8 minute read
A Cooperative Effort in Paradise
By Bev Faxon
Before we went back to Costa Rica, I walked in my mind down the dirt roads into the heart of the small town of Samara. I walked past the wall of tiny orange blossoms, past the motorcycle repair shop where women sitting on a bench lean back against the wall, the young mother on her cell phone, the grandmother patting the baby’s back. I walked past Ahora Sí, past La Bohemia, past Cafe Maxou, past Mr. Pelican’s, past Colochos. I walked on the broken sidewalks, my eyes cast down for the ridges, the gaps. I heard the howler monkeys and the "buc-buc-bacoo" of the doves, and watched the children follow an iguana in the school yard.
Finally, I walked down the dirt alleyway, pocked with crab holes, lined with frayed green tarp woven through chain link fence, through the soft gray sand to the darker packed sand close to the waves, past pink shells like translucent rose petals, and the fishing pangas pulled up onto the beach, listing, paint peeling. I walked until I reached the Pacific.
When we do arrive, exactly a year since our last arrival, it is 9:30 at night, late for Samara, dark but warm—the warmth a sort of kindness. Ahora Sí, its bright blue walls painted with sprawling English aphorisms about peace, and love, and cats, is shuttered—piles of broken old wood where the hammocks swung. Lo Que Hay, with its tacos and its sparkly lights in the palms, its music and battered tables tilted on the sand, has closed down. Colochos has a new name—an incongruous Blue Malibu—and the tablecloths are now a smooth, deep cobalt. More than one vacant lot where people pitched empty coconut shells and monkeys ate mangos is now a construction site. Where last year police horses grazed across from the station, there is a parking lot, and a playground, and a public shower to rinse off sea sand. But the sidewalks are still broken, and walking in the dark, we can hear the waves breaking.
It’s been eight years since we first came to Samara, and since then we’ve missed only one annual trip— the year after the pandemic started. When we first came, the only chairs on the beach were scattered in front of low-slung beachfront bars and restaurants, and few people lounged on the beach at all. Everyone had a deep respect for the searing midday sun at nine degrees of latitude, for the restorative siesta. At least once a trip, the electricity went out for hours, and one year, we were told there would be no water available, in the whole town, the next day. Why we asked? But no one knew, they had just been told it would be so. We bought a big jug of water at the local Super, and the next day all the restaurants closed down.
Still, Samara was no longer a sleepy fishing village when I first visited it. People had come from all over the world and fallen in love with Samara, then schemed for a way to stay. They had opened Italian pasta places, French bakeries, Canadian-owned surf schools. They bought existing businesses, sometimes with nothing but a lease on the Costa Rican-owned land. But sometimes they bought the land as well. Even more people come to Samara these days, and many fall in love, and often they fall in love with what they see as opportunity.
Now chairs, tents, umbrellas, people stretch down the beach front. The noon hour is still slow, but if the tides are right, people are in the water all day long. The electricity is steady. The bathrooms in most restaurants are newly tiled and grouted, the sinks no
longer rimmed with orange rust. In the evenings, we jostle against others on the sidewalks—a parade to the sunset beach, and an exodus back again in the early evening equatorial darkness.
Before we even left home, I found myself wondering—do I belong in Samara? There are few places I know as well, few places where the texture of the land, of the uneven pavement, are so ingrained on my mind, in my heart. I wondered how you measure belonging, and I wondered if that measure matters. And I wondered too if my very question of belonging implies a desire for ownership. Is the desire to claim a place as somehow one’s own in itself a kind of accumulation, of consumption?
Can we simply belong in a place—have it be of grave and joyful import to us—without a semblance of possession?
I once saw a movie where the main character, having struggled with a ceaseless desire to have more, finally says to himself in wonder, “I can love the whole world without owning it.”
Bandaids, beer bottles, bits of battered boogie boards spattered on the beach—an alliterative scattering. One day we remember to take a bag with us for litter as we walk along the beach. We meet an entire crew of people doing the same thing. In truth, the beach is cleaner than it has been in the past, but small slices of plastic are still everywhere, and I can’t help but imagine them caught in the throats of sea creatures, tangled around bird wings, around turtle shells.
Despite the pounding of hammers and the cicadalike whines of drilling, despite the stark white mini condos springing up in vacant lots, the most dramatic changes are down by the shore, where the waves have deeply hollowed out the sand in front of the Treehouse Inn, making a small canyon where tourists once sat on towels, watching the surfers. A deep gully has formed along one edge of the boardwalk, itself only a few years old. Like so many places, the ocean seems to be rising; perhaps the carbon footprint of thousands of tourists flying to Samara is carrying Samara off to sea.
Yet there is also a symbiotic relationship between tourists and residents in places like Samara, and one that would take a great cultural shift to reapportion. During the pandemic, when all tourist trade shut down, people were deeply hurting. And hungry. Wendy, a Costa Rican massage therapist, helped to start a foundation called Samara Ayudando Samara (SAS)—Samara Helping Samara—to collect food. They found single mothers were among the largest and most affected groups—and it is mothers I see every day, walking the beach, waiting at bus stops, dressed in the polo shirts and capris of hotel cleaners and restaurant servers. SAS was tremendously effective in getting the town through a hard time. A portion of money donated came from people Wendy knew in the States.
Now, the non-profit SAS has taken on helping the local public school, in the heart of small Samara. Almost every one headed to the beach, passes by it daily—we see the children in their white shirts and dark pants or skirts playing on the cracked concrete of the courtyard—a battered ball and a hoop, but no swings or other equipment. As the restaurants have gotten shinier, and the beach chairs more abundant, the school has been left behind.
The school is entered into a lottery for funds from the Costa Rican government, but the very nature of a lottery means they may not be chosen, or may not be chosen for help for a long time—no guarantees with a system where the lottery has been described by SAS as a “waiting room with no resolution in sight.”
My partner and I have struggled to find small, nonintrusive, ways to contribute to the school. But, as outsiders, it is difficult to know what is effective, what is needed, and what is appropriate, so I was excited to learn that SAS, with permission of the Costa Rican Ministry of Education, is trying to address those needs. The needs are basic—the first SAS project is the outdated electrical system. I’ve seen the photos of the current wiring—they are worrisome.
I am grateful that the people of Samara have found a way to help the school, and grateful, that in their generous Costa Rican way, they have invited those of us who love this place, who hope to belong to this community, to join them. It makes me wonder about all those places that bring us joy—about how we might contribute to them in greater ways than by tipping well or even by being eco-conscious tourists. Imagine if, each time we were lucky enough to travel and become enchanted by a place, we found a way to contribute to some project or dream that the people of that place were pursuing? What a way to love the world, without trying to own it.
For more information about the SAS project to help the local school, and a way to contribute (if you have ever loved Samara, or perhaps a place like it), see: www.gofundme.com/f/samara-ayudando-samara-inspire-learning
