Downward facing dog takes a literal meaning through a new style of yoga for pet owners and their canine companions.
All photos came from The Daily Mail Online.
Marcela Castro began a dog yoga class in San Jose, Costa Rica, after taking one of her six dogs with her to a yoga session.
“Doga,” as it is commonly known, intends to help dogs stretch their legs, backs, and spines and calm them down. It also socializes the animals with other dogs, which is proven to be beneficial to improving behavior.
U.K. news site Mail Online covered Castro’s business and quotes her saying:
“Dogs with behavioural problems started to come and now are much more calm and better behaved,” Ms Castro explains.
Castro goes on to say:
“One of my dogs, a rescue dog, used to be very nervous and urinate when people touched him. He doesn’t do that now after doing Doga.”
Castro goes through a series of standing and seated yoga poses with her clients and their pets to get the dog’s tail to stop wagging, indicating that they are relaxed.
Doga is not just a Costa Rican recreation. It is popular in New York too, where it first caught on. There’s even dog yoga studios here in Missouri, specifically St. Louis.
In 2007, Time magazine published a photo story called What the World Eats. It’s a series of photos by Peter Menzel of families from different countries surrounded by one week’s worth of groceries for their household.
In the photo captions, Menzel lists some common dishes for the family and how much a week of food costs in each nation’s currency, as well as American dollars.
The families featured in Menzel’s three-part series come from places like Poland, the United States, Australia, and Costa Rica’s northern neighbor, Guatemala.
Because Menzel featured Guatemala’s popular foods, I thought it’d be interesting to delve into the eating lifestyle of a native Costa Rican, commonly called a Tico.
Black beans and rice are the staple of virtually all Tico meals. The Viva Costa Rica! site says these two foods are implemented into breakfast as “gallo pinto seasoned with onions and peppers, accompanied by fried eggs, sour cream, and corn tortillas.”
For dinner, Ticos might enjoy a soup or stew made of beef and several veggies. Other common foods are plantains, which serve as a tasty banana-like snack. Or roast pork, the primary meat in Costa Rican cuisine.
Similar to Americans, Ticos love their seafood and coffee. But most of the highly desired foods are expensive and found in the nation’s capital, San Jose. Outside of this central area, most Ticos rely on a variety of vegetables, and the two staple foods mentioned earlier.
The Guatemalan diet consists of many vegetables and crops because much like Costa Rica, it is an agriculturally based economy.
Mendoza Family, from Todos Santos, Guatemala. Photo by Peter Menzel.
What the World Eats: Part II introduces the Mendoza family (above) of Todos Santos, Guatemala. Their family recipe includes Turkey Stew and Susana Perez Matias’s Sheep Soup. They spend about 573 Quetzales, or $75.70 in U.S. dollars.
The CIA World Factbook estimates Guatemala’s GDP per capita is US $5,200, making it one of the poorest countries in Latin America.
If you consider they spend about $75 on food per week, and multiply that to 52 weeks per year, the average Guatemalan is spending $3,900 every year on food. That is 75 percent of their annual income going to groceries.
I was unable to gather an estimate on the cost to eat in Costa Rica, but I presume it is considerably higher than that of Guatemala because it is much more economically stable.
Last year, Missouri faced “the most expansive drought in the United States in more than half a century,” says Reuters.
A drought that hurt soybean and corn crops, killed 25 people, and ultimately brought Governor Jay Nixon to declare a state of emergency due to the prolonged high temperatures.
However, Missouri’s drought complications are long behind us now, and instead, Costa Rica is battling a harmful dry season.
With almost half of 2013 behind us, Missouri is seeing a heavy, but much needed, amount of rainfall throughout the state.
The water helped restore Missouri’s agricultural to a productive state, but poses the threat of flooding. This makes things tough for farmers who can’t grow much food if their fields are muddied with too much water.
Our troubles would likely be seen as a blessing to Costa Ricans though.
The weather there has been unseasonably dry all year so access to water is substantially lower compared to previous drought years.
In the agriculturally based nation, water is essential to maintaining reservoirs, growing crops, and most obvious, sustaining the lives of its citizens.
