There’s a great passage about the difference between being a born traveler and a born expat in Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s sequel to her astonishingly successful travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.

Committed is a skeptic’s look at marriage from all angles, sparked by Gilbert’s decision to wed Felipe, the Brazilian man she meets in Bali at the end of Eat Pray Love. (Javier Bardem plays Felipe in the upcoming movie, which almost makes up for Julia Roberts playing Gilbert.)

The eight chapters of Committed have titles like “Marriage and History,” “Marriage and Ceremony,’ and “Marriage and Subversion.” The event that started Gilbert’s exhaustive look at this hallowed and maligned institution was that she and her boyfriend Felipe were pushed into marriage because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suddenly decides that Felipe can no longer enter the U.S. Now if she were married to a U.S. citizen, suggests a friendly Homeland Security agent, things might be easier…

But the official hoops they have to jump through and the strains it puts in their relationship are anything but easy.

Gilbert’s experience mirrors some of what I’ve been through—marrying for immigration purposes to a foreign-born lover you’re already committed to, so hey, Why not make it legal so that your lives are easier in the face of capricious and punishing laws? And then the fun (aka trouble) begins, especially if you both have different ideas of just what marriage means.

Although the book is a kaleidoscopic exploration of just that–what marriage means–I’m not finding what I was looking for in Committed. For my tastes, there’s not enough about cross-cultural relationships, or about how a relationship can change (and not always for the better) when you make it official. But of course that’s not the book Gilbert set out to write, so I can’t really fault her for not writing what I most want to read. As many writers have noted, when you don’t find what you want to read, well, then go write it yourself!

What I did find in Committed, on pages 216 – 221, was a sharply drawn description of the differences between a born traveler and a born live-abroader.

Here’s the background: Gilbert and Felipe, her Brazilian honey, are homeless, waiting to have his visa approved so they can both return to the U.S. and start building a life there together. They’re wandering through Southeast Asia, and after six months of such travel and of being with each other night and day, tempers are fraying. Gilbert has been hurrying them from one cheap hotel room to the next, trying to keep their anxiety at bay, when she realizes that that technique doesn’t seem to work for her partner. Gilbert writes:

“Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep in a moving car, I have always been comforted with the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle; since he was the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to enjoy any of this drifting.

…The reality about Felipe, as I was beginning to realize, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds—all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume that the man is not fit to be a traveler at all.

But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South American to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.”

So how about you? Are you more of a traveler, like Gilbert, or a born expat, like Felipe?

Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Here’s the trailer:

For those three or four people who’ve never heard of Eat, Pray, Love, suffice to say that it’s self-realization and travel porn for the thinking woman.

Despite my reservations, I won’t be able to resist seeing the film anymore than I could resist reading the book. Critics were less than kind. Maureen Callahan called the book “narcissistic New Age reading.” Lev Grossman said the author was “trying too hard to be liked.” Grace Lichtenstein said the only thing wrong with the book is that “it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.”

I agree with all of those critics, and yet I tore through Eat, Pray, Love, reveling in Gilbert’s incisive descriptions of far-flung locales and internal states, spouting select quotes to my friends, and giving the book as a gift to more than one (woman) friend. Gilbert is compulsively readable, and if afterwards I felt a little queasy about the fast food feast I’d just wolfed down, in the midst of the meal I thought I was absorbing valuable nutrients.

And the film? Well, Javier Bardem plays Felipe, the Brazilian guy Gilbert falls for in Bali. I’ll go just to hear how a Spaniard tackles a Brazilian accent.

The U.S., for example, is the only industrialized country to tax its overseas citizens on income earned abroad. That income is often also taxed in the country where it is earned, which means the incoming stream is dipped into not once but twice.

Double taxation is not the only problem for American expats abroad. New banking regulations have made it harder for expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad. The regulations are intended to curb tax evasion and (under the Patriot Act) to help prevent money from flowing to terrorist groups. “Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts,” according to an article in the New York Times, “because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.”

The numbers

In the last quarter of 2009 (the most recent period for which there are statistics), 502 expatriates gave up their U.S. citizenship or permanent residency status. Though it’s a tiny percentage of the over 5 million Americans the State Department says live abroad, the number is more than twice the total for all of 2008, when just 235 people gave up their citizenship. For all of 2009, the number was 743. And, reports the New York Time, “waiting periods to meet with consular officers to formalize renunciations have grown.”

What about you?

If you’re a U.S. citizen living abroad, have you ever considered giving up your U.S. citizenship?

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the West African nation formerly known as Dahomey: it is infrequently mentioned by the international press in a continent where no news is good news. A French colony until the 1960s, Benin is a tiny nation tucked under the Elephant Ear of West Africa, and is best known for being one of the continent’s stronger democracies.

