Not Just a Four Month Vacation

I realized that my previous posts make it sound like all I’m doing here in Costa Rica for four months is eating chocolate, drinking coffee and hanging out at the beach.  While I’m definitely enjoying my fair share of adventure, I am working on academics as well.  The first month in San José was actually pretty stressful.  We had four short weeks to decide on a project, perform a literature review, and write a detailed research proposal so we were ready to leave for the field at the end of February.  On top of that work, we had four hours of Spanish class every day.  It was a whirlwind of a month, exciting and fun but also stressful to try to fit in time to work on homework while also developing and maintaining a relationship with my host family.  

Now, for the months of March and April, all seventeen of us in the ACM program are at different locations around the country of Costa Rica carrying out our independent research projects.  I am living with a new host family in Pueblo Nuevo de Guácimo, a tiny agricultural village near the Caribbean Sea.  For my research project, I am comparing the quality of the soil under different agricultural systems in the area.  

The "main street" in Pueblo Nuevo

Many years ago, this region was entirely rainforest, but over the last 50 years the majority has been deforested and replaced by cattle pasture, banana plantations or pineapple plantations.  This has destroyed the habitats of many native animals and led to a reduction in biodiversity as well as a decrease in soil quality due to monocropping (planting only one crop – like cornfields in the Midwest) and application of chemicals.  However, many people who live in this region make their living working in agriculture.  One alternative to banana or pineapple monoculture is agroforestry, a system in which one primary crop is grown under the shade of several varieties of taller trees.  Some studies have shown that agroforestry systems can more closely mimic the biodiversity and soil quality of natural rainforests.  

We hiked up a hill with Geovanny, a researcher on the farm, to see the cacao farm from above.

Here are three of my study sites!

My project is going to focus on an organic cacao farm under agroforestry management, comparing its soil quality with the other agricultural systems that border it (pasture, banana and pineapple).  I hope to show that the soil quality is greater under the cacao system, to strengthen the case for cacao agroforestry as an alternative agricultural system that can continue to provide a way of life for local farmers while maintaining a healthy environment.  I’ll be taking soil samples from the different sites to send to the University of Costa Rica for chemical analysis, as well as comparing earthworm abundance, leaf litter accumulation, water infiltration, and soil bulk density.  

Banana Plantation

Pineapple Plantation

Cacao Plantation

Pasture

 After two months in the field collecting data, I’ll return to San José for the last month of the program, to analyze my data and write up a final paper.

I’m still working out the details and learning as I go, but I’m really excited about my project.  Sustainable agriculture, particularly soil health, is something that I’m very interested in, and I hope that the results of my research will be useful.

Off to the field!

I'm heading off this morning to my field site, where I'll be staying for the next two months to conduct my independent research project comparing the soil quality of different agriculture systems.  I won't have very consistent internet access, but I'll try to update my blog whenever I get a chance!

Coffee tour and how to learn swear words in Spanish

 

Last week we took a trip to learn about another of Costa Rica’s important agricultural crops: coffee!  We took a long and winding but gorgeous bus ride through the mountains south of San José (thank goodness I took Dramamine before leaving…) to arrive in the Valle de los Santos (Valley of the Saints) where there is a fair trade coffee cooperative called Llano Bonito.  The motto of Llano Bonito is “Café con un rostro humano” (Coffee with a human face); there is a huge emphasis on supporting the economic and psychological well-being of the region’s small familial coffee farms.  We visited the processing center, where coffee berries from all of these small farms are collected to be processed into high-quality roasted coffee beans.

We started off our tour with (what else?) a mug of delicious coffee and some fresh fruit.  The coffee was the cooperative’s “Gran Dragon” brand, a medium roast with chocolate-y notes (I’m pretending I’m a coffee connoisseur and know what I’m talking about).   

The berries first pass through the wet process, in which they are washed and the mature berries are separated from the unripe ones.  We visited at the end of the harvest season so farmers were removing all of the fruits from their trees, so there were many unripe berries being processed.  These green berries will still be processed into coffee beans, but they are kept separate because the coffee they produce is of lower quality.  Also in this process, the beans are removed; the pulp and peel of the fruit is saved to be composted and used as fertilizer on the coffee farms.

