Yesterday, the man who guided our coffee and chocolate tour told us about his journey to his current position. He was a paramedic, doing helicopter rescues, scuba missions, and such until tragic accident left him disabled while he healed. He took a new direction, and ran a tourism/driving business for a while until his daughter needed heart surgery. He closed up the business and put his resources in the health of his daughter. But the shut down of 2020 made reestablishing tours impossible.
To provide for his family, he gathered coffee beans in a canasto (about 12 kg of coffee), which paid three dollars per basket. This came to $25 per day for him. Providing for his family and not relying on the government was worth the struggle to him among the Nicaraguans who are more known for taking the hard jobs that the other Costa Ricans do not wish for. He only had a job two months when someone noticed he spoke English enough to work with coffee in another capacity. As a tour guide.
Our guide also told us about the eruption in 1968. The side of the Arenal volcano broke open, spewing an eruption that devastated the town of Arenal and changed the landscape forever. Two other smaller towns were consumed in the eruption and the subsequent lava flows. What to do with the ruins? The government made an interesting decision… They built a dam. A huge dam. It brought tremendous changes in 1979:
- The lake was expanded three times its original size
- It irrigates the western side of Costa Rica
- It provides hydroelectric energy to the country (12% of total)
- It covered the town of Arenal (which was moved to Nuevo Arenal). The ruins lay under the lake. This protects the area from future eruptions.
- It also provided an opportunity to expand tourism, the most dominant industry of this area.
So now I’m pondering the forces that push our lives. The outside influences that brought us new places, the hard impacts that challenge our resiliency but lead us a new direction. This lake, our tour guide, this town, and this volcano represent all that.
What else pushes us in new directions? What is re-emerging in 2021? A new day, a new way, a new focus, a new joy, a renewed sense of self and knowledge of the importance of others? As we grasp something new, perhaps we let something go. Siempre es así.
Cheerful Nomad 