I live in the city of Cotonou, whose name in the local language (Fon) means “River of Death.” And regardless of what Cotonou is today, it will forever retain the soul of a slaving hub at the mouth of a river that carried an unfortunate cargo down to the waiting slave ships.

For the moment, Cotonou is my home, and this message comes to you live from the River of Death.

In the three years I’ve lived here I’ve drunk whiskey with kings, been the victim of a mob throwing coconuts, surfed a couple of decent waves, and rubbed elbows with a culture that three years later, I still barely know and perhaps never will.  This is, of course, the thrill of travel and of living in a foreign country.

The expat life in Cotonou isn’t bad. Benin is essentially a safe country, especially compared to Nigeria, our neighbor to the east.  Here, you are at constant risk of annoyance, hassle, and occasional petty theft, but physical aggression is rare, very rare and frankly, I’m safer here than I would be in any large American city (see exception at end of article).

Cotonou is less a city than a large village; large parts of the streets off the principal arteries are sandy and potholed. “Downtown” is little more than a few dozen shops and a traffic jam, and most Africans do their shopping in the sprawling, chaotic Dantokpa Market, at whose heart lies a vibrant Voodoo fetish market.  We can get better tasting croissants and pastries here than in Washington DC, but we’ll wait for weeks before one of the local supermarkets has cream cheese.  We’ve got talented leather workers, tailors, and artists, but can’t get the parts to fix the air conditioner. And though we successfully dodge the bullet of the European winter, it’s frequently so hot outside that we sweat while toweling off from the shower.

Cost of living

Benin is expensive. The country produces little in the way of agricultural products, and as a result, most of what we consume has been imported at great expense. I’m speaking about expat staples like milk, wheat flour, jam, butter, breakfast cereal, cookies, and such: they’re not cheap. The dependence on imports makes just about everything expensive, from gasoline to bread to shoelaces to butter: it all comes in on ships.

We also have the option of the local food.  The Beninese diet is similar to the cuisine across much of the continent: starchy pâte, a sticky, doughy blob usually made of pounded yam, corn, or manioc, over which a spicy vegetable or meat sauce is poured.  It’s spicy, and too heavy for every day, but not bad when I do eat it.

Dinner parties, orange sand beaches, and infinite minor hassles

Cotonou’s two biggest defects are that (a) everything is harder to accomplish than it should be, and (b) there’s not a whole lot to do.  We don’t even have a movie theater (and never will, given the thriving market for pirated DVDs).  As a result, the expat community takes care of itself in the old way: endless dinner parties, cocktail hours, and invitations.  I’m not complaining, and it’s a healthy reminder of how communities behaved in the days before everyone sequestered themselves in their personal pleasure palaces with their video game consoles, broadband Internet, and other toys.  It’s a revolving community as the expats rotate through, but participating in such a diverse and friendly community is pleasant.

Weekends I’m at the beach surfing (there’s a halfway decent bar break along the coast), or relaxing on the orange sand beach. Evenings I walk the dogs around the neighborhood’s sandy streets, read and write. It’s a simpler lifestyle than the one I lived back in the States, but it has its advantages, and I personally find elegance in simplicity. I also experienced the Harmattan for the first time here, an awe-inspiring meteorological phenomenon born in the Sahara desert: the wind turns 180 degrees during two months and comes from the Sahara, bearing a fine sand that settles everywhere and darkens the afternoon skies.  I sometimes think that experiencing things like this are why I travel, although putting down a shot of whiskey with a king is a pretty cool reason too.

The fact that everything is harder than it should be, though, is the one that slowly eats at your soul: parking, driving through chaotic traffic, arguing with the same people over the same prices every single time, dealing with lousy service, bureaucratic processes that seem both pointless and endless, and the infinite minor hassles that accompany every single transaction is tiring.

Tiring, too, are the repeated power outages, water outages, cell phone outages, the system resets at the Internet provider, the fast broadband that’s actually slow, the saturated cell phone networks, and the phone lines that don’t permit easy calls.  I think back to the days before these services and remember I should be grateful.  But the constant outages are wearing, and in sum lead to the only remedy possible: travel to someplace else once every 4 months.

Benin: birthplace of Voodoo (aka Voudoun)

I mentioned Voodoo. It’s Vaudoun, actually, but yes, Benin is the birthplace of the world’s most misunderstood religion.  Haitians are the second most populous followers of Vaudoun, but it’s because the slave trade carried Beninese to the Caribbean island that Haiti gained the religion.  If you’re thinking “Serpent and the Rainbow,” you are way off; Vaudoun at its roots is an animist religion with strong ties to the natural earth, and a belief in good and bad forces that would be recognizable by anyone who ever watched a Star Wars movie.  Large parts of Benin believe in Vaudoun, but there are lots of Christians and Muslims as well, and everyone seems to live together in a peace much of Africa (not to mention the Balkans!) should envy.

