Ahhhhh. Hello, Sunday.

Posted on by stanleyobando

This week, today really is Sunday, in every sense of the word.

In San José, Costa Rica, the sun is shining brightly after a week of heavy rains. In many communities around the country, that sun is shining on destruction, landslides and flooded homes (read more from El Colectivo 506, including relief effort links, here). So the work continues. But thank you, sun.

In the United States, events took place over the past five days that allowed my daughter to watch the first female vice president in U.S. history to take to the stage last night in a fierce white suit. My daughter dressed up in her Wonder Woman costume for the occasion and waved a flag she had made with the names of Joe Biden and his two dogs, Major and Champ. The work continues. But thank you, U.S. voters, poll workers, campaign volunteers.

At El Colectivo 506, we’ve raised nearly $10,000 thus far to help us start a new media organization that’s journalist-owned, community-driven and woman-powered. We’ve got a lot more road to traverse (read more here). But thank you, every last person who has given us a donation, words of encouragement, ideas during these critical early weeks.

Are you taking a deep breath today? If not, you should. If so, take another one. Shake your booty. Raise a glass. We’ve earned it. We’ll need it. We deserve it.

Featured image by Creatista via Shutterstock.

I run the virtual volunteer community Costa Rica Corps and am the co-founder of the new, bilingual media organization El Colectivo 506. I also work as a freelance grantwriter, fundraiser, and communications coach, and write essays, articles and books. I live in San José with my husband and daughter. Sign up at top right to receive an essay in your inbox each Sunday morning: a chance to dominguear together (a lovely word that literally means, “to Sunday,” and describes a leisurely trip or ramble). We’ll explore a project, changemaker, community, or idea I’ve come across, or just watch the world go by. See you next Sunday!

 

Women who put my 2020 in perspective

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We’ve all got a lot on our minds on this particular Sunday. If you’ve even had the mental energy to click “open” on this email, I salute you. But I’m writing this post to share an experience that, while very connected to the difficulties of life today, really helped me take a breath and put some of the challenges of 2020 in perspective.

Earlier this year, I won a Creative Grant from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Culture to carry out interviews with women in San Josés comunidades urbanomarginales. These low-income communities can range from neighborhoods that look fairly standard for San José, to tin-roofed shantytowns, often built along riverbanks or other unsafe terrain. I wanted to ask women about their experiences during the pandemic, how they’ve gotten through it, and how they think these crises could be better handled.

Our conversations reminded me that, while certain moments in history can have a huge impact for years to come, there is also a continuum of injustice and justice, weariness and energy, selfishness and generosity that began long before any of us were born, and will continue on. The resilience of these women shows us how we can tip the scales towards goodness from wherever we are.

I hope to continue these interviews next year through El Colectivo 506, because I know I’ve only scratched the surface of the deep reserves of wisdom and knowledge that exists in these communities. I also hope that, today or at some point over the coming weeks, you’ll find a moment or two to skim these short reflections from Verónica, Corina, Elizabeth, Sara, Yamileth, and Berlín. You can see them all at https://medium.com/five-questions-2020/. 

Wishing all these women, and all of us, fortitude during the days ahead.

I run the virtual volunteer community Costa Rica Corps and am the co-founder of the new, bilingual media organization El Colectivo 506. I also work as a freelance grantwriter, fundraiser, and communications coach, and write essays, articles and books. I live in San José with my husband and daughter. Sign up at top right to receive an essay in your inbox each Sunday morning: a chance to dominguear together (a lovely word that literally means, “to Sunday,” and describes a leisurely trip or ramble). We’ll explore a project, changemaker, community, or idea I’ve come across, or just watch the world go by. See you next Sunday!

 

You can go home again

Posted on by stanleyobando

This week my “Sunday ramble” happened on a Wednesday. That’s when I wrote for El Colectivo 506 about a story I am beyond excited to write in early 2021: the continuation, 15 years later, of an education series I reported in 2006 with photographer colleague and friend Mónica Quesada.

I have a terrible memory, but I remember reporting that series so clearly. The sheer noise level in the school in La Carpio, where the classroom walls seemed thin as paper. The shortness of the school day in the small town of Pacayas. The surprising conversations I had with teachers and principals, kids and parents.

I’d proposed the series to my editor, hoping that by not only visiting three very different schools, but also trailing three second-graders throughout the day, I’d get insight into the public education system’s inequalities. Short answer: I did. And now, Mónica and I are planning to revisit the series and its featured communities to learn how the past 15 years, and the COVID-19 crisis, have treated them.

Riding home from school with Steven in 2006. Photo by Mónica Quesada.

