Flor Tagliatti

Costa Rica Day 7

 It’s already been seven days since our arrival in Costa Rica and so far it has been all pretty amazing. Today me and the rest of the group arrived in an indigenous community where we’ll be staying overnight. As soon as we arrived we ate lunch, and after resting for an hour we all went together on a tour where someone from the bribri community showed us where they live and some of the medicinals plants they grow. The bribri guide told us a beautiful story about the cacao plant and how it used to be a beautiful woman. The bribri guide also told us the story of their god (Sibu) and about their shaman which is someone who is one of the most important people in the bribri community. The last and more important thing the guide showed was this sacred conic house where he explained how the four levels of the house represent the four levels of the world.

I found all of their stories about life and after-life very interesting and very different from other religions,  After dinner everyone got together to learn more about the bribri language and different spirituals dances. The bribri people showed us a couple of different dances and asked us to join them. What really amazed me about this whole experience is how much the bribri communities care about the environment and how pretty much their whole world revolves around nature. Thanks to them, I really learned and understood how much, and in how many different ways the earth we live on can help us and how important it is to make sure we take care of it.  The local culture is definitely well integrated into the tourism experience, especially ours, since the bribri community is really environmentally friendly and since the main goal for us was to really get a sense of how everyone, especially the people studying in hospitality, can be environmentally sustainable and how we practice everything we learned throughout our experience. I believe that having better accommodations would definitely improve the tourism experience and more people would decide to stay longer in order to really understand what the bribri culture is about and have more time to ask the bribri people about what their goal is regarding helping the environment and how they are planning to make people start getting involved in going green, and helping the earth we live on. It was a really great experience, it was really amazing staying with them for a whole day and I really appreciated how they made all of my meals vegetarian since they usually eat meat and how I was the only one who couldn’t eat meat.

I believe that everyone should go visit this community to learn more about them and their culture since this is definitely one of those experiences that can really change your view on the world and what we really need to focus on.