Legacy of the slave trade and modern-day slavery

But there’s no escaping the legacy of slavery here.  You see it in the disorganization, the mistrust, the difficulty with which the Beninese work together toward common goals.  As a white American who experienced the story of the slave trade in middle school textbooks and who thought of the whole story as ancient history, it is eye-opening to see the impacts of slavery in the 21^st century, and to learn that slavery is in no way ancient history in one of the countries that experienced it first hand.

In fact, slavery continues to this day, and not just in Benin.  Throughout Africa, families “lend” their children – sometimes permanently – to construction projects in the city.  These children are poorly paid, sleep on the ground, and remain uneducated for their entire lives.  Call it what you like, but slavery in some form remains a real part of life here.

An elegant austerity

But let’s go back to the fact that three religions and a half dozen ethnic groups have been able to live in relative harmony in one of Africa’s stronger democracies. Benin: quiet, mostly unnoticed, little understood.  It has suffered mightily, and never makes the headlines. Life as an expat here can be frustrating, but not necessarily dangerous. It’s expensive and somewhat boring, but in its simplicity and sparseness it brings elegance to austerity. And from the point of view of a foreigner trying to get a job done, I’d say that being at the center of such a whirling, swirling mass of humanity trying to better its situation is amazing. Life at the mouth of the River of Death is actually pretty peaceful.

Will we next see vacation home for swarms of winter-evading European retirees?  Not likely.  It’s the kind of place that sends you eventually on your way with more questions than answers, and the conviction you understand less of the world than you did when you arrived. In short, Benin will change you, as it has changed me.

——-

(1) There’s one notable, horrible exception.  Peace Corps Volunteer Katie Puzey was assassinated in her sleep in March, 2009.  A stellar volunteer, well-loved by her community and extremely well integrated into the village where she lived, the motives for this atrocious murder are not yet known, and to date, justice has not been rendered.  We will not forget!

Randall Wood is the co-author of Moon Handbook Nicaragua and Moon: Living Abroad in Nicaragua.  He currently manages a $300M development program in Benin and has lived overseas for over a decade.  This article appeared simultaneously at www.therandymon.com).

First, they chose the place, driving the length of the Nicoya Peninsula, looking for a beach town with enough tourist infrastructure to run a business but without the overbuilding and overreaching that can spoil a place.

They came equipped, with backgrounds in business, real estate and construction, and a chunk of savings that would let them take a good shot at their dream. Rosy spoke Spanish, and Doug was learning.

Looking to Buy

Once they settled on Playa Samara, halfway down the peninsula and with a sweeping half-moon beach washed by waves gentle enough for swimming, they had local realtors show them what was on offer.  They looked inland, “in the jungle,” but it was too hot. Places in the town of Samara were “too noisy—roosters, cars, and chain saws,” says Rosy. And when they liked the location, the building didn’t seem right.

They remember that one realtor showed them a hotel, assuring them, “If you buy this, I guarantee you’ll make your money back in 5 years.” Being familiar with the ups and downs of real estate and business, Doug and Rosy knew that a realtor should never in good conscience make such assurances. They put their guard up even higher.

Howler monkey at the Hideaway Hotel, Playa Samara, Costa Rica; photo by Doug Ancel

One day, after months of searching, they turned off the coast highway onto a one-lane road that ran straight to the southern end of Playa Samara. Wouldn’t it be great, they agreed, to have a place within walking distance of the beach? But there were no hotels for sale on that road.

A little later, in April 2004, they heard through the grapevine that a German woman was selling a 1-acre parcel of land on the very road that inspired their ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ musings. It wasn’t listed with any realtors.

Doug and Rosy looked at the land and loved it. But it had no structures on it; their dream had been to buy and renovate an existing hotel.

The location, however, was perfect, and the price wasn’t half-bad. And so, after checking to make sure they’d have easy access to water, electricity, and phone line, and after some back-of-envelope calculations and late-night soul-searching, they decided to go for it. They did what most people moving to a new country or starting a business have to do at some point: change the master plan in order to accommodate an opportunity that may not come your way again.

Building a dream, from the ground up

Anyone who’s ever built a house or a hotel knows what comes next. It took Doug and Rosy a little over four years from purchase of property to opening the Hideaway Hotel in July 2008. I’m sure they could write a book about those four years, but here are a few high (and low) points.

