(dramatic instrumental music) (birds chirping) - Our belief in pacifism is based on the fact that there's a spark of the divine in every person, and under no circumstances should we take the life of another person.

When the US passed their Universal Military Training Act of 1948, it was important to make a statement against militarism.

- The Fairhope Four, I call them.

These four young guys refused to register.

- [Marvin] We were sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

- They didn't want to draft into the army and they got sent to jail for a while.

- 'Cause, they didn't want war.

- [Ellie] And then the judge said to them that if you don't want to be part of this then you can leave the country.

- What they had to do was a really hard choice, leaving your country to a place you've never been.

(intense folk music) - Our prison sentences terminated on October 27th, 1950.

So November 4th we got into our vehicles and started for Costa Rica.

(laughs) (intense folk music) ♪ I'm gonna lay down my heavy load ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ Down by the river ♪ I'm gonna lay down my heavy load way down ♪ ♪ Down by the riverside ♪ Study war no more ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ Ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ Ain't gonna study war no more ♪ - Maybe it was presumptuous of us, but we just had this feeling inside of us, "This is what we must do."

- [Marvin] This group of Quakers leaving the United States for conscientious reasons.

- I don't think I'd ever heard of Costa Rica.

- I didn't really know where Costa Rica was or ever heard of it before.

- [Mildred] I guess we, just foolhardy or otherwise, there we were just burning our bridges.

(laughs) - [Mary] It all happened so fast.

- Costa Rica.

They don't have a standing army, it's not a militaristic society.

- So that rung a bell in our minds as well.

(laughs) - [Max] Let's go create a new vision.

- [Mary] Going out of the country to live somewhere and be pioneers?

That sounds pretty exciting when you're young.

- Starting all over again, sounds like it'd be interesting.

(laughs) (intense folk music) (birds chirping) (people murmuring) - [Andrea] What is it like to call Monteverde home?

- It's a place where you're comfortable, a place where there's a lot of nature.

It's not any danger.

(children laughing) - We're in the middle of a forest, so that's very calming.

You can just go outside and climb a tree or something.

(birds chirping) (gentle guitar music) - Monteverde is really like a special sacred place of, like, amazing beautiful nature that is rare and not many people get to see.

(birds chirping) (gentle guitar music) - What makes Monteverde special is all the nature and all the trees and all the animals.

(monkeys squeaking) (gentle guitar music) (birds chirping) - It was the idea of being able to raise your children where they wouldn't be in that military atmosphere.

- If your country is military it's pretty hard to be patriotic in that line.

And you just have to stand for the moral standards that you believe in, and feel like that if you're a good citizen that you're being patriotic.

(cannons firing) Being a good citizen doesn't necessarily mean going to war.

(gentle instrumental music) (planes humming) (bombs exploding) - The Quaker response is if war is the power, and the systems of domination, of violence, of oppression are the power, and you know they're wrong, then you have an obligation, no matter what the results, to speak truth to that.

It's an old Quaker phrase, "Speak truth to power."

(gentle instrumental music) (guns firing) - Pacifism was never something I doubted.

No, I just... To think of going out and killing any human being was the stupidest thing ever, you know?

It just didn't make sense.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Marvin] So we refused to register.

(gentle instrumental music) - I know that the guys definitely just felt like they really could not justifiably cooperate with the draft that was requiring people to go and fight and kill.

- [Marvin] The Peace Testimony of Friends was talked about in all our gatherings and so forth.

- The Peace Testimony is a way of being an activist for peace.

It's not being a passive-ist; it's not even pacifism as most Quakers would refer to it.

It's examining our own lives to see whether the seeds of war lie in our own lifestyles, to examine my actions, my life, and that of broader society, of our government, of the world to see whether the occasion for war, the seeds are sewn in our acquisitiveness, our aggression, our use of resources, the way we treat the environment.

And the peace testimony needs to address that activism.

How do we actively choose to use our lives and our efforts and our resources to remove the occasion of war?

- For Quakers it is very natural to have those acts of conscience.

Or for me it's very natural to think about Costa Rica not having an army.

(gentle instrumental music) It was officially decided that the expense that you would have in armies and training people, and having military academics, that would be invested into other social important needs such as education, agriculture, and so forth.

- There's a monument at the University for Peace here in San José, of two huge hands that are opening up for a dove to fly away from them.