Mature and unripe coffee berries being separated

After removing the beans, the fruit is collected here to be composted and used as fertilizer

Stirring coffee berries.  This batch is a mixture of about 50% ripe (red) and 50% unripe (green) berries, which will be marketed as lower quality than the 100% ripe batches.

Fresh coffee beans being transported to the dry process

The beans then move to the dry process, in which they are dried in huge ovens, and the thin coating of the beans is removed.  This coating is in turn used to fuel the drying ovens, which allows Llano Bonito to run its processing plant without destroying the rainforest for wood to burn. 

In the final stage of the process, the beans go through an initial sorting by size, and are packed into burlap bags.  They are more carefully sorted at another facility in San José, to ensure that the quality of coffee beans is consistent.

Drying oven

Huge piles of dried coffee beans are stored here to await further processing

Dried and sorted coffee beans, waiting to be shipped to San Jose for further sorting

After leaving Llano Bonito, we drove to visit a women’s cooperative.  Like the Mujeres de Amazilia on the Finmac cacao farm, this cooperative was formed with government assistance to provide rural Costa Rican women with a way to improve their economic status and exert their independence.  This women’s cooperative was formed around the idea of natural healing.  They gave us a demonstration of their services, which involve probing different locations on a patient’s body to determine his or her “bioenergy” and decide what natural medicines, creams, or shampoos they need to use.  It was hard for me, coming from a scientific background, to believe completely in their methods, but it was a very interesting demonstration nonetheless.

View from the women's cooperative

We returned to Llano Bonito to eat delicious lunch #123,3984,213 in Costa Rica, and then were given cappuccinos made with Llano Bonito espresso to sip on as we watched the process of toasting and grinding the coffee beans.

Lunch: corn tortillas, fried plantains, picadillo de chayote, green salad, and the requisite rice and beans

Freshly-toasted coffee beans.  The smell in this room was incredible

The next day, I checked another thing off of my list of must-see things in Costa Rica when I went with a few friends to a soccer game!  Saprissa, the San José team, was playing a game against another province in the national stadium, a huge, brand-new stadium donated to Costa Rica by China several years ago.  We had a great time sitting amongst die-hard Saprissistas, and I think we all learned some new colorful language in Spanish when they were unhappy with a play.  Our only disappointment was that the game was 0-0, so we didn’t get to experience the excitement of a Goooooooooooooooooooooooooolllllllllll!  Maybe next time…

El Estadio Nacional (national stadium)

...and Even More Chocolate!

The next part of our weekend adventure took us to the Tirimbina Biological Reserve, which is a really cool place.  It’s a private wildlife refuge run by Costa Ricans that uses ecotourism to fund rainforest conservation, environmental education and scientific research.  I’d recommend the site to anyone visiting Costa Rica; the location was beautiful, our rooms were very comfortable, and the guides were incredibly knowledgeable.

We got settled into our rooms (with air conditioning!) before heading to a buffet dinner at the restaurant.  After dinner, we heard a talk about bats.  It was interesting to hear more about these often-misunderstood animals which make up a vital portion of Costa Rica’s biodiversity.  The 113 species of bats in Costa Rica represent about 50% of the mammals in the entire country!  We also got to see the snare nets that researchers on Tirimbina use to catch bats for their studies.  Even though bats can use echolocation to “see” at night, the process is energetically costly so unless they are actively searching for food they don’t use echolocation, instead flying by memory.  This allows researchers to easily capture bats in simple nets, just by moving the location of the nets every few days.  Our guide caught a bat in one of the nets so we could get a closer look.

The next morning, I woke up early to go for a run in the rainforest with a couple of friends.  The terrain was a little rough, so we didn’t run that fast, but it was still beautiful to be out early in the morning.  I swear I could feel the extra oxygen from all the green plants surrounding me.  We got back in time for a delicious breakfast of gallo pinto, eggs, fried plantains and fruit, and then it was time for our guided rainforest tour!

