Thursday, December 18, 2014

La Negrita: Pilgrimage to Cartago, Paraíso, and Ujarrás

On 2 August 1635, a biracial girl whom myth calls Juana Pereira was collecting firewood in the forest when she discovered the small figure of the Virgin Mary standing on a rock by a stream. The statue was no larger than a doll and solid black. Juana took María home and placed her in a drawer wrapped in a cloth.

But the next day, she found the statue again in the woods, in the same place. Juana took her home again to discover the drawer was empty. On the third day, Juana brought the local priest, Alonso de Sandoval, and discovered the Virgin Mary once again in the woods. The priest took the statue back and placed her in a box. The next day, the priest discovered the statue had disappeared. So they went to the woods and found she was in her place again. They then brought her to the sanctuary to rest, but the following day, La Negrita, the little black one, had disappeared again. Once again, she was to be found in the forest.

So the people built her a fine basilica, the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in what is now Cartago in the Central Valley of Costa Rica.

In 1824, the Virgin was declared Costa Rica’s patron saint. La Negrita now resides on a gold, jewel-studded platform at the main altar in the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Cartago. Each 2 August, on the anniversary of the statuette’s miraculous discovery, pilgrims from every corner of the country (and beyond) walk from wherever they are to the basilica. Many of the penitent complete the last few hundred meters of the pilgrimage on their knees. This pilgrimage is called the Romería.

This year, I started seeing pilgrims walking toward Cartago several days before 2 August, and I felt the fever reach a pitch. On my way to a friend’s farewell party in Santa Ana, I was waiting for a ride in my town San Pedro, watching literally thousands of people walk past on foot. The Calle Principal, an extremely busy and important highway, was shut down due to the sheer volume of people. They were very quiet, unlike the crowds that filled the streets during the World Cup. Barely speaking, just walking in the dark. Some of them had been walking for a long time. I watched as a girl tripped and fell over a low fence and lay there, exhausted and dehydrated. Other romeros stopped to help her up and give her a drink.



The next day, I packed a light backpack with water and a change of clothes. I walked out my front door in San Pedro and started walking.



San José and where I live, San Pedro, are in the Central Valley of Costa Rica. Around 4,000 feet in elevation but surrounded by mountains far taller, the weather is perfect for a long walk, warm in the days giving way to cool at night, and August is smack in the middle of rainy season. It started spitting rain when I left, but then it stopped, and although the gray skies threatened rain all day, it was an empty promise. I left at 10:45 AM.



About 20 minutes later I met my friend in Curridabat and we started toward Cartago. We decided to stay off the main street and walk along the train tracks instead. The grade is gentle as Cartago is in the highlands, and the street was choked with pilgrims. And so we walked.

We walked under surly skies among green, green hills.


We greeted unicorns in disguise.



We wandered beside rambling coffee farms, the branches heavy with unripe coffee beans, shaded by rainbow eucalyptus.





We walked through town after town. Towns that charmed me with their warmth. Each one boasted at least enough flat ground carved out for a football pitch, the neighborhood boys kicking around the black and white football with abandon. We stopped at mini-supermercados and bought milk and cookies and bananas to snack on.

The train went by only once. Fortunately it was not while we were walking across one of the bridges.



I eventually started to feel tired and perhaps a little cranky. This was perhaps after walking about 20 kilometers, when I realized I had forgotten to eat anything. We rejoined the road and stopped by a small roadside tent and purchased tamales. We donned our coats, as it was cool and foggy in the mountain air, and unwrapped our tamales with glee. We doused them with salsa Lizano and devoured every bite. My humor restored, we went back to the train line and kept walking.




Just before sunset, we reached Cartago. The train line dumped us into an extremely impoverished neighborhood utterly devastated by litter, and we kept walking as the sky began to stain gold in the late evening light. We explored the ruins of Cartago first. Dozens, hundreds of people filled the town square.






Eventually we came upon the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in downtown Cartago. The sun was beginning to set and the plaza was packed with hundreds of thousands of people. Estimates put the number of supplicants between 800,000 and 2.5 million between 25 July and 2 August each year. I believe it.