And in that monument, one of the plaques that are there says, "Blessed is the Costa Rican mother, who knows at birth "that her child will never grow to be a soldier."

- Costa Rica, most of it, there never were a big war.

We don't have an army.

- We don't have to worry about being drafted to the army and maybe going to another place and having the danger of dying.

- So for me that's home, a place where you feel safe.

- Free.

Free from war.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Mary] The plan to go, to move out of the US and move to Costa Rica was all incubated in Alabama.

- [Marvin] Well, Fairhope, Alabama is not the typical southern town.

Fairhope had a lot of little off-the-normal road of thinking among its members, with the School of Organic Education, and the Friends Meeting, and the Single Tax Corporation.

- [Mildred] Fairhope had a bit of a Northerners streak in them.

I don't know how else to put it.

A lot of people from Iowa had come down there to settle.

So it hardly seemed like a Southern town in a way.

- [Marvin] My great uncles started moving down about 1910.

And so various friends and relatives started moving down, not only from Iowa but some also from Ohio.

As the number of Quakers, Friends, increased in Fairhope, they finally had enough so that they founded the Fairhope Monthly Meeting of Friends in 1919.

(lighthearted guitar music) I was born in Fairhope, 1922.

My father had a farm about two miles east of the center of Fairhope.

And he had some cows, too, for milk.

- My grandparents had gone to Fairhope for winters, from Iowa.

That's when I met Hubert, was when we were down there visiting my grandparents one Christmas vacation, and that's where it all began for the two of us.

(intense guitar music) Well, it was a dairy farm, so there we were milking cows twice a day.

Hubert was very well thought of.

He had this milk route.

He delivered house-to-house.

Everybody really liked him and thought well of him and the Mendenhall family and the Quaker community in general.

We had the two daughters at that time, and then along came Phillip in 1948.

(chuckles) And then there was Eston.

He was from Iowa and there were a bunch of Iowa young fellas.

He was one of them and he served some time in prison.

- Eston was my husband.

(chuckles) I came down to Monteverde as one of the original group.

I was 18 at the time, Eston was 20.

We'd been married five months.

Well, we'd met at boarding school in Ohio.

I was a good friend of Lucky's and Eston was a good friend of Wolf's.

- We were all at the Friends boarding school together at Olney.

Mary was my best friend there too, so we'd known each other since we were 15.

Wolf and I were planning on getting married in October 1950.

I was in Iowa and he was in Alabama.

- [Mildred] We and Hubert's sisters and his brother-in-law were all involved with the young people there at Fairhope, and there was quite a group.

There were the fellows who hadn't registered: Wolf and the Rockwell boys.

(gentle instrumental music) - The first time I was called up, for the Second World War, the Army assigned me to the medical corps.

And I was assigned to the ward where there were 16 soldiers who had spinal injuries and were paralyzed from the waist down.

Total waste of lives.

And then I was assigned to a ship as a medical personnel.

We headed for Europe, to Bremen, Germany.

Going up the river to Bremen, I saw the total destruction that war causes, and in Bremen just blocks and blocks of rubble.

And so when it came time to register for the 1948 draft, I decided that I would just not have any part of it.

There was a lot of discussion about the trend in the United States toward more militarism.

And the fact that everything was in some way contributing toward the military, you might say.

Income tax, a large part of it goes direct to the military.

- I think the popular misconception is that the U.S. spent all this money during World War II, and then kind of came back and converted and went back to making automobiles instead of weapons.

And that might have been true for a short period, but when the Cold War takes hold, the military budget grows tremendously.

So one of the recommendations of the new National Security Council in 1950 is that the US has to have a huge military budget and that it has to be sold to the public as a positive thing.

And I won't call it defense, people like to say it goes towards defense, it's not defense, it's the militarized economy.

(blues music) - The judge, when he sentenced us, said that he understood why were taking this stand, but he said that he had to abide by the law.

And the law said that if a person refused to register, he had to give a penalty.

And so he sentenced us to a year and a day in prison.

We were sent to a minimum-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida.

We were actually in prison for four months and a day, then released on parole.

Other inmates thought we were just totally stupid to be in prison for something we didn't really have to be in prison for.

(laughs) - [Mildred] And in the meantime, when Hubert was milking the cows, on the radio from New Orleans station he heard this advertisement for a tour, an International House agricultural tour.

- [Marvin] Hubert and Mildred Mendenhall decided to go on this tour of farmers to visit all the countries of Central America.

