First Week in Costa Rica Saturday October 13, 2007
I arrived in Costa Rica two weeks ago deep into the rainy season. In the morning the sun is usually out. It is warm and balmy. Then sometime in the afternoon dark clouds start rolling in, the wind picks up and the mountains surrounding San Jose are hidden. That is just what is happening now, as I write. The palm trees are blowing in the breeze and I hear thunder in the background. The rain has started. I hear it softly on the roof, and more thunder, getting louder. Within an hour the rain will be coming down in torrents and the sound of it’s pummeling on the roof will make normal conversation impossible to carry on. It seems to last, usually about four or five hours, but last night it rained until 10 p.m. Then the clouds blew away and I could see las estrellas (the stars).
My time here, so far has been interesting, fun, difficult, overwhelming, lonely, challenging, awkward exciting and serene. It seems every day I am faced with new challenges that force me to make decisons, figure things out, think and learn. Perhaps we all are doing these thing daily, but here and now, it is different for me. In Montana my life was set up and in order. I had built a pretty good life with a pretty good system for living it. Things hardly ever went wrong. My car didn’t break down, I knew where the money was coming from and there was always somebody to talk to for a second opinion. Not now! Frequently I find myself in situations that bring up some inner resource I didn’t know I had. I take a deep breath and say, “I can do this!” And I do.
My first week here was spent living with a Tico (Costa Rican) family and going to school every day to learn the language. Quite a bit of my learning was done outside of the school with my family because not one of them spoke English. It was great!
Spanish Language School - Centro de Idioma Intercultura
The school is small, only 30 or so students, in a lovely old building with many outdoor garden areas and plants everywhere. Beautiful, lush, huge jungle plants in deep and bright greens with all kinds and colors of flowers. This is how you live in Costa Rica. All the homes and many businesses have outdoor rooms and patios with gardens, even in the city, you know you are in the tropics. I took an intermediate level class with only one other student, a nice kid from Vermont who had just graduated from high school. The teacher, a Tico (Tico is male, Tica is female) in his 30’s, made learning lots of fun. At first I was really nervous, but things there were so casual that my enjoyment of the class took care of that.
At home, I was living in a very small house, with the mom, Alba age 57 and her three kids, Cristian - 24, Carol - 25, Brayan 30. and the abuela (grandmother), age 80. In traditional families the children live at home until they are married. Alba, who was once a school teacher and another time owned a clothing store, now stays at home and cares for everybody else. Her family is her world.
Each day she gets up at 4:30 a.m. to make breakfast and lunch for her kids before they go to work. They all have good jobs. Carol works in a bank, Cristian works in an online computer help center and Brayan works for a sporting goods manufacturer. Most people here work hard with only Sunday’s off. After breakfast Alba collects everyone’s laundry (including mine), which must be hung early so as to dry before the rain and then commences all her other household chores. By the end of the day she is exhausted and then she gets up the next day and starts it all over again. This woman does everything for everybody and she loves it! I felt like one of the kids. She would not allow me to help clean or do the dishes. But when she spurned my offers I didn’t complain! Sunday is her favorite day. The kids and their novios / novias (boyfriends and girlfriends) all come over to eat and hang out most of the day. Then Alba goes to visit her aunts and uncles. Her brothers come over to see their mother for a few minutes just about every day. These families are close.
The houses here share side walls one after the other in a city block. In the front and back, every door, window and entryway is protected by iron bars and gates. Alba and her family are middle class hard working people with a very small house. She earns extra money, ten dollars a day, for taking in students from the language school. I am her second student so I get the room that Cristian usually uses. Carol has her own room, which is right next to mine, with an open adjoining ceiling, so I get to hear her television going 24 hours a day and her every long phone conversation (the one time I am glad I do not understand much Spanish). Alba sleeps with her mother (same bed) And there is another room with a single bed that I have seen Cristian use. I never really figured out where Brayan slept.
Alba was married for ten years and then divorced, due to her husband’s alcoholism. She has never since had a boyfriend or even a date. She told me she still loves her husband (who has re married more than once) and did not want her kids to see her with any other man than their father. She is a kind hearted, generous woman who thrives on caring for others. She was incredibly patient with me in my awkward attempts at converatsion. I tried very hard and was amazed at myself. During my stay with this family, we had conversations about not only the normal day to day things, but about relationships, politics, animals, weird food, snakes, music and much more. At one point. Alba was very concerned about the fact that I had left my family - my kids, and come to Costa Rica. She told me that without her family she would not exist!
I would be forgetting something very important in my story if I didn’t mention food. Alba is a great cook! Typical Costa Rican food includes beans and rice (Gallo Pinto) eaten at every meal, inclucing breakfast. Lunch is usually the same as dinner in Alba’s house. And dinner is beans and rice with a salad, soup or stew with meat and all kinds of unfamiliar vegetables and sometimes potatoes, too. Yes, they eat rice and potatoes at the same meal. No wonder why most Ticos over the age of 30 are a bit chubby. I did enjoy the food, though, and if I had eaten everything that Alba had offered I would have gained 20 pounds in a week. But I did not and she understood. For breakfast she always made me a big plate of lucious fresh papaya, pineapple and those sweet little bananas you canot find in the States. She took me shopping with her to the Saturday market, where everyone goes to get their fresh fruits and vegetables for the week. The street was lined with little stands selling all the things we have at home plus papaya, guava, yucca, tamarindo, which looks like a tree branch and tastes like a cross between a potatoe and a squash, guayabana, which makes a sweet white juice like I have never tasted before and many others whos names I don’t remember. It is going to take a while to learn all these new fruits and veggies and I will enjoy it. Especially because most, if not all of the produce grown here is organic with no pesticides used in it;s production!
Part of my reason for spending my first week at language school and with a Tico family was so that I had a place to land - a place to live where I could learn about life here and get my bearings. I needed to talk to people, find out where and where not to go in this city, how and where to find a car to buy and how to communicate. Getting to know this sweet family was a really enriching experience for me and it helped me with all that I needed to do. I know we will remain friends.
In my next journal entry, I’ll tell you how I bought a car, got lost on the highway, broke down on the highway at night in a dangerous area, slept on the floor, slept in the pharmacy and successfully communicated in Spanish with auto mechanics, a metal fabricator, store clerks, a landlord and many others, all of whom do not speak a word of English.
(Please do not worry, Mom, I was with friends in that dangerous area and everything turned out fine.)