As luck would have it, we found our way into the chapel at the commencement of some kind of ceremony, and La Negrita was being carried in her special glass case with her golden throne. I honestly wouldn’t have known it was her; she is so small and surrounded by so many loud and precious beauties. The faithful carried her out into the plaza to who knows where, and my friend and I walked out behind her to witness an understated rainy season sunset.




There she is!



We ducked into a seedy bar to have a small meal and stopped at a market before setting off again; it was full dark now, though the town still had the feel of an important day about it. We walked a ways until we could catch a short bus close to Paraíso. There we disembarked and walked another 40 minutes or so, mostly downhill in the pitch black through farmland, to a hostel that clung to the side of the mountain. The clouds were thick, but it was clear the view in the morning would be spectacular.

Spoiler alert: it WAS.



We let ourselves in around 10:30 PM and greeted the owner, who supplied us with home-brewed peach beer. We threw our things onto beds in the dorm under lurid paintings of superhero sloths and removed our shoes – having walked about 33 kilometers (20 miles). Meanwhile, a little boy wearing a cape zoomed around us. When I asked him what his name was, he said, “Power Ranger Mega Force ROJO!”




A campfire was lit that night and we sat beside it in the deep silence of the deep country.

The next morning my body protested movement. But eventually I pulled myself out of bed and took a shower and drank some fresh coffee. The view was indeed amazing.


We breakfasted and slowly prepared to leave. Power Ranger Rojo walked up to me and tapped me on my arm. I looked down to see him smiling shyly up at me, holding a tiny red flower in his hands. I exclaimed over it and put it in my hair. By the time I was waving goodbye, Power Ranger Rojo cried, “¿Dónde está la flor?” I stopped everything and waited for him to present me a new flower, as I had lost the old one, asked him for a little goodbye kiss on the cheek, and headed up the steep hill to the gate. Such a little Latin heartbreaker.


My friend and I walked away from town, down the mountain into the valley below. We cut through a workmen’s trail, barely usable for vehicles, though clearly it had been.





We walked all the way down into Ujarrás next to the Lago de Cachí, to see Costa Rica’s oldest standing church Nuestra Señora de la Limpia Concepción del Rescate de Ujarrás. It is a shell of a building now, originally built between 1651 and 1659. It is framed by tropical trees draped with Spanish moss, called barba de viejo or “old man’s beard.” It was beautiful, and the day was beginning to simmer with heat down in the valley.





Right and truly tired, my friend and I wandered into… honestly, I don’t recall the name of the town, just followed a road until we found a bus stop. We took a bus through Paraíso into Cartago, but it stopped and everyone was made to get off because there was a massive oxcart parade going through town and vehicles couldn’t get through.




We watched the parades and the weatherworn Tico cowboys for a while, and eventually got across to the main bus station. We caught the next bus to San José. We both fell immediately asleep for the ride back to the capital. My friend got off in Curridabat and I rode a tiny bit longer into San Pedro. I arrived at my gate just as it started to rain for the first time since I left.

Costa Rica is a complex and beautiful nation with a rich culture hidden from tourists under all the pura vida stuff.

We do live pura vida here, but it is not always in the way you might think.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Coming full circle

When I moved abroad over a year ago, I knew it was for keeps. I was deliberately changing my life. Over Thanksgiving, I went back to Tennessee to visit my old world for the first time. I am happy to report my mission has been a success.

Back in Tennessee, every person I ran into did a double-take upon catching sight of me. Although most of them have me on Facebook or Twitter or at least this blog, they couldn't believe this woman is the Jessie they knew. In a single glance, it is obvious I am very different. Most of them would say something along the lines of, “You look great!”

Some changes are superficial. I have lost 20 pounds. My hair is sun-bleached. My skin is toasted pancake-brown.

There are no words to say how great it was to cuddle these guys.

But other changes are both more subtle, and more powerful. I smile more. A lot more. I stand taller. I talk more freely, peppered with laughter. I am less reserved. I engage those who matter, and blithely ignore those who don’t. I don't react to negativity anymore. My energy is ALIVE. I have pulled a 180 in the best way.

Coming back to Tennessee made everything stand out for me. First, the darker comparisons:

The main reason I returned was to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of one of my dearest friends. I did catch myself slipping back into my old personality a couple times—somewhat peremptory and officious—when we needed to get everyone where they needed to be. I’m afraid I haven’t eradicated that side of me, although it’s the first time I’ve acted like that this year.