Breakfast at Tirimbina

Crossing the suspension bridge through the rainforest

The tour started by crossing a 200-meter long suspension bridge over a river… good thing I’m not afraid of heights!  The bridge was a great point of view to see the rainforest as well, allowing us to see the taller trees and animals that are harder to make out from down on the ground.  We wandered along the rainforest trails, seeing walking palms (palm plants that can move toward sunlight by selectively killing off the roots on one side of the plant and growing new roots on the other side); a huge ceibu tree, toucans and other tropical birds; the oily seed of a plant (I can’t remember the name) that spits out flames when held up to a lighter; leaf cutter ants (zompopas) and bullet ants (hormigas balas) which are about an inch long and can give you a nasty bite that will hurt for 24 hours.

View of the river from the bridge

Standing by the giant ceibu tree

Our guide found this seed on the ground and lit it on fire to show us its oil content

We finished our rainforest walk at the site of an old cacao plantation.  The cocoa here was abandoned after it became affected by Monilia, a disease that has drastically affected the productivity of cacao farms in Central America.  Currently, the majority of the world’s cocoa is produced in Africa, a place to which the Monilia disease has yet to spread. 

At this site, we were treated to a lesson about the history of chocolate, with many taste tests along the way :)  We learned that the Aztecs in Mexico were the only native Americans to discover the process of making chocolate; the other indigenous tribes simply ate the pulp of the fruit that covers the seeds.  To make their chocolate drink, the Aztecs would remove the seeds from the cacao fruit, spit into them to add bacteria for the fermentation process, and ferment them, dry them, and toast them.  They would then grind the cacao seeds with rocks to form a paste, which they dissolved in hot water.  Before the arrival of Europeans, they didn’t have access to sugar, so they drank their chocolate bitter, flavored with finely ground corn, vanilla, and chili pepper.  When Spaniards came to Central America and tried the drink, they found it distasteful.  It didn’t help that the name for the chocolate drink was “Cacahuatl,” and “caca” means feces in Spanish.  To better suit their taste-buds, Europeans brought cinnamon and sugar to add to their chocolate.  

Cacao seeds at various stages of fermentation, from day 1 (bottom right) counterclockwise to day 6 (bottom left)

As part of the demonstration, we got to help grind freshly-roasted cacao beans with sugar and cinnamon, which we then dissolved in hot water to make an absolutely delicious cup of hot chocolate.  We could add corn starch (for texture), vanilla, chili powder, or pepper to our hot chocolate as well; I especially liked the extra kick of the chili powder!

Fresh hot cocoa!

We then went through the rest of the process of making chocolate, which I described in the last post so I won’t bore you with again… suffice it to say it included many more samples of delicious fresh-made chocolate, so we all left the presentation in good spirits.

After lunch at Tirimbina, we piled back onto the bus to head back to San José.  Many of us went out to experience San José night life on Saturday night, and we put our salsa dancing classes from earlier in the week to good use.  Sunday was a relaxing day of doing homework and watching a soccer game with my host family (reminded me so much of Sunday night football in the US!).  

What a fun weekend!  

CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE!

After leaving the banana plantation, our adventure got even better.  We traveled to Finmac, which is the site where I’ll be collecting data for my independent research project during the months of March and April.  On the farm, we took a tour through the cacao trees, and we saw sloths!  

A lot of research takes place on Finmac, because it has been organically managed for over 30 years and so it provides a good case study for long-term organic farming.  It is also an ideal site to study sloths, because cacao trees are maintained at only about 6 feet tall, so it’s easy to locate and observe sloths (in other ecosystems, they live too high up in the trees to be easily studied).  There are around 100 sloths that have been identified living on Finmac, and they are all fitted with radio collars to be more easily tracked.  This way, researchers can tell how far and how fast sloths move, and which types of vegetation they prefer to travel through.  We got to see a female sloth with a month-old baby clinging to her stomach, and I held a juvenile sloth!  

Smiling Sloth

Mama sloth with a baby clinging to her stomach!

After wandering through the cacao trees for a while, we got to see the rest of the process of making chocolate.  I had already seen most of the process when I worked on a farm in Ecuador last year, but this was on a much larger-scale and more mechanized.  

So!  Here’s how chocolate is made:

When ripe, workers harvest the fruits from the trees and haul them in a train (similar to the one on the banana farm) to be processed. 

Cacao train

 The fruits are loaded onto a conveyor belt, which brings them to a machine that breaks them open and separates the seeds from the shell.

