Ramblings of a Nomad

My mind doesn't seem to have a great capacity for personal memories. I can easily recall numbers, facts and information I have read, but it's a struggle to recall my own life experiences. For the sake of remembering this past year, I have been keeping track of the skills I have acquired while living on the road.

Here are the concrete items I have learned over a year of camping in the woods, living in RV's, working on organic farms and traveling through Central America. Some are shockingly useful (setting up a tent in the rain), while others are quite random (drip tape repair). But, I am a big believer in everything happening for a reason, so if the day ever comes that I am forced to repair drip tape to save the world, rest assured, we will all survive. 

• Dry herbs in the sun 
• Canning (salsa, green and red tomatoes, pickles) 
• Bake green tomato bread, carrot bread, jalepeño corn muffins 
• Operate a weed-wacker
• Hunt for mushrooms (identification, cleaning, cooking, eating)
• Chop wood for kindling 
• Properly stack wood, so it doesn't come tumbling down when a cat jumps on top of it
• Cook meals from scratch for 12 hungry WOOFers 
• Set up a tent in the rain
• Build a fire 
• Use power tools (angle grinder, screwdriver, compression driver)
• Install metal roofing onto a building 
• Drip tape repair 
• Buck up wood
• Operate a tractor
• Plant various vegetables 
• Tend a garlic patch 
  
• Clean a chicken coop 
• Compost 
• Weed every type of vegetable
• Work a farmer's market
• Fence repair
• Install row cover 
• Milk a goat
• Make goat cheese 
• Mix concrete 
• Hunt gophers 
• Thin onions
• Transplant seedlings 
• Plow a field with a big ole tractor
• Empty an RV's waste water
• Roast chile peppers
• Basic animal veterinary skills
• Make lefse 
• Herd sheep
• Citrus fruit care 
• Build a bio-digester 
  
• Make tortillas and empanadas from scratch 
• Improve my Spanish 
• Plan and teach English classes
• Plan and teach nutrition classes
• Bake anything in a toaster oven
• Distinguish between venomous and non-venomous snakes
• Debone a chicken
• Kill enormous spiders
• Shoo away huge, poisonous toads that hop into my bedroom
• Milk a cow 
• Haggle with Costa Rican vendors 
• Make animals out of pieces of grass
• Make rings from wire
• Create coffee bean jewelry 
• Harvest, dry, roast and grind coffee 
• Only go slightly crazy with 42 itchy bug bites covering my body
• Appreciate luke-warm showers, because they are better than ice cold showers
• Pick fleas off of Gabby 

It's amazing what can be accomplished in only a single year. I have omitted the countless, intangible life lessons that I have acquired while living this nomadic life because many of them are still rolling around in my mind and becoming a part of my core being. I will keep you posted, but I assure you they will only change me for the better. 

 Cheers to lifelong learning! 

Welcome to Fila Tigre

Alexa and I have attended church almost all of our lives. Mom would take us most Sundays, once she managed to drag us out of bed and plop us in the car. At church, we would sit in the pew and not so patiently count down the minutes until we were free to go. Sitting still for an hour was not something we were used to and we were always being told to play quietly with our bag of toys. After attending church in Fila Tigre, Costa Rica this morning, I have a brand new sense of how a church service can feel.

Our host family's church: Fuente de Paz (Bridge of Peace)

Yes, the service lasted over three hours. Yes, Alexa and I still had trouble sitting still during the last hour, but everything else about the service was loud and full of love. Church began around 9:30AM, but people trickled in until just before 10:00AM and not a single judgmental look was passed amongst church members highlighting their tardiness. I imagine the only thought that passed through their minds was excitement that they would have another voice to add to the singing. Not that they needed it, the entire church reverberated with music. Six people played different instruments in the front, one man led the singing, the little girls danced up and down the isles with streamers and the rest of the church swayed back and forth as they belted out the words to every song from memory. In every church service I have been to, the people with good voices sing the loudest and a singer's volume tends to decrease at an equal rate as their skill level. Which means that I usually lip sync or whisper the words. Not so in Fila Tigre, not a single person was shy about their voice, for better or worse. 

Passing babies around, singing songs and sweating! 

