#green program

Help me achieve my dream to study abroad in Peru with Green Program! Please share the GOFUNDME campaign.

Hiked thru Iceland today w the Green Program.

With our capstone projects over and all of the site visits completed, we headed west to the Pacific for some well-deserved beach time

8:45am: check out of San Louis and head onto the bus

noon: lunch (cheese fries, yes, finally!)

1pm: Check into hotel in Tamarindo

2pm: Conchal Beach - gah, this place was gorgeous see:upcoming posts

7pm: Pizza dinner with Kelly

9am: check out of JP's hotel

10am: service project at local grade school

noon: lunch on our own in Tilaran (with the language barrier, this proved more challenging than expected - I blurted out papas fritas to the poor fast food worker and pointed wildly at the menu and eventually got a basket of fries)

2pm: check in to hotel San Louis

8am: Hydro class

10am: Hydro tour

noon: lunch

- tour of restaurant's farm

- tour of hand-made house constructed completely from recycled materials

- visit Ever's house

5pm: Go to Frank's

- tour butterfly garden

- Frank cooks homemade meal!

8:30 am - Water Safari

11am - Las Pumas. wildlife rehabilitation center

noon - lunch

2pm - Taboga Sugar Cane Plant Visit

4pm - Ice cream (We were hungry and it was hot...also, ice cream)

6pm - Snacks (did we mention we were hungry?) and tour of Viggo's house

Once again I found myself being the seemingly anti-environmental asshole questioning skeptic. I am an environmentalist. But among other environmentalists, I am the critic.

Viggo's house was gorgeous - one story with large, open rooms - designed almost like you had never left the US suburbs. But obviously there were several glaring differences. His backyard looked out onto a beautiful, hilly, Costa Rican landscape. He had built the house himself, and local trees twisting from floor to ceiling had become integrated into the architecture. And he was entirely off the grid, thanks to a wind-turbine, a handful of solar panels, and lots of batteries.

My biggest issue? Being off the grid is not inherently "better" or "eco-friendly": you lose so much energy from charging and discharging batteries that it is normally much more efficient (and therefore sustainable) to hook your solar panels directly to the grid. My questioning brought out the reveal that he would have had to pay ICE for the power lines to his house.  At roughly $1million/mile, that's not cheap. Economics, I understand.

My second biggest issue (sort of spawned from the first)? It is so much more environmentally friendly (land footprint, CO2 emissions from driving, etc) to live in a city than taking up all this land in the middle of nowhere. Check yoselves, ex-pats.

As stubbornly opinionated as I am, I did really like the house. Viggo's former occupation was a chef in Norway with little formal education. He built he and his wife and children an amazing life. With no technical background, he built a house. He read up on how to do everything and learned the rest from trial and error. I can barely assemble a shelf from Walmart and he built a house. There must have been so much practical, seemingly mundane, but utterly fascinating knowledge that he had that I would have loved to absorb and add to my own projects. His anecdotes on wordplay and red tape, and meshing in with new cultures at the local bar were both hilarious and telling of his true nature and brilliance, despite the constant self-deflation that we were all smarter than him. I was torn at the message of if I can do this, everyone can - because no, not everyone can retire and build their own house in Costa Rica - but you can handle the scary unknown with a combination of giant leaps and baby steps.