Loading the conveyor belt

 The cacao seeds are surrounded with a white, slimy pulp that tastes really good – sweet and a little sour.  Indigenous South-Americans simply ate the pulp of the fruit in this way; it was only the Aztecs in Mexico who discovered that the cacao tree could yield an even more delicious treat.

Tasting Cacao fruit

The seeds, still surrounded by pulp, are covered in wooden boxes to ferment for several days.  This is an important process because it kills the plant embryo within the seeds, sealing in the cocoa flavor.  If fermentation didn’t occur, the plant embryo would begin to grow, sucking up the nutrients within the seed that give cocoa it’s yummy aroma and flavor. 

 After they are finished fermenting, the seeds are spread out to dry.  In smaller-scale operations, this is done by simply laying them out in the sun, but at Finmac they have equipment that releases hot air to speed the drying process.

Fermented seeds laid out to dry

Once the seeds have dried to 7% moisture, it’s time to turn them into chocolate!  Most cacao farmers sell their seeds to companies in the US or Europe at this point, but by carrying out the rest of the chocolate-making process on his farm, Hugo (the owner) is adding value to his product so that he can make a better profit margin.  First it’s important to check the quality of the seeds to make sure they are properly fermented and dried.

This apparatus cuts the seeds in half to check their quality

Dried and fermented seeds, ready to be toasted

 Then the seeds are sent through a series of machines that toast them, remove the shells, finely grind them, add some amount of sugar depending on what percentage cacao is being made at that moment, and then stirs the melted chocolate for 72 hours to produce a fine texture.  What comes out is a huge chunk of untempered chocolate, that tastes absolutely delicious but doesn’t yet look like a satisfyingly-shiny chocolate bar.  

This is where the Amazilias women come in!  Las Mujeres de Amazilia is a really awesome project started in Pueblo Nuevo (the town where Finmac is located).  A group of local women buy some of this crude chocolate from Hugo and turn it into delicious chocolate bars by tempering it (heating it up to boiling, pouring into molds, and then quickly placing in a cold refrigerator; this produces a nice dark, shiny chocolate bar) and adding yummy ingredients.  While most of the chocolate he produces goes to Belgium, this is a way for Hugo to support the local economy, and to improve the economic and social status of rural women.

Mujeres de Amazilia chocolate

The Mujeres de Amazilia also cooked us a delicious lunch after we came back from our tour of the chocolate plant – it was a typical Costa Rican casado, consisting of gallo pinto (essentially rice and beans), chicken, salad, and fried plantains.  Of course we had chocolate for dessert, and of course we all were delighted to support these women by buying lots and lots of chocolate from them!  Friends and family, please pretend to be surprised by the souvenirs I bring back for you.

Enjoying lunch on the cacao farm

Yummy lunch!

What an amazing experience!  I couldn’t help but feel a little bit smug that I get to come back here in a couple weeks for two whole months.

Bellies full of chocolate, we loaded into the bus for the next part of our trip – heading to the Tirimbina Biological Reserve!  Stay tuned for that experience!

Bananas

Wow, what an amazing weekend.  I enjoy traveling independently -- getting to explore and choose what I want to do, but it’s definitely a treat to go on a guided trip once in a while.  This weekend’s adventure to a cacao farm and biological reserve was organized by ACM, so we had the luxury of a private (air-conditioned!!) bus, delicious meals, charismatic tour guides, and comfortable sleeping accommodations without having to stress about any of the planning.

We started our trip early Friday morning, leaving the ACM building at 7:30 for Finmac, an organic cacao farm and the site where I'll be doing my research project for two months!  On the way to the farm, we stopped at a banana plantation that provides fruit to Dole.  It was astounding to see the scale of production at just one plantation – this farm ships out around 3,000 45-pound crates of bananas every day.  Each crate holds about 100 bananas, so that’s 30,000 bananas a day.  Lots of potassium heading to the US from Costa Rica!  We got to walk among the banana plants and see the fruit being harvested.

