La Carpio

While I currently am on somewhat of a vacation, as I have no class until November 5 when Conservation and Development begins, I have been keeping plenty busy with D.C. job and internship searches for the spring, and more than anything with advancing on the projects that I am coordinating in La Carpio with my UPEACE classmates.

I've been involved in La Carpio (a poor marginalized community outside San Jose, at the site of the national dump) since visiting it the first time with my Food Security class in January. A group of us from the class decided that we should follow up with the community after conducting interviews with a number of families who left quite an impression on us, due to their determination, spirit, and willingness to share their sometimes heart-breaking and often inspiring stories, and also for the extremely challenging conditions in which many of them lived, dealing with extreme poverty, lack of services, issues with migrant status, and the environmental hazards of being surrounded by two flood-prone rivers and a dump that receives over 700 tons of garbage a day. Since March we have been holding meetings with CODECA, La Carpio's community development council, with the goal of collaboratively developing a number of initiatives aimed at addressing some of the community's key issues, such as environment and health, stigmatization by the national media, and food security.

As the only student from that group remaining at UPEACE this semester, I have been working on getting together a group of motivated new students who want to commit to working in La Carpio throughout the academic year, and to advancing with the food and environmental security initiatives which are the projects that I am heading up. Having recently contacted an environmental consulting company that is very interesting in lending their services to our projects, and having finished writing a proposal for a grant that would fund much of our work over the next year, things are really starting to move along. Yet there is much work ahead...

In addition, I recently published an article on La Carpio as a paradigmatic case of the structural and cultural violence that exists in Costa Rica in UPEACE's Peace and Conflit Monitor.

Please check it out:

http://www.monitor.upeace.org/innerpg.cfm?id_article=547