Things are looking up!

Hi!

I'm going to start by thanking people other than my parents for commenting :-) It does make me happy to hear from people and know that you are enjoying hearing my stories.

Anyways, so lots has happened since yesterday (although lots may be relative considering the pace at which things move around here). The chances of us getting approval for our workshops before we leave seems to be getting less and less every day. So rather than wait around doing not a whole lot hoping to hear from the ministry of health, we have decided to start our own project to keep ourselves busy and be useful while we're here. At the moment it looks like we're going to be putting together some brochures intended to be distributed throughout the district in health education concerning things which the people working here at Bina Hill believe are not understood well enough. These include (barring some changes of course) the importance of cervical cancer screening, healthy pregnancies and/or nutrition and maybe something about the risk factors for liver cirrhosis. It's all in the early stages and therefore likely to change and evolve over the next month, but it's nice to finally have a goal and something to be working on that lets us feel like we're being of some use to the community. We're also going to be working with some women who specialize in the local language and culture to make sure it is culturally appropriate and has both english and the indiginous language spoken here on the brochure.

Moving on, adding my picture worked extremely easily yesterday so I've decided to be a bit more ambitious today. Here are a few pictures from when I was in Tortuguero.

This was the first time I saw the ocean while I was in Costa Rica and actually the only time I was on the Caribbean coast. I think this was the first day I was there, but the next day I actually went for a swim. Found out later that that wasn't the brightest of ideas as there are crocodiles and apparently sharks around. No wonder there was no one else swimming!

This is while I was on the canoe tour looking down one of the canals into the national park. All the canals were kind of like this and the further in you went the narrower they got. It was pretty cool!

Look, a bird! Sorry it's not the greatest quality, and I really have no idea what kind it is (although that day it seemed like everything we saw was some sort of heron, so that could be it), but I still think it's a pretty cool picture.

Here is a view of the village from my canoe. I wish I had taken more pictures of the village itself because it was pretty cool, but you sort of get a sense from this. No new buildings (except I guess the resorts which were all outside of town and very expensive to stay in) and all very quaint, but also sort of dilapidated and falling apart at the same time. No roads at all, just dirt paths to walk around in, and you could probably walk around the entire village in less than half an hour. This is the canal side of the village, the other side was limited by the beach.

That's it for today, I hope posting still works with a bunch of pictures!
Talk to you later,
Kaila