Day 1: Beginning the Journey

Hello! Today we began our venture to Costa Rica. We flew into San Jose, Costa Rica from San Francisco Airport around 7 AM this morning. From there, David and Mario from Green Communities picked us up and we began driving towards Providencia. On the way we stopped at a breakfast place and had some traditional Costa Rican food, including gallo pinto (rice and bean mix). From there we continued onto Providencia and then to the Tami Lodge where we will be staying tonight.

The Tami Lodge consists of multiple lodges which each include canopy covering the sleeping area, and a covered porch and bathroom. The porch on each lodge has a beautiful view of the rainforest and you can hear the river flowing below the lodges from everywhere around the property. After we settled in, we met in the lodges cafe and walked over to a local restaurant for lunch where the owners, Juan and Joanna, prepared us some rice dishes, salad, beans and fresh passion fruit juice. After lunch we had about two hours of free time before meeting back for orientation. During this time, some of the other engineering abroad members and I hiked up one of the roads. The views of the town was beautiful, even though the clouds rolled in and became thicker on our hike.

At our orientation, David spoke about the cultural significance of coffee in their community. He told us how prior Engineering Abroad teams have helped them in converting more coffee farms to organic through helping Providencia develop their own drying and fermenting area for the coffee beans. Before Providencia had there own processing area, they would send their beans out to a factory that processed their organically farmed beans using the same machines as non organically farmed beans, thus down grading their coffee.

David also spoke about how Carlos and Jonathon are the founders of the Tami Lodge and the Green Communities organization. They have developed the idea of bringing people in to have sustainable experiences within their community. Everyone's hope in this community is that we will be able to bring back some of the practices we see here to our lives back home and ultimately make the world more sustainable bit by bit.

We will finish off the day with eating dinner all together and journaling.

Tomorrow, we will scout out the areas we will be doing service work and be meeting our host families.

-Natalie