Lindsay Fendt from the TicoTimes.net online newspaper writes:
“When the water went off in March, it was for a few hours at a time. Then, a few weeks later, it shut off for eight hours every day, then for 16 hours. Now, in May, San Isidro de Heredia residents are lucky if they get any water at all.
20,000 people are affected by water rationing efforts throughout Costa Rica.
Due to Heredia’s reliance on water reservoirs, the public services company there has cut the province’s water intake down from about 196 liters per second, to 20-30 liters per second—an 85 to 90 percent decrease in usage.
In other areas, residents are on the verge of protesting. The community of San Isidro receives water maybe once a day, and “sometimes, it isn’t even potable,” says Laura Astua, a local victim of the country’s severe rationing.
The lack of water resources is also affecting the environment by heightening the conditions for acid rain to accumulate. This makes the air unsafe for humans and animals to breathe and kills the country’s crops and other plants.
Missouri’s drought of 2012 would probably be preferred over Costa Rica’s current conditions. Hopefully, their weather will follow suit to ours and bring plenty of rainfall in the coming months.
“A Spanish organization called Fundación ANAR, or Aid to Children and Adolescents at Risk, created a bus-stop advertisement in April that features the group’s hotline number for children to report abuse.
But by using a process called lenticular photography, the company made the hotline number, and much of the ad’s content, visible only to those under a certain height — presumably children.”
This comes from Betsey Issacson, writer for the Huffington Post.
In the eyes of anyone over 4’5”, the ad mentioned above features a solemn-faced boy, under the words, “Sometimes, child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”
However, those shorter than 4’5” see the boy with bruises to his face and a bleeding lip. The ad is supposed to target abused children who don’t know how to get out of their situation. The ad offers a hidden hotline number for the child to call.
The idea is that if the kid passes by the ad with their abuser, the abuser won’t realize that their victim is now equipped with a resource to stop the abuse.
Lenticular photography is no new phenomenon, but its use in this sense is revolutionary. As such, the YouTube video spread the organizations message and gained viral popularity.
This could however be considered counterproductive.
The company’s ad campaign creators say “thanks to the publicity on media and all the comments on social networks, the campaign has achieved its main objective: Raise awareness of the Foundation and [its] phone number 116-111 for children and teenagers at risk.”
I was under the impression that the goal was for primarily children to take note of the ad, but now, virtually, the entire developed world knows of this campaign strategy, including child abusers.
It’s already difficult enough to get children to report abuse, but now a great idea may just deter abusers from walking past the sign, if they see it ahead.
This is obvious in high abuse nations like Costa Rica, as reported by its English language news source, Inside Costa Rica.
“According to the 911 Emergency Services, the month of December brought a total of 2,296 calls regarding violence against children – victims of physical, sexual and psychological violence.”
Rodolfo Hernandez, director of the National Children’s Hospital there said there had been a 600% increase in the number of child abuse cases reported between January 2007 and January 2012.
Even though the number of reports had increased, this implies the “epidemic” of child abuse increased too.
Maybe Costa Rica could take a similar approach to reaching children as its colonizer, Spain, and use hidden messages.
Frank Jacobs, writer for The New York Times, details the events leading up to the almost war between Costa Rica and Nicaragua in 2010.
“The First Google Maps War” is a result of Nicaraguan intrusion into Costa Rican territory on account of a border inconsistency between the previously agreed upon land ownership and the ever-so-popular Google Maps.
According to the online resource, Nicaragua had claim to a few square miles just South of its already established borderlines. So the country dispatched troops to “the Isla Portillos, along the southern bank of the San Juan’s main channel,” to defend its “rightful” territory.
The history and lifestyles of the two nations are different in many ways, which might shed light on why either would participate in such a trivial feud.
Costa Rica is acclaimed for it’s relatively peaceful nature and has been involved in very little conflict in recent history. The country is wealthy and much more stable than most of its Central American neighbors. Because of this, it does not maintain a military, only a police force, seventy of which it sent to the area in retaliation to Nicaragua’s military presence.
