Elearning Help

“For years I fished commercial, living summers in Wailau Valley to work these windward waters. Sure, the kids went with me; they knew what they were getting into when we moved here.

“There’s too much hassle on the outside, too much dependency on nonessentials. Af­ter two years here, we’re eating better than most, harvesting what nature provides—fishes, goats, pigs, fruits from the forest. But we never take more than we need.”

The Kainoas and Joyce’s friend Mike have given nature quite a nudge. Behind their bluff-top house, carefully sited for compatibility with its surroundings, one and a half acres of terraced gardens bear the bounty of their industry: taros, cabbages, corn, beans, potatoes, squashes, sugarcane, wheat for flour, bananas, avocados, figs.

“No chemicals. We don’t know good bugs from bad bugs, so we don’t fight them. We just grow enough for everybody.”

Joyce occupies land to which she holds a title, but she has built her home without the necessary permits.

“If I waited for permits, we still wouldn’t have a roof over our heads. We’re more care­ful than regulations require about erosion, pollution, conservation, sanitation. After all, we’re the victims if we mess up.”

All the Kainoa youngsters respect and protect their environment, a lesson too few learn at any age. And their unorthodox edu­cation is more meaningful in many ways than standard schoolroom fare.

“I teach them all I know—reading, writ­ing, about plants and animals, about agri­culture, about what lives in the sea. They know our fish, recognize which to avoid for safety’s sake and when the ocean wants to be left alone.

“They’ve learned first aid and preventive medicine from a doctor friend of ours; also a bankruptcy lawyer who sometimes visits is giving them a continuing course in our legal sys­tem, vital knowledge for all Hawaiians who want to keep what little they have left. The kids know that they will be on the losing end if they play hooky in this household.”

Despite its evolving complexion, Guana­caste remains essentially what it has been for 150 years—cattle country. Here big ranch­ers are the social and economic elite, but they sense that they may be dinosaurs in the changing social order of Latin America. They worry that the leftist tide in neighbor­ing countries could lap into Costa Rica.

“There is a very large middle class in Costa Rica,” Alvaro Clachar told me at his El Real ranch at Liberia, where he produces more prize-winning Brahman breeding cat­tle than any similar enterprise in Central America.

“Because of that, the people don’t want Communism. But they really like some sort of socialism, and sometimes you don’t know where the border line is between the two. Is it pink? Red? Light pink, light red? Am I foolish in these times to devote so much money and effort to developing my ranch? I just don’t know.”

Seventy-one-year-old Alfonso Salazar, the weathered patriarch of a family that runs 10,000 head of cattle on 10,000 hect­ares, thinks the threat of Communism is real, but probably controllable.

“Somoza, a man I knew well but whose policies I disliked, was to blame for the left­ist government now in power in Nicaragua. He let conditions ripen to the point where Communism looked good to the poor peo­ple. Ripen is the word—and then he had to drop like a mature papaya!

“Here,” the rancher continued, “we think ahead; we are trying to take care of our poorer people, our campesinos. Still, I know that my kind is a target of Communist propaganda. And I recognize that my land­holdings are too pretentious for the tenden­cies of today. I already have everything I need. So I plan to sell off almost all my land. Maybe that will help my country avoid the excesses of the left. I hate Communism!”

In fact, Communism has only a small fol­lowing in Costa Rica, perhaps 35,000, many of them in the banana workers’ unions. And only 3 of the 57 members of the unicameral Legislative Assembly were elected on the Communist Party ticket—a representation almost unchanged from three decades ago.

“Your country is our guide,” rancher Sa­lazar explained. “We are within the orbit of the U. S.; we love it, and we emulate it. That is why we have what we have here—a living democracy, something out of this world!”

Yes, Costa Rica is special—not because of superlatives, but because of remarkable normalcy; not because it stands at the heights of achievement, but because it reso­lutely pursues them. Neither rich nor poor, large nor tiny, warlike nor pacifist, perfect nor fatally flawed, Costa Rica is, indeed, the land of the happy medium.