July 18th, 2008 fmorgan
After living in Costa Rica for nearly 4 years, I am finding that I am turning bilingual. Not like Amy who can speak English and Spanish very well - I have enough problems with English. This is not to say that I can’t communicate well in Spanish, I do, it is just I mangle it at times.
When I say I am turning bilingual, I mean that there are words that between English and Spanish, I select the one from one language or the other, depending on the concept I am trying to express, even though they both, in theory, mean the same.
A good example is months of the year. July means hot, dusty, Fourth of July - grass dying, daylight until 9 pm, etc. Julio (Spanish for July) means planting seasons, mud, everything super green, well into the rainy season with no sign of dry for the next 6 months. If I say that it is July now, my brain gets seriously confused. Darkness here is at 6 pm and we have roughly 12 hours of daylight. That should be March, but no, it is too warm. Much easier for me to think, it is julio now.
Another word is nursery, as in our tree nursery. My family had nurseries in the USA, and a nursery is something with a plastic over it and a source of heat so you can start plants early while there is still threat of frost. Excuse me? Costa Rica doesn’t even use the word for frost, unless maybe it is referring to what builds up inside the freezer. What we have here is a vivero, where you put up shading material so that the new seedlings aren’t cooked by the sun, even during the rainy season. Also, since we tend to start the seedlings during the dry season, a water supply is important - and there is no need to worry about heat, except perhaps heat stroke!
One last example is when we are talking about measurements of wood. The standard measurement here is a pulgada cubica (cubic inch) which doesn’t mean a square inch like in English. It is 132 square inches. Usually, in the USA we are used to using board foot (BF), which is 144 square inches. The reason is that a pulgada cubica (usually just said pulgada) is 1 inch by 1 inch by 4 varas. What is a vara you say? It is 33 inches. So, 4 x 33 = 132. A curiosity is that they used to use varas for measuring land in Texas. So, I think readily in pulgadas now - which is a good thing because it is how you buy wood here. You can imagine the confusion when people first start dealing with wood here and someone says that it is 1 dollar per cubic inch!
Before we moved to Costa Rica, I was talking to a little girl whose parents were North American and Costa Rican. She had two sets of grandparents, one who was English speaking, the other who spoke Spanish. She was completely bilingual. Once while making conversation in Spanish, I asked her about her abuelos (grandparents) in California. She told me she had no abuelos in California, only grandparents. In her mind, the parents of her tico father were the only abuelos she had, the others where grandparents. At the time I was amazed, but now I am starting to understand.
Posted in Spanish, business in Costa Rica, communications, cultural adaptation, language learning, nursery, trees, wood | No Comments »
July 3rd, 2008 fmorgan
We use motorized brush cutters (weedwhackers) a lot in the farms. Pretty much all day long you hear them running. Here in Costa Rica, they are called motoguadañas, or motorized scythes. They even cut the grass on the lawns with them rather than using lawnmowers, because the lawns are not rolled smooth.
A motoguadaña here costs about 250,000 colones, or in 2008, 500 dollars. When they are used about 7 hours a day, you can expect them to survive about 2 years before they start to become more trouble than they are worth. Generally speaking, you have to clean the motoguadañas once a week (grease, clean, etc.) or they will deteriorate much more rapidly. The consumption of fuel for a day is about one gallon. That doesn’t sound like much, except down here that costs about 6 dollars now. The mixing oil is a bit more. A good operator can cut about 3,000 square meters a day, or a bit less than an acre.
All of this adds up when you have 750 acres or so. We cut the grass on every bit of the land around our trees once every two months for the first two years. After that, it is about every 6 months. The trees grow really fast in our part of Costa Rica, but so does everything else. You have to keep up with it or it will effect the final shape of the tree and their growth.
Before there were motoguadañas, there were guadañas, or scythes. After a lot of research, we decided that scythes might just make a good replacement for the motoguadañas. It is a bit hard to believe, but in the hand of a person who knows what they are doing, a scythe is actually faster and less work than a motoguadaña.
At least, that is the theory.
Yesterday, the scythes arrived. Since it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to get shipments here, I went ahead and ordered 13 of them. Since we can make our own snaths (the handles), I ordered 5 of them in different styles so we would have something to go by. We also got all the stuff to sharpen the blades.
To prepare people for the coming of the new and improved motoguadaña, I showed them a video of a young girl beating an operator of a motoguadaña in a contest. They were impressed, and of course, since it was a little girl (about 11 years old I believe), I am sure they are convinced they can do at least as well as she!
It appears to be true. Yesterday, I showed Ignacio, our gardener, the scythe. After I explained how it worked, he was off and running. He is convinced that with just a little time, it will be faster than a motoguadaña.
One really big advantage is that the women can use the scythes, whereas a motoguadaña (commercial size) is a bit much for the average sized Tica. Many of the women in the area would love to work clearing the grass but could not before. There isn’t a lot of work for the women in the area, so this opens up possibilities. One other benefit that I really didn’t expect is safety. You wouldn’t think a knife that is nearly a meter long would be safer - but motoguadañas throw a lot of debris and those who operate them often don’t consider this. The other safety issue is your hearing. The steady noise of a motoguadaña can’t be good for your long term hearing and it masks the sound of a snake as well.
So far, the scythe experiment is going very well, although there was a pretty startled look on the faces of the people working nearby when I walked out of my office holding a scythe for the first time, looking like the Grim Reaper…
Posted in campo, conservation, cultural adaptation, culture, importing, scythe, trees, wood | No Comments »