When I arrived to Caribe Sur: Mel Baker

When did you first arrive to this area, why did you come, and what was it like when you got here?

When I arrived here in Costa Rica, I felt I was coming here as a refugee from development in the United States. I couldn’t take any more of what I was experiencing, all the rampant changes and insanity of subdivisions. So I got to Costa Rica basically looking for a place to .. well I didn’t plan to come here to live to tell you the truth. There was an opportunity to come here, and I took it. Again, never planned to stay but never decided to leave. I got here in November of 1974. I immediately started getting to know the place because I said, well, if I want to be anywhere I want to be a place where there’s no road. So, at that time I came here in a private plane with my partner. And we flew… like I looked around the map and the most remote areas were Golfito or the Osa peninsula and over here. So we flew to the beach in Golfito and I got out and I looked around and I said, “well this is pretty nice, but I don’t feel right.” Later I met some people from Cahuita. Americans who were living there. They invited me to come over so I trained over and visited.

And after a few days I realized this felt kind of like what I thought, because I grew up in a rural area in the U.S. and I liked rural life. And I said, “Well, this looks like an interesting place to hang out, let’s see what it’s like to live here”. So, after a bunch of delays, I finally came over to live here in May of ’75 because I had a partner that I met on the trip who was about to have a child and she didn’t have anyone to support her, so I stayed with her until she had her child, and then I had to get out of the city so I came over.

I lived in Cahuita, outside of Cahuita, for… I don’t know… couple years I guess, off and on. Because after I got my feet on the ground, started learning about the crops, chocolate, bananas, the whole nine yards; what people did for a living. And I got more and more comfortable with it and I was comfortable with the climate. A lot of rain, but it was okay. And so at one point I said, “It’s time to take another step,” so I bought a horse. And after getting used the horse, because I wasn’t ever used to horses much, I saddled up one day and I rode all the way to Gandoca.

There were no roads, except from Cahuita to Puerto Viejo there was a small gravel road. So, in that trip, I sorta got a view of what the land was as far as near the beach at least. There weren’t many roads going inland except to Bribri. So, after that trip I felt real comfortable with this particular spot. I don’t know why- the light- whatever it was.

So, I met a family here, the Brown family. Maria Brown who used to live here and Ernesto Creek. Well, actually when I met them, Ernesto was still alive. So, anyway, I don’t know if I was actually invited to stay with them or not but I ended up staying there for quite a while, just helping out with the farm. Whatever the guys wanted to do.Go fishing, we’d go fishing. whatever.

And so I got to know quite a few of the neighbors around here, and in the process the idea came, well I wonder if there is any land to buy. And it turns out a few years before I showed up there was a man who came through here, a North American I guess, and he was buying up everything he could find.

People weren’t into selling land much because they lived on cacao, right. And if you sell your cacao farm, basically you are saying “I’m not going to work anymore,” or “I don’t want to live” or something.

So I heard a few rumors that people might wanted to sell and they were false. But, finally, this little piece of land here was in the hands of a man who was working in the docks in Limón. He came one day to work his farm and I helped him out. We talked about it and he said, “oh no no no, I’ll never sell my land!” and I said, “Okay”.

So some days later he got in touch with me, and I don’t even know how because the communication was like “he said she said.” But, anyway, he let me know that he wanted to sell the land. So I went to Limón and met with him and we made a deal and so I bought it. And in those days the cost of land wasn’t so great, so the money I had could easily cover the cost. And I said, “Well that’s a small investment to see what life is going to be like.”

I got to work, at least I had an income. I had a little bit, almost two hectares of chocolate. Then I needed a house, there were no houses here. Seeing how things were done these days I bought a chainsaw and brought it here and thought, I wonder what you do with this thing now.

Of course the word got out quickly that I had a chainsaw and a guy came out of a bush and he said “You have a chainsaw, why don’t we go into business together?” So, we talked a bit. I didn’t know him from Adam, never met him. So I said, “Well, I guess I better make a deal with this guy if I’m going to get any wood coming for this house.” So I made a “papel de un colon” contract with him, I made it as formal looking as I could. Actually, he and I worked together for years.

Ended up sawing lumber for a whole lot of neighbors, and the only contract most bush people know is ‘a medias’. So, whatever we earned we shared it half and half. I was in charge of getting parts for the chainsaw. He did everything else. So in that manner as he would make the wood to build the house near the side there.