Banana plant - you can see tiny bananas starting to form in the fruit on the left

Bananas grow on herbaceous plants, not trees, and each plant only produces one “fruit” in its lifetime (a fruit is a big bunch of around 30 bananas).  When the bananas are fully grown but still green, a worker chops off the stem of the banana tree, and hoists the very heavy fruit into a “train,” which is a system of metal boxes attached to cables that run from all parts of the plantation back to the processing area.  That banana plant will now die, but there is always a clonal offspring growing adjacent to the “mother” plant, which is nourished by the recently harvested plant until it produces its own fruit.  Domesticated bananas don’t reproduce by seeds, rather by this system of cloning, which means there is very little genetic variation between individuals and they are very susceptible to plagues.  

Recently cut banana plant.  The shorter plant attached to its left side is its offspring, and will grow to produce its own fruit in a few weeks.  It's hard to see in this small picture, but there's even a "grandson," a plant that's only a few inches high, growing alongside the offspring plant!

After filling up around 25 crates on the “train,” the worker hooks himself up to the whole contraption and drags the bananas along the cable to the processing area.  Far from the completely mechanized process of harvesting corn or soybeans in the US, this was a hands-on affair.  Seeing men hauling pounds and pounds of bananas, sometimes for miles, often jogging along the way, made me think a little bit about the concept of “exercise,” and how it’s kind of a strangely Western idea.  I think it’s important for my health to go running or go to the gym, but these men were obviously in excellent physical condition just as a result of their everyday life.  Instead of sitting all day long, at a desk or in a car or in front of the TV, with a break for exercise, activity is a huge part of normal daily activities.  I don’t necessarily think one mindset is better than the other one, but it’s interesting to think about and I wonder how I’ll feel about running while I’m living in this rural town for the months of March and April.

Banana "train" - a worker is pulling these bananas along the cable back towards the processing area

Once the bananas arrive at the processing area, they must be very carefully handled; US customers don’t like their bananas to have any blemishes or other imperfections.  The bananas are loaded onto a conveyor belt, which dumps them into giant basins of water to wash off the dirt.  From there, there is a sort of assembly line process in which workers take bananas out of the water, cut them into smaller bunches, apply Dole stickers, paint the recently cut top with a chemical to slow the ripening process, and pack them into crates for their journey to the US to top a bowl of cereal and yogurt. 

Bananas being taken to the processing area

The bananas pass down this assembly line, where they are washed, clipped into small bunches,stickered, and boxed up

I'm going to break this trip up into a couple posts because there's so much to share, but stay tuned for CHOCOLATE!!!

Manuel Antonio

This weekend was action-packed!  On Friday, our Spanish professors took us to downtown San José to show us around.  It was a fun trip; I especially enjoyed the Mercado Central, which was a huge indoor maze of stands selling souvenirs, produce, meat, and prepared foods.  We didn’t have time to go into any museums, though, so I’m definitely hoping to come back downtown soon to check out a museum or go to a show at the Teatro Nacional.  Equally as important as seeing historical buildings: stopping at Pop’s (a Costa Rican ice cream chain) for helados (ice cream); coconut ice cream is The. Best. Thing. Ever.  

El Teatro Nacional

We then returned to ACM for lunch, and to sing happy birthday to Danny, one of my fellow students.  For the occasion, Iveth (the building attendant) made a homemade cake filled with pineapple, peaches, and walnuts.  Yum yum yum yum!  Most of the group left Friday afternoon for the beach, but I stayed back for the Rosary.  It was so nice to meet even more members of Vicky’s large family, and to get to know the others even better.  I continue to be impressed by the emphasis placed on family, and especially by the care shown to the young children in the family.  There is almost a mindset of “it takes a village to raise a child; ” there’s no need for parents to pay for childcare while they’re at work, because Grandma or Great-Aunt or several other relatives are eager to watch the kids.  

I woke up early on Saturday morning to go meet the other ACMers at Manuel Antonio.  I love how, with a little bit of foresight, it’s possible to take a bus to almost anywhere in Costa Rica.  The system of public transportation is extensive.  In comparison with Ecuador, however (where I lived last January), buses and taxis do cost more, and I was surprised to see how many people have personal cars here.  The streets are always pretty congested, even at 6 in the morning when I’m heading to the bus to go to school.  According to Vicky, in an effort to cut down on congestion and pollution from cars, the government recently passed a law that assigns each vehicle one day of the week when it can’t be driven into downtown San José.  She said that this has helped somewhat.