Building the Hideaway Hotel in Playa Samara; photo by Doug Ancel

They knew what they wanted-a clean, contemporary design, high-quality construction to North American/European standards, and about a dozen spacious rooms. They wanted a pool, landscaped grounds, and a modern wastewater system that would allow them to irrigate the grounds with gray water and to give North American guests the privilege of flushing toilet paper instead of putting it in a waste container next to the toilet, which is the Tico style.

They got a good lawyer (key to getting anything done in Costa Rica), who introduced them to an architect who had a good reputation. “But he didn’t deliver,” says Rosy, so they set up meetings with several architect/ builder pairs, chose their favorite, and got to work. “The design process took some time,” continues Rosy “We wanted to be sure to choose the finishes, tile, granite, etc. ourselves.”

The permit process was also challenging. “We were held up in SETENA for 6 months,” Rosy says. “Apparently SETENA [the Secretaria Tecnica Nacional Ambiental] was backed way up at the time.”

“We were ‘next in line,’” adds Doug, “for a good 5 or 6 months.”

The web site costaricalaw.com explains, “the sole mission of SETENA is the administration of the process to review and evaluate environmental impact considerations. Builders and real estate developers cringe when they hear the word SETENA.”

“But our building permit didn’t take much time,” says Rosy. “You just present plans to the municipality and pay the fees.”

The pool before it was a pool at the Hideaway Hotel in Playa Samara; photo by Doug Ancel

Once construction got underway, Doug stayed on site as much as possible to oversee the work. The builder went over budget, and there were construction delays. But when the Hideaway Hotel opened its doors in 2008, it all seemed worth it. “Local realtors couldn’t believe it,” says Doug. They said, ‘You guys actually opened! So many projects end up unfinished ruins.’”

Their hotel is indeed no ruin; it’s a lovely place with the sort of amenities you really appreciate after having been on the road for while, from the spacious shower to the mini-fridge to blackout curtains for the times you need to adjust to jet lag or turn in early to make a wee-hours flight the next day. A hundred feet from your poolside breakfasts are trees often full of howler monkeys.

Advice on opening a B&B in Costa Rica

I asked Rosy and Doug if they have any advice for opening a B&B or a hotel in Costa Rica.

“Find one that’s been built,” Rosy laughs ruefully, although she also says she feels proud of how well their from-the-ground-up building turned out.

“It takes time to grow a business,” says Doug. “So you need operating reserves to tide you over. We planned not to make any money the first years,” he smiles, “And so far, we’re right on plan.”

But even in the months after I visited, their was an uptick in guests, and the hotel is getting great press in guidebooks and online-when I last looked they were the #2 Samara hotel on Trip Advisor. I have little doubt that the next few years will bring even more visitors and a return on their investment, both in financial and life-satisfaction terms. After all, they dreamed a dream and then, with hard work and imagination, they made it happen. It’s all part of the (somewhat flexible) master plan.

Photo of finished version of the Hideaway Hotel by David W. Smith

Some Costa Rica expats are satisfied with Caja (public) care; others opt to supplement or replace it with private care, paid out of pocket or through national or international health insurance.

One whole-hearted and one half-hearted fan of the Caja (Costa Rica’s national healthcare)

San Ramon-based expat Stephen Duplantier, 65, is a Caja fan. “We are very happy with it,” he said recently. “It’s US$18/month (a discounted rate through Association of Residents of Costa Rica–the ARCR). We go to local EBAIS (a neighborhood clinic), where there’s an excellent doctor and excellent nurses, plus all pharmaceuticals are free. Recent surgeries, diagnostic tests, ER use, pharmacy, etc.–all are totally free and high quality, and the waiting time is equal to our experience in the States.”

I agree that the Caja can be great for routine care, but when I found I needed surgery, I moved from the public to the private realm. I’d been part of the Caja system, paying around $60/month at the age of 41 and happily using their neighborhood clinics for routine care, tests, and medications. But when it became clear that I would need a major procedure, I defected to private care, opting to pay out of pocket (I’d let my U.S. insurance lapse). I was happy with the care at private Clínica Bíblica, though the final price for my stay, while quite low in comparison to U.S. prices, was still more than twice what I’d been quoted in a formal estimate.

Two that had bad experiences at public Costa Rica hospitals

Others are not so happy with the Caja.

