My new home

I’ll be honest, for someone with a Spanish degree; I knew shamefully little about Costa Rica, Central America, or Latin America before I boarded my final flight in Miami Airport. Studying in Spain, and then taking most of my classes from a professor who studied Spanish literature did not provide for much knowledge about the Western Hemisphere that isn’t America or America Lite (Canada). I’ve obviously learned a couple of things in the more than two months I have been here (if not the training staff certainly has some questions to answer). Yet, I would say that because so much of my time has been interacting with other Americans and learning about Peace Corps policies and project goals, I have not learned as much during my first two months here compared with my first two months in Spain or China. But, I’m going to share a little smattering of what I’ve learned during my training and from reading the Costa Rica Wikipedia article a few times.

The land. Costa Rica covers a bit more than 50,000 km^2, and contains roughly 4.3 million people. For comparison, Iowa covers 145,000 km^2 and has almost exactly 3 million corn eating inhabitants. My last place of residence, Changzhou, covered 4,000 km^2 and had 4.4 million people. So, Changzhou packed more people into less than one tenth the area of Costa Rica, and Iowa is three times the size of Costa Rica yet has a million less people. Considering that I grew up in Des Moines, which has 400,000 people in maybe 2,000 km^2, Costa Rica seems very rural for me. And, these two months have been the first time I have ever lived anywhere that is at all rural. Also, it is my first time living somewhere at all hilly. Des Moines, Tulsa, Salamanca, and Changzhou are all reasonably flat cities. It is gorgeous here, but I have had trouble getting a sense of where towns are related to others, because I go up, down, around, and up again before getting to the next town. Also, Costa Rica’s less than desirable infrastructure (I’ll probably write more about this) combined with all these hills means that in a country a third the size of Iowa it can take ten or eleven hours to travel between places. For example, the bus from my training community, El Rosario, to San Jose, covers the 16 miles (25 km) in an hour and fifteen minutes.

More on the land. Costa Rica is roughly a rectangle 250 miles long (400 km) and 100 miles wide (160 km), bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean, the east by the Caribbean Sea, the north by Nicaragua and by Panama in the south. You can see both the Pacific and Caribbean from some of the highest mountains and volcanoes. There are three main mountain ranges that run through the center of the country, with the biggest population center being in the Central Valley, which is between two of these ranges. San Jose, the capital, as well as Cartago, Heredia, and Alajuela, all major cities, are in this region. On each side of the central ranges are hilly zones that contain many of the rainforests and flatten out to the more cultivated plains, which lead right to the beaches. Bananas, pineapple, sugar cane, and rice are among the major crops cultivated in the flatter zones near both coasts, while coffee is grown in the hilly zones and the mountain ranges (which are not incredibly high ranges). Even with a fairly robust agricultural sector, one fourth of the land in Costa Rica is devoted to national parks or protected zones (what a nicely vague label). Many of these still have huge economic importance, as they are visited by tourists, one of the nation’s most important industries.

The people. 94% of Ticos are either white or mestizo, I guess they kind of consider it one race. I’d make a critical comment about this, but the US Census hasn’t really figured out how to deal with the Hispanic/Latino race thing, so I’ll bite my tongue for now. Blacks make up 3%, Asians 1%, Amerindian 1%, and the one out of every hundred Costa Ricans is ‘other.’ As for religion, the Internet tells me that 76% are Roman Catholic, which is convenient, because that’s the official religion, 14% are Evangelical Christians, there is a sampling of Jehovah’s Witnesses, other Protestant sects, other religions, and 3% are not religious. They love football, but aren’t all that great at it as a national team. They love rice and beans, or if they don’t love it, then I don’t know why they eat so much of it. They also seem to love playing the lottery.

The work. Until very recently, agriculture made up most of the economy, with coffee, bananas, pineapples, and sugar cane being important products. But, now, most people work more industrialized sectors especially in pharmaceutical, technology, and medical products manufacturing as well as offshored customer service and clerical work. Tourism is a huge industry here, now larger than agriculture, as over a million tourists visit annually. Related to this is the unpleasant fact that more US passports are stolen in Costa Rica than any other country. What’s more, no crime records are opened for theft under $500 because pickpockets and the like are so common. As for the energy for these industries, Costa Rica has harnessed its numerous rivers, and gets over 80% of its electricity from hydropower. Among its biggest imports is gasoline, but the Costa Rican government made the ambitious goal of being carbon neutral by 2021. A much less admirable fact is that this year the US government added Costa Rica to its list of major countries for organized crime. This is due to the transport of cocaine from Colombia to the place where people love cocaine: the USA. This was done to help the US work with the Costa Rican government against drug rings. Because, of course, we only should fight the supply side of the drug problem, and there’s no need at all to look at the demand side of the equation.

The cheddar. Costa Rica’s GDP per capita in nominal terms is $6,345 per year. When purchasing power parity is taken into account, it rises to $10,579 per Costa Rican annually. This places Costa Rica 86th among 181 countries in the world (according to the IMF). To me, what is very impressive and something worth remembering is how high of life expectancy (78.9 years) and a human development index Costa Rica has achieved with a lot less money than comparable countries. There are all sorts of things that contribute to these statistics, but I would suggest that not spending money on a military and also having had no civil strife for 60 years has really helped keep those numbers up. I’m not advocating abolishing every army, it’s just very interesting to see how much Costa Rica can spend on other things because they aren’t buying planes and tanks. Well, hopefully this has given you a better idea about how the Costa Rican people work on their land to make some cheddar.