la finca

Marcos and Britta with the chair

our treehouse home away from home

workin the field

cashews with its bosom buddy, the marañan fruit

the finished product

our afternoon sanctuary

papa

where we read books

When I was in grade school we had different kinds of fundraisers every year. They tended to focus on wrapping paper and magazines, and if you sold so many of either you would get prizes--cool to cooler. One year, maybe 5th grade, I won a tent. I am from the urbanization of Memphis, TN, and so to get the more bang for my free buck, I pitched the tent in my parents´dining room. They were good sports, and for the next several weeks, I would sleep in my prized tent with my tooth brush and toothpaste kept conveniently in the inside pocket where you store clever things. In years to come I would move the tents or just a sleeping bag under stars, near mountains, snuggled up to rivers, but it was that younger longing that took me there-thank goodness for People magazine.

Rivaling the star-bulleted ceiling of a July Many Glacier Valley was our home for the week we lived at the farm. Our cabaña was on the jungle floor of Mastetal built by our friend, Marcos, some years ago with the built-in surround sound of the rainforest to put you to sleep. Minus our first night´s encounter with the poisonous snake on our trip down to the cabaña, it could not have been a more perfect place to spend our nights. I will build one for my future niños (and myself) one of these days.

When we signed up to volunteer with Siempre Verde we had no idea that it would be so gloriously remote or so little actual farmwork. Their rainy season begins in just a few weeks, so we only did one day of real planting, clearing, shoveling, etc because hand watering all that stuff is something else. But we sure felt like farmers for that morning adding cantaloupes, cilantro, bean trees and radish seedlings to the earth. The rest of the working week we made a rocking chair. You know, professionals with amazing equipment may do one in a morning, but with Marcos, Britta, myself, a handsaw, sander and hammer, it took three. It rocks, that is all that matters in the end. Marcos, at the ripe age of 25, has already taken his entrepeneural mind to great heights by starting a Spanish Immersion school on his parents land (to see the cutest farmer dad of all time, look above), built the cabañas to hold students and eventually volunteers. He hopes to make the farm a fully sustainable land eventually, but first he hopes to continue to get used to marriage. He just married Sarah, a 19-year-old Californian who came to volunteer on the chocolate farm down the street and ended up becoming full-time partner to Marcos. They are in the middle of building a house, and furniture to go with (hence the rocking chair). She is quite the mature 19 year old who is becoming quite the Tica housewife.

A few of our small joys in such a short experience was collecting the marañan fruit with cashews attached on our way back from the river lazy afternoons, having Marcos roast and set them on fire, and then using a hammer and fingernails to break and peel the shell until a delicious cashew emerged to our satisfaction. Pineapple work breaks were pretty delicious as well.

Honestly, the only thing that really urged us to escape was our poor legs that got eaten alive by ants. Maybe there was another culprit as well, but those damn ants, we caught them in the act. So we said goodbye to Marcos, Sarah, his adorable father and the secluded riverside and jungle home for la playa.