- We didn't know any Spanish and how was a good way to find out about that part of the world.

So we signed up for that.

Marvin came to the rescue.

Marvin was paroled to us.

He was out of prison for non-registration and he was paroled to Hubert on the dairy farm.

So we were all set up to leave things with him.

And on we went to Costa Rica.

(birds chirping) (gentle guitar music) We fell in love with Costa Rica and got to the airport all ready to leave, say goodbye forever to Costa Rica.

Got on the plane; pretty soon we got off again 'cause the plane wasn't gonna go, something wrong with it.

So I was thinking in my mind, is this some kind of an omen?

Hubert and I felt like this is it, we're gonna work towards selling out and going, taking our family to Costa Rica.

And of course Hubert's parents were gonna go where he did.

- And then the word started spreading amongst other Quakers.

- Then everybody wanted to go.

All his cousins, everybody.

Well, that didn't exactly work out.

It wasn't that simple.

- It just sort of (laughs) grew.

(laughs) (gentle instrumental music) It was rather exciting, and everybody, a lot of movement going on there.

(laughs) - Word of mouth from those who knew.

- [Mildred] First was the Birmingham News.

And then other papers picked up on it, and Time magazine showed up.

- [Marvin] Time magazine sent a reporter down and did quite a little article, which was published in Time magazine in October of 1950.

- They put a picture in their magazine.

This is the local paper and the Fairhope Courier letters that people wrote to the local newspaper saying what they thought.

"We send you our greetings and love with the prayer "that you may mean to that country "what Friends first coming here meant to America."

Some really interesting correspondence.

A lot of people that said, "Good on you," and a lot of people who would like to go too, and... - There definitely would be neighbors that would not be approving and would not be very happy with their stand, their pacifist stand.

They felt like they were failing their country, they were being unpatriotic.

- "You're walking out on things.

"I mean, why don't you stay here and fight militarism?

"We need you here."

(laughs) But eventually, like I say, amongst the letters are some from those very influential Quakers too, who said, "Well, this is what these people wanna do, "they'd better do it."

- [Marvin] So it was not unhappy in any sense of the word when we loaded up and started out.

It was an adventure.

- [Mildred] And by the end of the year, why, we were on our way.

- My sister Dorothy and her husband and family got this 1948 Chevrolet ton-and-a-half truck.

My brother Cecil had a jeep, and we thought that it'd be awful nice to have that jeep in Costa Rica.

We left Fairhope, Alabama on November 4th.

Two or three days later arrived at the border between the United States and Mexico, at Laredo.

My cousin David Rockwell thought he knew a little bit of Spanish.

He asked a boy at the tourist camp, "¿Cómo se llama usted?"

The boy answered, "¿Quién, yo?"

So for the rest of the time they were there they called him Kenyo.

What he actually said was, "Who, me?"

(laughs) So he didn't know Spanish.

(laughs) On the trip down, we kind of wondered sometimes just whether we had done the right thing, but no, things are going along pretty good.

We went to Mexico City to get transit visas and found that Mexico had their part of the Pan American Highway built to the Guatemala border.

Guatemala didn't have anything connecting with it.

(laughs) So, well, now how are we gonna get all of this stuff into Guatemala?

All they had was a narrow gauge railroad.

We had to drive down to put the vehicles on flatcars.

And it was pretty rickety and not very nice, but it got us there.

Those of us that came by land finally got the vehicles to San José on February 4th, 1951, three months to the day since we'd left Fairhope.

Most of the people came down by air.

- [Lucky] We flew down from New Orleans, along with Eston and Mary Rockwell.

- What I would remember the most is when we landed in Guatemala City and spent the night there on the way down, and that was pretty exotic.

The guys bought us each an orchid and pinned it on our blouses.

When we got down here it was a little difficult because nobody knew where we were gonna settle.

- [Marvin] We didn't know where we going to locate, so we didn't know what kind of farming we were going to do.

But we figured that we'll have a farming community somewhere.

And Costa Rica was very happy to have us come and gave us immigrant visas.

It was very different from anything in the States.

It was just all this, how do you behave?

You don't understand anything anybody's saying, and it's just really difficult to know how to feel or what to think.

There was some publicity about this group of Quakers descending upon the country, so people were coming to us to offer to sell us land.

The guys went out, sometimes a woman went with them, would go out and check anyplace in the country that sounded like it might be a possible place to settle.