After a motorcycle accident in Costa Rica, Matt Hogan sampled both public and private hospitals. Photo: David W. Smith

Take Matt Hogan, 35, co-founder of Finca Bella Vista, a sustainable treehouse community near the Osa Peninsula. In late 2009 he had a motorcycle accident, and was taken to the newly opened public hospital in Ciudad Cortéz. “All the newspapers had been boasting about the brand-new, state-of-the-art facilities and medical equipment, 300 clean new beds, and the rest,” says Matt. What the newspaper accounts failed to mention, according to Matt, was that all those new beds were serviced by only a few doctors who showed up only once in a while.

Matt says he suffered serious neglect and misdiagnosis (they told him he was fine). Feeling anything but fine, he had himself driven by ambulance to San José and checked himself into private Clínica Bíblica. There he was found to have one collapsed lung and the other in mid-collapse, as well as severe internal bleeding in his chest cavity. The doctors at Bíblica said that if Matt had waited another day to seek proper care he most likely would have suffocated.

Matt was very happy with the care he received at Bíblica, adding with a smile that “all the nurses were very attractive young Ticas.”

Alex Murray after being released from a 20-day hospital stay.

In another example, Alaska native Alex Murray, 72 at the time of a fire that burned over 20 percent of his body, endured an extended hospital stay that also allowed him to compare private and public care in Costa Rica.

“While expat friends with residency have had important procedures successfully performed at slight cost in the public system,” he says. “I recommend avoiding it in life-threatening situations if at all possible.”

Alex was burning garden trash at his home in the Lake Arenal region when he spilled some gas, causing the fire to flare up and burn him over much of his body. Alex spent the next 20 days in two hospitals in the capital city of San José, first at the public Hospital San Juan de Dios, and then at private Clínica Bíblica.

“Of course,” he admits, “it’s a foregone conclusion that such a comparison is unfair to the underfunded public hospital, but the devil’s in the personal details.”

Alex was first picked up by a Red Cross ambulance and taken to a clinic in nearby Tilarán. Then he was moved to the public hospital in Liberia (about an hour north), where the doctors decided to send him to the burn unit at San Juan de Dios (a public hospital) in the capital city of San José, 4 hours away.

“Arriving in San José,” says Alex, “we should have directed the driver immediately to Bíblica or Clinica Católica [two private hospitals], but, ignorant of the quality of the public hospital and anxious to get treatment, we let the driver take us to the teeming mystery that is San Juan.”

Hospital San Juan de Dios in Costa Rica

Three days at a Public Hospital: San Juan de Dios

“In our three days there,” says Alex, “no doctor ever consulted us, though one led a group of students into my room each day. The nurses, male and female, sometimes seemed like the proverbial five or six workmen who stand around a pothole gabbing while one guy fills the hole. For the most part, they were not dedicated, not attentive, not very competent, and not sympathetic. They seemed the dregs of the nursing schools. A friendly nurse assigned to draw blood samples spent three days drilling mostly dry holes all over my landscape, partly due to my extremely low blood pressure. One rough middle-aged nurse told me that I was not much hurt nor in pain. I finally had to yell at her, “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.” She desisted, smiling to herself, it seemed.

“A night crew came on and half-heartedly started to bathe me and change my dressings. Three stood on one side of the bed and made little come-hither motions with their fingers. Two stood on the other side and made little shooing gestures. Finally, they decided to help me turn.

“They would not let my wife sleep in one of the three extra beds crowded into my room. Instead she spent her nights trying to sleep in a plastic chair. In the not-very-clean bathroom, she found bloody bandages in a corner.”

Clínica Bíblica in Costa Rica

Seventeen Days at a Private Hospital: Clínica Bíblica

Alex and his wife decided that they needed to move him to a private facility. “When I was admitted to Clínica Bíblica,” he says, “I recognized immediately that here was a competent staff. The emergency room nurse quickly found a vein and soon had a set of color-coded vials filled with my blood. All staff were purposeful and attentive.

“The next evening I began to rave and tried to tear off my bandages and leave the hospital. A doctor soon arrived and said my actions were due to a lack of oxygen to the brain. I was then moved to intensive care where a coma was induced and I was intubated, remaining thus for five days, not a reassuring sight for my four daughters who arrived from points around the globe.

“I doubt that these measures would have been taken at San Juan de Dios. Three doctors tended me at Bíblica, one a burn doctor, one a plastic surgeon who moved skin from my thigh to my hip, and one a staff doctor. They each came by almost every day to talk with us. The nursing staff was a no-nonsense but friendly and attentive group, evidently the better graduates of the nursing schools. Midway through my stay, physical therapists began visiting daily to exercise my wasted muscles. When I left, I had lost 14 pounds and could walk only a few steps unassisted, but I was recovering.

“And throughout my stay, my wife was permitted to sleep on a narrow built-in bed or cot in each room. “

For more information on health care in Costa Rica, see Living Abroad in Costa Rica by Erin Van Rheenen, or visit www.livingabroadincostarica.com.

