Berta’s Travel Shenanigans

Right – so, once again, deployment tomorrow morning.  Last phase – and the phase that I was most attracted to orginially:  working and living in a community with the youth participants.  So, this means that I have been very lucky to be one of only 3 project managers who have been assigned to all three types of phases – plus, this mobility means that, for this phase, I get the priviledge of ‘reuiniting’ with 4 participants…2 each from phase 1 and 2.  I will be working in Nicaragua – specially, we will be travelling to a town called La Fortuna and working with the cooperative ‘Miraflor’.  La Fortuna is located in Miraflor National Park and is meant to be absolutely stunning so CANNOT WAIT.  

Here is the official Raleigh description:  The Miraflor reserve is 206sqkm of beautiful mountainous terrain with various different ecosystems, including tropical savannah, dry tropical forest and mountain cloud forest. Within the reserve there are a number of communities living through subsistence farming and gaining income from coffee growing, cattle farming and some small tourism initiatives. However, the people have few resources and lack access to basic services such as health and education. The Raleigh volunteers will live with local families and experience the lives of local people whilst enjoying the beauty of the local natural environment.The journey will be long (we have to stay overnight in Jinotepe, approx. 4 hours from La Fortuna and not arrive until Day 2 around 10 AM) and will involve getting the 14 of us from five different countries across the Costa Rica/Nicaragua border…everyone knows I don’t speak Spanish, right?  No worries, Lorein, our Costa Rican interpreter, is travelling with Sian and I – can’t wait to learn enough Spanish to actually understand the responses to my butchered Spanish (which, by the way, is what is wrong with phrase books…you can ask a question but don’t have a clue what the answer is anyhow!).

We will be putting a roof on a community centre, working on the floor and painting the walls of a school.  Halfway through we may be moving to Las Laguestas to work on a building previously built by Raleigh.  This project will be very different from the previous ones because, at 5pm each night, the group will be saying good bye to one another and heading off to their respective host families.  That means that instead of spending 24-7 with the group we will all need to adjust to this level of separation and the participants will need to express a unique type of independence.  

In other news, I will be returning back to Canada, around the first of June as have received confirmation that my research has been accepted for the CPA conference in Hali. (is it wrong that I was kind of hoping for a rejection letter in order to stay longer?!).  This means that there is still plenty of time for travel companions to come out of the woodwork ;-p.  Full intentions of returning to a few of the places I have been to re-connect with the contacts I have made (can get good/free deals on food and accom. if you are willing to do a few hours of volunteer work)

Also, I have had (and will be having one more) interview for the Community Psychology graduate program at Laurier and will know by the end of the week what I will be doing in the fall – not sure how will receive this info as no computers or phones in La Fortuna (though our mobile phone apparently works only whilst standing on one rock in the garden of our host families home or through 2 fields atop a grassy knoll). 

Was hoping to post more pics but computer doesn’t like my memory card so, alas, it might be best to check out the Raleigh blog for a few snippets of me!  Hope everyone is well and look for an update in 3 weeks! 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.