My host father Rafa, let me go on another boat tour with Bahia Aventuras, this time a full day tour to Caño Island. After some cloudy skies, Thursday was sunny and clear – perfect weather for snorkeling and swimming at the island. On the boat I sat near the back next to our guide Reymer – it was great to see the GPS unit seeing some action when we spotted groups of dolphins and turtles next to the boat!
After 1.5 hours on the boat we arrived at Caño and got our snorkeling mask and fins on for the morning. The water was so clear and the reefs quite shallow – amazing fish swimming around from huge schools of Big Eyed Jacks to Angelfish and Pufferfish! We went to a second island – Violin Island for lunch and swimming at the beach. The beach on this island was so calm with almost no waves – beautiful to float and look up at the clouds!
I was on the tour with a large American family… they were very interested in my Gap Year adventures particularly how I ended up living and vounteering here in Bahia Ballena. I told them all about the Geoporter’s project and how we are sharing the GPS technologies within the community. One of the tourists saw Reymer using the GPS and asked if he was texting his girldfriend! He explained no it was a GPS and he was marking that we had seen a turtle swim past the boat. I see that an important component of the project is to also educate the tourists visiting Bahia about Geoporter and how we are using GPS technologies within the community.
At 3pm we arrived home safely after an awesome tour. Many thanks to Bahia Aventuras particularly Reymer for making the day so special!
Hola! Over the last weekend, we went to visit my host grandparents house in La Suiza (about 1 hours drive away from San Isidro). No it’s not really in Switzerland… just given that name because of its location high up in the mountains across the state border into the San Jose province.
On Saturday afternoon we hiked up the 10km road for 4 hours to their house. I brought a GPS along with me to record the trail which I have mapped on GIS below. The wet season began as we started climbing and it poured down rain so the steep dirt road became slippery mud! Finally the rain stopped halfway and we saw an amazing rainbow – so close you could almost touch it! We arrived at 7pm after the sunset at 6pm so walked the last hour by the natural moonlight – it was just beautiful.
My host father had driven 2 hours with the kids up for the visit so we all spent Sunday together. Being in a small village, it was a chance to see the Costa Rican Pura Vida (Pure Life). From hand-making tortillas, cooking on a wood-fire stove, having to boil water for showers and milking the family cow….. La Suiza is a paradise escape! Spending time visiting relatives and taking in the beauty surrounding us – saw a sloth hanging in the backyard, visited the local soccer field and watched the sunset over the mountains.
On Monday morning we began the hike home at 8:30am – the fog up in the mountains meant poor visibility again but when we got half-way down the sky cleared and we had amazing views out towards the ocean and of the whale tail! Today we hiked all the way from La Suiza to Bahia Ballena – 15km journey over 5.5 hours! It was amazing experience to visit relatives and celebrating Semana Santa with them.
Hasta Luego! But I’ll be back with more of my adventures soon!
Hola! Como Esta? (How are you?) Moi Bien. Puda Vida (I’m very good. Pure Life in Costa Rica). Busy week at Geoporters trying to get the quebradas (streams) in the town mapped before the wet season starts and before Semana Santa celebrations (Holy Week) begins on Friday.
On Tuesday morning, Amy, Luz, Jovino and I went mapping the quebradas again from Bahia’s historical house nearby the beach entrance through the outskirts of the town up to the main highway! It was interesting to see roads that cross straight through the stream, people who direct grey-water into the stream and the pollution from the supermarkets and shops along the highway. Of course we couldn’t help but have fun too; eating fresh papayas from a nearby tree and catching a small snake that I almost walked into!
On Wednesday Amy and I spent the whole day at Escuela Verde. In the morning I presented a PowerPoint and speech about Australia – the population, climate, geography, fauna and flora – to grades 4, 5 and 6. The students were very interested to learn about where I have come from and what its like to live there! In the afternoon, Amy and I continued our lesson with grade 5 students on using the computers to look at maps and understand populations and geography. The students are quickly picking up important computer skills – I feel really happy to have made an impact and taught them these new skills.
Thursday morning was the weekly basura (rubbish/ trash) collection in conjunction with Dolphin Tours. This week we had a smaller team but managed to collect all the way along La Forgata Road. This road runs along the outskirts of Bahia and although we saw many more cars driving along the road, there was much less trash than last weeks collection along Plias Chaman Road.
Friday marks the beginning of Semana Santa (Holy Week) where everyone in Costa Rica is on holidays for the Easter celebrations. I had a morning walk along Chaman beach to the whale tail and back home – beautiful view of the beach and clouds reflected in the water! Friday night, I went with Rafa (host father), Kendall (host brother) and Sofia (host sister) to watch the bull riding – a traditional celebration here in Costa Rica at the Festiva Civica (town festival).