She ran a campaign that declared her “firme y honesta” — firm and honest — and promised more doctors in the state-run medical clinics and more police officers on the streets. She is a social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortions, though she favors civil rights for gays and birth control.

Chinchilla, 50, is married with one teenaged son. She will take office in May, becoming Costa Rica’s first female president and Latin America’s fifth in the last two decades. The other four are Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, who was elected in 2007, Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, elected in 2006, Panama’s Mireya Moscoso, elected in 1999, and Nicaragua’s Violeta Chamorro, elected in 1990.

Interesting that Costa Rica, a supposedly “third world” and  “macho” country, elected a woman president, while a first world country where the sky’s supposedly the limit (the US of A) lags behind in the gender equity department. Speaking of third world, Chinchilla recently asked, “Who gets to decide if a country is deemed “developing” or “developed?” Interesting question. Chinchilla thinks Costa Rica qualifies as the latter.

Click here for election photos and here for a truly bizarre campaign video from one of Chinchilla’s competitors in the Presidential race. A middle-aged man naked except for a diaper cavorts among pregnant women singing a takeoff on the 60s classic, “I will follow him.”

This week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested that the state might outsource incarceration by opening prisons in Mexico in order to house jailed undocumented immigrants.

Sfgate.com reports the governor saying, “We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. … And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons.”

Of the state’s 171,000 prisoners, approximately 19,000 are illegal immigrants. The state spends more than $8 billion a year on the prison system. Schwarzenegger predicted housing prisoners in Mexico instead of California would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

The idea has a certain logic: Under the terms of the 1977 Prisoner Transfer Treaty between the United States and Mexico, United States prisoners in Mexican jails and Mexican prisoners in United States jails may choose to serve their sentences in their home countries.

But there’s a definite taint of “let’s send the illegals back where they came from” anti-immigrant sentiment in the governor’s comment. Beyond that, it’s just a very odd idea. When one breaks the law within a given set of borders, it makes sense to be punished within the limits of that same country. Each country has its own philosophy of crime and punishment. Mexico tends to have longer waits for sentencing, for instance, but shorter prison terms.

And though there’s no yelp.com for prisons around the world, it’s pretty clear that Mexican prisons aren’t known to be models of modern and humane incarceration.

An analysis of Mexican prison conditions (drawing from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook) concludes that “overcrowding of prisons is chronic. Mistreatment of prisoners, the lack of trained guards, and inadequate sanitary facilities compound the problem. The United States Department of State’s country reports on human rights practices for 1992 and 1993 state that an entrenched system of corruption undermines prison authority and contributes to abuses. Authority frequently is exercised by prisoners, displacing prison officials. Violent confrontations, often linked to drug trafficking, are common between rival prison groups.

In fact, just this week, a prison riot in the Mexican state of Durango left 23 inmates dead.

Female inmates in Mexican prisons are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. Photo: Caroline Bennett

Not that Mexico suffers in every prison-related comparison. The U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. And Mexico has some prison policies that are more humane than those in the U.S. For example, women inmates are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. The Huffington Post recently published a photo essay on Mexican Prison Life: Babies Behind Bars.

Even if the prisons in Mexico were built and run by the U.S., Schwarzenegger ’s idea would still be problematic. Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, said it “would be like the state of California having a separate island of its own government in Mexico. It just seems like that would be impossible.”

The not-so-sweet spot where privatization meets outsourcing

Schwarzenegger’s suggestion sits at the intersection of privatization and outsourcing. Earlier this month, our my-governor-can-beat-up-your-governor called for allowing private companies to compete with state-run prisons, which he claims would save billions of dollars.

And beyond privatization, it seems that in this era of free trade in a global economy, everything’s on the table for possible outsourcing: manufacturing, telephone help centers, retirement, medical care, and now, imprisonment.

What’s next—the outsourcing of education? Maybe public school would be more viable if you only had to pay teachers a few dollars an hour. And how about outsourcing funeral services? We could send our loved ones abroad for cut-rate embalming, Fed Ex them back to the local cemetery, then hire illegal immigrants to help us mourn.

You can start to make that shift pretty much anywhere–reading the local newspaper at your favorite expat cafe, exploring a crumbling castle, or talking politics with the guy who repairs your car with tin foil and fishing wire. But some places are particularly well-suited for contemplating history from a decidedly local perspective.

Covert ops hottie visits El Avion bar? Lovers of freedom should be so lucky.