After an hour of singing and dancing, the sermon began with a prayer, a few tears and a lot of shouting. By this time, it was nearing in on the warmest part of the day and in a small church, 100 people heat up quickly. This was when a few members walked in with glasses of water for all of the old people that needed to cool off. Everything about the service revolved around it's members. Even though the sermon went on for two hours, it went on regardless of the noise of the church members. Children would get antsy and their parents would send them across the aisle to sit with a friend. Toddlers would start screaming and would be passed around the church until they quieted down. Babies would cry until someone made them laugh or fall asleep. The noise of the children was never an annoyance to anyone, the children were never sent to a quiet room where the parent had to listen to the service over a speaker. Children were expected to be quiet, but everyone knew that they were still just children, so their tears, laughter and screams were met with hugs and kisses.

The entire church was filled with the greatest sense of community that I have ever felt firsthand. It was a powerful and comfortable feeling. One day I hope to be part of a community that radiates with such love and support.

Walking Down Separate Paths (for 100 days)

As some of you know, Chase and I have decided to pursue slightly different goals over the next few months. Chase will be advancing his career by taking classes at a local college in Minnesota and selling art from his very own studio. I am currently writing to you from Costa Rica, where I am working on implementing a health program for the community of Fila Tigre. 

Chase has diverse artistic interests and is currently enrolled in Art History, Theater Production, Photography and Website Construction at Central Lakes College. With the opportunity to finally have an art space of his own, besides our tiny apartment dining room, he has rented a studio at the Franklin Arts Center. Stop by and see him sometime, he will woo you with his charm and you will likely come away with a one of a kind Chase Vreeland creation. Word spreads fast in a small town and Brainerd is no different, the local news station heard about Chase's talent and interviewed him in his studio last week. It is probably good that I am not in the same town as him right now, between attending school, creating props for the theater and working in his studio, he doesn't have time for much else in his life. With the glories of modern-day technologies, we are able to talk every day and keep up to date on one another's life.

I came down to Costa Rica to pursue an interest in health and food that has been growing over the past year. With the help of my sister, Alexa, who has been a volunteer for the past two years, we will attempt to improve the health of the Fila Tigre community. Fila Tigre is filled with 300 men, women and children who have become like family to Alexa. As her relationship with the community deepened, she heard from many people that diabetes, obesity and hypertension were spreading like wildfire and many were unsure how to stop the destruction. To me, it seemed like a chance to improve the current and future health of Fila Tigre, so I purchased a plane ticket and headed south. 

The bottom room is our home in Costa Rica, we all get excited when Lobo arrives with vegetables

Only a generation ago, Fila Tigre was a remote village in the southern mountains of Costa Rica. Families lived off of what the jungle provided by hunting and gathering the majority of their sustenance. While still remote in comparasion to the rest of Costa Rica, the influx of processed foods due to lower transportation costs, has drastically changed the eating habits of the community. Today, their meals are filled with refined carbohydrates, sugars, and fat. Processed food products are now conveniently available at the local pulpería, whereas vegetables are expensive and difficult to come by. Currently, vegetables are delivered in the back of a pickup truck by Lobo, who usually makes it to Fila Tigre once time each month. Fila Tigre has rich soil, plenty of water and the knowledge to grow vegetables, but their hillsides are filled with coffee plants. To provide for their families, many have chosen to grow coffee for cash than food for consumption. 

The men spend their days picking coffee or herding cattle through the mountains and the women are confined to cleaning their home and tending the children. Both are equally important, but the confines of a home drastically reduce the activity levels of the women and when combined with an unhealthy diet result in weight gain. With weight gain comes an increased risk for the infamous, non-communacable diseases of diabetes and heart disease. 

Our plan to improve the health of Fila Tigre involves the completion of three projects: 

1. Teach nutrition classes - stress the importance of eating vegetables every day and explain how sugary drinks, white rice and fatty meat can lead to weight gain. 
2. Develop regular walking groups - organize leaders in the community who can commit to leading walking groups on a regular basis. 
3. Build gardens for families - make it possible for families to eat vegetables right out of their own backyard, rather than waiting a month to buy produce. 

Diabetes and hypertension are two life-threatening conditions that are on the rise across Costa Rica. Both genetics and lifestyle influence a person's chances of becoming diabetic or hypertensive and while we cannot control genetics, we do have control over our diet and activity level. With a little education and a lot of hard work, we can decrease the chances of Fila Tigre becoming an unhealthy statistic of a developing nation.

Freshly picked coffee drying in the sun, the women of Fila Tigre learning to grow vegetables