Field Trip Weekend

So this past weekend was absolutely fantastic. Everyone should be extremely jealous because usually school field trips kind of blow, but this one def. rocked my socks off. We started off by going to Earth University which is on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. It is an international school which has 400 students from around the world, only 100 students per class. Everyone takes the same courses, and they do a lot of field work on the organic farm, research, and in there third year they go out in the field and work with rural farmers implementing different techniques to help improve their farm, increase income, and the farmers in turn teach the students while in the field. We were shown around the university by rosta david who later that night gave me a natural tattoo. he climbed his way up the tree like a money.... which was this wicked skinny tree and grabbed three fruits for me... but then i sadly forgot to grab them from him before we left earth university.
we also got a tour of the banana planation they had there, which is currently 70 percent organic, and they are working on making it more. Also exciting information was that all theyre exported product goes to whole foods and whole foods only!! ive eaten their bananas before! and will again. They showed us the process they used with the banana leaves and how they are trying to reuse everything and making banana paper. it was fascinating.
That night we had an awesome cultural show where students from the university from all over latin america played traditional music, showed us dances, and wore the traditional wear from their countries. a lot of fun, and they were really good. after that i went out to the bar with a few of the students, but the really awesome part was when the davids (rosta david and switzerland david) and francesco (suck at spelling names) took me to the river at night. it was pitch black.. couldnt see a thing walking down the path, and then you had to walk down a hill slash steps to the actual river. im surprised i didnt wipe out considering my normal klutziness. it was awesome though... i ended up swimming in my clothes because i didnt have a bathing suit on, but you could see the stars peaking through the treetops. there was a rope swing which i wanted to do, but it was so dark i figured id kill myself so i wisely withheld. it was def. a high point of the weekend.
The next day we woke at 5 in the morning to go work on a farm. Kaitlyn and I were put on composting, where we were shown around by the head guy carlos, who only spoke spanish... so lets just say i really got to practice my listening skills. We learned a lot though, and then did some shoveling of compost into bags for the fields with a two students from panama. We shoveled and talked with the boys, and later got a tour of the farm. Carlos took us to the buffolo and I got to pet a buffolo! They are huge, but they had theyre horns cut off for safety, but its insane to have seen the enormatity and intensity of such a large animal up close. We learned about some small scale agro systems for subsistence farming, which i took a particular interest in the mandela system and the biointensive system. I def. want to look more into it at some later point.
We spent Saturday afternoon touring local farms nearby, and got to see a chocolate farm!! chocolate in its original form is weird btw. We then separated into groups of 2 or 3 and each spent the night and the next morning with a different rural farm. My friend Monroe and I were put on a farm that wasnt really a farm anymore. He recieved money from the government to protect the water resources on his land because he had two large rivers that combined into one. He did however have a cat, a dog, a pig, 4 cows, three birds which talked, and wait, heres the kicker... a baby jaguar. He rescued it at the end of 2006 so it was a little over 2 years old. It was by far the coolest thing i saw the whole weekend. I was entranced i wont lie, because i have never been able to get so close to a wild cat. Her name was Condesa, and she was in a cage, and no i did not hold or pet her... I like my arms and hands thank you very much. They have permission to take care of her, but will soon have to give her to another organization because as she gets bigger she will need much more room to run and roam. Dont worry people... i took a video.
We spent our morning helping out on the farm. he had a porch which was rotting and needed to be replaced so monroe and i got our stress out by literally just destroying the porch bit by bit. Hard labor... but i could def. handle it. Afterwards, we drank one of those wonderfully freshly squeezed juices and then hiked through his property... and when i say hiked i mean it... through primary forest past trees over 200 years old.. past a rotting tree that is the home of a huge boa constrictor.. over 5 feet i believe from how he described but i wasnt actually trying to see it up close in person.. and through the scrub. He was often using his machetti to forge a path for us.. and then we got to this beautiful river.. water so clean you could drink it. we were playing in some rapids he literally had to pull us through cause the current was so strong it could have easily swept us into the rocks. We hung out there for a few hours until we had to make our way back to the house and get picked up for our return to san jose.