Final Installment of Lara's Blog!

It has been long promised and long awaited - here it is, the final installment of Lara's Blog.

Lara at home in front of the cacao drying rack

Chapter 4:

I think this may be close to week 5, but I'm losing track,  haven't been in  ´the city´ for quite some time. But I did have a visitor from San Jose--Taylor Overturf!! The time with her was great! I had a moment where I reflected and had to ask myself, if someone told me that I was to have ONE and only one social engagement for an entire summer with someone my own age and who I knew before, what would I think? or do? well, I certainly got very chatty for a couple days, and let's just leave it at that.

Taylor and Lara at the waterfall

She got the real country experience-- making chocolate (our second batch with oh so many sweet flavors: dark and milk, with cashew cranberry, roasted almond, roasted cashew, roasted peanut, cacao nib with and without cinnamon, little heart shaped molds with toasted pumpkin seeds and cayenne pepper grown and dried in the garden, etc), milking the cow, taking a horseback ride with our wonderful neighbor Dianey to an undiscovered waterfall, harvesting a banana bunch of ten layers of bananas with two sacks and our horse Miloo through the cacao forest, yucca soup, rice, beans, our own yogurt and cheese, and of course a couple snakes, a mini scorpion, cockroaches, and and and.

Melting Chocolate

She had to watch me, calmly, as I began to freak out a little more than usual about an infected bug bite on my arm...turns out its a ´nacido´--gross name, I know-- and not that thing that lays eggs under the skin. Just went to the doctor to get antibiotics. Something I'm learning is that I don't have to be physically uncomfortable to the extreme in order to do the extreme work I want to do. I can wear gloves, but don't, put on a mosquito net hat, or not, and so on and so forth.

The garden is bursting and all the beds are full. This morning after getting the bananas (the tree was huge that I chopped down and out of the middle a little snake came hissing out at me--only added to the Indiana Jones-like Sunday Taylor and I had experienced) we transplanted a bed of tomatoes, strung up some more beans and tomatoes, transplanted a row of white pumpkins and a small bed of hot peppers. Things are looking better and better. Soon I'll focus more on special projects like making chicha  (locally fermented alcohol) with whatever fruit we have: corn/ “maiz”--traditional--, pineapple, overripe quadradoes, which are sort of like bananas. I'll also make bio-char, still working on implementing a better composting system, making things from the beeswax we are getting at the coast in a few days, and continuing our weekly kombucha batches. In this climate any kind of fermentation is interesting. Jim and E even went into the forest for two hours to try and harvest cacao juice!! my god, I'm telling you all, this stuff is gold. One sip and you just can't help smiling.

Now that is a bursting garden!

Horseback riding has become one of my favorite pass-times (pastime, I get it now). I rode to work at our friend Willy's place last week and had a crazy time trying to get back in the pouring rain. I'd never ridden that horse before and it totally trusted me and I trusted him...it didn't stop raining for hours and as it began to get dark I had to rush out. Within minutes my boots were filled to the brim with water and an hour later I arrived at the river crossing...it was way too high for cars and I had no idea how deep in can be in order for horses to cross...especially with me on the back. The first time we checked it out, Miloo turned around--of course he would know better than I would. After a few minutes of resting and contemplating the situation up the hill in the running dirt and mud road, we tried again and went for it...there was a moment we almost got flushed  down the river...I think Miloo was even swimming. but I survived and the hills were covered in fireflies as the white fog surrounded me and the palm trees lining the road. Nothing else out there. Sometimes I can't help thinking, where the fuck am I? It's beautiful, that's all I know.

Rafting, oh that was about two weeks ago. Fantastic, that's all. I'm so behind on journaling that I think I'm not even gonna try at this point. I'm doing well still but excited to get back to the farm after our trip to the coast and have it be quiet again--just Keli, Jim, and me. Then I'll have a few weeks to focus on my last projects, including adopting a half acre of the cacao plantation for care-taking: pruning, and cutting off the infected pods.


Chapter 5:

Okay, falling far behind and its almost the end of July!

I have about three weeks left and I'm just returning from a sort of crazy spontaneous different vacation week on the coast and in the mountains. The boys are gone, I got time by myself, I socialized (or tried) with people closer to my own age (early 30s is as good as it gets), spent hours in waterfalls, pools and the ocean, got super sunburned, finished two books, drew a lot, surfed and healed my infected arm with antibiotics which made me feel all funky. It was rocky but refreshing to move around and break the habitual farm work and life. I actually feel like I'm aging--did I tell you people thought I was thirty/think it all the time? I don't think I want to appear thirty quite yet...

Other highlights include a few waterfall-jungle hikes and climbs in primary forest. There is so much incredible water here. I saw wild turkeys, blue jean frogs, toucans, iguanas. Even for Tico standards I think I look a bit homeless at this point. All three of us look more haggard (?) than most of the farmers. My hair is blond again and somehow turned curly/dready, I'm covered in bites or blisters, dark or red from the sun, my clothes are terribly stained from oil, banana and sugar juice, dirt, you name it. Mostly I enjoy it. Oh, and today, after returning from Panama after only a few hours (where I found some freshly dried tobacco and lots of middle school kids in uniforms making out on park benches), I finally bought my first machete, which I think I deserved now that every single Tico I've worked with has, without fail, called me "valiente" by the end of the day.

Now I'm ready to get back to the farm. The car is full of wet smelly clothes, cuttings, uprooted palmitos (heart of palm), and groceries from the giant farmers market in San Isidro. I´ll be working in the cacao forest more now and continue in the garden.