Here’s more from El Colectivo 506:

THIS WEEK IN OUR NEWSROOM: an article 15 years in the making. (ESP en el post de abajo.)

How can we help Costa Rica’s young people emerge from the COVID-19 crisis? What is the path, in 2020, towards quality education in Costa Rica? At El Colectivo 506, we believe that to plan the future, we need to understand the past. In February 2021, our journalists Katherine Stanley Obando and Mónica Quesada Cordero will return to the communities they got to know in 2004 when they spent various days following second-grade students in three very different contexts: public schools in downtown San José, the binational La Carpio community, and rural Pacayas de Cartago. Back then, we observed each student’s trip to and from school; the classes they received; and the challenges they faced, in the words of their teachers, parents and, of course, the kids themselves.

Now we want to return to these schools and find out what has changed in the past 15 years – and what hasn’t. We’ll explore how the crisis caused by COVID-19 has affected urban magnet, low-income urban, and rural schools in different ways. We want to ask children, teachers and parents how they think the country’s schools should move forward.

And of course, we will try to find Steven (in the photo), Greivin and Ariana, the children we met in 2006 and who know are 22 and 23 years old, to find out how the inequalities and particular characteristics we noticed in their elementary schools have affected the course of their lives.

Are you intrigued? Would you like to help us do this reporting, as well as other journalists who want to work with El Colectivo 506 to create the coverage of their dreams? Visit the link below and DONATE TODAY to a new, bilingual media organization that is community-based and journalist-owned. Photo by Mónica Quesada Cordero. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/el-colectivo-506-costa-rica-from-the-inside-out/x/24665235#/

elcolectivo506 #subasealcolectivo

How to not always be thinking

Posted on by stanleyobando

A few years ago, in a different world where we flew on planes and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other people in crowded airport bookstores, I picked up a little book called “How to Not Always Be Working” in Newark. It’s a slim treatise by the artist Marlee Grace about how many professionals today – creatives, in particular – blur the lines between their lives and their work, and need to find ways to carve out structure and space for themselves. As I recall, it cost $25, quite a lot for a volume not much bigger than those “50 Reasons I Love My Mom” gifts books on the counter. I had to buy it, though, because the title was irresistible. 

The year 2020 has brought many more of us into the fold that Grace describes. Because the pandemic vaporized so many of our everyday routines, anyone whose work takes place mostly in her head has now entered this privileged but bizarre no-man’s-land: a place where location and schedules are basically irrelevant, because your work life goes anywhere your brain goes. This is both freeing, and terrifying.

When we can build anything we like inside our heads, we can imagine, dream, and launch new projects like never before. In fact, every single project of my whole career has seemed to pop back up this year. People who, only months ago, seemed less accessible because they live in another state or country, can now be daily workmates. Projects that died because of geographic or financial constraints can now be reconfigured in a virtual world. Ideas that were in the “someday” category are now, because of this new freedom and also the gut-wrenching urgency of the world in 2020, front and center. 

The writers’ group, the volunteer corps, the reunions I’ve long pined for: I can now conjure them up on my screen. I can record a piece with my college choir and its other alumni around the world. I can watch my mother preach a sermon on a Sunday. 

I’ve run with it, spreading sunshine and positivity like a crazy person. I’ve churned out work plans and two-pagers and essays and grant proposals fundraising appeals and blog posts and sections of books, staying up late, waking up early, jolting wide awake in the middle of the night. I’ve been fueled by a relentless, anxious, wheel-spinning drive. I know it’s too much when I have a call with friends or coworkers where I am the least deflated, most chipper person on the line; I look into the weary faces gazing back at me and know that I’m cruising for another crash. We all crash, this year, again and again. How can we not? 

At the same time, how do we dare? Is there time to not always be working, right now?  Is there time to not always be thinking? Are these things we should even aspire to? Is there a way to find balance, or should we just forget about it altogether for the foreseeable future?

I sit at my desk in my the spare bedroom that is my mother’s when she is here, missing her. I look out on the hills of my neighborhood, the clouds moving quickly over them as they tend to do this high in the mountains, gray and white with little gaps of blue in the sky above. I think about the protests and roadblocks that have seized Costa Rica in recent weeks, these physical outbursts of grinding economic strain and inequality, causing violence and heartbreak and despair. I can hear my lonely seven-year-old daughter playing in the next room, making up stories about unicorns and mermaids as the countries that issued her passports are rocked by, respectively, creeping authoritarianism, racism, misogyny, brutality, depression, and waves of death; and economic near-collapse, hunger, protests, blockades, and the heartrending murders of women. 

