Breaking Pura Vida - Being Handicapped in Costa Rica is an Exercise in Humility, Humiliation and Erasure
Being Handicapped in a Non-Handicapped World of Costa Rica. Buckle Up Because This is Long
Near Tama’s supposed handicapped access, where you need to surmount a few steps and jump a ditch.
Lately I’m just having a very bad run of luck with my own personal disabilities. Nearly 4 years ago I suffered a Thalamic stroke, right in the center of my brain, that was serious enough that I still struggle to keep moving forward in my day to day life. I’ve recovered well, save for one thing, now I routinely bump up against a hard reality here in Costa Rica, the way handicap people are handled in this country. If I had to sum it up to a sentence it would be “Well, we tried!”
Starting with the time a local church decided to interpret local disability law as “kick the disabled member with mastocytosis out of the church for the visitor with a faked emotional support dog” when it kept sending me into anaphylaxis with the dog’s mere fur. I had only the faintest idea at that time what the American ADA laws covered. I wasn’t on the tines of a physical disability like I was after the stroke. Costa Rica takes all of it’s existing disability laws directly from the United States, just like many countries do. The problem being as lousy as the US is in handling the disabled, Costa Rica is so much worse!
This weekend I got to see this hard! I’ve been thinking seriously about the entire thing about humility and humiliation after I took a tumble on one of the local beaches last month. It was entirely my own fault, I saw how steep the climb was back to the parking lot from the beach, but I took that path anyway. The fall was entirely due to my own hubris, ending up with broken toes and cuts and scrapes on my feet before I managed to hobble back to my car. The entire humiliation aspect happened when Gringo visitors stepped over my prone body to get to the beach. Luckily some wonderful Ticos helped me up.
On Saturday I had to pick up my husband at the airport, a task I’ve done solo for many years without incident. Find a spot, park the car, walk to the airport building and wait at arrivals. Easy peasy, as they say. Not quite so this Saturday.
My husband had flown into the frozen Midwest for a family funeral for a few days and was supposed to fly straight back. Unfortunately there was a series of winter storms that left him stranded at the Dallas Fort Worth airport for two days before he was flown to Houston where he had to wait another day before boarding a flight for Costa Rica. He was hardly the only one affected by this weather. Three or four days worth of Costa Rica flights were canceled out of Dallas, meaning on Saturday that airline had oodles of flights arriving at the same airport along with other airlines that canceled flights. The airport in Liberia, Costa Rica was never designed for that much air traffic!
Once I arrived I found that the paid parking lot was full up to the top with a line of 30 plus cars waiting to enter. No problem, there’s always the grassy field that the airport uses as long term free parking. It was completely full too, including all of the handicapped spots in both lots. I had a friend with me, my friend Julie who also happens to be disabled. I am experiencing a crazy painful bout of sciatica right now, meaning instead of my usual cane to walk I am dependent on a rollator, a rolling walker. Julie uses crutches after a bad auto accident during 2020. Since Julie is a bit more ambulatory than I am in this moment she offered to hop out, grab Jim and go to a certain spot for pickup. That way I could just circle in the car until they appeared, no need for impossible parking.
Except it didn’t quite work out that way. I circled at least 20 times, far longer than it should have taken according to the arrival boards for Jim to appear. Eventually I approached the transito police officer guarding the lanes to the turismo bus parking. I asked him if I could get one of those completely empty pick up/drop off handicapped spots in that lot. He said no, but pointed out that since I was handicapped he would allow me to park off the main road, among a few more turismo buses. It would be a straight shot to the handicapped ramp to arrivals. Great, I thought. Little did I know.
I parked where he’d indicated, crossed the two lanes of traffic pulling into the airport, crossed the two equally busy lanes leaving the airport, playing some sort of strange human “Frogger” game towards the ramp. I was dismayed to find that the ramp dead ended into a large ditch, concreted culvert that there was no way to cross. Great, a useless handicapped ramp that had no way to reach it. I ended up shuffling along slowly with the walker down about the equivalent of two city blocks, back those blocks, then up a narrow lane leading from the drop off area to the main road, cross three lanes of insane traffic and over to the arrivals area. People were honking and yelling at me, but what could I do? I needed a solid paved surface to use the walker. I arrived shaken up, a little sunburned and dehydrated to the point I was shaking and crying. I found Jim and Julie inside. The airline has lost my husband’s luggage, that delayed his arrival by about an hour to file a claim.
There are times when I oh so deeply love my husband and this was one of those. He took one look at my white face and shaking self and volunteered to go get the car. All I had to do was sit and wait. While I was I was talking to one of the ladies working at the airport, controlling the taxi line, and she told me that this was the busiest travel day ever at an already overused airport and that I should write to the airport administrator about how awful the handling of disability parking was. We left, a little worse for wear, and arrived home just in time to nap.
On Sunday morning my husband asked if I could drive his usual pickup bunch of disabled ladies to church. He’d brought a bad cold/flu back from the States and just could not get out of bed. So I did. I don’t attend church with him because I find his church crazy triggering with the pastor attempting to do a TACF style revival every weekend. My plan was to drop off the ladies, scoot on over to a nearby store I liked, pick up some produce and cat food and come back in time to pick them up. Dropped off, driving up the handicapped access driveway and letting them all out. According to plan!
On the way back things started to go haywire. I pulled into main parking lot, which is supposed to be for handicapped parking, pregnant women parking and old timers parking only. It was full up to the top, to the point where several folks had parked right on top of the handicapped ramp! When the service was over I had to wait about ten minutes for one of the pickup truck drivers parked on the ramp to leave. This guy, who fit none of the posted criteria to use this one of the two lots, ambled up slowly with his wife and kids. I admit, I yelled at him. His excuse was that he didn’t feel like walking that far, so what did it matter where he parked? I told him it actually mattered a great deal because I was picking up 3 disabled ladies, and we needed the ramp. Even after he moved there was still not enough room to maneuver around the other vehicle and up the curving ramp. I had to get out, take the walker and walk up the ramp to tell the ladies we would have to wait. I also ran into the pastor, and I unloaded about everything wrong with the church’s disability accommodations. The one handicapped stall being unusable for a wheelchair or walker, the fact that the handrails were placed in an impossible to use position, and about the parking situation and the ramp blockage along with all the steps one must navigate to even get near the restrooms. I was in tears again because it’s so frustrating to be fighting the same fights all over again!
I share this not to whine, although both situations are incredibly frustrating if you are not very ambulatory, but to illustrate how Costa Rica is for disabled folks. There are attempts, but most of them end up being unusable. Lip service paid to the idea of access for all without any real substantive steps being taken. A few years ago the parks service bragged that they’d made a number of local beaches handicapped accessible, one of which was Tamarindo with a wheelchair safe mat running all the way down to the water, a handicapped restroom and TWO WHOLE HANDICAPPED PARKING SLOTS! The mat broke apart a few months later and was never replaced. The restroom removed after it turned into a place for folks to do drugs out of sight, and motorcycles turned those paltry two spaces into free motorcycle parking. An attempt was poorly made. Do not come to Costa Rica with a significant mobility issue because there is nothing here that helps at all.