My little brother baited me, as always, spoiling for a fight. I pretended not to notice, and nothing happened. I used to react strongly to being treated that way, and end up in a nasty argument. Not so now. By the end, he was actually apologizing to me.

A girl who was supposed to be a good friend cut me off when I needed friendship the most, at the time I got divorced. I even reached out to her at the time, told her it hurt my feelings and I needed a friend, and she said she was “on a fence”—meaning had to choose between my ex and me. I worked very hard to ensure my friends weren’t put in that position, and she is the only one who felt the need to drop one of us, and she picked me to drop. Eventually she deleted me on Facebook. I’m no longer hurt by it, though I was for a long time, and when I saw her, I just kept my distance. I gave her the chance to make things right and she didn’t. But the beautiful thing is I did not then sink into depression and agonize over what I did wrong. She is not a good friend, so I’m well shot of her.

Speaking of my ex, he was at the wedding. We both pretended the other didn’t exist. He’s still with the girl he started dating before our divorce was even final. This doesn’t arouse jealousy or anger but rather pity, that he can’t be alone. He left his girlfriend of 7 years for me, so there is clearly a sad pattern here. He wears fake eyeglasses now, which was like a shining little gift to me. If I ever felt uncomfortable, which was only once, I simply said to myself, “Fake eyeglasses. FAKE eyeglasses!” I haven’t seen him since the divorce, and I wasn’t sure how I would feel seeing him. Thankfully the rage is gone, and the heartbreak too. I felt only bafflement that I could ever spend so much time in an emotionally abusive relationship with an unworthy man.

But otherwise, everything was highlighted for me in the limelight of positive change.

I attended a reunion of my KidLit writing group, and one of them (love you, Jamie) said, “JESSIE. I have never seen you write like THIS!”



I went to lunch with my former boss and mentor, and did a quick round around the old office, and you wouldn’t believe the reactions people had. Many of them hugged me. I was surprised at how many of them said they read this blog. (Hi, guys!)

I went to my favorite pub, McNamara’s, and something like 20 friends showed up to say hello. They played my favorite song, one that I feel was almost written about me called “Beeswing,” a Richard Thompson cover.

I danced like a loon with my little nephew in the aisles even though no one else was dancing. I used to be embarrassed about what a bad dancer I am. My ex once danced with me and 20 seconds into the song he said, “You’re really not good at this, are you?” Talk about hurt feelings! I never danced in public after that, until I moved to Costa Rica. Now, I am still a terrible dancer—I mean truly bad—but the difference is I do it anyway, with no shame or fear or embarrassment, just joy and abandon.



With most people, I was able to pick up right where we left off—sort of. I mean, I’m different for sure, and some of the things they talked about, I couldn’t truly relate to, and I know the feeling was mutual. But that wasn’t bad in any way. Just different. I sang Frank Turner’s “Four Simple Words” with one of my friends, bellowing it at the top of our lungs like old times. I had Greek gyros with another and we were able to talk together as if no time had passed. I went walking at Radnor Lake and the trails that used to get me a bit winded were easy-peasy, and the friends I hiked with and I laughed and chatted away.


It was absolutely amazing to see my mom. She and I are very close and used to hang out together almost every Sunday. I haven’t seen her in over a year other than Skype. She and I went walking back through her property through the fields and juniper woods, splashing through the creek and talking up a storm. We went to lunch, watched movies, cooked together, and thoroughly enjoyed her company. I’ve missed her a lot.


All summed up, going back to Tennessee for a week was good because it allowed me the ability to reflect. I’m so much better, so much happier than I was before. Sure, I still have plenty of flaws, and I’ll never ever be perfect. I still have lots of work to do in this journey of self-improvement. But I am glad at who I have become, where all this hard work has landed. Proud, even. This crazy step has been the best choice I could possibly make in my life.

And when my plane descended into Costa Rica beneath the cloud layer and San José appeared like a nest of golden fireflies in the velvety night, I was even gladder to be home. Because let’s face it. I didn’t “go home” for a week. I just visited the place where I used to live.

Costa Rica is my home.