No trip to Costa Rica would be complete without spending a bunch of time waiting on the sidewalk outside the airport, so John (our construction advisor) and I decided to get that out of the way right away this time. Matt, our engineer, and his wife Katie were delayed by about two hours flying in from Mexico.
At least we hoped it was only two hours. See, we didn’t have their flight number, so we weren’t sure if they were coming in at 12:10 a.m. or on another flight from Mexico at 1:30 a.m. We decided to call somebody in the U.S. who would know. Problem was, we didn’t have a phone card and there wasn’t anywhere around to buy one. I did, however, have a ton of Costa Rica’s enormous coins left over from my last trip. I pulled out a Ziploc bag full of them and started going to town.
John’s conversation lasted about two minutes. During that time, I’m fairly sure I pumped in about forty or fifty Costa Rican coins. We made it with a few seconds left. At least my backpack was lighter.
Anyway, we got Matt and Katie and crashed at the Casa Ridgway (a nice little hostel run by Quakers) before grabbing their rental car the next morning (they planned on continuing a tour of Latin America after helping us out) and heading to Talamanca.
It was pouring rain there, pounding on the tin roofs until you thought they would cave in, and then pounding harder.
We connected with Sebastian, a good comrade and a reliable riverboat pilot, and went up to Coroma the next morning, where a team built a bridge in July, in order to check up on things and show our new engineer our previous project. The bridge looked fantastic, but the community was extremely saddened about the recent death of a young man named Wilber, the community leader in charge of the bridge construction.
The next day (today), Sebastian went with us up to Soke, where we hope to assist the community in building a much-more needed bridge.
The span of river the Bribri have to cross at Soke looks more impressive every time you see it, and especially now, since heavy rains for the past few days have driven the water levels up. Matt and John were both somewhat stunned.
A previous bridge hung from 1996 until 2004, when it collapsed as seven families crossed. We went across the river in a small, shaky boat to look at the support on the other side. As we crossed, an 8-year-old boy walked on a three-cable bridge held together by vines some 30 feet above us. It was from that makeshift bridge that a 9-year-old girl fell to her death while walking to school last spring.
That bridge looked shaky and I had seen it before, but I didn’t realize how shaky until I elected to cross it going back. It wasn’t so bad at first, but out in the middle, with all three cables wobbling independently and the vines–the only things controlling the sway–spread 15 feet apart, I had to grip pretty darn hard just to stay on and I was wobbling all over the place. The 8-year-old boy who had crossed before, named Luis, sat on the shore on the opposite side laughing at me and cheering me on.
He’s our main customer. We want him to stay alive.
-Steve
