La finca

Here is a recap of 4/1-4/4:

I’ll admit, I didn’t post about my trip to the farm right away because I told myself I wanted to figure out how to describe my experience accurately. The truth is, the whole thing made me extremely uncomfortable, therefore thinking about it was uncomfortable, and after settling all leftover feelings I became too lazy to want to bring them up again. I’m still not really sure how to go about this…

The premise: I would join Karen and her family, along with another student from my group to go to her cousin’s farm/vacation house. There were maybe 20 people in total besides us three who went, and four of them were women (we were highly outnumbered, in other words). Other people came the next day, but I didn’t really meet them as they were friends of the cousins from the martial arts academy and we were leaving the next day. At first, I was upset to only be going from Thursday until Saturday, but by the end I was more than willing to leave earlier. Right off the bat, I was made extremely uncomfortable, and the trend continued on a lesser but still irritating level for me.

Spoiler alert: there were still some great things, and I will make sure to finish with those, but the discomfort I am certain is integral to the cultural experience I had.

To start off, something that was only physically uncomfortable! If you are someone who is extremely concerned about my safety and well being and will be upset with it being compromised, then the next paragraph might be a good one to skip. I'm still alive and well, see? I'm typing in complete, coherent sentences and everything :)



After getting off the bus, we had to take a taxi to the farm. Unfortunately, the taxi-truck had just been hailed by a different group. So, what did we do? Well, hopped on the back, of course! The other student from the program just looked at me and we exchanged sentiments that the program would DEFINTELY not approve, but everyone crammed into the truckbed, luggage and all. I was slightly nervous about going over bumps, as I was on the veeerrry back edge, but I survived, and was taken into the interior of the car as soon as the first group got out. Doing things the tico way, 100%.


And now, the farm experience.

As everyone is chatting, maybe an hour or two after we arrived, someone suddenly says, ‘alright, who wants to go kill a pig?’. I, as a long-time vegetarian, am used to being harassed about my eating habits, and as a gringa I am used to missing humor among ticos. This, however, was no joke, and all the guys got super excited about killing this pig. I realized that they were serious, and was horrified. Yes, I prefer the free-range lifestyle to factory farms, but that doesn’t mean I want to be involved. Karen was very good through this, and she sat with me and a few others as the rest went off, and I made peace with myself that there was nothing I could do and that the pig had had a good life, at the very least. As long as I didn’t have to deal with it, I would be fine. As I am keeping my mind on other things, I see the student from my group taking pictures of me. I soon realize it’s because Karen’s 50+-year-old uncle is standing behind me with the dead pig draped over his shoulders to try to get me to turn around and freak out. Hilarious, right? And no, there is no April Fool's Day here. I have no words, I was extremely upset yet remained calm (except for railing on the other student a bit for being supporting obviously unsolicited behavior). Typing this is getting me upset, I just can’t stand when people purposely try to hurt others (he knew EXACTLY what he was doing, this was no ‘culture barrier’).

(Note: Just after typing this, Karen brought up the incident while we were talking online and apologized for her uncle’s behavior. She also told me that her mother, who practically raised her siblings, heard about it and felt embarrassed on behalf of her brother. We both agreed that we were happy she wasn’t like her uncle.)

Thankfully, the second pig they slaughtered wasn’t as big of a deal. Unfortunately, all they ATE was pig. Breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner. Karen, who doesn’t eat red meat, was also getting a stomachache from the awful smell of pork fat, day in, day out. So, what did I eat? Cheese. That was…pretty much it. The others ate pork and fruit, I ate cheese and fruit. I can’t believe it’s even physically possible to eat that much meat and nothing else and still function, my body shuts down one day without vegetables. Besides that, all the male cousins past puberty were BUFF. Like, ridiculous, every muscle in their bodies defined buff. The American student who was with me wouldn’t drop it, he was completely obsessed, they were THAT ripped. I have no idea how that can happen on a steady diet of pig fat, but apparently it can? It must also create the phenomenon of 95% of the female population having large breasts and not an ounce of fat anywhere else on their body.