On the other hand, Nicaraguans tend to be impoverished and the nation has long been disgruntled by its constant gang violence and lack of stability. Nicaragua’s history of conflict may yield an explanation to why it’d be so confrontational over the small area.
The nation’s leaders may have seen the incursion as a potential economic boost because Costa Rican lands are lush with agricultural possibilities and its people are wealthy. That being said, the loss Costa Rica might’ve incurred justifies its hasty reprisal.
However, Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega explains his actions because of the shrinking river that denotes the border between the two.
In an interview with The Tico Times, President Ortega said, “In the 1600s and 1700s, the river covered an enormous amount of territory at its delta.” He goes on to say, “And as the zone has dried, the river has moved and (Costa Rica) has continued to advance and take possession of terrain that doesn’t belong to it.”
Despite the standoff near San Juan, the countries did not battle it out. “Google Maps’ imprecision reignited a long-standing border dispute that could have led to a real war,” writes Jacobs.
No physical fighting commenced, but Costa Rica did go on to file a lawsuit against Nicaragua to the International Court of Justice in The Hague “for alleged environmental damage and violation of sovereignty,” as reported by Nicaragua’s La Prensa. This court case is still in the works, as recently as April 2013.
President Barack Obama, of the United States, visited Central and South America from May 2 to fourth, making stops in San Jose and Mexico City to discuss economics and immigration reform.
He is the first U.S. president to do so since 1997, when Bill Clinton visited. Because of this, Costa Rica marked May 3 as a national holiday, pulling out all the stops for Obama, including a parade and the day off work for its citizens.
This excerpt comes from a blog called The White House Dossier, maintained by Kevin Hoffler. He credits some of the day’s events as noted by a White House pool report.
From the White House pool report:
Overwhelming crowds, in the thousands, greeted the motorcade between the airport and the hotel where POTUS is having a meet and greet with embassy personnel. It appears that the government of Costa Rica has declared a national holiday. That might explain in part the affluence and the enthusiasm. “Welcome Mr. President! Blessings” read one makeshift sign. Others waved US and local flags, many were snapping pictures. Some stood on the highway itself, only leaving one lane for the vehicles to go through.
A report from Reuters says, “At Casa Amarilla, headquarters of the Costa Rica foreign affairs ministry, school children wearing white shirts with blue silk shawls stood in a circle around Obama and sang to him.”
Compared to the rest of Central America, Costa Rica appears to be a trendsetter in the international goal to preserve planet Earth. The country is well known for its natural beauty and efforts to improve national sustainability.
In June, Costa Rica’s environmentally friendly reputation will be boosted even further. A new organic food distributor is stepping on the scene to draw back the amount of anti-eco footprints that Costa Ricans make.
Former AOL Europe CEO, Andreas Schmidt, designed the Barefoot Social Commerce Group. Barefoot is a distribution service to connect local organic farmers with customers and businesses seeking pesticide-free produce.
The idea shows a direct link between environmentalism and small-scale globalization by developing an online resource called The Local Food Network. This website allows the people of Costa Rica to order fresh fruits and vegetables to their door, in what is commonly called a farm box.
I call it small-scale globalization because it is the first of its kind, but has vast potential to expand on an international scale
The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism offers a succinct definition of globalization that supports my concept of Barefoot’s downsized globalizing.
“Globalization is the process of world shrinkage, of distances getting shorter, things moving closer. It pertains to the increasing ease with which somebody on one side of the world can interact, to mutual benefit, with somebody on the other side of the world.”
The Barefoot business is revolutionary because its benefits are three-fold.
First, it benefits organic farmers who only make up two percent of the agricultural sector in Costa Rica. Barefoot makes earning a living in such a small market much easier because it relieves farmers of the stress to find customers.
Next, it eliminates customer’s search for organic foods by making it accessible online, opposed to hunting down a local producer and transporting the food themselves.
Similar to the definition noted earlier, it’s improving the ability for farmers to access a market of distant organic consumers, and vice versa—small-scale globalizing.
The final benefit is the most obvious—preserving Earth’s purity and natural resources. The primary mission of Barefoot is to do common good instead of maximizing profit.