I think about the illness and stress and income loss that has affected my small family nucleus this year, but in that same moment I contemplate green trees and flowering bushes outside my window and hear, under it all like a motor running day and night, the message that the list in my head is the list of a very fortunate person right now. This is just standard 2020 fare, lucky-as-hell edition.

I sit here and watch those clouds whisk by and wonder if I have done this whole thing wrong. Some people have rediscovered the beauty of nature, or the joy of working with their hands,or the simple connection of family. I seem to have gone in the other direction. Somehow, with all schedules and events blown away, everything has accelerated. A week passes in the blink of an eye. A weekend looks much like the week. My daughter has grown tall in this weird void, and much too wise. 

I don’t like sad or messy endings. I want so badly to tie this up with a nice red bow, to twist it towards a solution as I always do, pushed onward by that motor always running underneath. But somehow, mid-crash, it seems like something to avoid, at least for a day or two. It seems unjust to the weight in my belly and the ache in my heart. This is a moment when the clouds settle into the side of the hill; and they are heavy clouds, and sad; there is no rain today to purge us, just the waiting. It is not a day for sun.

And while it brings me great discomfort, I will try to let that be. 

I run the virtual volunteer community Costa Rica Corps and am the co-founder of the new, bilingual media organization El Colectivo 506. I also work as a freelance grantwriter, fundraiser, and communications coach, and write essays, articles and books. I live in San José with my husband and daughter. Sign up at top right to receive an essay in your inbox each Sunday morning: a chance to dominguear together (a lovely word that literally means, “to Sunday,” and describes a leisurely trip or ramble). We’ll explore a project, changemaker, community, or idea I’ve come across, or just watch the world go by. See you next Sunday!

What would the world be like if we all pulled together?

Posted on by stanleyobando

What would the future look like if all of our cities and towns used the global pandemic as a chance to pull together? How would the world change if we truly understood that we’ll all succeed, or we’ll all fail?

The community of Bijagua, Costa Rica, is showing us part of the answer. Its families have spent decades building an ecotourism industry that protects rainforest and wildlife in a critical biological corridor. Their latest effort, a new fundraising campaign, seeks to help those families keep food on their tables during the worst crisis Costa Rica’s tourism industry has ever faced. And it’s pursuing that goal with a relentless fairness, making sure each community member has a chance to chip in with whatever skills or resources they’ve got.

“The thing is, this crisis is like a river,” rural tourism entrepreneur Donald Varela told me a few months back. “Everyone in this town is standing on one side of it. And if we’re going to get to the other side, we’re going to have to cross that river together.”

As an old friend of Donald’s and his family’s, and in my role as an impromptu emergency fundraiser during the pandemic, I’d been proposing that Donald get some support for his extraordinary rainforest conservation project, Tapir Valley. His response, in effect, was: “Not without my whole community.” As president of the Río Celeste Chamber of Tourism (CATURI), he wanted to make sure that any emergency fundraising in Bijagua was shared equally, across the board.

This was, of course, the right approach. But given the intense strain every single rural entrepreneur has been under in Costa Rica since the total suspension of its tourism industry in March, I find that kind of solidarity rather breathtaking. “Solidario” is an essential adjective in Costa Rica, and one without an exact English translation; maybe there’s a reason for that. At any rate, it’s the adjective that describes every aspect of the campaign that the community launched this past week through the U.S. nonprofit Amigos of Costa Rica: Río Celeste Forest Stewards.

CATURI’s board and affiliates worked carefully for months to come up with a campaign that would benefit as many community members as possible. You might be familiar with the concept of payments for environmental services, where, for example, landowners who protect forest are paid by the acre. CATURI sought to do something similar in terms of rewarding local families for forest conservation, but without excluding anyone – without leaving anyone behind on the side of that river.

Large landowners receive the same amount as a family protecting a few acres of forest. That family receives the same support as a naturalist guide who’s helping monitor species (and essential activity to help sound early alarms on poaching or logging). If you don’t own any forest, and can’t do species monitoring, you can receive support for working to create a tribute to conservation at the heart of town. They’ve made sure there’s something for everyone.

To provide all this urgently needed support, they’re asking for U.S. tax-deductible donations on the Amigos of Costa Rica site. This support will keep a town afloat. It will send them a message that their hard work and sacrifices – their choice to protect their forests rather than turning a profit through logging, hunting or development – have been worth it. And it will help them continue to protect their ecosystems until the rest of us can visit them in person to enjoy them once more.