There was one point when the community was just about to split up, because some of us thought it would be really neat to live down in the San Isidro area on a farm that we'd looked at there.

And the Fairhope people decided it was too warm.

They decided they would rather stand up for settling in a higher altitude where it'd be a little cooler.

And so we kept looking and finally a German man who had talked to the people in the group was flying over this area and saw that it had been cleared and that grass was growing and there was some land that was usable for pastures, certainly.

And so he checked it out to see who owned it and whether we could get the titles from them.

- [Marvin] A man brought three of the group by jeep to Guacimal, and then from there up by horseback.

- [Mary] Because there was no road, and there was a trail that could possibly take an oxcart could go over, but it was not very nice and there was lots of big rock and stuff.

- [Marvin] And that was on April 19th, 1951.

And they came back and they said, "There's no question we found the right place."

(birds chirping) (wind blowing) (birds chirping) (rain pattering) (birds chirping) (gentle instrumental music) (birds chirping) - [Debra] This was an area settled by a small amount of Costa Rican farmers that were here.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Marvin] Some of the families moved quite a little ways away and others bought land close-by and stayed as neighbors.

- [Lucky] And they became good friends and helped us in many ways.

- [Marvin] We made a deal for a tract of land of about 3,400 acres, and set aside about a third of it when we came up to be left in forest as a watershed at the headwaters of our little river.

(jeep engine whirring) - [Mildred] It was pretty harrowing to get up and down that road back at that time.

And some trips were made entirely on horseback, it was impossible to get a Land Rover or jeep up the road.

(insects chirping) - [Marvin] So then we went to work with picks and shovels on the oxcart trail, and fixed the worst parts of it, brought the first jeeps up.

- [Mildred] There was a lot of mud to deal with.

- [Mary] We had some hills that were named Ball Bearing Hill, and... (laughs) And all kinds of things.

And you can imagine that the winches on the front of the vehicles pulled out an awful lot of posts and so on coming up.

- Then we had to decide, what are we gonna name our community?

One suggestion was Buena Vista.

Another suggestion: Monteverde, Green Mountain.

Monteverde sounds better.

So we named our Friends community Monteverde.

Then we started moving up.

(cheerful instrumental music) - [Lucky] There were some houses already here that the Costa Ricans had made, with their split-shingle roofs.

It was roughly done, but they were houses.

And so some people lived in those houses, and some of us had already bought army surplus tents.

- We were ready to take on about anything.

We'd been living in an upstairs apartment with three young children in San José for five months.

So the adventure of going to live in a tent... We didn't imagine we were gonna live in a tent for as long as we did, but that was okay too.

Our daughter was born in the tent, (laughs) our third daughter.

(intense instrumental music) Life was great.

Those days in that tent were... we really look back on those with pleasure.

(gentle instrumental music) - In the Quaker religion there are very strong core values of simplicity, equality, peace, justice, family, community.

In Costa Rican culture, their values are peace, family, community, very closely related, and they mesh together very well.

- Here was a Gringo community, you know, basically transplanted North Americans here in the middle of Costa Rica, starting their own sort of pioneer community, English-speaking for the most part, having square dances every other Saturday night, having community group dinners and so forth in this matrix of Costa Rica, Spanish-speaking Central American culture.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Lucky] At that point, Catholicism was definitely what there was in the country, and there weren't very many other churches.

And so we were certainly looked at with suspicion, I think, as somebody that might proselytize, and we don't do that.

We feel the value of teaching by the way you live.

So these were two cultures that basically were settled up on this mountaintop that was pretty isolated.

(truck engine whirring) It was a dirt road to come in and out with torrential rains which we get all year long with three to four meters of precipitation a year.

(country music) - [Lucky] My husband had been a square dancer back at Fairhope and had gone to square dances.

So he thought, well, that was something we could do here that wouldn't take any extra equipment or anything to do.

I played the harmonica and he called.

We did it every two weeks then and the people loved it.

And a lot of Costa Ricans even came and some of them joined in and some of them helped make music.

Anything that we had, social gatherings, they would come to because I think they were as curious about us as we were about them.

And oftentimes would come and just visit.

But since they couldn't speak English and most of us didn't speak Spanish, a smile is the universal language, (laughs) and there was ways of communicating other (laughs) than languages at that point.

