HISTORY OF COSTA RICA SCHOOL PROJECT
Tucked away in the Northwestern corner of the tiny Central American country of Costa Rica is the Guanacaste Province, a land of many contrasts with hot, humid beaches spotted with famed luxury resorts surrounded by cloud forests with legendary volcanoes inhabited by an incredible diverse flora and fauna. This is an area of the Blue Zone, some of the longest living people on earth. In the mountains above the well-known yoga retreat of Nosara, lies the rural village of Zaragoza, home to about 80 families of poor but proud country folk with roots back to the original farmer settlers in this rural outpost. The contrast between the wealthy tourist resorts on the coast to this community couldn’t be greater. This is the land where Eunice “Mayela” Campos and her family struggled for years growing coffee and subsistence crops, while living in a windowless shack with no electricity and the only “running” water being a tube behind the house sourced from a mountain stream.
Mayela met Seth Derish in Costa Rica over 25 years ago and after first visiting the village he was amazed at the desolate beauty of the area and friendliness of the people despite the hardships the they suffered. “It was an amazingly isolated area back then,” Seth mused. “Though only 125 miles from the capital of San Jose, we traveled for more than eight hours on what would be considered ill maintained rural roads in the United States. We put the car on a ferry boat to cross the Gulf of Nicoya to yet travel on dirt roads in various states of disrepair through the regional capital of Nicoya, slipping and sliding on the gravel and mud until we crossed the river into Zaragoza.”
What he found was his future mother-in-law Miriam cooking on a wood fire in her outdoor cook shack and soon was feasting on fresh water river shrimp, the ubiquitous “Pinto” or rice and beans, with cabbage salad and some unknown tropical fruits for dessert. Miriam had clearly never met a “Gringo” and was continuously apologizing for what to Seth was an astounding meal.
Well, things have come a long way since then, sort of, as more of the road is now paved (but most parts still in a state of disrepair), and the village has electricity, a rural water system, and within the past two years, even the Internet. What was still lacking then and now was a fully functioning K-12 school system. There was a one room primary school for first through sixth grade with the students lumped together in one large room with one instructor.
The Zaragoza region area has little services - a community clinic served once a month by rotating doctors, a primary school, two small stores (pulperias), a small church and a community once very dependent on the price of world coffee. During better times, many community members would work in construction or the tourism industry in the nearby towns of Nosara and Playa Samara. Many a morning, to this day, one would hear the buzz of small motorcycles racing towards these tourist destinations ridden by mostly young men on their way to minimum wage jobs. More recently there have been some local construction jobs as foreigners looking for better land prices than the coast enclaves have been creeping up the mountain gobbling up land that was once used for coffee and cattle.