Community Organizing in Costa Rica and stuff

Here we are back in San Jose our third leg of our trip. We are staying at a very cool hotel. $25 a night. Gotta love that! Sure we share a bathroom with other people, but we have been doing that for the last week and it is not even a thing. Josh and I are doing pretty well at living fairly cheap here. We are not eating as cheaply as we had planned, but that is mainly because we found this awesome restaurant called Fresco and ate there like 4 times. We tried to convince Rob, the owner, to come back to Winona to start a restaurant, but he really wasn´t interested. I don´t understand why. Oh the lack of surfing there is one of the bigger problems and then the snow... It was not Costa Rican food, but it was very close to gourmet and we were still paying $25 for 2 meals and drinks. Not bad at all.

I thought I would share some observations of some very grass roots organizing that I have observed since I´ve been here. There is a group that gets together (residents and hotel owners) to discuss crime prevention in Santa Teresa. It is not an unsafe area, but it is very well known that there is a great deal of small, opportunity-based property crime throughout Costa Rica. We were warned not to leave any valuables on the beach and to bring in our clothes off the line as name-brand clothing esp. board shorts get stolen frequently. The hotel owner, Kelly, told us that people really know what is going on in the area as the population is small. So when people are getting ready to travel (cash on hand) or if it is known they have valuables in their home, they become very vulnerable to break-ins. One example she told us about is a woman in the area is a photojournalist, with a lot of expensive camera equipment. Her house got broken into and many of the items were stolen. The crime prevention group is working to stop some of this type of thing from happening in the area. The police are of little help here since they drove through the town we were in approximately once a week and then leave.

The other community organizing I heard about was a group of shop and restaurant owners get together after soccer matches to clean up the area. It is a bad habit for local residents to litter and after the soccer games, the town is just a huge mess. The whole country is littered actually. It is quite sad because there is all this beauty, but the first thing that stuck out to me is how much crap is thrown all over the place. We are very spoiled in Minnesota, but I haven´t failed to notice how clean our state is when I travel through even compared to other parts of the US. I am very proud of this fact. My parents live in Tennessee and there is a huge amount of garbage in the ditches there. I find it very disheartening. It is more expected in less developed nations, but it doesn´t make me think any less of how far we have come in Minnesota and for the most part this is all based on community organizing.

After a 6 hour trip- 4 by bumpy bus and 2 by ferry, I am going to take a nap listening to the sound of the rain.