An old plane sits grounded atop a lush hillside on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. The battered Fairchild C-123, built in 1954 and now part of a popular open-air bar, is the perfect place to nurse a cold cerveza, watch the sunset, and remember a bizarre chapter in history: the Iran-Contra affair, which from this Central American vantage point would more accurately be called the Contra/Iran affair, with the illegal arms sale to Iran a minor chapter in the 80s-era U.S. covert funding of armed guerillas (the Contras) bent on bringing down Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Part of the Costa Verde hotel, the Avion Bar is the perfect place for ruminating on that 1980s arms-for-hostages-and-while-we’re-at-it-let’s-fund-some-paramilitaries scandal because the plane itself played a starring role in the fiasco.

The plane was dubbed “Ollie’s Folly” for its connection to Oliver North, chief architect of a covert operation—lodged firmly in the heart of the Reagan administration—that funded and provided military assistance to the Contras.

Though the U.S. government supported the Contras in the early 1980s, Congress cut off all funding in late 1984, afraid that Nicaragua would become the next Vietnam, and alarmed by reports that the C.I.A. had secretly mined Nicaraguan harbors.

Who needs Congress when you’ve got Ollie North?

Despite signing into law the bill cutting off all funds to the Contra’s paramilitary operations, Reagan ordered his staff to find a way to help the Contras keep ‘body and soul together,’ in his words. Reagan and his staff—especially those in the National Security Council (NSC), secretly raised $34 million for the Contras from other countries, with an additional $2.7 million from private contributors, and later, with funds from the illegal arms sale to Iran. This money was funneled into a private company called ‘the Enterprise,’ and put under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

The Enterprise had its own operatives, Swiss bank accounts, airfields, and airplanes, including two Fairchild C-123s, one of which now holds up the roof of the Avion bar.

For 16 months in the mid-1980s, the Enterprise provided covert aid to the Contras—aid that the U.S. Congress had specifically prohibited. When U.S. and world press caught wind of the operation and reported on it, Reagan, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and other administration officials repeatedly assured the public (and Congress) that nothing illegal or untoward was going on.

The game is up.
But on October 5, 1986, evidence to the contrary fell to earth over southern Nicaragua. A plane carrying supplies to the Contras was shot down; the two pilots were killed, but Eugene Hasenfus, a former Marine from Wisconsin who’d been hired by the C.I.A., parachuted to safety, only to be captured by Nicaraguan government forces. Hasenfus’ capture was instrumental in uncovering the U.S. covert operation providing money and military help to the Contras. The plane shot down that October day was the sister plane to the one now reincarnated as a hilltop bar in Costa Rica.

Allan Templeton, owner of the Costa Verde hotel, was intrigued by the plane’s history and bought it in 2000 for $3000. Templeton had the plane moved, at great expense and trouble, to its current perch close to Manual Antonio,

'Fusilage suite' at Costa Verde hotel

Costa Rica’s most popular national park. The Costa Verde has a taste for giving old modes of transport new life—recently, they transformed a 1965 Boeing 727 into a high-end ocean-view suite. And they just opened what must be one of the few places in Costa Rica where you can get a Hebrew National kosher hot dog. It’s called The Wagon, and it’s housed in an old train car.

But let’s return to the 1980s for a minute. What happened in Nicaragua back then didn’t stay in Nicaragua. In fact, Ollie North had a secret airstrip built in Costa Rica to support his covert ops in Nicaragua, then got himself barred from Costa Rica for life for that and for his alleged part in drug smuggling to fund the Contra effort.

More information on traveling and living in Costa Rica.

For more information in the Iran/Contra Affair: U.S. Congress Iran Contra Committee: Key Findings in 1987

Photos: Costa Verde Hotel.

She’d been very active in a few local nonprofits, and she scaled back her commitments, quitting boards and letting people know that she’d be putting her energies elsewhere for a time.

And dammit of she didn’t write that book! In a year. I’m beyond envious—I’m positively inspired. I keep looking at little huts on the side of the road or up on top of mountains, thinking, Now there’s a good place to hole up and write.

The book is Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica. It centers around a garden on her land on the shores of Lake Arenal, an organic garden a longtime friend, Evelio, tries to create out of nothing. Evelio is a local, born and bred in the Arenal area, and he has a natural talent for planting and tending. But trying to garden organically, and on a plot ravaged by the winds off the lake, turns out to be more than he–and Sandy, as his enabler/landlord/cheerleader–bargained for.

Sandy describes the ups and downs of the gardening project, but more than that, she details how the achingly beautiful land around the lake is at risk of devastation. Not incidentally, a portrait of expat life emerges, as we learn of Sandy’s neighbors from Europe and North America and Costa Rica and see how they all coexist, sometimes peaceably, sometimes contentiously.