“We developed the Barefoot idea as a system that can help to bring change to one of the biggest problems we all face: healthy food that doesn’t make us sick and doesn’t destroy the planet,” Schmidt said.
With its launch fast approaching, Barefoot clearly has potential to dominate the organic food industry in Costa Rica, and likely, the world.
It could be said that Haiti is the least “western” country in the western world. With its extreme poverty and trade deficit, it is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere and is considered to be one of the least developed. In its past, Haiti has been without the labor productivity and the foundation of strong democracy that Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post- American World argues are crucial to a country’s success. A continual colonial presence and occupation inhibited Haiti’s ability to develop economically and politically.
Zakaria recognizes non-governmental organizations as one of the major players that power is shifting to in the so-called “post-American” world. However, Zakaria also stresses the idea of legitimacy as power. He explains that legitimacy is what provides the means to establish agendas and to assure support for these initiatives. These two concepts collide in an important way in Haiti.
Over the years Haiti has played host to thousands of NGOs. Even before the 2010 earthquake, Haiti had more NGOs per capita than any other developing country other than India The constant an often overwhelming presence of NGOs in Haiti has in effect undermined the legitimacy of the Haitian government. In a New York Times article entitled the “The NGO Republic of Haiti” Kathie Klarreich and Linda Polman state that NGOs in Haiti have set their own priorities and have largely excluded the government.
Harvard professor Steven Lawry of The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, expresses a similar view point. He explains how NGOs challenge the Haitian government by creating their own infrastructure (setting up their own health, water, education and agricultural systems) with little reference to governmental oversight. He says that because of this, “funding channeled through international NGOs failed to help build the capacity of Haitian public institutions.”
This dynamic has undeniably affected Haitian nationalism. It has been argued that Haiti’s weakened state, economic instability, and lack of central authority have negative impact on Haitis’ national self-image. The Institute for Research in Socioeconomic and Public Policy indicates that the issues caused by the 2010 earthquake have had a particularly negative effect. Feelings of unrest, loss of control, and non-determination have weakened national identity. However, since the 19th century Haiti has been a hub for Black Nationalism. The spirit the contributed to the successful slave revolution in the 1800s has endured in various forms. It is particularly recognizable in Haitian art and music. It is clear that Haitians remain a proud people despite their national troubles.
Haiti has two distinctions in the Western Hemisphere. Firstly, it is one of only two nations that have French as their official language. Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, it is the poorest nation on the western side of the globe. Both of statistics are revealing about the status and experience of Haiti.
Between the 1400 and 1600s, both the French and the Spanish laid claim to the island of Hispaniola (of which modern Haiti occupies the western third). In 1697 the two European nations settled hostilities by diving the territory in half. The French received the western half and named it Sainte-Domingue. They quickly established permanent settlements and developed plantations. The primary crop was sugar cane, but land was also dedicated to indigo and coffee. These were all important exports, from which the French profited intensely. To sustain their agricultural endeavors, the colonist imported slaves en mass. The island was one of the harshest and most brutally effective slave colonies. Due to backbreaking labor and tropical disease, more than a third of slaves died within the first year in Sainte-Domingue. Admits these conditions many planters and overseers took advantage of slave women. As a result a substantial mixed race population developed. Many were freed by their fathers and went to live in communities of “gens du couleur libre” (free black men). These people lived separately from both slave and white society.
Inspired by the French Revolution, the slave population of Sainte-Domingue revolted in 1791. After the revolution, the island was renamed for the Amerindian name for mountains. The current president recognized that not all the former slaves spoke French and wanted the nations name to reflect that. To this day Haiti is the only nation to be born out of a slave revolt. The French eventually agreed to recognize the independence of the island in 1838 in exchange for a large sum of money. However, their autonomy did not last long, as the U.S came to occupy the nation until the late 1930s. When the United States discontinued its presence, Haiti was taken over by the Duvalier family, a line of dictators. Only in the 1990s did Haiti moved to a system of general election.
