Sustainability and the Environment: "Not Too Young to Dye"

Finally back on the mainland of Central America, the adventurers found themselves once again cruising through the beautiful mountains and valleys of Costa Rica. Their destination was a cool place called Boruca, and it was an indigenous village where they were planning to learn about the friction between these indigenous communities and the attitude of progress in power and energy production. At one point, Boruca was intended to be flooded in order to create a Hydrothermal plant. That plan has now been revised and Boruca is safe, but there's another small town that's now in danger instead. But we'll learn about all of that a little later on.

The adventurers were excited to be heading up to Boruca because they knew that it had a lot of cool history and culture that they could learn from, so they were super psyched about that. 

On their long drive this day, the adventurers found themselves on a scenic coast, and they took the opportunity to remind themselves about the mangrove habitats they had left only that very morning. This was a coast that was ripe for mangroves, and had been crawling with them until fairly recently, when a couple resort hotels bought big sections of the beach and eliminated all of the mangroves to make room for the rich folks to swim.

As Texas Ranger from Talladega Nights would say, "Traaaagic..."

Yeah, it's gonna be hard for crocodiles to live in there 

After getting all bummed out about the destruction of mangrove habitats again, the adventurers took a quick dip in the beautiful ocean and then headed up the winding, winding, winding mountain roads to beautiful Boruca. Now one thing you may not know about this cool culture is that they have this tradition of making ornate, beautiful, and sometimes super terrifying masks. Back in the day, the indigenous people used these masks for ceremonies, which involved someone dressing up as a devil or a bull and fighting the brave members of the community. 

Over time, a lot of the Boruca culture began to be lost, but recent community members have begun the process of resurrecting their culture. As that culture has been retrieved, of course, it has evolved and changed a bit too. While these masks were at one point strictly for ceremony, the Boruca people now make a living off of the creation and sale of these masks, and they have branched out from the traditional style to incorporate the forms of jaguars and pumas into their designs. As the culture adapts to the changing world around it, it changes and evolves in order to survive. 

ALL OF THE LIGHTS MASKS

Now the adventurers were really excited about this geographically unique community and culture, and so they were super stoked to hear that they were going to get to do homestays for the two nights that they were here, and that way they would get to experience the culture first-hand and see what it was realllllly like. 

All the host families were super cool and friendly and happy to have these nice gringos hanging out with them, so it was a really swell time fore everyone. 

Eilish and Angela definitely have the coolest brother, don't you think? 

Now remember how we talked about how, back in the day, they were thinking about flooding Boruca and some other indigenous cultures in order to build a new Hydropower plant? Well don't worry, they're not gonna do that anymore. But do worry a little bit, because they're basically just gonna turn around and flood someplace else called Ceibo, which is a little community nearby. There's a proposed ICE project called the Diquis Project that would see the relocation of Ceibo and towns like it, and so the adventurers were pretty interested in learning about this proposed project. They would do a lot of learning about it in a few days, but for now they went up to a cool bridge to kind of get a visual. Adam and Karen pointed out and said, "You see this, everything the light touches; someday soon it might all be underwater..."

Don't worry, there weren't any cars coming 

The students knew they needed to get all the information they could on this project, so they went and talked to an old friend of Karen's who was working with ICE on the Diquis project. Even though he had gone over to the dark side, he was still super nice and helpful, and answered all of the questions the adventurers had. 

ICE understands that it's kind of a bummer to relocate entire communities against their will, but they see the implementation of green(er) energy as an end that justifies the means. We'll talk more about all of this stuff a little later on, but it's good to start kinda thinking about what your opinion is on this situation. 

The adventurers gain knowledge and resist the power of the dark side

After their little talk with the ICE Diquis folks, the adventurers headed back into Boruca to learn a little but more about this unique culture. They learned that Boruca is located in one of the poorest regions of Costa Rica, but they are definitely culturally rich. Boruca is in the crib of indigenous communities throughout Costa Rica, which means that a lot of these indigenous cultures originated here, and then spread out across the nation. 

As we already evidenced with those crazy masks, Boruca is a very artistic community, and one of the things that makes them so unique is the natural dyes that they create. Relying on knowledge from their ancestors, the women of Boruca have perfected the art of creating dyes from plants and flowers, and they support their families with the sale of small bags, blankets, and rugs made with their unique and colourful dyed materials. 

Since they asked real nicely, the adventurers were lucky enough to get a demonstration on how the women make the beautiful and natural dyes. 

Dan's memorizing the procedure so he can go home and be an entrepreneur 

Tessa's trying to figure out how all this white string got purple all of a sudden 

After the demo, the adventurers got to try the dying process out themselves, and they were pretty stoked about it, especially because the dyes were so colourful and they had a lot of white skin they could put it on.

Eilish, Chandler, and Rachel look like they're holding little orange brains 

 Eilish and Channy are ready for Coachella

Leah maybe trusted Adam a little too much on this one 

Natural dyes are pretty awesome, naturally 

Well the adventurers were all walking around going "Well this is cool, I wish we had some stuff to dye..." and then they remembered that they'd brought along a bunch of white t-shirts, and it was time to start tie-dying them!

[Note: while the photographer was tie-dying, local grom Esteben took over the camera duties, so all photo credits go to him.]

Erica, Meg, and the bottom half of Chandler love this sort of thing 

I suspect old Sammy boy is showing off somebody else's shirt and pretending that it's his

After they got themselves all riled up doing the tie-dye stuff, the adventurers realised that they really liked what these Boruca folks did with their creativity, and they said, "Hey, what else can we do to be Borucan?" 

So that's how they ended up painting these sweet masks:

A bohemian artist's collective somewhere in the Talamanca mountains
 

This one's gonna sell for about a million dollars 

A lot of the sweet masks turned out really good, and the adventurers set them out to dry and were excited to take them home with them. Hector and the photographer decided that their masks were pretty great, so they set them out on the table with the big masks to see if anybody wanted to buy them. Nobody did, but probably just because they figured they were too expensive. 

Boruca turned out to be a pretty righteous place, you know what I mean? If you ever want to get a glimpse at an ancient traditional culture in the midst of its resurrection, you should definitely go and check this rad place out.

The field trip was nearing its end. Stay tuned for the last few dispatches from the road. 

Emma's new best friend, Chuckles, in his natural habitat; her hair