It’s a book about how we live on the land, how it nourishes us and how we should nourish it. It’s beautifully written and has a strong sense of place. I’m honored that Sandy let me read it and that she’s allowing me to publish an excerpt here.

Excerpt from Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica, by Sandra Shaw Homer

All land has a history, and the history around here goes back a long way.  Satellite images have picked up old roads all over this canton, long grown over, made by the indigenous peoples of pre-Columbian times.  One of these roads runs along the south shore of the lake, uphill from the current road and downhill from the ridge that links Tilarán with the tiny villages of Silencio and Río Chiquito.  I have ridden my mare along one stretch of this old road that runs behind San Luís and Tronadora, much washed out and crowded with second-growth forest, and it took a man on horseback with a machete to cut open a way for us to pass.  Artifacts of the native people show up everywhere.  When the lake is low, you can go out in a kayak or canoe and explore along the naked shoreline for pottery shards.  In town, there’s hardly a house that doesn’t sport a metate, or corn-grinding stone, that turned up when the foundation was being dug.  It usually has a potted plant sitting on it.

Modern local history dates from the late nineteenth century, when there were gold mines south of here in Las Juntas and Líbano.  It was rough country then, virgin forest, and the only way in was by horse or mule.  The gold was shipped out in ox-carts.  (More recently it was taken out in helicopters!)  Gradually settlement drifted north, and people carved farms out of the ancient forests, establishing a fiercely independent, frontier life-style.  Even in the 1930s, it could take the better part of a week to get to San José – from Tilarán on horseback (oxcart took longer) to Cañas, where you waited days for a small boat to take you down the Bebedero to the Río Tempisque and the port of Puntarenas, then by all-day train up to the Central Valley.  The Inter-American highway wasn’t completed along its northern reaches until the sixties.  There was no paved road around the lake until the eighties.  (It’s still not finished.)  I have met retired school teachers in Tilarán who remember four-hour treks on horseback to get to their one-room school houses on the lake, sometimes in mud up to the horses’ knees.  The niece of one of these teachers told me that her grandparents owned our farm in those days, and that it was a much bigger property.  A lot of the farms around here were broken up when ICE acquired the land for the reservoir.  Since then, the process of development has been inexorable.  As long as there’s someone to buy, sooner or later a farmer will face the economic conditions that force him to sell, frequently just a small piece at a time, enough to give him ready cash to get along until beef prices go up, or the weather improves enough to let him get a good crop in.  There are still some fair-sized farms around the lake, but since the early nineties development has speeded up and been gringo-ized. (At least in Tilarán, the word gringo can refer to Europeans as well as to non-native-Spanish-speakers from north of the Río Grande. Our nearest neighbors are Germans.)

Earlier this year an 18-wheeler parked its trailer by the side of the road just uphill from Cinco Esquinas, smack in your face where the first grand view of the lake should be.  It was a mobile office with the name of an international real-estate company painted in large letters on its side.  This was beyond ugly, but it never opened.  Instead the world-wide recession brought local real estate sales almost to a halt.  Still the trailer sat there, month after month, until finally some locals couldn’t resist jacking the thing up to steal a pair of off-side tires, leaving it listing crazily on a slender pile of cement blocks.  Just the other day it finally disappeared.  How it was moved, nobody seems to know.  But nobody was sorry to see it go.  This little story – especially the part about getting that trailer out of there – is no doubt already brewing up into a local legend.

We’ve been here long enough to see people come and go.  Some can brave the remoteness, the vagaries of the weather and the strangeness of the culture, and some can’t.  Some people get attached to the land, and some don’t.

When I was growing up, my family never lived long enough in one place for me to become bound to the land.  We lived in some beautiful – and not so beautiful – places, both rural and suburban.  From my early twenties until I came to Costa Rica, I moved almost as frequently, living exclusively in cities.   It was a little shock to realize, when we started building this house five years ago, that I’ve lived on Lake Arenal, and on this particular plot of ground, longer than I’ve lived any place else in my entire life.

You can’t get attached to the earth in Philadelphia or New York.  How many millions of people never do?  It’s this attachment that fires my desire to protect it – but not just my attachment to this particular plot of ground, but to the whole thing, the planet.  It’s not such a giant leap of the imagination from the sight of a growing young forest to the image of a tiny blue speck in the vastness of the universe.  So, finally, it is the sense of place that has captured me and pinned me to the planet.

It is gratifying to be part of the history of the land, to be growing a farm instead of shrinking it, to be building a forest instead of cutting it down.  Here, in one tiny corner of the planet, the question becomes obvious:  do we add something by our tenancy of the earth, or do we take it away?