Costa Rican ecologist Marco Quesada sees a new side of his country when he travels to Chira Island for a conservation project. 

Marco Quesada earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in biology from Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). His M.Sc. work on marine plankton ecology was complemented at Portland University (U.S.). He completed additional graduate studies on microzooplankton taxonomy at the Université de la Rochelle in France. In 2011, he obtained a Ph.D. from the Department of Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island. His dissertation on stakeholder participation in fisheries management was based on fieldwork in coastal fishing communities in Costa Rica and Kodiak, Alaska. During his work with Conservation International, he has had the chance to visit and work in numerous coastal communities, particularly in Latin America, as well as engaged in fisheries policy-making processes in Costa Rica and the Latin American region. Marco teaches university graduate courses at both Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR) and the Costa Rica-based United Nations University for Peace and is a member of the Marine Stewardship Council’s (MSC) Stakeholder Council. He has worked with CI in Costa Rica since 2005 and is currently the Director Conservation International in Costa Rica.

This story originally aired on June 22, 2018 in an episode titled “Unfamiliar Territory.”

Story Transcript

Mangroves are not the first place you consider when you're planning a vacation.  Mangroves are very hot, muddy, they're wet, smelly, and full of mosquitoes.  As a biologist who grew up in the tropics, I am used to mangroves.  I have visited them numerous times as a student and also as a professional. 

The mangroves of one part of the country made a good impression on me, the mangroves from the Island of Chira.  I first went to Chira about eight years ago.  I was actually looking for coastal fishing communities to apply a survey on.  I heard of the Island of Chira and its communities, but I have never been there. 

Costa Rica is a small country and this is the largest island in the country.  I had never had the chance to visit it.  It is interesting because Costa Rica, even though it’s pretty tiny, the capital is in the center of the country and the coastal areas are pretty much undeveloped.  Not until recently with tourism, actually.

But when I went there, it impressed me immediately as a very rural place, very authentic.  It’s a place that does not have banks.  There are no restaurants, there are no signs in English saying “For Sale,” and that was important to me.  I immediately fell attracted to the Island of Chira and its mangroves. 

Mangroves cut right through it and surrounded the island.  To get to Chira, you have to take a boat from the coast, about half an hour.  A small boat, usually crowded.  You get to a mangrove area, actually, where a small, old, yellow school bus is waiting for all the passengers of the boat to jump into this small bus and it will just cruise slowly through the gravel roads, dusty, and across the grasslands where there's scattered cattle and the small communities. 

It is really a place that brought me back to when I was a child.  When I was a child, not very often actually, very rarely, we will go down from the capital to the coast on a family vacation.  That’s a little bit of what I remember of what used to be the coastal areas of Costa Rica.  Rural, very little developed. 

Shortly after, sure enough, I started working in Chira.  We deployed from Conservation International a project on fisheries and eventually we moved into a project on mangroves. 

So I am there in Chira at 4:00 a.m. one day two years ago.  We woke up at that time because we wanted to go work in a mangrove replantation project that we had developed together with a group of brave women that volunteered their time to work in this.  We woke up very early in the morning because you don’t want to be in the mangrove at 8:00 when it is already very hot. 

We dressed accordingly.  As we say it in Spanish, I’m very sweet to mosquitoes.  I don't like them very much but… so long-sleeve shirt, long pants and knee-high socks for the rubber boots, and we were off. 

It was me, the Marine Program Coordinator of Costa Rica, Anna, and two consultants.  We were walking down the hill from the lodge across the gravel roads in the middle of the night.  You have to walk about two miles to get to the coastal area and, sure enough, the women were there just waiting for us.  Some of them were wearing lipstick and earrings, which really impressed me and stroked me a sense of pride of their project. 

They really know the mangroves well because they got their mollusks’ shells, mollusk actually, from there every now and then.  Many of them single mothers, they have to find a way to live, and they were there just happy and proud to show us their project.  They had actually been raising mangrove plants for several weeks now in their mangrove nursery and they had cleaned an area. 

So we walked through them and they guided us.  The morning was starting to crack and we had some light already.  We got to the mangrove nursery and the first task was to move a couple of hundred of these plants into the degraded mangrove area. 

So here we were, twenty-something women and three guys just ready to work.  We lined up in two front-facing lines and we started passing the plants from one hand to the other.  200 plants, we moved them 100 feet.  200 plants, we moved them 100 feet again.  And so we went into the mangrove and into the morning. 

Of course it started getting warm and I started getting a little bit of a back pain.  I was sweating.  I had gotten off my long-sleeve shirt and tied it around my waist.  I was thirsty, because you're moving muddy things.  You cannot just step out of the line to have a drink.  You're all full of mud so you're expected to work.  I was very tempted to complain, but I could see that everybody was happy and were working happily and with pride so I swallowed my complaint for a while.

But eventually I gave up.  I complained because even though we had been working for hours, you couldn’t even see into the mangrove.  I couldn’t even see where we were heading.  You couldn’t see the area that was degraded.  So I muttered a complaint and that started a joke that everybody was laughing about and went over and over several times that morning. 

One of the women said, “This is the Island of Chira where women work and men cry.” 

It was great, but it was also an important joke.  Of course it was not the first time.  I would have complained that more and so I came back several times.  We finally got to the place that needed replantation and we grabbed shovels.  If you have ever put a shovel into a mangrove area where the sediment is very fine and compact and wet, it’s really hard because it makes a vacuum.  Digging each hole was a fight but we finally did it at 10:30, 11:00 a.m. 

We called the day was already too warm.  So I left.  That was my only day at work.  And I left with a lot of humbleness and respect for the work they were doing. 

I come from a very small country and when you come from a very small country you feel like you know everybody.  You feel connected very easily culturally to people around you.  There's nowhere in Costa Rica that will take more than one day to get to.  It’s really easy to move around. 

But Chira just felt so different.  Clearly, that day, I was seen as a foreigner by these women and I was a foreigner to the mangroves also, a place where I have been in multiple times. 

I also work in a big NGO that works all over the world and has headquarters actually very close to here and I am always seen the field guy.  I come from the field.  But that day in Chira, two years ago, it’s shown me how important it is to be connected with the people that work and live in these areas, to be grounded by these visits, to continually be open to learning. 

And especially important is that these people often do not have time to even think of complaining.  All they have time of is to keep moving and keep working every day.  Thank you.