El Rosario

From October 9 through December 18, I lived with the Mora Fernandez family in the town El Rosario in the district of Desamparodos. El Rosario is too small to make it onto Google Maps the last time I checked, but San Gabriel is probably the town nearest that makes it onto the maps. El Rosario doesn’t have too much going on, three small sundry shops, one mini-supermarket, one bar, one small restaurant, and one bar restaurant. Add that to the elementary school, the community hall, a soccer field, a church, and maybe 200 houses spread over lots of land and hills, and you have El Rosario. It consists of just two streets: the main highway and a street perpendicular to it, where I lived. My family’s house was up a hill from this main street, and was a really interesting house. It was two stories, with tile floors on the main floor, and wooden floors on the second. My host mom, Xinia, explained that she really likes the rustic look, so the stair rail was nicely done with lacquered branches. The ceilings weren’t all finished, and most of the pipes and cables came through holes in the wall that hadn’t been finished off with putty. My room featured a bed, a plastic lawn chair, and the world’s most interesting shelf-as no two shelves were the same size or made of the same wood. Despite the house’s rustic and unfinished character, there wasn’t a thing to complain about, it wasn’t clean-but you couldn’t really call it dirty either.(me with Haiden, Stuart, and Jose)

The clear head of the household was Xinia, the mother. Xinia has seven children, four of which live at home. It was never made clear to me how many fathers there were of the children, but I am confident there are at least two, maybe three. She seemed to maintain contact with at least one of the fathers, but I was never privy which children were his. Additionally, the house which we lived in was given to her by a former significant other, who as far as I know, moved to the U.S. with a younger lady, and may or may not be the father of some of her children. I’d peg Xinia at about 50, based mostly on the fact that I know that she was quite young when she had her first child, who’s now 35. During my two plus months at her house, I never developed what I would call a good or healthy relationship with Xinia. To begin with, she was at times hard to understand, as she spoke with a thick country accent (yes you can have a hillbilly accent in Spanish-she does). Additionally, besides eating and sleeping, I don’t know that Xinia and I have much in common. Her television tastes went no further than telenovelas and as she often saw me reading, commented that the only book she had ever read was the Bible. I think she is literate, but only at a fifth grade level (when she was forced to drop out of school). In my opinion, Xinia has had a very rough life. She was raised by her father and his drinking buddies, was forced to drop out of school and begin working as domestic help to help pay for her younger sister to attend high school. And from what I can tell, the romantic relationship world hasn’t been to good for her. For me, the biggest problem I had living with her and her family was her strong tendency to shift moods. It would be inappropriate to delve much further into the situation than saying some days she would be very friendly, open to my questions, and be quick to grant permission if I needed to come home late or something similar. Other days she would be cold, cast offish, ignore my questions, claim I hadn’t notified her about something, rude, stressed out, finicky, or castigate me for doing something with the previous days she had said was just fine. Living with Xinia was difficult, but it certainly worked on my patience and as my buddy Aaron says, ‘built character.’

(This post is all sorts of long, take a break, and check out what some other TU grads are up to)

The oldest of the seven children in the family was Mauricio, about 35, who works in the tools/appliances section of a supermarket in San Jose. He had laid much of the tile and done the lighting in the house, as well as in his own, just fifteen minutes up the road, where he lived with his wife and soon enough another, as she’s expecting. Mauricio is a cheery, funny guy always making jokes, often a little too involved for me to understand. We’d most often see him when his wife was working late or at a friend’s house and he would show up to grab a meal, and as this was all he came for, leave soon thereafter.

Xinia’s second child is Cristopher, who everyone in the family calls El Indio (or the Indian/Native) because of the braided poneytail that reaches the small of his back. He came by the house only a few times, as he lives in the next town with his girlfriend, who at 55 is older than his mother. Cristopher works as a gofer/messenger for a law firm in San Jose. Although I was told that his mature girlfriend had helped him put his partying days behind him, I believe he brought a bottle of wine over to the house two of the three times I remember.

Jose is the next oldest of the children, and he lived upstairs with his wife, Sharon, and their son Stuart. Stuart’s name should really be written Estuart, as Spanish speakers cannot pronounce words beginning with the ‘s’ sound without adding an ‘e’ to the front of it. Stuart was a smart seven year old, but about as ornery as a seven year old could be. Living in a house with older uncles had given him access to plenty of words that one doesn’t generally expect out of a seven year old’s mouth, but Stuart delighted in showing off his lexicon. I liked him a lot though, as I can relate to ornery elementary school kids. You know when you’re at a concert, fair, or football game and there’s a guy selling ponchos if it’s raining, gloves and hats if it’s cold, and thunder sticks all the time? Well, that would be Jose’s ‘job.’ So he was pretty much always around during the day, but I would randomly hear his motorcycle at one in the morning as he came back from some event in San Jose. Sharon was super nice, and did the lion’s share of taking care of Stuart even though she worked as a maid every day and her husband was, um, chilling. Young men also came to the house all the time looking for Jose; sometimes he would walk to the end of the driveway to talk to them (and maybe engage in a transaction). I don’t have any conclusive evidence, but I tend to think that if Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson lived nearby, they’d be happy with Jose’s business.


