Río Virilla cleanup set
for Saturday in Mora


An expected 200 volunteers will take to the banks of the Río Virilla Saturday for the second weekend of cleanup.

The event is being sponsored by the Fundación Terranostra with the support of Banco Nacional and Teletica.

The volunteers will begin at the Piedras Negras section in the Cantón de Mora. The river is widely acknowledged as one of the dirtiest in Central America. The goal is to eliminate the trash and garbage along the river near the Brasil hydro plant operated by the Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz. The dam at the plant is a collection point for tons of garbage that comes down the river from the San José and Desamparados regions. The company maintains a crane there to lift trees, garbage and trash from behind the dam.

In the first effort to clean up the banks of the river, volunteers collected 2,267 kilos, nearly 2.5 tons, of trash and garbage, said the bank. Much of the trash consists of plastic bottles which can be recycled. Money raised from recycling is passed on to local recycling associations, said the bank.

After Saturday, there are six more cleanup days scheduled for the river, about one a month into October. The bank is maintaining a data base of those who want to be enrolled as volunteers and notified about future cleanups. Enrollment is via an e-mail to pbertoglia@bncr.fi.cr.

3G system fails to give
service that was promised

Dear A.M. Costa Rica:

Your article about the old TDMA and the supposedly newer, better Kölbi 3g underscores, at least for me, another problem that the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad has.  The new Kölbi 3G data card/modems have run out, and that is only part of another problem with ICE’s new 3G service.  The ‘new’ system is NOT working well, and many of us who bought this data card/modem for internet service are pretty much left in the lurch.  What ICE didn’t tell us is that a lot of us are still in fringe areas where the 3G signal is weak, and therefore, we are not able to obtain the promised high-speed broadband access they promised us.

Personally, I can tell you that my service is all over the place.  Yesterday afternoon, for example, I couldn’t even get on line for short periods, and when I did connect, the connection was so tenuous that even my e-mail could not fully download.  This has been the standard of my 3G since sometime in February.  Yes, that’s right, February.  It was not actually as bad in January as it is now.  Weather obviously has nothing to do with it as yesterday afternoon was hot and sunny.

I have personally gone back to the local ICE office on at least three separate occasions, asking them for help, to exchange the unit, to do something.  The local office staff simply gives the strong impression that they do not have a clue.  First they told me that no exchanges were being done because so many people were complaining like me, and that they were compiling a list of users to forward to San Jose, so an engineer could come and survey our area.  That, of course, has not happened. 

I have sent three different consultas via e-mail, to their contraloria.  The first, sent in January, received an answer after the second (which was sent on Feb. 7), had received a non-answer.  That second request for assistance took six weeks for a response.  Ultimately, and not a bit surprisingly, the local office told me that there are simply no more data card/modems available in the country, and they have no idea of if or when ICE will deliver the high speeds they originally promised for January.  (Some of your readers may recall that ICE originally said that this system would provide speeds up to 1.5Mbps, but to date the best I have gotten, and then only for short periods of time, has been around one third of that).  Granted, they are still not charging the full amount that the service was going to cost, and that speaks volumes, at least to me.

When is summer?

Dear A.M. Costa Rica:

Winter vs. Summer. We have just bought a condo in Costa Rica to escape Canadian winters. My husband and I live in Edmonton, Alberta, and the winters are very cold and DRY. Even though we get a lot of snow, snow is not usable water, and cold is very drying.

Our humidity level is never very high in the Province of Alberta at any time. In the spring the snow melts, but a lot of it runs off and can't soak into the frozen ground. My point if winter (November to March) is our dry time (no useable moisture) and Costa Rica calls summer (December to March) it's dry time (no rain), is summer just a point of view ?? I am confused. Can you get a science teacher to explain this.

A.M. Costa Rica photo