(country music) - [Mary] In the early days, when we first moved up here, we had to decide what we were gonna do.

Well, it was dairy.

Dairy was definitely a given.

- [Marvin] We decided that cheese would be our principal product.

So we bought 40 or 50 purebred Guernsey heifer calves from herds in the central valley of Costa Rica, and brought them up a few at a time in the backs of the jeeps.

(laughs) And when these calves grew up and were ready to start producing milk, we built a little factory building and we bought a 200-gallon cheese vat made in Wisconsin and had it shipped down.

It was a quite a job to get up that mountain.

(laughs) The first cheese was produced in April of 1954.

And the first week's production was about 350 pounds.

(intense instrumental music) - You had, basically, this Quaker group creating the cheese factory with the Costa Rican families that were here, but at the same time, you had the Costa Rican farmers that were teaching the Quakers about chayote and yuca or tequisque and all of these other root crops that were up here, and how to basically convert their diets and farming skills into what matched the environment here.

(birds chirping) - [Marvin] There were gardens on a lot of the farms that we got, and immediately we planted more gardens, of course.

- [Mildred] Yes, we had a garden as soon as we could get one going.

- [Marvin] There were potatoes and tomatoes and beans.

I planted coffee and bananas.

Our food was rather monotonous.

(laughs) Chayotes were rather plentiful.

The chayote grows on a vine.

They're a very staple food and easily grown.

So we had boiled chayotes, fried chayotes, chayote pickles, chayote pie.

The food value is not that great but it's filling.

(laughs) - Oh, boy.

- There she goes, Marvin!

Ooh, ooh, ooh!

- [Sue] Oh, you have something else up your sleeve, uh?

- [Lucky] In the very beginning of Monteverde, it was always Friday afternoon Scrabble.

Always.

- Dictionary.

Dictionary.

- Yes.

- And I think that's about when Scrabble first came out too, so it was a new game.

- 24, 25, 29.

- [Lucky] I loved the game, too.

I played it with Dorothy, Marvin's oldest sister.

That went on for years to this very day.

(laughs) Every Friday afternoon, Scrabble.

- 22, 26, 30.

- [Sue Wow!

Nice going.

- I feel a strong sense of connection with the story of the original group that came down here, their choices and their courage in making pretty dramatic changes in their lives (chuckles) for the sake of conscience to follow, as best they could discern it, what they were called to do.

(intense instrumental music) - [Lucky] Costa Rica was very proud of the fact that they had more teachers than soldiers when we moved here.

That was sort of a phrase that was used, the fact that they put their money into education rather than military.

- Demilitarization is well and deeply established in the Costa Rican popular soul.

It is part of our national being.

We are proud of that.

- People speak of Costa Rica as a pacifist nation and there not being an army here.

I know that that was an incentive, an attractive thing for the Quaker settlers who came here in the '50s.

But I also am very conscious that with living here comes an awareness that not having an army is, it's a powerful step, but it's not the equivalent of being a pacifist country.

This is a place where there is plenty of violence, although it is a culture that has a wonderful emphasis on friendliness and hospitality and harmony, and some of the conflict avoidance that goes with that.

- [Luis] It is true that Costa Rica being demilitarized, it's not necessarily a pacifistic country.

And it is a source of concern that even when we have this seemingly strong and definitive adherence to demilitarization, we do not have an equivalent in the way we relate to each other.

And that is something that we need to deal with.

And the only way to do that, I think, is in the context of a nation and a government that takes care of the common good, and upholds social justice, education and the access to health and other services as one of its most important national goals.

(people murmuring) - [Jonathan] Living in community and living in this kind of environment is a wonderful thing, but, you know, we all struggle with our tensions and imperfections.

(laughs) And it's an ever-changing landscape.

- There were times when there was difficulty and there were... Yeah, there were things that happened where there were disagreements and families did not agree with each other.

- [Mildred] Well, people are people.

And a bunch of people trying to get along under these circumstances, sometimes there was some kind of tricky stuff to get worked through.

We did have the Friends School, so that was a big plus.

- [Mary] Hubert's sister Mary was a teacher for the school in Fairhope and she continued right on down here.

- [Mildred] There were some who felt like we should be making use of the local school, the Costa Rican school, the government school, rather than having our own Quaker school.

- We were thinking of becoming more integrated into the Costa Rican community and becoming more Costa Rican.

And our first three children all went to the little Cerro Plano two-grade school for the first two years.

