For most of the two weeks in Costa Rica, our ACE team stayed at Casa Tucan, a family-run lodge in the small community of Gandoca. The people there welcomed us like we were family and provided us with an amazing experience. Over the course of the trip, I really came to appreciate their way of life, their resilience to life’s challenges, and their passion for their community.
One of the days we were there, Kendall, one of the staff at Casa Tucan, gave us a presentation on Costa Rica’s history with cacao farming. What he told us was shocking to me. A few generations ago, cacao was a staple crop in Costa Rican agriculture. Cacao was so important that even cacao seeds were used as a currency. A majority of the agriculture in Costa Rica was small, local family-owned farms, and the main crop was cacao. But in the 1970s, this all changed when a disease spread throughout the cocoa farms, killing all the cacao crops. Coincidentally, a year later, the banana companies came in and bought up all the local cocoa farms and employed locals for cheap wages. Kendall says his parents’ generation remembers planes flying above their farms and spraying chemicals over their cacao farms, right before they all got diseased.
Listening to Kendall and witnessing the work being done by Casa Tucan gave me so much hope. This community chose to build itself up, despite all the hardship and injustice they faced. That kind of resilience and passion is something I’ll remember and be inspired by for a long time.
Despite their lives being completely altered over the last few decades, the Casa Tucan staff and Gandocan community have found ways to overcome it. Construction on Casa Tucan started in 2018, with the goals of sharing their culture and showing the youth in Gandoca that there are ways to make a living that don’t involve working on the banana plantations. Casa Tucan is very community-oriented. Much of the volunteering we did was centered around the community. For example, volunteer projects included setting up sports lessons for the local children, helping plant crops at a local organic farm, and harvesting cocoa seeds.
It was so inspiring to see the passion that the Casa Tucan staff have in working to build up their community. One thing that inspired me was their vision to bring back organic cacao farming to the region. They want to sell organic cacao to show other local farms in the region that organic cacao is a profitable alternative to planting bananas. The bananas that are planted are also so harmful to the environment because of the pesticides that are used to plant them and the plastic bags that are used to cover up the bananas.
Listening to Kendall and witnessing the work being done by Casa Tucan gave me so much hope. This community chose to build itself up, despite all the hardship and injustice they faced. That kind of resilience and passion is something I’ll remember and be inspired by for a long time.