16 August 2013

You get to the event. You’re planning on sitting at the back so you can eat your lunch during the speeches and sneak out early. But there’s a table on the stage and they tell you that you have to sit there. As you take your seat, you look around. Everyone else at the table seems to have a piece of paper in front of them. Slowly it dawns on you that this is a speech ceremony and you’ve just been placed at the speakers’ table. You ask someone to confirm. Sure enough, you need to address the room, albeit briefly, and you need to do it in your second language. You feel rather faint, and after a few swigs from your complementary speaker’s water bottle you set in to frantically pen out a few words before the event begins. You run out of time.

I’m pretty sure I’ve had that nightmare before. Only this time around it was very much a reality, and very much one of those terrifying experiences that can be spun positively as a “learning experience.”

The event was to celebrate the Bandera Azul: this is a prize awarded to towns, educational institutions, tourism establishments and other organizations in Costa Rica to recognize ecological excellence. It can recognize environmental education or sustainable eco-tourism or in Cloudbridge’s case, Espacios Naturales Protegidos - protected natural areas.

San Gerardo as a town has a Bandera Azul for its recycling program, its support for environmental projects, and its educational Earth Day celebrations. In addition, there are no fewer than six establishments in and around San Gerardo that also have received the Bandera Azul: the school, the local hot springs, two hotels, a hostel, and Cloudbridge. That makes 7 Banderas Azules in a town with population ~350. That is an achievement for San Gerardo to be proud of, and the reason for the event I found myself at.

As the current acting manager of Cloudbridge, it was my job to represent Cloudbridge as a Bandera Azul recipient. I was under the very distinct impression that representing would involve sitting in the salon for about an hour or two listening to talks about the importance of the Bandera Azul and environmental awareness in the community, and would then get to go home.

How wrong I was.

In the end, though, the speech required was nothing, a formality, just a few words to express excitement at the achievements of the various establishments in San Gerardo and for the town’s mentality as well. I did not have to go into depth about Cloudbridge’s role in ecological conservation, although perhaps that would have been easier; as it was, I had to listen carefully to the formalities of the speakers before me so that I would be able to appropriately address those present: A todos los que están aquí presente hoy, a los invitados en la mesa principal, a las docentes de la escuela, a los estudiantes por sus presentaciones, es un placer estar aquí… super formal. For the most part the other speakers used a level of vocabulary that I haven’t reached yet, very polite and formal and refined. Mine was more basic, but I was able to express my excitement at the sheer number of Banderas Azules the community had achieved, and how this reflected a broader mentality of conservation which was extremely valuable. Nothing fancy. But I stood up and I spoke and I said eh and bueno and no sé a lot as terrible little bad-habit fillers, but I conveyed my thoughts and I didn’t faint or cry or pee in my pants, so I felt that overall it had been a wild success.

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