The story of La Llorona, but not the one you know

Posted on by stanleyobando

It’s such a small stone for such a big name.

La Llorona: she who cries. A massive, creepy presence in our legends, in the minds of children up and down Latin America. The woman who drowned her own children, who walks the riverbanks ceaselessly, crying and crying. A powerful myth. A strong, loud wail.

But that Llorona has nothing to do with this shiny stone, selected long ago from the Santa Cruz mountains. The stone belongs to Melesia Villafuerte, and belonged to her mother before her. Like the indigenous people of Guanacaste for generations, Melesia and her mother have used a favorite stone to polish the rough sides of clay pots and vases and dishes into a high sheen: the famous pottery of Chorotega.

One day in Melesia’s youth, a boy in the neighborhood stole the stone. Melesia cried so hard and so long on the porch of her family’s Guanacaste home that, ashamed, the boy eventually returned it. She cried so hard and so long that, from that day on, the stone has been known as La Llorona.

Today, Melesia is 57, and La Llorona flies and gleams in her hand as she sits polishing pottery at Coopeguaytil, where women come together to make art. It shines from years of polishing and being polished in return, a give and take between clay and stone. It shines with the memory of Melesia’s tears the day it was taken from her, only to return. It shines almost like a river stone, plucked from the waters before it was too late.

As published today in El Colectivo 506. Image by Mayela López. Text by Katherine Stanley Obando, inspired by a story by Mayela López about the artisans of Guaitil, Guanacaste, published by El Colectivo 506. Our Sunday #MediaNaranja series collects short love stories with a Costa Rican connection: romances, friendships, love of humans, animals, things, places, ideas. To share your own ideas for stories to be featured in this space, write to us at katherine@elcolectivo506.com. 

The startup that lets you shop Costa Rican small businesseses – from anywhere

Posted on by stanleyobando

Last week I was thrilled to attend a presentation by the Costa Rican startup Local Keeps. Founded by Costa Rican-born Galit Flasterstein and her husband Eric Scharf, Local Keeps is an online store that allows small Costa Rican businesses to sell their wares to customers anywhere in the world.

I’ve interacted with a number of Costa Rican artisans and small business owners in the past and heard, “Ah, I’d love to sell online someday, but I have no idea how” – so I immediately understood that Local Keeps is filling a very necessary role for its “makers,” as it calls its product creators. Two of the makers joined Galit to speak to visitors from Travel with Ann and other students at Personalized Spanish in Trés Rios on Friday: natural cosmetics creator Adriana García and fruit jewelry genius Rosa Montealegre. Rosa is pictured below with her husband, Juan.

Yup, I said fruit jewelry, which has to be seen to be believed (and you can see it here): Rosa and her now 11-person team collect unsold fruit from farmer’s market and create incredible pieces from shaved mango seeds, dried banana slices and other things you could never have imagined as bright, gorgeous rings and necklaces. Meanwhile, Adriana, a one-woman show, whips up lotions and sugar scrubs that smell good enough to eat.

Galit explained that the mission of Local Keeps is not just to sell the work of these entrepreneurs, but also to help them grow. They give each entrepreneur a professional photo shoot and access to the resulting images, and are organizing regular get-togethers so that the companies can exchange ideas and receive support.

Going to the post office in Costa Rica is not exactly the easiest process, so I’ve often opted for U.S. online merchants when buying presents for someone back home – which is a shame, given the insane number of high-quality artisans and producers here in Costa Rica. It’s a relief to know I can just hop online and support them while getting the gift delivered anywhere. This post might sound like an infomercial, but that’s just how excited I am that someone is making this possible for Costa Rican microbusinesses and fans of Costa Rica from around the world! Thanks, Local Keeps. I can’t wait to see you grow.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

 

 

Day 61: I want to send you a boost in the mail!

Posted on by stanleyobando

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to send someone a Costa Rican care package – and that moment has arrived. I’ll send a little box of CR love to a Daily Boost reader next week! To my delight, three of my favorite local businesses jumped on board to make the package even more amazing: Santo Café, Alma Artesana and Holalola Travel Gifts.

I’ve gotten lots of messages over the years from from Ticos abroad who miss their country during the holidays or non-Ticos who wish they were here. I am excited to reconnect with some of those same people through this contest and meet others who love Costa Rica, so even if you yourself aren’t interested, I’ll hope you’ll share the contest anyway so we can welcome some new readers into the fold before the year is out. (You can also transfer your win to a friend if, say, you live in Costa Rica or are visiting soon and would rather someone else benefit. So come one, come all!)

To enter, simply:

1. Like the Daily Boost on Facebook or Instagram, if you haven’t already.

2. Like the post about this contest (from today, Monday, Dec. 9).

3. In the comments for that post, tag a friend who might like the Boost in general, and/or this contest in particular. (I’ll give you a bonus entry if, in that same comment, you tell me a little about one of your favorite Costa Rican holiday memories or experiences – sights, sounds, smells, treats, people you miss – so I can share them in a later post. But this is a bonus, not required. I have plenty of readers who have not yet set foot in Costa Rica!)

