Hi! My name is Maricruz Arias and a few months ago I had the opportunity to live a week In Talamanca, an indigenous region in Limón, Costa Rica. I shared with the community and learned about their culture. I was in a region named Dururpe, home of the Bribris (a Costa Rican indigenous group). The water there was a limited resource and it wasn’t very clean… because of this we boiled it before we drank it. Another fact is that we had to cook with firewood and there was no refrigerator so we didn’t eat meat at all. Our diet was based on platain, rice, pasta, beans and cassava.

During this time, I learned about the importance of the rivers because if the river gets contaminated then they have no water.

They didn’t use plastic on a daily basis and this was an example of how we can reduce the use of it in our life on the city. For example, they don’t use plastic dishes they use the platain leaf as their dishes.

I also learned that we can reduce our meat consumption a lot and it-s not like we are going to lack of protein as we may think. This is very important because the meat industry produces a lot of CO2 emissions.

For now on I’m going to reduce my meat consumption and avoid using plastic.