22-01-06 The president of Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado, describes the country’s response to COVID as “el baile y el martillo,” the dance and the hammer. If infections are down and the population is being careful, everyone can dance and enjoy themselves. If infections rise, then down comes the hammer: curfews, capacity limits, closings, and such. Right now we are dancing. Though cases are rising here, they are nowhere near as high as the states we’ve left in the US. Here there is a mask mandate for both indoors and outdoors (and even in our chartered bus) and the vast majority of people wear masks. Only in restaurants while eating do the masks come off. Yes, it’s a nuisance, but the practice gives us a bit more confidence in our ability to travel in, learn about, and experience Costa Rica without COVID interrupting our course.
We are in San Jose, sampling the good food and picking up some background information on the causes and consequences of climate change, and mitigations and adaptations to it worldwide and, particularly, by Costa Rica. This morning we had a very nice presentation by three faculty at Veritas University (one of 54 private universities in San Jose; as our guide Raquel says, there’s no excuse for Costa Ricans to be uneducated given national support for education and all these nice universities!), a school that supports many semester- and summer-abroad programs for students from around the world. They, like most of the people we’ve met here, spoke good English. It was an inspirational call to be “stubborn optimists,” working to do what needs to be done.
Tomorrow we leave for Tortuguero on the humid Caribbean coast. Onward!