This weekend we are planning to hike up the mountains to visit my host grandparents house…Asta Luego for today but I’ll be back with my hiking adventures later this week.
On Friday, we collected GPS waypoints and observations along the local creeks and rivers around the Bahia community. There were 6 of us split into 2 teams: Amy, Christian, Wayner then Luz, Jovino and I. Each group had 2 GPS units and cameras to take photo’s and observe the proximity of vegetation and houses to the waterways. The section we followed had many forks and bends making it difficult to map and understand the flow direction – I can see the importance of producing maps of the town’s water systems and better understand where the water flows during the annual wet season here in Costa Rica.
While I am volunteering, I am staying with a Costa Rican host family for the month – Rafa, Angie, Sofia and Kendall. Rafa (my host father) is the manager of Bahia Aventuras and on Saturday he offered for me to go on a full day boat tour out to the CorcovadoNational Park. From a tourist perspective, I can see why these boat tours are the towns major income generator – the wealth of both marine and land wildlife in the area are amazing and it’s special that the community will share it with tourists. From the Geoporter perspective, there are many future uses of GPS and GIS within the tours for instance mapping the birds, monkeys, sloths, snakes, lizard and frog locations within Corcovado or mapping other marine wildlife such as the dolphins we spotted so that their location is better understood and guides can predict where they will see these animals for other tours.
As Amy first said; It’s not just volunteering but voluntourism – there are plenty of opportunities to be a tourist and enjoy Costa Rica not just work the whole time. While I have only been here for a short while, I have experienced the beauty of Costa Rica to the full through swimming at the local UvitaRiver, visiting the local beach and walking along the famous whale tail formation or swimming at the waterfalls up in the nearby mountains. I can also see many uses for GPS and GIS in mapping these locations for other tourists to visit too!
Hasta Luego for now but I will be back next week to share more of my Costa Rican adventures!
Hola! My name is Fiona (I come from Australia) and I am here volunteering with Amy and the Geoporter Project for one month. Already a week has flown by yet it only feels like yesterday that I arrived in Bahia Ballena!
In my short time here I have experienced lots of action with an official tsunami watch from an 8.2 earthquake off the coast of Chile – this gave me huge insight to the risks of living along the coast like the town of Bahia but also to the response by the locals who are used to living in such a risk area. It is interesting that there is no official warning system such as sirens or alarms but only by word of mouth and facebook updates.
On Wednesday, Amy and I went up to Escuela Verde (a local bilingual school) to teach students how to use computers particularly the arcGIS program. It was amazing to see the positive response from the students to learning and also Amy’s enthusiasm in teaching GIS to the students. I can really see how the students are empowered by what they’re learning and the positive impacts this can have for future generations living in Bahia.
Thursday morning was the rubbish (excuse my Aussie terminology for trash) collection from 6am till 8am. We collected from the entrance to Playa Chaman all the way to the beach!! We had a team of 12 – my host brother Kendall came along and plotted the waypoints on the GPS while I stayed back and counted/sorted the trash with Luz, Jovino and Wayner. From this collection I noticed that A) the rubbish was mostly concentrated close to the main highway and around houses/ restaurants along the road and B) the rubbish was mainly related to food (drink bottles/ cans and food wrappers) or to cigarette use.
If you purchase anything from Amazon, you can now donate 0.5% of the cost of each eligible purchase to Geoporter, at no additional cost to you. Recently, Amazon unveiled Amazon Smile, a simple and automatic way for you to support Geoporter, or your favorite non-profit organization, every time you shop. When you shop at smile.amazon.com, you’ll find the exact same low prices, vast selection, and convenient shopping experience as Amazon.com, with the added bonus that Amazon will donate a portion of the purchase price to Geoporter to help us continue to train and educate community members to use GIS and GPS to map resources and issues impacting their lives.
It’s that easy. Simply go to Amazon Smile and type in “GEOPORTER” as your charity. Then, each time you’re ready to shop, go to Smile.Amazon.com instead of Amazon.com and your donation will be automatically made. You can learn more about Amazon Smile here.
Geoporter appreciates all your support in helping residents understand their communities through mapping! Happy Smiling!
Students from Escuela La Flor de Bahia help their school earn its first Bandera Azul (Blue Flag). Students is grades two through six (2-6) worked with Geoporter and community volunteers weekly for seven weeks to work on its waste management initiative. As such, students participated by mapping and collecting trash on school grounds, the adjoining soccer field, and street in front of their school. Quickly picking up on how to use GPS units, the students were off and running, collecting and recording the locations of where they picked up trash. They then downloaded their GPS points, creating their very own School Trash Map.
The data the students collected was sent into the Bandera Azul program along with other school identified initiatives that include: water management, risk management, environmental education, status of health services, promoting clean spaces, developing an integrated waste management plan and energy. Before April of 2014, Escuela La Flor de Bahia will celebrate by raising its first blue flag on school grounds as part of the Bandera Azul program.
