The Costa Rican Water and Sewer Institute (AyA) began a series of inspections Friday afternoon in San José to ensure the safety of the city's potable water.

Friday's sweep, the first of many to come, took place Mercado Central, a popular market in downtown San José that sells anything from kitchenware to medicinal plants to hefty portions of freshly cooked rice and beans.

Members of the national water laboratory, AyA and Health Ministry officials examined the water systems of more than 80 merchants in the market.

Officials from the national water laboratory took samples from several businesses in the marketplace, which will be analyzed to determine if the water used by the Mercado Central for drinking, cooking and cleaning is safe.

Officials from AyA also examined damage to the pipe system, where the institute has already noticed several leaks, according to an AyA press release. The institute will provide recommendations for the repair of leaks and the use of hydrometers to detect them, the press release said.

“This effort will bring us closer to our clients and because people know the work the institution does, it will help the city achieve quality potable water,” said AyA's executive president, Ricardo Sancho, in a statement.

The institute will continue its sweeps in neighborhoods and other city sites in the upcoming weeks.

The government of Costa Rica may be down 17.5 percent in revenues this year and amid a global recession, but it is moving forward with plans to raise salaries of teachers, janitors and security guards by 4.88 percent.

The finance minister signed the pay raise alongside the leaders of 13 unions on Thursday, increasing salaries for “non-professionals" (or those with less than a high school education) by more than ¢8,700 or $15 a month.

For an entry level security guard who makes ¢182,000 ($318 a month), the raise would boost his salary to ¢190,700 ($332) According to numbers provided by ANDE, security guards are typically granted an annual raise of ¢4,000 ($6.99) per month.

The change came – in part – in response to a complaint filed in December of 2008, in which a civil service study of wages found that the salary of “non-professionals” was between 19 percent and 59.6 percent lower than positions in other state institutions.

The raise will take place in two parts, with 2.44 percent applied to wages in September and the remaining 2.44 percent salary increase in January.

“It required a great effort to reach this agreement, which is a considerable (raise) given the country's economic situation,” said Guillermo Zúñiga, finance minister. “But it is an effort we welcome because we are aware of the importance (of the raise) for non-professional public servants.”

The announcement came just days after Zúñiga released the latest economic indicators for the country, showing a drop of ¢515.8 billion ($902 million) in this year's revenue of almost ¢3 trillion ($5.15 billion).

He prefaced those numbers by trying to dissipate fear about the country's financial state.

"These estimates do not take us by surprise,” Zúñiga said. “In fact, they have been in our forecasts. Since last year, we have been discussing these estimates… So much so that at the beginning of the year, we have asked select government institutions to expect a 20 percent cut in budget expenditures…a figure very similar to 17.5 percent reported today.”

Ana Solano and her two colleagues at Costa Rica's National University, Nuria Villalobos and Olga Chávez, saw an opportunity to put English language learning to good use.

Instead of confining the curriculum to the four-walled classrooms of their campus in Heredia, north of San José, the professors assigned their students projects that would help connect social justice issues in Costa Rica to the English-speaking world.

Over the course of four months, students visited crumbling schools, needy animal shelters and other nonprofit agencies and filmed scenes of problems they saw. They collaborated on a project to help alleviate existing situations, meanwhile collecting scenes they would use in a video of their efforts.

“We wanted to figure out how to use language to do good,” said Solano, who explained that while “social responsibility” has entered into the curricula of other schools like public relations or business, it is still a relatively new concept to the language department.

She plans to attend a language studies conference in Brazil in the coming months to share the video project with other language professors.

“There are so many problems that exist all around us,” said Villalobos. “With the need to learn English and the desire to fix (those problems)…our objective was simple: To unite the two.”

With simple software and point-and-shoot cameras, students were able to dig deep into the issues that plagued the communities they visited. They solicited donations from nearby businesses, involved community members and were able to bring further awareness to the issues through their 10 minute videos.

“Students responded very positively and many want to continue with their project,” said Villalobos.

More about the student's projects can be found at their Web site: http://sites.google.com/site/thinkshareact/

To view the students' videos, follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/user/ThinkShareAct

Costa Rica marked World Refugee Day this weekend with the opening of a photo exhibit Friday and Saturday with the inauguration on Saturday of a new mural outside the Legislative Assembly in San José.

The two artistic ventures deal with the same theme: the refugee experience, and how to dispel some of the misperceptions they face.

The weekend started with a photo exhibit in the Mexican Cultural Institute, in the eastern San José neighborhood of Los Yoses, which opened Friday night. The exhibit is titled, “Through my eyes, my life in Costa Rica,” and consists of 45 photos that chronicle the lives of 17 refugees since their arrival in Costa Rica.

The mural outside the Legislative Assembly spans the length of the outer wall facing the National Park. Its theme, “Displacement, Meeting and Coexistence,” is represented in the shifting colors – from cold to warm – as the chaotic movement of people slows to a stop at the end; the refugees having found a respite from the storm in a new country, said the artist, Natalia Morales.

“It's a history that is a little chaotic to begin, but little by little things are getting better,” Morales said.

There are 12,000 refugees in Costa Rica, according to Andrea Vásquez, a spokeswoman with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which is putting on the events. Of those, close to 80 percent are Colombians – the majority having left their country for political persecution. Colombia has the most internal displacement, with an estimated 3 million people having been forced from their homes.

But there are also refugees from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and other Caribbean and Latin American states, Vásquez said.

In the world, there are an estimated 42 million refugees, UNHCR said. South Africa has been the most receptive to individual requests for sanctuary last year, taking in 207,000 people. Pakistan, however, took in the largest number of refugees last year, however, with 1.8 million people seeking safety within its borders.