And, okay, why did I stay here?

Well, it met the criteria that it was without a road, there were maybe two or three vehicles in the whole zone and mainly it was for hauling chocolate from where it could be processed, well in some cases dried, and then got into the river or got into a boat or train. I don’t know what they did with it, but somehow they got it out of here. I felt good living in a place with no road. It wasn’t always easy, but it was always interesting. And that’s, to me, very important. I don’t find it interesting now to live around here.

And then the other thing I found really interesting was that it was a small community of like-minded people. Basically everybody was a cocao farmer, cocao and coconuts.

So, and, I didn’t find any trouble relating to people. I heard stories about other foreigners in the past that didn’t last very long, because they didn’t get along. Anyway, for whatever reason, I seemed to move pretty good with the people around here. We were often forced to help each other. Especially after monilia came in, the cacao plague. Because that didn’t take long in reaching everybody. It started from near Cahuita and worked it’s way down.

So by 1981 basically there was no more crop. Well, at least there were fruits but they didn’t make it to maturity. So we had to try other things. The cooperativa that was formed actually in ’78. It was barely getting its feet on the ground and all of the sudden we were like okay here, we’re a cacao crop but we don’t have any cacao.

And gradually, little by little, the big shots that started it kind of backed away from it. It got so that even I turned out to be a member of the board of directors. You could see how desperate they got. A few of us like George Hansel was on it and we would have to go to Cahuita for meetings. There were many of times we walked from here, crossing flooded rivers and whatever.

We’d get a bus to go to a meeting. Often the people who lived 200 yards away didn’t show up or showed up two hours late. Made us feel pretty useless. Finally, it just got to the point like why are we even doing this? Nothing was happening. We tried a lot of different things. One of the efforts we had was through a contact I had with Bill McLarney who was an ichthyologist who did his phD studying Gandoca.

When the monilia became very obvious it wasn’t going to go away I wrote him a letter, “just like you said the monoculture is falling on top of us. The monilia is fatal.” He had a contact, somebody that had contact with money, and we were able to get a grant to get the co-op to buy yam seed.

That looked good to me. I mean, anything that was something that could grow. On top of that it was something you could eat, if nothing else. It was amazing how many local people took seeds and didn’t even bothered to plant them, because they said no one would buy this stuff. Anyway, I planted it because I guess I was dumb, I don’t know.

I got a pretty good crop and I was one of the few people who hired boats and stuff to haul it out to sell it and got a chunk of money for it. Then all the sudden everybody became interested. But, as luck would have it, it started getting a disease in the leaves. So the second crop that came, or anything after the first one — it took a while for the fungus to say, ‘oh, here’s some new food’ or whatever, I don’t know — the succeeding crops did not turn out well, so we were back where we started. But it was a try. After that we had to almost give up because there was no other new thing to try.

Around early 80’s my friend Bill McLarney had bought a place in Gandoca. His main interest was basically to have a research center. He was interested in self-sufficiency like having tilapia ponds. He was an ichthyologist, he taught fish, right. He was doing different projects in Gandoca and one of the men that came down to work to keep the farm up and try to keep the projects going, because you have to keep with the people or they just kind of walk away from it. They’re really interested when you’re there with them but often they just walk away if you’re not.

James Lynch came down and worked for a while, trying different things to get people to have access to plants and bags for example, like fruit trees or something to get them doing something with the land. Anyway he realized that this isn’t working. The colegio and BriBri had the project there, people were not coming from bush to go get the plants.

I was part of an association called ANAI, and the next step was well if people can’t come to us, we got to go to the people. So he, I guess, more than anything, got projects and proposals together and got funding to start what they called community vivero, community nursery project.

We ended up having something like 23 different communities. In the indigenous reserve mostly, and there was one here in Cocles that didn’t have much local participation. I can’t explain why really. Again, it’s why we go into all this trouble. A tree takes forever to produce fruit.

Part of the idea was find something that will maybe stop people from going into cattle farming or cow raising and chop the forest down to starve to death with cows. I have to say in the indigenous reserve, it worked out quite well. Of course they can’t just always do what they want with the land, they have their governing body. But they accepted it really well and in many cases it helped to unite those communities because we would meet once a week to fill bags of dirt and plant seeds and talk about things. Sometimes after these meetings people would start meeting on their own, find they have common interests. Even to the extent that it reinforced their interest in the things they had been growing all along like the bananas and plátanos and that sort of thing.

