Pots and Pans

Fear not, there's still lots of me meticulously detailing mildly interesting things I've done in the last two months to come, but for now, I'll comment on a curious Costa Rican occurrence. At least in the suburbs of Des Moines, door to door sales are almost exclusively limited to the Boy Scouts (wreaths, popcorn) or the Girl Scouts (cookies). That's not the case in rural/semi-rural Costa Rica. Both in Sarapiquí and in Líverpool (my new site) there are two main items that are sold door to door. 


The first makes all sort of sense: fruit and vegetables. It's not so much door to door, but rather a truck will drive down the road, incredibly slow, and either yell out the window or will have a speaker with a microphone set up, broadcasting the products and their prices. To me, this seems like a very logical item to sell door to door: it's something that people need almost every day and that is important to sell quickly. Additionally, it's likely that people might run out of fruit or vegetables mid-week, and getting a few more bananas or mangoes for breakfast isn't vital, nor is getting a pineapple to make juice-as families here always have extra juice packets lying around. Furthermore, some items here grow seasonally or grow on shade trees that aren't the main product, and thus the farmers don't have much of a reason to invest in formal distribution networks. Some of these fruits are the mamon chino, jocote, nance, guaba, and pejibaye (Spanish names)-click the links to see what new foods I've been eating. In short, I totally understand and support the door to door sales of fruit and vegetables.


The second main item is one that has baffled me since I first saw it. Pots and pans. They usually don't look to fancy, and somewhat like you'd expect to see in a camp kitchen. Usually a young to middle aged man will be carrying a net bag filled with pots and pans, walking door to door yelling 'pots, pots, pots'. It's a fairly common sight, enough so that during one of my two times in Perez Zeledon a good sized town of more than 40,000. In Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí, a town of 15,000, there were three national domestic appliance chains, and two or three other stores selling pots and pans. So, it certainly isn't as if you can't find them at the stores. In addition, a pot or pan seems to me like one of the last things that when a man came to my door offering one, I'd go, "oh yeah, I hadn't realized that I needed a new one, thanks." I remember when I lived in China there was a guy that would come by the apartments every once in a while yelling out something I didn't understand. I once asked my girlfriend, and she explained that he sharpened knives. This seemed quite appropriate to me. I probably wouldn't go into town and search out someone to sharpen my knives, but would have totally paid him to do so (had I cooked and ever used knives). Pots and pans seem the opposite to me, if my pot is worn down, it'll still work for a few days, I'll add it to my shopping list, and go buy it. I've probably thought it over more than any reasonable person should, but, every time I see them, I stretch my brain to figure it out, and just can't do it.