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Published on Friday, November 1,
2024
By
Barbara Steenstrup
Connie Sandlin is the 2024
Coordinator for Costa Rica’s phone-banking
team. This means making hundreds of calls
per week to overseas voters around the
planet.
She is in charge of a team of 15 in Costa
Rica, and sometimes more, diligent
volunteers who call potential U.S. citizen
voters who live outside of the United
States to encourage them to request and
return their ballots in the 2024 election.
As election day looms, they are sprinting
toward the finish line, finding stragglers
especially those who vote in key swing
states, and helping them to get their
votes done and counted whether sent by
email, fax or courier depending on local
and state rules.
Politics from a young age. Connie’s
first campaigning for Democrats happened
just before she turned 14 years old,
campaigning for Lyndon B Johnson.
Twenty years later, she was a delegate for
Jesse Jackson at her Texas district
Democratic convention in 1984.
U.S. politics from Costa Rica. When Connie
and her husband moved to Costa Rica, their
reasoning was not involved with politics.
They had met kind people, they were bird
watchers and concerned with conservation
and the public universal health care was
an attraction.
Connie got involved with Democrats Abroad
Costa Rica (DACR) in 2018. She says her
two main motivations for her volunteer
efforts for DACR and the global
organization of Democrats Abroad are her
two granddaughters, ages 16 and 11,
growing up in Texas. Their
futures are of the utmost importance to
her.
At that time, Connie coordinated voter
registration events for U.S. citizens in
Puriscal. She gradually increased her
involvement and activities. In 2022,
she led all other phone-bankers on the
planet in making calls to get out the vote
for Democratic candidates. When the
global leadership of Democrats Abroad held
the global meeting in Costa Rica this
year, Connie was the Volunteer Coordinator
of a team that was so efficient that some
of the meetings were able to adjourn up to
one-half day early!
As a retiree and volunteer in 2024, Connie
finds phone-banking to be a flexible and
productive use of her time to elect Kamala
Harris and Tim Walz. A substantial
number of the more than 233,000 calls made
globally are made by volunteers living in
Costa Rica. One of the advantages is that
there are individuals in Costa Rica who
can speak either English or Spanish.
Connie keeps her team motivated with
regular updates and shared anecdotes from
phone conversations they have had, all
without sharing names. Also, she hosts
weekly ‘cocktails’ on Zoom where
volunteers are encouraged to tell what
they are drinking, sometimes it is only
water or coffee and sometimes not, and
their experiences from the week. There is
laughing and a great deal of useful
information is shared.
One of Connie’s favorite sayings reflects
the importance of U.S. elections to the
rest of the world: “When the United
States sneezes, the rest of the world
catches the cold."
Connie’s background made Costa Rica a
perfect place for them to retire. And as
you can read, she has been volunteering
ever since. Connie and her husband, Dick,
moved from Dallas, Texas to Puriscal,
Costa Rica in 2008. For them, it was
the discovery of delightful people and
culture on a birding trip during the last
week of 2007. Connie persuaded Dick that
living in Costa Rica would be a good
choice.
Pre-Obamacare, with both having
pre-existing (but manageable) medical
conditions, it seemed that medical debt
and eventual bankruptcy loomed large as a
possible future. The prospect of joining
Costa Rica's Social Security, the national
healthcare system, was another attraction.
Connie’s family took up bird-watching as a
hobby when she was five years old. She
grew up with family and Girl Scouting
values of conservation and appreciation of
nature. She also followed in her
mother’s footsteps doing volunteer work;
in Girl Scouts, the PTA, Audubon Dallas,
and more.
Moving to a country full of biodiversity
was an attractive prospect. Also,
Connie had taken “all the Spanish
available” in high school. It was her
minor at the University of Texas at
Arlington where she earned her BA in
Sociology/Social Work. She had experience
communicating in various newsletters that
she edited, as well.
In her adopted home in Costa Rica, Connie
is an advocate for dementia education and
the conservation of Costa Rica’s natural
resources. She and Dick have planted
a half dozen mountain almond trees on
their finca in hopes of attracting
Scarlet Macaws back to their “corner” of
Puriscal.
If
you need assistance, we have voter
volunteers in many locations around Costa
Rica. Please call us at 7137-3570 or email
us at help@votefromabroadcr.org.
For
more information visit the
Democrats Abroad website.
---------------
The views
or opinions
expressed by
the author are
his/her sole
and exclusive
responsibility
and do not
necessarily
represent the
opinion of
A.M. Costa
Rica.
Therefore, the
newspaper
doesn't accept
liability for
the author's
article
content.
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