This March Break, fourteen Grade 8 Junior School students from Trinity College School traveled to Costa Rica for a school trip. During this trip, we lived in a rainforest for a week at Rancho Mastatal, learning about sustainable living, permaculture, natural building, and making amazing connections with local Ticos.
We had a fantastic tour guide, Marcos, who showed us various wonderful things in Costa Rica. This included Rancho Mastatal, rainforest hikes, Costa Rican snacks, the beach and the Pacific Ocean. Marcos was also an essential connection to the local, rural community.
Our one-week experience at Rancho Mastatal was very educational and unique. We met a lot of amazing people at the ranch who taught us lots of Spanish words and phrases. We also got to try different varieties of food that were grown on the ranch or sourced locally, such as red bananas, papayas, green papaya kimchi, cacao fruit and a lot more! Every day at the ranch was fun and exhausting too. We played soccer, hung out on the hammocks and in the open-air classroom, and played chess with each other.
We did lots of fun, educational and experiential activities during our time at the ranch too. Natural building was a great experience where we filtered soil and mixed mud with our feet to make bricks. Soap making was also something that most of us had never tried before. We loved mixing ingredients and then pouring them into the container and letting the soap dry! All of us took a bar of soap home that we made. Learning about permaculture and fermentation was really interesting too! We learned about sustainable ways to grow food and had the opportunity to taste local fruit and vegetables, like jackfruit and guava. Later we had a tour of the ranch garden and fruit orchards, learning about all sorts of different plants and the ways the people at the ranch plant them. Rancho Mastatal taught us the sustainable ways that they use to live and grow every day.
Learning about fermentation was also really fun. There were lots of green papayas for us to peel up and shred them into little pieces. Then we added salt to release the juice from the green papayas. We also learned how to make chocolate in sustainable ways and we also tried fresh cacao fruit. We walked for 30 minutes under the hot sun and finally reached the chocolate farm. While we were there, the people served us chocolate cupcakes and hot chocolate; it was delicious! Taking part in mixing chocolate and grinding dried cacao beans was fun.
All of us were very grateful for the opportunity to visit this beautiful country and hang out with our friends for a whole week! We would love to visit Costa Rica again!
- By Claudia Zeng and Elaine Lu, Grade 8 students
