Ride to Puntarenas

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Hola!

On Sunday all the students met in the hotel breakfast area to get to know each other. Many of the students have an anthropology background, others have public health backgrounds and some are journalism and international relations. We all went to dinner that night, continuing to get to know each other.

My roommate for a couple of days is Ally and she is great. We get along well and she does not snore and doesn't mind me getting up early and moving around in the room. She has a background in Anthropology and is getting her masters.

On Monday and Tuesday we have been being driven around the San Jose area to different hospitals and to the social security headquarters in order to understand the structure of the health system in Costa Rica. In many ways it is similar to our HMO system in which you must see a generalist before you are referred up the system to a specialist. The Ticos we saw and talked to seem very patient with the process. We also visited a woman's clinic and were given various lectures about water quality, HIV/AIDS and women's health issues.

We spent much of the day on Tuesday discussing watersheds and visiting sequential areas along a river from the most polluted areas to the more pristine source. Our speaker for the day was an expert in the area of water as a recreational medium. We had lunch at an old remodeled Tico house that had some wonderful antiques including a corn grinder used for making corn suitable to be shaped into tortillas. We had more lectures on Public Health and current research that is being conducted in Costa Rica.

As I am writing this we are now all packed up and on a bus up to Puntarenas where we will visit another hospital. It is Wednesday, June 25, but I am not sure when I will be able to post my blog. The significance of our visit to this hospital is that this hospital is the regional hospital where people from Monteverde will be referred if they have medical needs that cannot be provided in a smaller clinic near their home.

This evening we will stay in a hotel and get to know the area and the Monteverde Institute before we go to our host family. I am really enjoying my roomy and I hope that we get to be together again in Monteverde.

Later: We arrived at the hotel before dark and it is really nice. We all have double beds and lots of room, hot showers and the best part is a beautiful swimming pool. The pool has small dark blue mosaic tiles and is heated to bathtub temperature. Many of us had a fun time swimming and chatting. It was really relaxing and we are enjoying getting to know each other.

Monteverde is really beautiful. We are way up in the mountains and it took the large bus an hour and a half to work our way up a dirt road to the town. We passed lots of small farms and very modest homes. Once we got into Monteverde we could see that it was a resort town. Across from the hotel they are trying to develop a mall and the people have been protesting on billboards with grafitti. The air is really cool and it looked like it might rain for a while. Today, I will try to get some pictures of the area. (Later: I have tried to send pictures but bandwidth is so bad that I cannot upload pictures. I will try tomorrow at another internet cafe.)

Today we are going to the Monteverde Institute where we will be studying most days for the rest of the time we are here. There we will have easier access to internet and to computers if we didn't bring one. We have been having some lectures from our instructors sporadically over the last several days and I think we will have some today.

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