I took this photo in Costa Rica, while living at the field station Campanario in the Osa Peninsula. I’ve been missing Campanario and have been a bit nostalgic lately for jungle living. That’s what five months of city, town and village living do to me. “Civilization” makes me miss the jungle, the vast open sea and all of the wildlife that call these ecosystems home.

To help cope with the emotions of longing for what was, I began sorting through my photos to reflect back on my wondrous time living in Osa for 10 months in 2008. As I sorted through the pictures a few caught my eye, which I hadn’t yet used on my blog. This is one of them.

By the way, I’ll be returning to Campanario in August to get another dose of Osa before going to North America in October and November. But then I’ll come back to Costa Rica and Nicaragua before the over-commercialization of the holidays numb people out in the U.S. The Costa Rican jungle and remote Nicaraguan mountains form part of my DNA now, and I can’t imagine living too far from the southern mesoamerica hotspot.

The photos of La Chureca that I uploaded into my Photostream don’t appear where they oughta. Instead the whole batch of 91 photos has ended up in an entirely different location. So now I”m flummoxed and God only knows when the FlickR geeks will respond to my inquiry. Because I spent three hours attaching titles and captions to this huge photostream, I want the photos to be seen. Why else take the time to do the work if not for public viewing? Grrrrrrr, there’s that bear sound again. Speaking of which — if you haven’t joined the Ursa Freedom Project yet, do so now!

So, here’s the deal with my Photostream — in order to see the photos of La Chureca that I uploaded you will need to click here on this hyperlink. Once I know how to merge this Photostream onto my real FlickR page, I”ll do that to streamline the operation. But no sense getting all warped out when all it takes is a click to get the hyperlink. Most of the photos in the photostream were taken by the youth that I am teaching in La Chureca. The kids have taken some remarkable photos of their home and community inside Central America’s largest waste dump. I think you’ll be fascinated by what you learn from the photos and captions.

By the time I leave Nicaragua I hope to have visited all of the protected natural reserves in the country. There are magnificently beautiful areas here. For a poor country, Nicaragua seems to have adequate staff to patrol the reserves to keep wildlife poachers and tree bandits away. Costa Rica could learn something from their neighbors on this count, seeing how Costa Rica has a lot of acreage set aside as protected but hardly any guards to ensure it actually stays protected. I was glad to see so many guards at the Masaya volcano, about 30 of them, all armed with loaded pistols, I might add. The guard at the front gate, where the money is taken for entrance fees, has a pistol and a loaded rifle. The guards are adorably friendly and eager to have their photos taken. They are a good group of guys, so long as you’re not a bandit I suppose. When I began slipping down the lava-ash trail from the volcano top, one of the guards left his post and gave me a helping hand all the way down the steep, unstable volcano slope, which meant he had to climb all the way back up to return to his windy position. Another guard, Christopher, gave me a side-saddle ride on his bicycle to give my aching feet a rest from the 3-mile march on the pavement down the main road back to the entrance. I felt like Katherine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, minus the cows and hay barn.

Three young men peddle fruits and vegetables from their wagon throughout the barrio where I live. The brothers make a twice a week visit to the house so I can buy tropical fruits and whatever vegetables they might have on hand. I like this way of shopping. It’s informal, neighborly and lets me support a local family economy. It also gives me a chance to interact with the boys on a business level, which allows me to practice my Spanish and learn how to count money more accurately. The side benefit to the boys is that it gives them the greatest hoot of their day as I butcher their poetic language. All over Nicaragua you see men and boys pulling carts laden with various assorted wares. The women and girls are walking the dirt paths and city streets wearing pretty little frilly aprons and giant baskets on their heads filled with breads, candies and cookies and sometimes plantains and empanadas. They hawk their goods by singing out in loud cadenced voices what it is they’re selling. So all day long you hear women’s voices singing out what they have to offer, and you hear the wagons rolling. There are also men pushing little ice cream carts equipped with a bank of high-pitched bells that they ring to advertise they’re coming. The ice cream vendors, I’ve observed, sell only in the late afternoon and early evening. The fruit and veggie sellers take to the streets in the morning. But the women are on the streets all hours of the day and night. They never seem to take a break.

Stray cats and especially dogs are a routine part of the Nicaraguan landscape, as they are in other Central American countries that I’ve visited. Most of the animals are in terrible shape. But every now and then you see a stray that someone has taken mercy on and through acts of compassion helped fill out the meat on their bones. I just happened to have my camera flung around my neck when I saw a man drop a handful of kibble on the sidewalk for a feral cat. He had some extra food leftover, so I convinced him to put it into the makeshift bowl I had just fashioned from a plastic water jug for a stray dog that wanders in front of the house. Within seconds the kibble had vanished from the sidewalk and the makeshift bowl.

When the Spaniards came to conquer Latin America in the early 16th century, some things met to their liking and others didn’t. In a letter to the King of Spain in 1525 one conquering general wrote that the Volcano at Masaya, Nicaragua, was “the mouth of fire that never ceases to boil.” Friar Francisco de Bobadilla placed a cross near the crater to stop the demon in what he called “the entrance to Hell.” A replica of the original cross is visible in the photo I took. I spent my birthday yesterday hiking around the volcano and came back beet red. And that was a day when the volcano was inactive. I can imagine how blazing it would be at that spot when the volcano was churning, burping and getting ready to erupt. The big round boulder in the bottom photo is actually a piece of lava that burst from the volcano in 1772 and upon contact with the air hardened into this sphere and plopped itself onto the soil, where it’s been ever since. Lava rock dots the entire landscape at the Masaya volcano.