Throughout this terrible year, we’ve witnessed terrible acts of selfishness, recklessness, hatred, and divison. If we’re lucky, we have witnessed extraordinary acts of selflessness and teamwork. To me, the Río Celeste community’s approach to emergency fundraising is right at the top of that list. Despite each family’s individual suffering, they’ve kept their eye on the big picture. They’ve remembered that they must all cross this river together. That’s not just smart, and right, and realistic. It’s also the foundation for a whole new world, don’t you think?

I hope you’ll check out what they’re up to, here. Not just because they need and deserve our help – but also because the rest of us need and deserve this kind of inspiration.

What would the future look like if we all pulled together like Bijagua?

Let’s find out.

I run the virtual volunteer community Costa Rica Corps and am the co-founder of the new, bilingual media organization El Colectivo 506. I also work as a freelance grantwriter, fundraiser, and communications coach, and write essays, articles and books. I live in San José with my husband and daughter. Sign up at top right to receive an essay in your inbox each Sunday morning: a chance to dominguear together (a lovely word that literally means, “to Sunday,” and describes a leisurely trip or ramble). We’ll explore a project, changemaker, community, or idea I’ve come across, or just watch the world go by. See you next Sunday!

Welcome to Sunday rambles: domingueando

Posted on by stanleyobando

Why, hello there. It’s nice to see you. I thought that, as life turns a bit of a corner, I would take a moment to introduce myself.

I am unusually lucky in that, this month, the frenetic energy of the past year or two has started to settle. The frantic, perpetually-behind feeling of homeschool has relaxed into benign neglect; a million unrelated projects have converged into a few big ones; ongoing rage about what’s happening in my home country, the United States, grows every day, but there is at least plenty on my to-do list both there and here. Finally, my daily blog has stretched out into a weekly affair. I’m thinking of this space as “Domingueando,” that beautiful Spanish word for “Sunday-ing.” A relaxed drive or trip or stroll. A pleasant wander. A nap under a tree with a straw hat over your face. That kind of thing.

I hope that those of you who’ve had a daily coffee with me over the past year (a coffee that sometimes was served, cold and hastily, at 11:50 pm) will now pour a refill, or maybe a mimosa or a Bloody Mary, and join me on Sundays for a more leisurely conversation.

You can’t do that with a stranger, so here’s who I am in September 2020. I’m a 41-year-old writer, journalist, nonprofit jack-of-all-trades, mother of a seven-year-old who is obsessed with spies, and husband to the most mellow Costa Rican ever to dig into a plate of pinto. These days, I’m focusing in on three main projects. The first is the Costa Rica Corps, a virtual volunteer initiative I launched in April with two other intrepid old friends, Travis Bays and Ana Camacho; we match people who love Costa Rica and would like to donate their time and talent, with community organizations for online service. After some time spent treading water, I’m now gearing up for a 12-week push – with amazing support from Returned Peace Corps Volunteers – to create volunteer trainings and tools that will allow us to “reboot” the Corps in early 2021 and recruit virtual volunteers for specific tasks. Please follow along on our website, Facebook and Instagram, because there’s much more coming from this new initiative.

Second is El Colectivo 506, the new media organization I co-founded last week. It seeks to support in-depth, quality, “slow journalism” while also showcasing Costa Rica’s rural communities through a national directory. We’re trying to raise $15,000 by November 15th to get the party started and launch our website on Jan. 1, 2021. I wrote more about this here and hope you’ll follow us and get to know my intrepid co-founders and old friends Mónica Quesada and Pippa Kelly.

Third and finally, I’m a writer for hire… and for myself. I’m writing grant proposals, websites, and fundraising campaigns – both paid freelance gigs for people and organizations I admire, and work I donate to communities and organizations that need the help. (After all, I’m a Costa Rica Corps Virtual Volunteer, too.) And I’m writing freelance journalism, personal essays, and a pesky old pipe dream of a novel.

So, that’s me. Mucho gusto. As they write so elegantly in Spanish: Without anything else for the moment, I bid you farewell. I’d like to wish you a measure of peace this Sunday. An extra coffee. A spot of sun. I look forward to seeing you next week to rest, ponder, and dominguear.

Featured image by Rebeca Bolaños via Shutterstock. 

I run the virtual volunteer community Costa Rica Corps and am the co-founder of the new, bilingual media organization El Colectivo 506. I also work as a freelance grantwriter, fundraiser, and communications coach, and write essays, articles and books. I live in San José with my husband and daughter. Sign up (top right) to receive an essay in your inbox each Sunday morning, perfect a leisurely exploration of a project, changemaker, community, or idea I’ve come across.