I forgot to mention: every meal we ate, we ate off of styrofoam plates. I don’t think I need to go into detail as to why I don’t like disposable plates, especially not styrofoam ones, but the long and short of it is that they are awful for the environment. I started to help with the cooking, so I could scrape together whatever vegetables they had in the house (this resulted in a cabbage and tomato salad for the best lunch I had there), and I would always put things on reusable plates. I think the main problem was that there were not enough plates for everyone, so the women in the kitchen just used styrofoam for everything. I washed dishes to be helpful, and started to wash the styrofoam and plastic spoons as well because they were so lightly used I couldn’t stand to throw them away. Having a tortilla on a styrofoam for two minutes doesn’t result in a very dirty plate…

Then, we slept on the floor. The first night I was on a thin, single mattress with the other US student (we get nice and close here in Costa Rica…), and the second night I had it to myself, as he had a nest of bug netting (surprisingly cushy). Apparently all the inflatable mattresses that were bought for the occasion broke within minutes, which resulted in scraping together random soft things to sleep on. Some people went outside and slept in hammocks, as I found out the second night. So, the sleeping was like camping, which really wasn’t that bad, but everything combined just caused me to feel anxious and sick. On the way home, the first bus was half an hour late, and we had to wait for the second one for two and a half hours. I was extremely happy to be home, once I finally got there, and even missed my tica mom’s oily cooking and my extremely hard mattress and pillow.

Aside from learning to appreciate what I had, I also had some great experiences on Karen’s family vacation. It helped me learn to understand groups of ticos at a time, I learned how wonderful it is to eat a mango with its skin, I tried a ‘guaba’ for the first time (a large pod with slippery, black seeds, in which the casing of the seeds is eaten), I experienced the relaxed tica family dynamics, had my first arroz con leche (and pretty much learned how to make it) and had some great conversations. When I got any of the kids around my age alone and chatted with them, I was pleasantly surprised how intelligent they were and how easily we could have conversations about important things. I gave my opinion on ‘third-world and first-world countries’ for one of their school projects, and we ended up discussing politics and environmental education. You must understand, I wasn’t judging intelligence as a factor of where they came from, it was simply after watching two days of guys being guys to the extent that I taught Karen the phrase ‘sausage fest’. Most activities centered around the two pools that were there, and after watching how interested everyone was in swimming and not feeling the same sentiments, I realized how spoiled I was growing up with a pool. I still joined in the festivities to the extent my noncompetitive nature let me (I was not getting in the way of a bunch of muscular guys pegging each other with a ball, nope), and had a great time when it started raining at the tail end of our walk to the nearby river and we all immediately stripped down to our bathing suits once more for a night swim. I bonded with the cousin who owned the house’s son, which is apparently not his usual behavior, and he built himself a ‘granja’ (farm specifically for animals) and stuck me in a cage of foam blocks. (We totally slept on those blocks later, double purpose.)

Speaking of the rain, it was magnificent! The drops were huge, the air was still warm and the mini-rainstorms were frequent. I fell asleep to the sound of the rain on the roof the second night I was there and had the best sleep I’ve had in ages. Apparently, the rain drowned out the noise of the immature yelling and teasing that went on all night among the boys who couldn’t sleep, which Karen told me about later. I almost forgot: there were many chickens, ducks and geese running around, and the most adorable of all were the tiny chicks and ducklings following their mothers :)

I also learned that it wasn’t just my perception, but ticas really do like to always be right. In Spanish, they say ‘jugando como Dios’, or something similar, which means playing God. And that ‘horita’, which to me translates to ‘right now’, could mean ‘later’ or even ‘later, but I really mean never.’ This word basically means everything and nothing, because someone else just yesterday explained it to me as ‘in just a bit’ or ‘within the next few minutes’. Now I know, every time I hear that word, I have to take a random guess as to what it means and hope that I’m taking the correct course of action for how the word was intended.

Looking back at it all, I probably wouldn’t do it again, but I’m glad that I did do it. And I’m glad that Karen proved to be the sweet, caring person I took her for, and that none of my discomfort transferred to our friendship. The next day, I just took the entire day for myself. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted to, and even went out to buy myself exactly the food I wanted. It was a good day to prepare me for the start of school once more, and to recover from my lack of sleep and cheese stomachache.

Oh right, that was also Easter! Easter here does not involve chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts, there are full-blown re-enactments of the resurrection of Christ through the streets and things are shut down. I didn't go watch, because I was still recovering, but my tica mom was amused by my explanation of our commercial celebration of the day they know only as 'La Resurrección'.