http://www.travelmag.co.uk/article_1440.shtml
The brutish animal stamped her foot and glowered at me with resentful eyes. The humidity was stifling, with moisture rising in waves from the mud and causing my t-shirt to stick to my back. The farmer pointed at the wall and I took my cue to stand back and let him get on with the early morning milking. However he laughed and I realised he was pointing at a stool on the wall, and gesturing for me to take a seat alongside the disgruntled cow. There was no possibility that I would be leaving that stool until I had learned to milk to his perfectionist standards and it was not until two hours later, fingers aching, that I retired to eat a breakfast of rice and beans, lovingly packed in a neckerchief by my host “mami”. Looking back I am amazed myself that at 6am on an August morning, when any sensible student should have been asleep in bed at home, I was experiencing my first working morning in a tiny farming village in the middle of Costa Rica, and my day’s labours had only just begun.
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I had arrived in El Silencio the night before, in an unexpected change of plan. We experienced an extremely hairy public bus journey from Quepos (bear in mind that drink driving is legal in Costa Rica) and had arrived in El Silencio in the dark. We would have missed our stop had we not noticed the congregation of people surrounding the bus stop. I have never received such an enthusiastic welcome anywhere, as whole families turned out to meet our group, excited and delighted by the prospect of English guests. I imagine we failed to live up to expectations; bedraggled and exhausted from 3 weeks of travel, we allowed ourselves to be allocated on the spot, evacuee style, and were marched off to our respective host families. I was greeted by one of the family sons. His father is chief of the Palm plantation, whilst the mother, to put it bluntly, guts chickens for a living. The sons work in the fields when not at the tiny village school, and their beautiful eight year old daughter is entrusted with the entirety of the housework. As I was soon to learn, each villager plays a significant role in the running of the co-operative, and I was expected to take my own responsibility in return for the welcome of this isolated community.
I awoke the next morning at what I would consider to be a reasonable time, covered in fresh mosquito bites (top travelling tip, use mosquito spray!). Ironically in considering the name of the village, the air was buzzing. Sound systems blasted Western and Latino music from even the humblest dwellings, dogs roamed the streets, and the clucks of hens radiated from every side of the house. However, the dwelling was entirely empty.
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My “reasonable” waking hour of 9 o clock was lagging behind the 5 o clock rise employed by the rest of the village, who rise early to avoid the scorching heat, and the daily afternoon downpour of the rainy season. I met my friends, who were weary eyed from a night of poor sleep (I had fared better, a testimony to my earplugs) and we ensued on a tour of the village. The village is largely self-sufficient, with an organic vegetable garden, animal farm, chicken area and an animal rescue centre. A further source of income, the eco-lodge at the centre of the village, had been damaged badly by a hurricane and El Silencio was visibly reeling in the loss of custom in the wake of this.
One of the greatest demonstrations I can offer of the ambitious and modern outlook of these generous people was found in my encounter with the chicken farm. As one of the only Spanish speakers in the group, I took the job of translator as we visited the site. It was one of the experiences I had felt most uneasy about, being of a squeamish nature, and as we approached the image of women and children washing pimply chicken carcasses appeared to confirm my worst fears. A pretty, weathered lady greeted us with a toothless smile. She explained to me how the women of the village had started up the chicken area, desperate to feel useful in the village and secure their own source of income. They had negotiated a deal with the nearest farm to buy day old chicks from them. These they raised to one month old, before slaughtering them, as she gesticulated by pointing to the bloody slab. Each week new chicks arrived, creating a ‘conveyor belt’ effect. Grinning proudly at us, she showed me an area of wasteland, and spoke of her dream to turn it into further chicken area, and for the farm to grow from 200 to 1000 chickens within the next five years. This would allow them the chance to export chicken meat and earn some extra money for the women. My perceptions were changed and I was incredibly humbled to see female solidarity blossoming even in such a traditionally machoistic society. The chickens provide a vital source of protein to compliment the fruit and vegetables that abound in the rich climate, and ultimately improve health prospects for the many children of the village. To consider that these previously downtrodden and housebound women had achieved so much in two years was inspiring beyond words. I offered our services; anything we could do to help during our stay, we would. The woman was delighted, and turned to me. “What we would like, more than anything,” she told me, gesturing towards the simple structure the woman used for shelter whilst preparing the chickens “is for you to paint the walls white for us.” The concept that so simple an action, in the face of their incredible endeavours, brought tears to my eyes.
The nature of the people of the village can best be captured in the children of the village, beautiful, dark haired and full of joy at everything around them. My most precious experience of this was through the children in the family with whom I lived. The youngest daughter proudly presented me with her colouring book on the first day I arrived, with every picture coloured over and over a hundred times. The children have few toys, but unlike wealthy children I met in the Costa Rican cities and children in the United Kingdom, are happy to content themselves with the simple things in life, using stones as marbles, and constantly indulging in imaginative play.
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They are safe to play in the street all night, and the tiny size of the village means that they can easily reach each others homes, with the phrase “it takes a whole village to raise a child” ringing true. They are friendly and very outgoing, always greeting you and trying to persuade you to teach them English, and showing none of the shyness of their older counterparts. One memorable manifestation of this was that on our third night they insisted to put on a show of Costa Rican dancing for us. Dressed in beautiful clothes for people who have so little, they danced with joy and pride in their national customs and, of course, insisted that we join in too. However, during my trip I saw a strange combination of innocence and experience. Whilst experiencing more liberty than children in the UK, they also experience more restrictions. They are expected to play their part and act like young adults, and the realities of life have to be accepted whilst they are young. I daily heard my eight year old ‘hermanita’ ask her mother how she chickens had killed that day, and woke up to see her doing the family washing and cooking.
My days in El Silencio were blissful, if physically challenging; for the first time I worked with my hands rather than with my mind. I felt a strange sense of liberation as I walked through the rainforest carrying a machete to chop trees for steps, or as a white-faced capuchin monkey hung from my neck as I washed its cage. Cultural differences, such as the boy who offered to kill a chicken for me to eat, holding it in my face, or the men who hacked a freshly slaughtered pig to pieces beside the school yard, may have been startling to deal with. I may have been laughed at by the villagers as I tried to pull out a root with my bare hands and was attacked by ants; I may have been the lucky recipient of an egg in my bed when a stray hen wandered into my room, and I may have lived off rice and beans for 15 meals straight, but to wake up every morning to a blue sky, and the exuberant warmth and generosity of El Silencio made it worth it. Even if only for a short time, I felt I was part of a real community.
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However I fear for the future of this tight knit community. Globalisation forces the multinational giants closer and closer to the village like a dark shadow. The intrusion of cheap imported goods would surely destroy the future of this idealistic co-operative society. I fear also for the children; whilst the more reticent adults may persist in resisting the modern world, the children are already caught in a cultural dilemma. They worship Western culture and ideals, desperate to get their hands on anything, whether a magazine page, a phrase of English, or anything which emulates the pop stars they dream of. Whilst most have never left the village, the adolescent boys bring back tales from the town of fashion, modern culture and what lies beyond the idyllic palm forests of the village. Girls have begun to realise that not all young women are expected to stay at home and have children, and even within the family I stayed with, the two eldest teenage daughters had run away to the more urban and tourist-packed Caribbean coast. As I left, my little “hermanita” looked at me with chocolate eyes and begged me, “Please let me come to England and stay with you one day.” For now the village stays a safe two hour (and very rocky) bus ride from the modern world, but as the cities expand outwards, I wonder how long the village will stay in its current state. This is one of the reasons I feel so privileged to have been able to visit El Silencio and experience some of the ideals it safeguards.