(I told you it was long, if you need a breather: TFLN or xkcd)

Next in line was Yerlani, the only daughter of Xinia’s seven children. Yerlani worked in San Jose (selling clothes or shoes I think) with her three children. She, like her mother, didn’t have a father figure for her children. She would drop by the house occasionally with her kids, who were cute and funny, but her visits usually involved a tense discussion about my host mom (and her real mother) not being a babysitter. A fun and random event was one night when Yerlani dropped off her two youngest children at about 21:30 as she had come in town to get a big block of sugar from the sugar cane processor in town. I remember hearing her come back about an hour later, and apparently return to San Jose that night with the kids. One: I didn’t check to see if she really came to get a block of sugar. Two: I didn’t check because I was already sure that wasn’t while she was here. Three: it was times like these that I wish I had been more involved in the El Rosario gossip circuit to find out what (and with whom) Yerlani was doing that night.

Haiden is the fifth of Xinia’s seven children and by far the one I spent the most time with. Haiden’s real name is Jeffry, but he gave himself his own nickname after the composer (spelled Haydn) as Haiden, is, if nothing else, a lover of music. Haiden was the first in the family to graduate from high school, something his two younger brothers would also do. He is probably the definition of the Costa Rican saying ‘Pura Vida’-directly translated as ‘pure life’ but better understood as ‘everything’s good, everything’s fine.’ Haiden is a nature lover, and he took me on a hike of the hills above the house during my first few days, then twice more took me and other trainees on adventurous walks through the coffee fields and forests surrounding El Rosario. Walks with Haiden involve him picking all sorts of fruit off of trees to eat, and him identifying various plants, birds, and insects. He can do this as he is studying natural resources management at UNED, the national distance learning university. Every night when I walked through the garage to go brush my teeth (my room had an outside entrance) I would pass Haiden, fully engaged with the computer, reviewing some family or phylum of the animal or plant kingdoms. His knowledge in nature, and mine in how our development and population growth are affecting it made for a number of wonderful conversations with Haiden.(taking a break during one of Haiden's nature walks)

If he wasn’t studying or tending to his tomato, cucumber, or lettuce plants, Haiden was either playing or listening to music. As an adolescent, he would go to school in the afternoon, and spend his mornings on the buses of San Jose, singing with his brother and begging for change. (The gift of the house by Xinia’s ex-boyfriend did a lot to bring the family out of poverty). One day, a man they often saw in the neighborhood’s where they would play in the streets, invited Haiden, his brother, and other boys up to his apartment. This man, Craig, was an American retiree, and much to my surprise, wanted nothing more than to share some treats with the kids. It was then that Haiden learned to play guitar and piano. It was this kindness from the American retiree that instilled in Haiden a feeling of debt to the US. So, I assume that when he heard about Peace Corps having trainees in his town, he jumped at the opportunity to host one. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Haiden who I had to deal with every day about food, laundry, schedules, and use of the house. Back to the music, eventually, as Haiden explained, the neighbors got suspicious of the old retired foreigner having the kids from the street up to his pad, and the authorities encouraged him to stop. But, as Haiden very emotionally told me, not before his love of music was started. I’m glad, because it meant Haiden would often be jamming Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel from his room, and would play songs for me from time to time. It was crazy how much classic rock he knew, and somewhat humbling when a Costa Rican was playing Beatles and CCR songs that I didn’t even know. I had a great time at the family party singing karaoke to the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There” with Haiden and Barton R. It was a fitting way to end my short, but wonderful friendship with Haiden.

Jason and Manuel are the last two people who lived in the house with me. I can group them together because they are very similar in many ways. They both work very hard and fairly long hours, Jason as a purchaser for ICE (the nationalized telecom and power company) and Manuel as a manager of a supermarket in San Jose. They both have girlfriends, which took most of their time. Jason would spend any free time he had studying, as he was studying psychology at a private university. Manuel spent it either on the phone with his girlfriend or playing videogames. One really fun thing I did with them was to play a futbol sala game (similar to indoor soccer) with them. They are on a team which plays weekly in a league, so I threw on my tennis shoes and shorts, along with a team jersey and hit the synthetic turf. They initially placed me up front, with the simple instructions given to every forward: put the ball in the net. I was unable to do this, and for added effect, whiffed what would’ve been two wide-open shots against just the keeper. I am not using the term whiff loosely, it wasn’t like a wasted the cross by shooting wide or too high, I straight didn’t even make contact with the ball, despite winding up and kicking about as hard as I could. After convincing them to let me play defense, and where I played in all of my limited intramural soccer experience, I think I held my own. I was generally slow to switch positions, as the directions (in Costa Rican indoor soccer slang) had to be repeated or put into standard Spanish. I could’ve gone to play two other times, but one game I was ready for got cancelled last minute and I couldn’t go to another because the Peace Corps forbids riding on motorcycles-and that was the only form of transport. I highly doubt I was missed.

All in all, my time with Xinia’s family in El Rosario was a generally fun, quite interesting, and occasionally trying experience. Luckily I was super busy during training, so I only dealt with my problematic host mom in doses. On the other hand, I certainly hope to have opportunities to connect with Haiden and some of the other brothers during my two-year stint here.