The Quakers in the group did not approve of our move, of what we were doing.

- But, worked through it and those that wanted to go take part in government school went ahead and did so, and that was okay.

- What we were was a community of individualists.

And when you get a community of individualists together you gotta learn to work on a lot of issues that come up, and it's not always easy.

(laughs) - I mean, we were a headstrong bunch of people, one reason we were down there.

(gentle instrumental music) (birds chirping) - [Nalini] When the first Quakers came here, they were not conservationists.

- I think they were naturally conserving areas the same way with Costa Rican farmers who naturally conserve forest fragments.

I think that, again, that was another value that mixed in with the two cultures.

And so the Quakers set aside 500 acres as a protection of their water source.

(gentle instrumental music) (birds chirping) - [Nalini] Wolf Guindon, he was one of the original Quakers here.

And Wolf himself became one of the most ardent conservationists.

But in the early days he was the guy who sold chainsaws.

(chainsaw whirring) (tree cracking) - When we came here, our farm was all in trees, so he had to cut trees to make pasture.

So I often say he spent the first 20 years cutting trees and the next 20 years, only it went on to be more than that, like 60 years, saving trees.

(laughs) - [Debra] There was a research scientist that came here named George Powell, who worked really closely with Wolf Guindon.

They became very good friends.

- [Lucky] George Powell, who was the biologist, ornithologist, studying here, he and his wife lived on our farm here and were good friends with us.

And it was George and Harriett that became concerned about having a reserve.

- [Debra] And George and Wolf partnered up to start protecting that area, starting with the original 500 acres and expanding it slowly but surely to get to its current size.

(gentle instrumental music) (birds chirping) That was the start of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.

And George nor Wolf maintained ownership of this.

They found a Costa Rican organization called the Tropical Science Center, Centro Científico Tropical, and they have had ownership of this reserve.

And it was one of the first private reserves in the tropics.

- [Nalini] That's when conservation really kind of sparked and took flame here.

(gentle instrumental music) (monkeys squeaking) It's been a transformation of the community that originated here who had no real drive towards conservation, to becoming one of the most central models of conservation that exists really around the world.

- Well, definitely the eco-tourism piece was not anything in anybody's plan.

- [Lucky] Nobody ever dreamed this would become a tourist place, that people would be coming from all over the world.

We were just farmers.

We had farms.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Debra] After the reserve was created, tourists started coming up.

So you started out with having researchers come in, and then bird watchers come in, and then tourists who really wanted to see the Resplendent Quetzal or the three-wattled bellbird, or monkeys, or tapir, all of these different animals.

(monkeys squeaking) You've got all of a sudden this door open in the tropics where people are bilingual and where people are open to... You can come here and you can stay.

And I'll help you.

Wolf Guindon took how many researchers through the woods, clearing trails for them and paths and making sure that they didn't get lost.

It went from this farming community where everybody was working together on the farms, and if the road washed out everybody was showing up to do that, to then people not knowing quite what to do.

And many in the Quaker community are thinking, "Oh, my goodness, now what?"

The classic question of George Powell and Wolf Guindon: "Did we do a good thing or a bad thing?"

(upbeat music) There's a middle generation in here that really struggled with who they were and what they were doing.

And now I see the next generation kind of has grown up in this environment, economic environment as well as the natural environment.

(traffic humming) Ecotourism serves a very important role in generating income in a really positive way that is supposed to work in harmony with nature, but if you don't have the foresight and the vision and the planning, ooh, it's a rough road.

And so a group of 27 people got together and said, "Basically, we're not gonna stop this change "that's going on, but let's form an organization "that can help guide it, and guide it in a way "that's beneficial for the community "as well as the people that were coming here."

And so they created the Monteverde Institute with the hope of attracting students here so that they could be learning all about conservation, cloud forest, tropical ecology.

And that started with one course that came out of the University system of California called Education Abroad that continues to this day.

- [Nalini] I first came to Monteverde as a graduate student, and I realized as soon as I got here that the community, the people community here, was really a fantastic and very compelling part of this place.

- Quakers have traditionally valued peace and justice, and that has been our public witness in the world.

That's what we're known for.

I see the environmental crises that we're facing as not separate from that but as completely intertwined with peace and justice issues.

(people murmuring) - Recently, we had the climate march here, which I'm really passionate about.

- We now had the biggest climate march in Costa Rica.

