Day 9 - A Photo You Took

This is one of my favorite photos that I took, mostly because being there was so awesome, and because there's actually a story and some personal growth behind it. I took it from a motor canoe that was taking us across this river in southeastern Costa Rica. We had to cross the river (and many smaller ones on foot) to get back and forth to a BriBrí villiage called Katsi where we were volunteering at this tiny middle school. The BriBrí are an indigenous group that live in that part of Costa Rica...the village we were in didn't even have a high school. But that's another story. This picture is about the bananas.

Every day on this river, workers spend all day transporting bananas by motor canoe from trucks on one side of the river to trucks on the other. If they had a bridge, they could just drive them straight across, but unfortunately that isn't really the government's priority. These bananas end up in our supermarkets, and we never really stop to think about what they've been through. But it's actually really cool that there's a whole story behind such seemingly trivial things as bananas. Or at least I think it's cool. Plus it was just amazing to see the way people live in rural parts of the world outside the U.S. - it's pretty intense having grown up the way I did to think that there are so many people who wash their clothes and bathe in the local river and can't imagine living any other way. Mr. Nardie, my AP Spanish teacher and one of the teachers on the trip, said that an indigenous boy once asked him about our local river, and when Mr. Nardie told him we didn't have one, he asked how we bathed. He couldn't even comprehend when Mr. Nardie attempted to explain showers to him. Basically, being in that part of Costa Rica was a perspective shock, which is one of the reasons I love experiencing other cultures so much.

Anyway, if you want to see more photos I took, check out my Flickr! Yay!