Note: If you follow the blog via email and refuse to be on Facebook or Instagram, I think you are awesome. Simply comment below to enter, and tell a friend another way.

This will close Weds. at midnight EST. On Thursday, Dec. 12, I will draw and announce the winner, and I’ll send a package to any address in the Americas. It includes:

  • Delicious coffee from Santo Café (which sources its beans from the award-winning coffee region of Los Santos)
  • A gorgeous Gallopin in the shape of the Costa Rican flag and a lovely dried-flower resin paperweight from Siempreviva (both Alma Artesana artisans)
  • A package of Holalola postcards featuring all seven provinces, plus her whimsical Christmas card
  • A signed copy of “Love in Translation: Letters to My Costa Rican Daughter,” because of course
  • Some traditional Costa Rican sweets, including a Tapita Navideña, Guayabitas, and a delicious box of rainbow Chocofrutas.
  • Plus Salsa Lizano. You gotta have it.

Help me bring a little Costa Rican fun to someone’s holiday – and thanks for reading this year!

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

 

Day 51: A parade for your Costa Rica bucket list

Posted on by stanleyobando

Holiday-wise, November brings some celebrations to Costa Rica from other climes: some people do celebrate Thanksgiving here, whether because of a U.S. relative or just a liking for the idea, and of course, Black Friday rears its ugly head with increasing vigor each year. But November is also the time for the most authentic Costa Rican tradition you can imagine – the Oxcart Parade, which fills the country’s biggest city with the pride of its countryside.

You need to see this spectacle for yourself. In case that’s not imminently feasible, I took lots of photos, as you can see. So did a gaggle of professional photographers, which, in fact, is part of the reason I have never attended this event in 15 years in Costa Rica: it’s across town on a Sunday morning, and I guess I’ve always figured I will see it in the paper the next day, expertly captured by the best. But oh, the sheer volume of cart after painstakingly painted cart, the faces of the impeccably coiffed girls and stoic old ladies riding high in their places of honor, the old man strumming his guitar and making every child on the sidewalk fist-bump him, the kids casually steer enormous bulls through the streets… it was an astonishing thing to witness.

And I probably would have missed it except for the Daily Boost, an entirely made-up obligation. Which taught me something. I kind of hate it when people say that what you put out into the world is what you get back, because even though they would hasten to say they don’t mean that you “earn” illness or injustice, that’s always how the statement hits me. In big ways, the statement is not true, because some people simply do not get what they deserve. But it can be true in small ways. If you love something and talk about it, an announcement in the paper about that very thing will catch your eye in a new way. If you decide that you are supposed to be a person who finds beauty around her, for no other reason than that you said so, you will find yourself in the middle of beauty more often.

So much of life, of what we see or miss, is determined by the tiniest breaths of air that blow us one way or another when we make a decision, when we balance on that tipping point between “meh” and “yes.” When we say out loud what we love and want to see, even if we only say it to ourselves, we make our own breeze. Not gusts of wind. Just the smallest puffs. But at the right moment, they can still change our course.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

 

 

Day 2: Our artists need us, and we need them

Posted on by stanleyobando

I practically swerved the car right off the road and up onto the sidewalk when I noticed the Alma Artesana Collective for the first time last month. (Not that this would have been particularly unusual behavior. Someone actually did this in my neighborhood a couple of weeks ago. With a city bus. Into a Chinese restaurant. No one was seriously hurt. But I digress.)

An oasis on a traffic-clogged intersection in Curridabat, Alma Artesana is jam-packed with the beautiful offerings of more than 40 artisans from all over Costa Rica, sharing space to defray costs. Their motto? “We don’t sell products – we sell stories.”

As someone who firmly believes that stories, especially true ones, can save us from just about anything, I took this slogan to heart and threw down the first challenge of my year of Costa Rica Daily Boost-ing. I hereby challenge myself to acquire more stories, to save more of my dollars for artists whose names and backgrounds I actually learn. As an introvert, I don’t tend to chat up artists even if I do buy straight from them at a street fair… and too often, it’s easier to buy gifts that benefit bigger companies. I want to change that. Today, art is such a source of not only solace, but also activism. Our artists are a big part of movements for change, and God knows it’s a hard trail to blaze, whether you are crafting political statements or cuddly unicorns (see below). And at a time when ugliness is so dominant – including, literally, in San José, where a new Legislative Assembly building that resembles a skyscraping bunker has been horrifying the nation alongside other, similarly grotesque towering travesties – we need to stand by our purveyors of beauty.

During the year ahead, I want say thank you to the artists and artisans around me by taking off my blinders and getting to know them wherever I can, especially when they are creating change through their art. When I can buy something from them, I will try to learn their stories so I can spotlight them here. Maybe in the process I’ll feel a little more connected to people in this city, which is something I yearn for – and I’ll see that connection whenever I look around my house.

Are you good about this? Are there a lot of stories in your home already? What’s a piece of art that’s been bringing you comfort lately? I’d love to hear about it or see it – and if you know any Costa Rican artists, please tag them or mention them here so I can follow up with them. (Check out Alma Artesana on Instagram or Facebook.)

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!