Angel to home for elderly,
Donlon Havener dies at 91


Donlon Havener could turn a bus load of sleepy expats into a rolling party, particularly if the vehicle was on the way to the

home for unwanted adults in La Rita de Guápiles. Havener was an expert at rounding up potential expat donors and taking them to the project he loved, the Tom and Norman Home. Havener would act like a game show host and hold raffles and contests on the bus trip, most likely using his own money for prizes. But there was no chance of failing to understand his goal.

Donlon Havener

He wanted the expats to enjoy the trip and continue to support the home for the unwanted elderly and the Angel of Love Foundation that operated it.

Havener, 91 when he died Tuesday, successfully kept the money coming in and the home open even when high interest operations that benefitted many expat donors collapsed in 2002. Havener also fought the local municipality to keep the home open when officials wanted to apply nursing home standards. He helped distribute a video of the home and encouraged many annual fund-raising operations. He made frequent visits even lately when his health began to fail.

In fact, Havener sometimes was called the guardian angel of the foundation, but he was much more. A summary provided by friends and family said that he graduated college in 1940 and earned a master's at a university in New York in 1941. Four years in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater followed, and he was reported to be among the first U.S. troops to enter bomb ravaged Hiroshima.

He taught at Syracuse University and in México where he spent nearly 20 years. Havener taught at the University of the Americas and was for 17 years director of the Mexico City Center of Bilingual Studies, said the summary. He founded and was president of the Lowell School, Mexico’s first finishing school.

Havener returned to the United States to head up a bilingual program for The Mount Vernon School in Westchester County, New York. In 1971 he accepted a position at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico, where he worked as professor, department head and interim rector until his retirement in 1989. That is when he came to Costa Rica.

The Tom and Norman Home originally was set up to help AIDS sufferers when the government health services did not. Later it became an unusual home for the elderly.

Only those without funds and abandoned by their family could live there. One resident was found living under a piece of tin. Havener was able to identify and help an elderly woman who was a U.S. citizen. Through his help she began to receive the Social Security checks she deserved.

The home started as a barn and gradually grew, mostly under Costa Rican director Alexis Barquero Benavides. Barquero wrote a tribute under Havener's obituary in the Oneida, New York, Daily Dispatch, for whom until recently Havener wrote a column. "Today we have lost a friend, a brother, but above all a father for us," he said

Also signing the Spanish-language tribute were a number of residents and community supporters of the home.

According to the newspaper, Havener is survived by a daughter, Mary Agnes Drisgula and two grandchildren of New York; two cousins from Oneida, Becky Karst and Bob Staudt; a cousin, Ella Mae Johns from Verona Beach, New York, and numerous Havener cousins from all over the United States.

There was no local information on funeral or memorial services, but cremation is expected.


New law on trash prompts
ceremony at old landfill


A new law about garbage appeared in the la Gaceta official newspaper Tuesday, and President Laura Chinchilla and the health minister, María Luisa Ávila Agüero, will hold a small ceremony today to talk about the new law.

Appropriately, the site for talking about the law is the old Río Azul landfill in La Unión de Tres Rios. Some of the former landfill is now the Parque La Libertad.

The health ministry said that the new trash law represents a change in paradigm in handling such material. Now the emphasis will be on recycling an integrated management instead of just burying the trash, the ministry said.

The president also will be presenting trucks to municipalities to go along with the new law.

Meanwhile, the Municipalidad de San José said Wednesday that it had cleaned up an informal landfill in an area south of the central city known as El Pochote. The work included opening up a blocked storm sewer and construction of a new sidewalk to replace one that was heavily damaged, the municipality said.

The area also will be patrolled to keep the landfill from returning, officials said. The municipality also will increase the number of weekly garbage pickups in the area from two to three to cut down on the need for informal disposal.

However, the El Pochote dump contained construction waste and other items that are not normally trucked away by trash collectors.

Vetiver Network International

sewage. The climate there is somewhat dryer thanGuanacaste. Extending an existing system in the town of Toogoolawah, involved placing 21 pontoons with 300 plants on each on the settling ponds, which was enough to eliminate a problem with algae there. For a town of about 1,000 people, the wetland where the first-stage water was sent was three hectares. This was planted with rows of vetiver about 12 meters apart along contours. After passing through this cycle, the water emptied into a natural wetland.

Results in terms of contaminants at the end of the treatment process met Australian standards, and under arid Queensland conditions most of the water never made it out of the planted vetiver area.

This process seems promising for rural towns in Costa Rica with space, being relatively inexpensive for the treatment of the waste water. Unfortunately, those are the places least likely to have any other infrastructure in place to deliver sewage.

Small scale applications are also possible, and some relevant to rural Costa Rica were developed by Truong and others as part of rebuilding in Indonesia following the 2004 tsunami. Planting vetiver over a drain field reduces the size and complexity needed and reduces cost. As they rebuilt entire villages in Sumatra, communal systems could also be designed, which might be relevant to the clumps of houses often seen in rural areas here.