Haiti’s history has been shape by its lack of self-governance. Early on, Haiti was crippled by the massive sum of 150 million francs to the French. Furthermore, as an upstart country, Haiti was isolated internationally. Few nations were willing to invest in the new nation. In more modern times, first world countries such as the United States have benefited from Haiti’s low labor costs and tariff free access. This exploitation has contributed to Haitis high inflation rates and extreme trade deficit. Haiti has also suffered greatly from internal official corruption, lack of access to education, and reliance on traditional technology.
Since the removal of the Duvalier Haiti has made attempts to remove its economy with increased focus on trade and tariff liberalization. Haiti also worked with World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to help stimulate private sector growth. However, political uprisings and natural disasters since the early 1990s have greatly undermined Haiti’s efforts to achieve economic stability.
According to the Haitian newspaper Haiti Progress, Haiti is at a crossroads. In an article about the grand opening of a Haiti Best Western, the paper suggests that the country is looking towards the tourism industry as a means for economic improvement. The article explains that many Haitians are hoping to see new luxury hotels and accommodations, “make a change in infrastructure.” However, it is clear that not all Haitians feel this way. Haitian Times expresses very different views. In an article discussing the possibility of cruise ships setting up on the island, it states that with 400, 000 still in tents after the devastating 2010 earthquake, it is still too soon.
In recent years the small Caribbean nation of Haiti, has become almost indistinguishably associated with its tragic earthquake of 2010. The earthquake, measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, occurred on January 12, 2010, with its epicenter about 15 miles west of the country’s capital Port-au-Prince. The results were absolutely devastating. The quake decimated the population, killing 316,000, injuring 300,000, and leaving 1,000,000 homeless. It also destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, damaging roads, airports, hospitals, residences, and commercial buildings. All together, damages are believed to have exceeded $14 billion.
Sanitation conditions after the initial disaster were, and have remained a major issue. After the earthquake, morgue facilities were overwhelmed. For weeks, dead bodies lay by the thousands in the streets. In many cases, unidentified mass graves were dug or bodies were simply burned. The earthquake is also believed to have led to the rampant cholera outbreak that began in October of 2010. Since this time, the ongoing epidemic has killed almost 8,000 Haitians and has caused the hospitalization of thousands more.
Almost immediately preceding the earthquake, there was an overwhelming humanitarian response to the disaster. With two months, over $3 billion had been given or pledged by countries and organizations. Haiti, itself, was flooded by thousands of non-profit organizations from around the globe. Yet despite the intention, these NGOs may have actually added to the countries woe. As journalist Linda Pullman highlights in her book What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid: The Crisis Caravan, misunderstanding and mismanagement on the part of aid organizations often contributes to the chaos. MU French professor and Haitian scholar Valerie Kaussen, asserts that this was the case in post earthquake Haiti. Of the billions of dollars in aid, she states that only an estimated $1.5 billion as actually gotten to relief projects on the ground. Kaussen, who was there at the time of the disaster and throughout the rebuilding process, feels that there was a complete lack of coordination and communication. Many of the organizations were completely unfamiliar with the area. They did not possess the tools or the knowledge to act effectively and correctly link resources with need.
Perhaps the biggest issue with reconstruction in Haiti was the lack of Haitian participation. While the various organizations attempted to set up a cluster system to organize and work with each other, the Haitian government was largely left out of the loop. Only a few executives were involved in the meetings. Even then, these proceedings were conducted primarily in English, while the official languages of Haiti are French and Creole. According to Kaussen, the presence of so many foreign NGOs undermines the government and the security of the state. This is a sentiment that Pullman also expresses in her book. She explains that the Tutsi regime in Rwanda was unique in its ability to maintain power over these organizations and remove those that they saw as unhelpful.
As it stands, Haiti is facing a major dilemma. Many of the non-profits that have been in Haiti over the past three years are beginning to pull out. As few of these charities worked with the government, there will be no one to continue the work. Furthermore, the removal of aid and foreign investment will likely throw the economy into even greater turmoil. But despite the grave state of things, Kaussen asserts that the Haitian people will pull through will their enduring sense of spirit.
Globalization and Digital Technology 