, my home for the last 10 years. We plan to arrive in Costa Rica in December. We will be volunteering our way to Costa Rica through Mexico and Central America on small farms, many through WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms or WorldWide Opportunities on Organic Farms - whichever you like, I guess) and at an iguana conservation and breeding station. WWOOF is a network of organic farms that accept volunteers. Volunteers are provided with a place to sleep and food in exchange for working on the farm (although most of the farms we’ve written to ask for some financial contribution to food/cooking gas from short-term volunteers, and I’m okay with that).

We will be taking what we can carry on our backs on this adventure. We have already shipped three boxes of stuff and will ship one more with computers, degrees, and other “important” stuff. A couple more musical instruments will find their way down with family members when they visit. Although we’ve gotten rid of a ridiculous amount of stuff, I still feel like we have more than we really need. We shipped books, musical instruments, small kitchen appliances (the juicer will surely come in handy!), some clothing, some decorations to help our next place feel more like home, tools, and other things I can’t remember at the moment (we will arrive just before the holidays so we will literally be like kids on Christmas morning opening the boxes, lots of surprises!). How did I acquire so much stuff? I have tried to be conscious about not acquiring a lot of stuff - a true challenge in our society. I can’t imagine how much stuff I would have had I not moved so frequently throughout my life. While there are many benefits to living in one place your whole life, I can see that one benefit of moving is that it usually makes you evaluate which material things you want/need badly enough to haul from one place to another. I am really looking forward to living out of a backpack for the next four months and Koki and I have made a new rule for stuff: when something comes into the house, something else must leave.

In addition to shipping boxes we’ve been working on many other tasks associated with an international move. We have everything in order (that we can from the USA) to have our degrees recognized in Costa Rica - much easier than we expected so far! My residency application is almost complete - I have to write a letter explaining why I want to become a resident of Costa Rica, which should be pretty easy since there are so many reasons. We have to send everything to the Costa Rican consulate in Atlanta; then we have to deal with the rest once we arrive in Costa Rica (translation, interviews, etc.).

Another important step in preparing for this journey has been saying farewells. I’ve seen most of my good friends in the USA in the past few months… a reunion of my Waldorf school class (1st through 7th grade), farewell Boone party, mountain hikes, and visits to family. My mom Wendy is about to purchase a ticket to Costa Rica for January; it is nice that I won’t have to wait for an indefinite period of time to see her again. It is painful to say goodbye not only to my dear family in the eastern US, but to the forest… the smell of mixed hardwood leaf litter, clear streams, moss-covered rocks, salamanders, mist and the contrast of dark tree trunks and green leaves, spring wildflowers, finding crystals, mushrooms, knowing the names of most living things I see, even snow when it falls slowly and sticks to everything and makes the forest silent, blue mountains in the distance… these are a few things that come to mind when I try to articulate what it is that makes the forest here feel like home. Obviously many of these southern Appalachian natural wonders have counterparts where we’ll live in Costa Rica… the two places are so similar, and yet so different. But I digress, back to our plans…

Completely new experiences will commence on 21 August when my dad CAP and stepmom Theresa take us to Atlanta to catch our first Amtrak train. We’ll travel to New Orleans, Louisiana where we’ll spend one night at India House Hostel. We’ll rent a car and travel to Lafayette Louisiana to visit my great-aunt Jeanne, her son Jeff, and his wife Tana. We’ll spend one night at the Blue Moon Guest House and Saloon in Lafayette and then head back to New Orleans for two more nights, giving us some time to explore the city. On 25 August we’ll catch another train to San Antonio Texas. We’ll camp at the KOA for two nights and explore San Antonio a bit. (I promise it is coincidence that the two affordable places I found to stay in the USA have swimming pools; we understand we’re getting a little spoiled before heading to small subsistence farms in rural Mexico and Central America, which don’t all have swimming pools.)

In San Antonio we’ll catch a Greyhound bus to Laredo Texas, cross the border to Nuevo Laredo Mexico, and then on to Monterrey (northern) Mexico. From Monterrey we’ll travel to Rancho El Chuzo near General Cepeda, where we’ll work for two weeks. We’ll likely be helping out with some construction projects and hopefully with the peach harvest and production of peach conserves. They are using some technologies we are interested in using at our farm, like a windmill and solar electricity. We are looking forward to our first WWOOF experience on this small farm; we think we’ll learn a lot from some folks who have been doing something similar to what we want to do for ~6 years, and we hope we can be of help to them. I also look forward to spending my 29th birthday there (31 August)!

We don’t know what our exact route will be from Rancho El Chuzo to the second farm/community where we’ll volunteer, but we’ll spend a night or two along the way to break up the trip and see a little more of Mexico. The farm we'll visit is not officially a WWOOF farm but we heard about it from Marie Oaks at Bosque Village, a WWOOF farm we contacted. Marie lived near Boone for several years and has friends at ASU; small world. One of the projects we’ll probably help with at Rancho El Fresno is to divert runoff from the road through some filtration ponds.

We really appreciate the invitations from generous friends in Mexico! We will visit Ingrid in Puebla, a friend of Koki’s from the Permaculture course he attended in Costa Rica earlier this year. The last portion of our time in Mexico will be in Playa del Carmen, between Cancún and Tulum on the Yucatán peninsula, where Koki has more friends from the Permaculture course: Wally, Chaman (who has invited us to stay at his house), and Rodrigo (Ro). We’re looking forward to some beach time, checking out some archaeological sites, and hanging out with friends!

We will work on two WWOOF farms in Belize. Spanish Creek Rainforest Reserve is growing bamboo and farming. SCRR is adjacent to the Spanish Creek Wildlife Sanctuary in Rancho Dolores. The couple that is living and working on the farm now are both ASU graduates; such a small world! We will also work for some other farms growing a wide variety of tropical fruits and veggies, making wine, and building/maintaining trails. (It sounds like there is a cooperative of several farms in the area that share resources including volunteers, we’re not totally sure yet how they are connected.)

In Guatemala we will work on Finca Santa Ines and visit family (Coto, Koki’s brother-in-law’s brother - is there a name for that?) in nearby Guatemala City. We would like to visit El Salvador but as of now we do not have plans to work there. We looked into working with the Permaculture Institute of El Salvador (IPES) but it doesn’t look like it will happen on this trip, unless something changes prior to the time we would reach El Salvador. At any rate we will be in touch with IPES and we might work with them in the future. In Honduras we will volunteer at the Iguana Station on Utila Island off the Caribbean coast. We don’t have anything confirmed in Nicaragua yet but we are in contact with Project Bona Fide on Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua and we might work there.

Well, thanks to those of you who are still reading, I know this was long. I’ll try to post frequently enough that posts don’t become monsters like this one. I tried to be concise but we’ve done a lot already to prepare, unfortunately keeping you all updated has not been one of those things. We should have internet access at least every two weeks, but hopefully once a week. I look forward to your comments/questions/suggestions/etc. I thank you all for your support! Check out Koki’s blog, too.

Peace,
Fern