After arriving at Manuel Antonio, we were fortunate to run into our friends at the bus stop as they were heading to the beach; even though many of us bought cell phones to use in Costa Rica, we didn’t have service in Manuel Antonio.  That was one thing I realized during this weekend trip: it’s nearly impossible to coordinate a group of 17 college students who are staying in two different hostels, without cell phones.  We’re just not accustomed to having to make plans far ahead of time, because at school you can always send someone a text!  This weekend was a good exercise in communication skills, though, and a reminder of the pre-cellphone era. 

You could tell these monkeys were used to people - they came so close!

We headed into the Manuel Antonio national park, and hiked through the forest to the beach.  Along the way, we saw several monkeys.  This was our first “wildlife” experience of the trip, so it was exciting to see the monkeys even though we know they’re very common here. 
 Other wildlife encounters included some feisty raccoons that tried to steal our things, and a big iguana sunning himself on the beach amidst all the people.   Besides the exciting animal experiences, the beach was beautiful.  The waves were just big enough for some fun bodysurfing, and the water was warm and clean.  I can’t believe I get to be in this beautiful country for four months!

La Playa

 

Familia y Galletas

Little by little, I’m starting to get more accustomed to life here in Costa Rica.  I still look and sound like a gringa, but at least I know how to comfortably get myself to school and back.  School so far has been great.   It’s nice to have some structure to my days and feel like I’m learning something academically, but the professors understand that it’s also important for us to take advantage of the opportunities we have for new and exciting experiences in a different country so they haven’t given us huge amounts of homework (yet).

I will have to learn how to build some homework time into my days, though, because by the end of February I have to turn in a formal research proposal including background research and an estimated budget, and give an oral presentation about my project… I’m not exactly on a four month vacation!  It’s going to be difficult when my schoolwork gets tougher, because my host mom is always taking me to family events, or cooking some delicious Costa Rican food that I want to learn to make.  In this first week, the cultural experience of getting to know my host family has been more important to me than academics, but eventually I’ll need to have more balance between the two.

                For now, though, spending lots of time with my host family has given me an interesting perspective of the Costa Rican culture.  It’s wonderful to see how close-knit Vicky’s family is.  Last night, we went to my host-aunt’s home nearby to say the rosary, and there must have been 20 family members there!  The kids were running wild through the house and the adults were oohing and aahing over the babies.  It reminded me a lot of my family getting together for Christmas or Easter in Verona.  After reciting the rosary, everyone drank eggnog (it’s not just for the holidays anymore, apparently) and served themselves dinner.  I was struck by how informal and stress-free the whole event was; it was apparent that they spend a lot of time together as an extended family by how relaxed and content everyone was together.  I’m sure not all families in Costa Rica are like that, but I think that in general members of extended families live closer together than in the United States, and that spending time with family is valued more highly.  

Vicky, my host mom, and me

                We have another family event coming up tomorrow (Friday).  This time Vicky is hosting it at her house, so I get to help with the preparation.  She expects around 30 people to come tomorrow evening to recite the rosary again, and we have to prepare food for everyone!  We started cooking today, and I did my part by making some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.  Apparently chocolate chips are very expensive here, but I had brought some from home, so Vicky, Julián and María (my host-nephew and niece) were very excited to have chocolate chip cookies.  I made a double batch of cookies, so it was quite the production!  María was a great helper, though.  We both wore plaid aprons and scooped out dough to make pan after pan of cookies.  I had to do some estimating because Vicky doesn’t have measuring spoons, and the temperature on the oven was in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, but I was relieved when the cookies came out well.  Julián was calling them “galletas santas,” or holy cookies, so I think I done good.  We also started preparing some dessert tamales made with ground corn, sugar, dried coconut, and the tico version of sour cream (natilla)… I’m excited to try those tomorrow!

"Las cooks", as María Ines called us, with our sweet aprons

Julián helping me make cookies

                There’s much more to tell, but it’s time for me to go to sleep, so I’ll stop for now.  I’m looking forward to traveling to downtown San José with ACM tomorrow, the Rosario at our house tomorrow, and going to the beach in Manuel Antonio with my classmates this weekend.  ¡Buenas noches!