(speaking in foreign language) (people cheering) - It really taught me how to, in a smart and peaceful way, stand up for what you believe in and what you think is right.

(chanting in Spanish) - [Ellie] I think Costa Rica's already doing a lot to try and combat climate change compared to other places, but there's still a lot we could be doing.

(people murmuring) We can already see the rainy seasons are becoming shorter periods and more, like, intense rain rather than spread out, and the dry seasons are becoming dryer, and there's less cloud cover.

(wind howling) And so, you know, as climate change progresses it's gonna get worse and worse.

(bird squawking) - I think that it's never gonna be enough unless everybody starts acting.

- We need to focus on the earth and where we live, because if we don't, and we're just focusing on all of that material stuff, we're not gonna have an earth to live on.

(people murmuring) - Being in this school, they have taught me a lot of Quaker values, like how to treat people with respect.

And I think that's very important for any human being at all, and I think that it really has impacted my life in how I treat others and how I try to teach others to treat others too.

(chuckles) - [Jonathan] I feel a real congruence with those values as they still live in the community and my desire to be true to that process of discernment and leading.

It's really made me think about what does it mean to have an impact in the world.

I know that there's tension between living one's life in a quiet day-to-day way in accordance with one's values and going out and engaging with the world in a broader scale.

The power of the model of living one's life perhaps deserves more credit than I was giving it in terms of its impact on the world and the ripples that go out from it.

You start to see that the Quakers here have had a powerful influence on the dynamics of how people in the zone engage with each other, engage with the world around them.

And people who come through all the time are influenced by their experience here.

- You can build community wherever you are, but that means you have to know your neighbors.

You can do that if you have the motivation.

I feel that what I've learned from living in Monteverde myself was that each one of us can do much more than we think we can do.

- If you look at movements historicaly, they mostly come from people having some hope of an alternative, that there's something else possible, or some other vision that they can share with people.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Marvin] I don't think there was ever a time that we even questioned whether it would be viable and lasting.

We just figured it would and lived accordingly.

- [Mary] It's hard work, there's no question there.

- I see my world, my life, my work as constantly walking this line between despair and hope.

And I see despair in some of the political things that are going on and the climate change that I see right now going on in Monteverde.

And I can get to a point where I am feeling so full of despair that I say, "Well, what's the point "of any of this?"

(gentle instrumental music) For me, that's the dance, that's the tightrope walk that I think I and many others are desperately trying to sort of figure out.

And I think Monteverde is a really great microcosm to watch that, because we're seeing the effects of climate change, and yet we're also seeing people who are taking action, who are doing things on the ground in a small scale, but they also have visions of how can this grow, how can this be a model for others.

(gentle instrumental music) - Find hope even in really dark times, because that's the way we build movements and make a difference.

- [Nalini] You do what you can do to provide hope for yourself and others, and it's an avoidance of complete despair, in which you roll up on your belly and say, "I couldn't change the big thing so I chose to do nothing."

(gentle instrumental music) - [Debra] All of these years later what we have is a place, basically, on the planet that is dedicated to conservation, that is dedicated to community, that is dedicated to peace and social justice.

- [Lucky] We all need to be open to learning and to working with others, to looking at the heart of everybody, and not just looking at the outside, to look at the heart.

And if we could all do that more, what would this whole world be like?

(gentle instrumental music) (intense folk music) ♪ Wishing on a falling star ♪ Who knows how right you are ♪ Hope the moon shines bright tonight for you ♪ ♪ Sleeping out in the dark ♪ Hold tight, the night is bright ♪ ♪ Hope the stars being guiding light for you ♪ ♪ And I know that you must be thinking ♪ ♪ That your whole world's become dark ♪ ♪ And it's a matter of mixed emotions ♪ ♪ They're telling your heart ♪ About a new start ♪ And to yourself, be true (intense folk music) ♪ Open your eyes and greet the dawn ♪ ♪ The blackened blue sky, the night was long ♪ ♪ Another day opening arms for you ♪ ♪ Step up and don't be late ♪ You're lacking love but call it fate ♪ ♪ Just remember the sky's wide open for you ♪ ♪ And I know that you must be thinking ♪ ♪ That your whole world's become dark ♪ ♪ And it's a matter of mixed emotions ♪ ♪ They're telling your heart ♪ About a new start ♪ And to yourself, be true (intense folk music)