Later on the idea of organic this, that and the other came in and it really helped reinforce the communities. Those that were working together, were stronger. I was really proud to have participated in that.

I guess I was involved with that for like 12 years, which meant being somewhere out there every day. Sometimes ten days a week. But, it was great, I enjoyed it.

Finally the project did about all it could. It was never designed to be forever because you hope at least that something gets on its feet can run by itself. It finished with the association called APPTA in BriBri, which was to be in charge of commercializing produce. I assume they’re still doing that, I haven’t visited them for quite a while.

That’s an important aspect — if you have your product, and you want to sell it, you are stuck with either giving it away or selling it to intermediate who is not going to treat you fair. So the idea was to have an association that was of the farmers and they could decide who was going to be running it and how they were going to run it.

I assume it’s still going on. After faltering steps, of course, like everything else, it seemed like it had some good contacts with organic cacao and the organic bananas, exporting to companies…

Where did that leave me? Well after the project stopped with ANAI I said, “Ah, at last! I can go back to my farm!” I think it was about two weeks into my new life, or back to my old life so to speak, that I accompanied a group of law students to Gandoca. I was wearing river boots from way early in the morning to way past midnight that day, and somewhere along the line I got an infection in one of my feet.

So I was out of commission for like a month or something. I was like, “Uh oh, my savings are dwindling and I still don’t have anything on the farm I could really live on.” Even though I tried to plant some of the same trees we were sharing out in the communities. So since I hadn’t been working. Well, as long as I was working with ANAI, I didn’t have much time for other activities.

I was a founding member of ATEC, because I believed you needed some community based thing to control what tourism was going to be doing in your community. I was a member, but just a member. I wasn’t part of anything. After I quit my other job I said, “Okay I’ll accept the position” they put me in as treasurer. I’m not exactly designed for those kind of things, but I accepted it. Within a short time the man who was the manager got a better deal from World Wildlife and he left and so I felt like it was my responsibility as treasurer to somehow cover what was supposed to be done.

Little by little, first working for free, just to keep it going. I think we just had one person working at that time. Then afterwards a woman had been working with us, a local woman, Damaris Patterson. She also was finished with her project so she became interested in what was going on there and she lived right next door to the office. Little by little she sort of took over running things which I was grateful for. But, then she decided to get married and go off to, Switzerland, was it? I think so.

So, again, I came out of retirement. I took over running the ATEC office for seven years. I never imagined I would be doing anything like that. It was challenging but I kept it going, started the first internet access here in the community, about ‘92 or ‘93, something like that. No, ‘93 maybe. I can’t remember dates that well.

At that time they did not have digital lines, they had analog. I don’t know if you can imagine what it’s like to use analog for internet. Apparently it was needed because people would use it and so I was able to make a little income more for the office. I had to charge like $6 an hour or something because it was so expensive, and so slow! People really used it because they really wanted to or, I don’t know. Anyway, so we kept going with that.

We also managed to get a fax machine. So we ended up being like the center of activity. We also took over the post office from the police station which wasn’t exactly doing a great job. We had a phone line that was administrated, meaning people would come to make phone calls and you had to have somebody there to make the call for them. The obligation with ICE was that we had to have it functioning something like ten hours a day. We had to have two shifts of workers, at least. So we got like, okay, we’re big time now, we have like three people working in this office.

One of the reasons we existed when we started was mostly because Damaris insisted that we have to have school supplies for kids all year round. So that was one of our unwritten laws that we were always going to have school supplies available for the kids here. We tried to help the school as much as possible.

Photocopies…that was our other thing. We had a photocopy machine. So these were sort of our guidelines and so we, well… Damaris actually had met a guy who was selling postcards. And she consulted me and said what do you think? I said, “Whatever, try it”, so she started selling postcards. You know, another five cents here and ten cents here just to pay the budget and pay the rent and all the other things you end up owing, light bills and that sort of thing. Well somehow we kept going and going and going and I guess they’re still going even they’ve had some hard times.

I must say it isn’t often you see an association that lasts that long around here. It was founded in 1990 or something like that.