Costa Rica, 2008, Rich And Poor

Sunday, 17 Aug. 08 This morning I went to the Anglican church in downtown San Jose.  Most of the congregation is Afro-Caribbean and they come from Limon Province and from Panama.  One fellow, Manuel, befriended me, but it turns out that like so many Ticos I´ve run across so far, he sees me as a rich gringo he can soak.  Following the service he gave me a sob story that he had just recovered from brain surgery and has been out of work and only returns to his construction job tomorrow.  Well, maybe it´s all true.  Or maybe he´s another liar like all...or most...Ticos.  Anyway, I gave him two thousand colons, which translates to less than five bucks Canadian.  There´s a sucker born every minute and two to take him.  I´ve been warned about this by the way, and it´s something to put up with I suppose.  He says he´d like to see me back at the church.  Doesn´t mean I´m going to sit anywhere near him if I do come back.  In our conversation after lunch that was served following the service, Manuel told me that as in Canada, they have been seeing a growing divide between rich and poor and the middle class is shrinking, and that life in Costa Rica was actually better until a few years ago.  So, this seems to square with some of my other observations.   This afternoon I took a bus ride to Escazu, a wealthy suburb of San Jose that straddles the mountains.  Again it was nice to walk on quiet streets away from crowds.  I couldn´t quite get up into the mountain because of the luxurious gated communities full of rich gringos living in them.  One of them has not only razor wire but electrified wire over that.  Luxuriant plant life and flowers everywhere, and birds too.   You know, my attraction to Costa Rica has had nothing at all to do with the people here, and only with the natural beauty of the place, it turns out.  But this is another reason why I have come here this time.  I was wanting to find out for sure.  I could never live here and I would never want to live here.  I´m not even sure if I ever want to return.  But I feel that I am learning some invaluable lessons while I´m here so it´s worth the frustration.  I think also that once I get out into some of the countryside more that it´ll be less unpleasant for me.I´m going to give it another week, anyway, and if things are still maddening for me, I´m going to try to change my ticket and come home early.   Monday, 18 Aug. 08   I took a bus up to Volcan Irazu, an extinct volcano with a crater lake.  At 11,000 ft, high the air is quite thin and it made hiking a bit of an effort but it was great.  The crater lake is small and emerald green due to the high mineral content of the water.  When I got off the bus I was greeted by a large pack of coatimundis, or coatis, which are the Latin American counterpart to our raccoons.  They´re smaller and more agile than raccoons, dark brown with a long tapering tail that they often hold up like an exclamation mark and a pointed, fox-like snout.  They of course looked cute and adorable but I still wouldn´t want to try petting one.  This high up there isn´t the kind of lush vegetation that we associate with Costa Rica.  The trees are stunted and everything´s scrubby.  There is a huge field of black lava sand that I wandered around on as the mist rolled in and obscured everything.  This feels like my first real solitary walk since I arived in Costa Rica.  Later, I walked up a path to the summit.  Again, the solitude, but for a hummingbird and a few other birds, felt absolute.   I read in the paper this morning that poverty is at 16.5 per cent of the population in Costa Rica, which isn´t bad, statistically speaking, though I would be interested to know what criteria they use to determine this.  I would also be interested in knowing how many people get missed in these estimates, given the number of people I see begging and sleeping on the street here) about at a par with Vancouver, but if you factor in the sprawling poor barrios in San Jose it does create a rather different picture.  According to one government official, they don´t acutally have the names and identities of a number of the poor, so that they exist only as anonymous statistics. I would say that for a Latin American country Costa Rica does indeed have a large middle class.  How comfortable a lot of them still are is another question altogether.