Chapter 5:
I feel like an old turtle, wrinkled-necked and stubborn, sticking my head out from below my shell. panza. Here I still am, getting quieter and quieter on my end of things. I guess this may be the closing letter for this chapter of my life. And what a whirlwind it has been.

I'm in town again, as you might have guessed, having just returned from a day at the local botanical garden. After wandering through a place like that for a few hours I realize what a geek I am for how much I love plants. But it does, too, remind me of my desire to study landscape architecture. It's funny, but it really seems like most of my interests were visible such a very long time ago. I'm thinking now of the photo mama placed in the front of our family cookbook for me: me, white blond hair in woolen tights attractively covering my diaper and two fists tightly clinging to the blender whisks, covered head to toe in chocolate.

And yes, that was me this past week all over again. Monday we made our third big batch of chocolate, of which I will hopefully bring some back with me. We even tempered it this time (getting the right crystal structure to ensure slower melting). The peanut ones are especially good and made with peanuts from a neighbor´s farm.

I realized that I finally have been accepted into the neighborhood-valley not just as Keli and Jim´s guest but as a friend of the locals. I crossed the river to visit a family who offered me all their fruits, cacao, banana, mamonchino, cookies and typically oversweetened black coffee. And then I visited Walter´s house. He has 11 siblings but lives in the house he grew up in almost as if it were abandoned. It's rice season but it's been raining a lot so the floor of his entire downstairs was covered from wall to wall with drying rice. It looked a bit like a scene out of a Marquez short story. He picked me some sapote to taste and I returned fully loaded up with goodies.

Sunday, Dianey took me on a motorcycle trip across the valley to a friend of his. This couple lives on goverment parcelled land and I felt very silly and humbled to be their guest. They have a stall-like house with a mud floor and chickens wandering around and aside from their land, have little else. But they live in abundance too and I was overcome with the gifts they gave me to carry back. Then we stopped for some chicha at a woman´s porch and hung around before returning in the rain.

Final Chapter:
A foggy morning, a bright green frog squished flat on the road, the sound of boiling water and the smell of farm coffee. My last morning at the Chocolate Farm and yes, I am feeling nostalgic. It's been 10 weeks already, at times slow--giving me the feeling that I'm actually aging--and at others simply a whirlwind. My life here, despite the many phases of this passing summer, has taken on quite a shape of its own, and it has become so present in so many ways that whatever came before it actually feels far away. It's funny how "home" can stay untouched and still remain, but my memories of Costa Rica only came to life once I made this experience happen. So, in a way, this time has been the most present yet, especially considering the extreme contrast and disconnect from my "normal" life. In other words, the fact that my hair is now curly, my skin is hairy, tan and luscious and rarely scrubbed are only the physical responses to a new environment. Let's just say that waking up at 5:30 AM naturally every morning, eating a raw snake once in a while, peeing into a bucket, spending a half hour cleaning beans or rice before cooking them, reading by candlelight and checking under my bed for snakes religiously every night before I go to bed are new habits that I've grown accustomed to.

My brother, in a recent email to me, likened my experience to Odwalla's Super Food - “crazy awesome stuff so condensed that it's almost overpoweringly interesting, and while ingesting it, you know that you're getting the most compact form of a vast multitude of experiences.” So, my time here has been like a super food, and not just produced “maybe an orange. Or a kiwi. Strange, rather vibrant, exciting, but just that -- one fruit.” I would have to agree 100% aside from the fact that I've been trying real hard not to liken beautiful and new experiences to familiar and utterly commercial products. Though I have to say that Odwalla must have a very good rep since Ky, a fellow volunteer here, likened my absolute favorite juice (cacao nectar) to Odwalla also. I believe that in his terms that was equally high praise.

One thing I know for sure is that I would never trade my experience here in the campo to another's travel vacation in Costa Rica. The opportunity to live as self-sufficiently as I have here is worth every dirty sock, every sip of vinegar-like-tasting chicha, every black fly bite and molding everything. Things tend to be more complicated here but the times of rest are all the more sweeter. I will greatly miss the delicious fruits and delicacies I have tasted here, the wonderful people I have met, the general generosity and neighborhoodly feeling. And I will take with me the skills I have learned, and the knowledge of basic processes and the patience it takes to follow through on any of them: the pleasure of making churriadas (harvesting corn, scraping the cobs, grinding the corn by hand, frying the batter with salt or dulce), of making cheese (milking, heating the milk, cooling it, stirring it, adding cultures, shaping it), and of course the immense delight of chocolate (harvesting, fermenting, drying, toasting, grinding, dehusking, grinding, grinding again, pouring, cooling, and finally eating). Just like it is with anything else, something worked hard for bears sweeter fruit. It is no different here—only that one has to beat the birds to the ripe papayas.

Birds love to eat our fruit!

The garden has been my steady companion and perhaps, in this way, a reflection of my greater experience here. It is no surprise that a garden's mulitude of activities have long been used figuratively to rely all sorts of life lessons (“reaping the benefits”; “sewing the seeds of one's own destruction”; “inch by inch I'm gonna let this garden grow”; “rooting oneself”, etc.). I enjoy learning full processes and cycles just as I enjoy turning compost, mixing soil, sewing seeds, transplanting, watering, harvesting and finally eating vegetables. And so I am happy to see that every bed in the garden now has a crop growing, the vivero is flourishing and cucumbers, celantro, celergy, tomatoes and lettuce have already become our daily bread.