Introduction

It was a typical summer evening in Talamanca, a small village in the Bri-Bri indigenous reserve in the south of Costa Rica, near the Panamanian border. I had the privilege of accompanying a group of lawyers from the Costa Rican Court of Justice who were working on a popular education project about the Costa Rican constitution. On that evening, some indigenous people met with us in the well-lighted education centre of the village in order to tell us some stories of their lives. With the musical background of animal life in the surrounding equatorial forest, an elderly farmer told us how a primary school had been created in the village in the 1950s. He also shared his experience of how, after falling seriously ill in the 1970s, he was taken by helicopter to the nearby city where he received free medical treatment and how, after remaining for many weeks in hospital without any result, he was cured by going to see the traditional healer of his indigenous community. A young indigenous lady reported how she received support from the Costa Rican state university in her efforts to translate the Bri-Bri language into written form, as well as to write the legends and traditions of her people. The young lady's ten-year-old boy proudly taught us how to breed iguanas (after school, the young boy was helping his family in their iguana breeding farm supported by a government programme designed to protect endangered species).