Costa Jill

Free To Bloom

Let me toot my horn. My ebook Free To Bloom is finally published on Amazon and Barnes & Noble for an initial price of only $2.99. Thought I’d give you some background to get you interested in buying it and reading it. The print edition will be published in days. Here’s a description:

Through eleven partially linked chronological stories we follow Danielle as she splits from a long-term marriage to find her way as a single woman living alone in a foreign country. Her search for both physical and emotional contentment and independence leads her to take risks in life and love from jumping off waterfalls, to discovering a gorgeous young caveman, and learning the art of marijuana growing and harvesting. Follow her journey as she intertwines intimate personal insights with wild adventures.

Of Time and the Mountain

The first story Of Time and the Mountain reveals that beginning a new life and building a house in an isolated part of a foreign country, Costa Rica, is rampant with challenges: physical, emotional and personal. The frayed threads of a long term marriage begin to unravel one by one.

Learning a new language, meeting new people, living in a strange culture, subsisting in a primitive environment without basic necessities bring a need for a little respite wherever it can be found. And find it Danielle does, whether it’s going to local festivals in the mountain villages, finding archeological artifacts, or getting to know both locals and expats.

Alligator Dreams

Danielle travels back and forth between the U.S. and Costa Rica finding adventure wherever she is. New relationships blossom, grow strong, wilt, revive or die, but all are worthwhile experiences. With Danielle’s newborn independence, taking risks in both love and life becomes necessity. A U.S. doctor is shocked by her little parasite in My Friend George. A scary alligator plies Florida waters in Alligator Dreams.

God's Caveman

A Costa Rican cave dweller falls in love with her in God’s Caveman.She is horrified by the ‘dog-eat-dog’ world in Puppy Love. At turns she is terrified and exhilarated by conquering the waterfall in Fear of Falling.

Fear of Falling

Getting to Know You -Humboldt County

Getting to know Adrian in California includes experiencing his illegal lifestyle and feeling his paranoia when the cops appear at the pot growing fields in Getting To Know You – Humboldt County.

Join Danielle as she deals with both the highs and lows of her adventurous life; how she deals with conflict, has fun, learns patience and gains contentment as her life blooms into full flower.

Author Biography

Though born in California, and living in France as a child, Jill Green’s formative years were spent on Florida’s Gulf Coast. After college at the Univ of Florida, marriage, two children – one deaf, she started teaching, helped run two businesses and after 30 years, got divorced.

What a turn life took! Now living in two countries, Sarasota, FL and Costa Rica. she forgot her French, but learned Spanish. Living alone took many adjustments, eventually she has become a self-sufficient, adventuresome individual, traveling the world, volunteering with many organizations, climbing mountains, surfing the seas and teaching ESL in Costa Rica and Florida.

The Author

After many years working and bringing up a family she has finally become a published writer with her book of short stories Free to Bloom about life in Costa Rica and the United States, hopefully the first of many. Although she has written stories and essays for small magazines, her next big project is auto-biographical: the trials, tribulations, joys and sorrows of living with and educating a deaf child who after the fact designed and now runs a successful website www.gatorcountry.com, one of the top U. of Florida Gator football websites.

Visit Jill’s personal blog at http://www.costajill.com and her Free to Bloom blog at http://www.freetobloombook.com, where you can buy the book in either format.

Terry & Jill RVing at Wanee

Jill & Cindi

I desperately need to burst outside; leave the home cave, after too many hours inside from taking on the worries of the world, including publishing my book Free to Bloom. I walk out into my yard and start picking fruit. Under an umbrella of mulberries pricked through with sunlight, I pick buckets of sweet luscious berries each facet reflecting a thousand purple insect eyes, the last of the meyer lemons, as big as oranges, one lone papaya from my former tree recently fenced in by the evil neighbors.

I begin to see a different world as my edges smooth allowing the colors, scents, music, smiles and perspective in with the fresh air. Frustration is tempered with fulfillment:

• Verizon has disconnected my phone and internet, but can’t turn it back on. On April Fool’s Day my luck reverses and they work.
• I’m unable to upload my bookcover on Amazon, but successfully upload the book.
• My computer guru son isn’t able to complete my website, but fixes and delivers his RV to us in time for the Wanee Festival, an old hippie extravaganza of musicians running the gamut from headliner the Allman Brothers to Taj Mahal.

