Tico Tuesday, February 9th

And the winner is...

Laura Chinchilla! Yes, that's right folks, Costa Rica's president-elect is indeed a woman. She was the only female candidate, but boy did she have a strong campaign! Her party (National Liberation or PLN) is the biggest and strongest right now and it's members also landed just under half of the 57 seats in the unicameral legislative assembly. All the other parties are not so organized and not as well financed. The current president, Oscar Arias is also a member of this party. Please join me in praying for the new presidenta. More stories from election day, including me “helping” are on the blog...

Have a blessed rest of the week!

Love,

Carrie

Yes, I got roped into helping out on election day. Pretty funny. I was happy to help though, especially since I knew my big bother Dan also helped support candidates in the elections when he was here in Costa Rica several years ago. It's just what we do. Jijiji. Anyway, a guy from CCI is a member of a small, provincial party and was running for a seat in the Legislative Assembly. So, Ana Victoria, her husband William, and their kids, Diana, Felipe, Veronica and me were there helping out (These are the people I also spent Christmas with, if you recall). I'm not sure how much we helped. We, like people from many other parties had tents on the plaza (in front of the Catholic church), because the elementary school was a voting location and it is directly across the plaza from the Catholic church. So we weren't helping people check in or anything like that. I think we were technically supposed to ask people if they'd voted yet and encourage them to vote for the guy from Restauracion Herediana as the diputado. We pretty much just ended up hanging out in our tent though. That was fun. We got free t-shirts out of the deal, but the party doesn't have much money, so we didn't have anything else to hand out except little flyers with the guy's name on them.

In the meantime the PLN tent was next to ours (pictured above in the Tico Tues section) and there were people ALL over the dressed in white and green and with Laura hats, visors, bumper stickers, t-shirts, plastic PLN flags, etc. And they had coffee in their tent (and possible other goodies but it was always so full of people I could never tell).

There was a constant sound of honking as cars drove around with one or several flags (mostly of the party/ies that they support) stuck in the windows. Often there were long trains of cars together. All the little ice cream vendors bicycle carts from town were at the plaza and there were a ton of people just hanging out. It was like a big party.

So, it was fun. Our guy didn't win. His chances were really slim. Heredia only gets 5 diputados in the Legislative Assembly and his party is really small. But, perhaps in the future...