Back in March 2013, we received a seed grant from the Pollination Project for $1,000 to support the creation of our Geospatial Technology Lab. The lab enabled us to offer trainings to residents here in Bahia Ballena at different locations around town and into Escuela Verde and Escuela La Flor de Bahia. At the end of the year, the Pollination Project was seeking input from their first year’s daily-awarded grant recipients to reflect on how the Pollination Project has helped seed change in the world. Geoporter responded with The Pura Vida of the Pollination Project: The Costa Rica Geoporter Story.
Our summary of how our Pollination Project award made a difference was selected as one of 10 incredible impact stories. Being selected rewarded Geoporter with an additional $500 award which we will use to support the expansion of our geospatial technology lab and highlighting Geoporter in the Huffington Post.
While the article highlights one person, we at Geoporter know that without all the community volunteers and everyone involved in this project, we wouldn’t be where we are today and making the impacts that we are. So thank you to all those involved in Geoporter!
What a year 2013 has been. We ended the year with news that Geoporter received official recognition from the U.S. Federal Government for our Non-Profit Status. That means we are officially a non-profit or a 501(C)3. This status is retroactive back to November 12, 2012. This is exciting news as we move Geoporter forward, making a difference in communities through education and maps.
Humpback whales from northern and southern migrations in the Pacific Ocean travel every winter to the breeding grounds near the equator. These humpback whales now have a breeding environment off the coast of Costa Rica that is less polluted than it was a year ago, before The Pollination Project seeded Bahia Ballena.
Bahia Ballena is a small coastal community with 3,000+ residents that has transitioned from a rural fishing village to one that brings in more than 20,000 tourists annually to see these magnificent creatures in their natural breeding grounds. Over the past year, residents of Bahia Ballena have been using GPS units and computers with GIS (computer mapping and analysis software), that were purchased with support from The Pollination Project, to improve the environment of their community and the habitat of the whales that call the ocean waters home for about four months every year.
This geospatial travel lab of four GPS units, rechargeable batteries and two computers has enabled Geoporter to train and educate community members to use these technologies to investigate their community. Over five months residents, including youth, categorized and mapped trash along the streets and beaches in town. After the 6 am Friday morning trash classification activities, key residents and leaders gathered to review the trash maps, created by residents, to examine concentrations of trash and identify new locations to place trash and recycling containers. By going door to door, residents collected enough money from ten companies and organizations in town to build and construct eight new trash and recycling centers with roofs to protect from the daily rains.
Residents know that placing these trash cans is not the final solution to eliminating trash in the streets and beaches and protecting the marine habitat, but rather there needs to be a behavioral shift in the people. With this in mind, residents and the resident Geoporter in town shared the GPS and GIS technologies with students in the local elementary school. Students learned how to use the technologies while also understanding their role in creating and eliminating trash in the streets. Using the trash map created from data collected by the students, the director of the school was recently informed that the school earned its first Blue Flag as part of the Bandera Azul program. Bandera Azul is a national program designed to recognize schools, communities, organizations that develop and implement environmentally friendly practices by balancing conservation, development and protection of natural resources.
With the new trash and recycling centers placed in the ground at the end of October, residents are now preparing for another high season of tourists and mapping the streets and beaches again to see if the new trash centers have made an impact in the amount of debris in the streets. With over 128 cm (50 in) of annual rainfall, it doesn’t take long for the trash in the streets to make the 2 km journey to the ocean and the winter breading grounds of humpback whales in Marino Ballena National Park. But trash isn’t the only thing residents are concerned about. They also want to know when the whales are arriving, where they can be spotted in the ocean and the departure dates so they can help protect the whales and their habitat. Guides and captains from different Tour Companies are using these technologies to map the daily humpback whale sightings during the different migration seasons which will help them understand the whale patterns today as well to see changes in whale numbers, location, and arrival and departure dates in the future.
Without the support of The Pollination Project, Geoporter would have been without the geospatial travel lab to take to different locations to train and educate community members to apply the technologies and carry out projects themselves. The application of these technologies has earned national news recognition with two articles being published in La Nación, one of the national newspapers in Costa Rica, about residents using GPS and GIS in to map trash and monitor whales. Residents of Bahia Ballena along with Geoporter are grateful for this support and have had the opportunity to take this travel lab to other nearby communities to share ideas and help support other communities to start learning how to use GPS and GIS. With these seed funds, Geoporter applied for and recently received its 501(c)3 status in the U.S. to continue educating communities around the world to learn to use these technologies for themselves to investigate their community and make the change they wish to see in the world. Thank you for pollinating our project and helping us get started on our dream to change the world through education with GIS and GPS!
We currently have an IndieGoGo Project to help raise funds to continue this project. Won’t you help us continue to make a difference.
