Medicinal plant exhibit
With talks, videos, through July 9, San Ramón Museum, San Ramón, Alajuela.

Vacation workshops
Making pre-Columbian crafts, kids and adults, July 9, 9 a.m.-noon; Creating art with recycled cardboard, ages 7 and up, July 9, 1-3 p.m. both at the National Museum.

Jazz Café 10th Anniversary
Features Nicaraguan trova singer Kattia Cardenal, July 9-10, 9 p.m., San Pedro, and Steve Smith and Vital Information, soul, jazz, funk, fusion, July 9-10, 9 p.m., Escazú.

Play: “Julius”
Drama, performed by Rubén Pagura, through July 19, Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m., Teatro 1887, CENAC.

As the two men who claim to be the Honduran president arrive on Costa Rica's doorstep for the mediation process, some are questioning whether this country's president, Oscar Arias, is capable of resolving a situation that's polarized a nation.

Others are speculating on whether Arias brings pre-existing biases to the table. Honduran human rights activist Ramón Custodio has called for Arias to be more neutral, after the Costa Rican president's past pronouncements that President Manuel Zelaya should be reinstated.

“It's a very complicated situation,” Arias acknowledged at his last scheduled press conference before he initiates the discussion tomorrow. “But we are going to come to a resolution because we have the future of many Central Americans in our hands.”

Arias would not offer a prediction on the outcome of the discussion.

“I will not talk on substantive issues,” he reiterated on Wednesday. “That will be left to the dialogue tomorrow.”

Arias, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for similar peacemaking work, accepted the job of mediator on Tuesday, after receiving word that both the ousted President Zelaya and the man who took his place, Roberto Micheletti, both agreed to the discussions and his participation.

Zelaya, who was dragged from bed and forced onto a plane to Costa Rica on June 28, arrived here again late afternoon Wednesday, this time in a private jet from Washington, D.C. He is accompanied by Patricia Rodas, who served as his foreign minister before the president's ouster. Micheletti and his delegation are expected to arrive Thursday morning.

Just off a plane from Honduras, Jessica Figueroa from Honduran daily La Prensa said few people in her home country think the situation can be resolved in Arias' house in the western San José neighbourhood of Rohrmoser.

“In reality, no one thinks that Arias can accomplish a resolution,” she said. “President Zelaya and President Micheletti are not friends. Well, they were friends once, but it ended very badly... Zelaya and Micheletti are standing firm and no one thinks they'll waver.”

Given Arias' forceful denouncements of Zelaya's removal from office, some question whether he will come to the negotiating table with an open mind.

Reflecting this skepticism, a reporter from TV station Univision asked Arias Wednesday, “How will you receive the presidents? Are you going to receive Micheletti as a golpista (coup leader)? And Zelaya as the president of Honduras ?”

Though he stumbled over his words when pressed to answer the question, Arias responded that Zelaya is the president elected by the people and Micheletti is the acting president following the coup.

However, a growing international chorus has voiced approval of Arias' role as mediator, including the United States, European countries and Cuba. But Nicaragua's government, a close Zelaya ally that until recently resisted handing over the rotating presidency of the System for Central American Integration to Arias, told the Nicaraguan daily El Nuevo Diario it does not support the San José talks.

The dialogue is expected to begin Thursday afternoon.

The images of families living in tarp-covered shelters, weathering wind and rain, have slipped away from the media's eye. But Costa Rica quietly continues to work to put together the pieces after the Jan. 8 earthquake.

Six months on, not even 40 of the nearly 1,000 families displaced by the 6.2 earthquake have been relocated into permanent homes, according to Housing Minister Clara Zomer. However, she said 265 families have accepted relocation and projects are underway to house them by mid-August.

One project in Tambor, Alajuela, northwest of the capital, began last month. Volunteers and staff with the charity Habitat for Humanity Costa Rica are building homes for 13 families who saw theirs toppled by the quake.

The state's Mixed Institute for Social Aid has been subsidizing the monthly rent of 884 families, totalling ¢426,036,222 ($744,818), according to a report released Wednesday by the government's Rebuilding Commission.

The report also offers the latest estimates (see box) of the damage caused by the quake, which struck near the Poas Volcano, 30 kilometers north of San José, and rippled through the provinces of Alajuela and Heredia, killing as many as 30 people.

All told, 3,000 people evacuated their homes and took refuge in shelters.

Iliana Ramírez, a 21-year-old single mom, didn't trust the shelters as a safe place for her 3-year-old daughter, Carolay Arroyo. In fact, Ramírez had already lost most of her valuables when looters sacked her home in Dulce Nombre, Alajuela, after the quake rendered it uninhabitable, she said.

Ramírez and Arroyo are one of the families whose home is being built in Tambor, in a project Habitat officials said could be completed by late August.

The housing minister told The Tico Times obstacles remain in finding housing for many of the families who refuse to leave their towns, after studies showed swaths of the earthquake zone should not be built upon and other areas where zoning laws simply don't permit it.

“We're working together with residents and municipal governments to locate the most adequate places for those families and to see if it's necessary to change the municipal zoning law,” Zomer said.

As for the families already moving into Tambor, they seem hopeful for a new start.

Holding young Carolay in her arms, Ramírez said, “ we have to move on, for us but especially for the kids.”

In the year 2000, world leaders met to create a plan to establish goals to eradicate extreme poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease. Organized by the United Nations, the group also aimed to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women, environmental sustainability and a global partnership for development.

However, in Latin America and the Caribbean, rising food prices and the current economic crisis threaten to cast doubt on progress towards meeting some of the Millennium Development Goals, according to a new United Nations report.

The report includes an update on how this region fares in respect to achieving the aims, which were hoped to culminate in halving extreme poverty by 2015.

Latin America and the Caribbean progressed in eradicating poverty from 1999 to 2005, as the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 per day fell from 11 to 8 percent. However, the recent upswing in food prices has begun to reverse that trend, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that 53 million people in the Central American region experience extreme poverty.

The Latin American and the Caribbean region is the leader in the efforts to achieve gender parity in parliamentary representation, with 22 seats held by women, up 15 percent since 2000. The region has reached its target goal of gender parity in education and has the highest share of women in paid employment outside of agriculture (45 percent in 2007).

The study also shows that the Latin American and Caribbean region is reducing the death rate of children under five and that reaching the goal of reducing mortality rate two-thirds by 2015 is probable. The rate decreased from 54 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990, to 24 deaths in 2007.