Terry & Vilma way down upon the Suwanee

Wanee Music Festival

And Wanee Fest becomes my perfect tension tamer. 30,000 people mill about under 80 acres of trees on the Suwanee River. In our first RV experience, Terry, Vilma, Cindi and I eventually find our way to the campground and set up. We sit under pines and oaks, music on all sides, skin cool after a morning dip in the river. We’re in an isolated world of friendly smiles, great music, perfect weather, cool breezes with nothing to do but dance, eat, sing, play, laugh, and forget the cares of the outside world.

I relax, open up and another gift appears – my ebook Free to Bloom is published on Amazon. Thank you everyone, especially my son Ray, for helping me in so many ways to accomplish this feat.

Robert Plant and Patty Griffin

Sebaco

Back on the road with El Porvenir, a national NGO, we travel the Pan-American Highway, trashed with plastic bags and bottles, through Nicaragua to Sebaco and check in to one of the only hotels. We are in the breadbasket of the country. Fields of sugarcane, rice, beans, peanuts, tomatoes, and at higher elevations, coffee, surround the valley. Semi-trailers and buses carry workers, animals and vegetables to and fro. The town is a trade center disguised as a truck stop with lots of banks, prostitutes and gas stations on a contaminated river.

The afternoon is free so Bob and I hike into town for some local color. We hail a bicycle taxi and ask for a tour. To alleviate drabness the storefronts, though neither colonial nor quaint, are painted in gorgeous bright colors, especially pink and purple. The market, filled with friendly vendors, is a profusion of mounded fruit and vegetables shining in the afternoon sun. We return unharmed from our rich experience to admonitions of “Stay out of Sebaco! It’s a dangerous haven for robbers, gangs and prostitutes.”

The next day we’re off to Casas Viejas on a rutted dirt road rough enough to break an axle. Stark serene mountains on both sides frame the dry dusty terrain clotted with brown stubby trees. The tiny village is far enough away and hard enough to reach that it is isolated not only from the crime and politics of the big cities, but also from the ‘basic necessities’ of potable water and sanitation. And that’s what we’re here for.

typical house Casas Viejas

Latrines and handwashing station in progress

The village has been approved for a project by El Porvenir. Three latrines and a hand washing station with piped in potable water will be built by community members and volunteers (us) before school starts. All materials and training are supplied by El Porvenir. We are greeted by the teachers and children the first day. We volunteers do mostly grunt work along with the children – carrying sand for cement, rocks for the drain field. There’s no electricity so everything is hecho por mano, done by hand. The locals like to see and get to know the volunteers and vice-versa. We four Gringo volunteers and two El Porvenir staff drive up two plus hours each day to help. Jose is the local foreman and his wife Chepita cooks lunch for us at their house. Walking through the village we get a view of the valley below, meet the neighbors, check out the mud/thatch houses, doors flung open to catch the light and breeze. I’m surprised to see the contented, though not easy, lives they lead. A teacher says, “the children like to work, they want to help. They’ve been raised that way.”

Jill and her students

translator Marco, volunteers Tim, Connie at work

Casas Viejas has almost 500 inhabitants, approximately 6 per house. There is a church, a primary school with no water or sanitation, a clinic open only once a month, and no stores. A truck with a bench along one side for riders comes once a day from the closest town, Dario. After six years of school hardly anyone continues their education. It’s too far and costs too much ($1 ea. way).

across from the school

family members at work

Learning to live and work together is inherent. Older children take care of younger and all have chores: in the garden, feeding the chickens, milking the cows, grinding corn, washing clothes. The women and children handle the stuff of life in the village. Most the men are either non-existent or have work far away. Self-sufficiency is a necessity. If a job is available, average pay is only $2 per day.

view of the valley, Bob and pal Jose

On the third day of construction I hurt my back and can’t dig or carry. I become the Pied Piper and gather the children together for English lessons. They are thrilled and eager. With only the occasional cry of a baby, the children are happy and busy. Siblings don’t fight, parents don’t scream. Talking with them I find that they’d like to continue their education past sixth grade. Young Jose, who comes every day, takes a liking to Bob and me. He says sadly, “This is my last year of school. We don’t have enough money for the trip to town.”

Check in next time – Getting to Know You Nicaraguan People.