Leaving Costa Rica

I now know what one of my saddest moments in Costa Rica is. It´s waking up at 4:30am in a dingy hotel room in San Jose to say goodbye to a handful of people who have become your best friends over the previous two years …and then staying in that room as they all file out to head to the airport to catch flights back to the US. Left in the room is just you, a crappy air conditioner cranking out artificial cool air, and a bunch of dirty sheets and towels.

It´s not quite my time to take a flight back to the US. I´ll be doing some other things first, and will get to that in a minute. The focus of this blog is more about saying goodbye…and moving on.

Saying goodbye to Costa Rica – the Peace Corps, people in my community, and other Peace Corps volunteers – has been about a two week process. Thank god it has finally come to a close!

I had no idea saying goodbye would take so much out of me. The most difficult part, easily, was saying goodbye to people I´d worked with in my site, struggled together with on projects, experienced failure and overcome obstacles, and become great friends with.

Last Saturday my counterpart, the community bank, organized a dinner with about 30 people that I worked closely with over the two years in the town. A lot of people, including me, were given an opportunity to say a few words. People were extremely generous in their praise, and there were definitely a few tears shed. I´ve honestly never felt so honored in my life, and wonder whether or not I will ever feel that way again.

When it came to me to say a few words, I started out my apologizing for having failed them during these two years, or that is, for not having found a girlfriend that would cause me to stay in San Cristóbal Norte. Fortunately, that brought out some laughs.

The dinner was a type of Going Away and Welcome party. The new volunteer that is to replace me, Liz, had arrived that same day, and so the bank decided to take advantage of the timing and do both activities on the same day.

Liz is from San Francisco, California, studied business, and will be spending the next two years in San Cristóbal Norte, continuing to support some of the projects I began, and also beginning her own initiatives.

I´m so glad Liz will be there! I had requested a female volunteer be sent to the town to follow me, and fortunately Peace Corps was able to accommodate my request. She seems to be an extremely bright, thoughtful person who I believe will do amazing things during her two years and come to be a wonderful role model for the women of the town – young and old.

So after roughly two weeks of dinners, goodbye parties, cafecitos in friends´ homes, and a million other small chats, I finally left from San José on Wednesday of last week.

One of the most difficult goodbyes was with my 74 year-old host mom, Doña Albertina, who I had lived with and had taken care of me for the last two years. Doña Albertina´s husband passed away about 5 years ago, and although she has a lot of family very close by, I know it was hard for her to see me go.

We had become good friends over the course of the two years, and I know she liked the extra presence in the house I provided, which kept her from feeling so lonely. And I also think she liked the feeling of being needed, as she was responsible for most of my meals. We will continue being friends, and I´m grateful for the time we shared.

After leaving San Cristóbal Norte, I stayed in San José with friends for several days as we completed lots of paperwork in the Peace Corps office to finalize our close of service. We took advantage of the few days to enjoy each others company one last time.

Bros Icing Bros

When my good PC friends get together, the result is usually a mix between a fraternity party, a family reunion, and well…maybe just a fraternity party. A good example of this would be ¨Bros Icing Bros¨, a game that one of my friends, David, stumbled upon on the internet.

The game plays on the aversion most men have for Smirnoff Ice. The rules of the game are basically, any guy presented with a Smirnoff Ice, in any place – whether it is in a bar, restaurant, hotel room, bus, car, or other random setting – must immediately drop to one knee, and slug down the Smirnoff Ice. This is called being ICED!

The only defense one can have against being iced, is to have a Smirnoff Ice on your person at the time of being iced, then the ice is reversed and the other person is then iced. This forces you to choose between the two unhappy scenarios of either having to chug a Smirnoff ice, or having to walk around (being seen) holding a Smirnoff Ice for hours on end.

David insisted that we play, and so once we got the idea (which didn´t take long), and the endless number of possibilities for icing someone, our final days were mostly defined by people getting iced in various random settings.

I hold the dubious honor of being the first person iced. As I stepped out of the bathroom after showering one night, the guys had propped up a Smirnoff outside the bathroom door on top of my friend Marcus´s saxophone case.

Having heard of the game earlier in the day, I understood the implications of finding the Smirnoff Ice, and dropped down the one knee to chug down the drink. However, even if I didn´t know what it meant to find the Smirnoff there, I probably would have figured it out soon enough from the jeering and laughing from the other 5 guys in the room.

So somewhere out there is a picture of me in a towel chugging down the Smirnoff on one knee in our San José hotel room, but unfortunately it’s not available for the blog.

On the flip side, I feel I will get the last laugh, as last night after the guys had gone out for a pre-dinner beer and I was left in the room, I was able to order Smirnoff Ices from the bar and bury them deep into my buddies´ baggage that was to be checked. And so right about now that should be arriving home, unknowingly about to be iced as the start to empty out their bags. Sorry boys, but you had it coming!

Reflections after two years in the Peace Corps

It seems to me that something needs to be said after this whole experience - come kind of conclusions that sum everything up. I still haven´t been able to think of anything too apropo; however, my good friend Josh, who is a good writer, came up with a few things on his blog that I completely agree with, and I wanted to share them with you. Josh´s thoughts:

¨I should say at the outset that there´s no way I could possibly encapsulate my Peace Corps experience in a few paragraphs. So I´m not going to try. I guess that´s what my 20 or so previous blogs, in the aggregate, are more or less for. But with that being said, here are a few thoughts on my experience:

• I made the right decision by joining the Peace Corps. I´ll be honest, I haven´t loved every single moment of my time as a PCV. I´ve been lonely sometimes. I´ve been frustrated sometimes. But then again, I can´t remember any particular period of my life when I loved every single moment. I can say this though: I´ve learned things as a PCV – about myself, about another culture, and perhaps even about the world – that I never would have learned otherwise. I hope and believe that I´ve made a positive difference in the lives of the people in my village. I´m pretty good at Spanish now. I don´t know if any of this will ever serve me in a professional sense in the future (though it probably won´t hurt), but I know that to me the most important thing is that I had a dream, I went for it, and I´ll always be glad that I did. As the sign in the Peace Corps office says: “Peace Corps....it´s about never having to begin your stories with 'I should´ve...'”

• A Peace Corps experience, much like life itself, is what you make it. Like anything else in life, in Peace Corps you get out of your experience what you put in. While there´s no guarantee that if you´re constantly trying to work with your community, staying positive and helping to motivate those around you, and always looking toward sustainability and community ownership of projects that your projects will necessarily be successful and your time as a PCV will necessarily be fruitful. But it´s generally a pretty good formula for success. Likewise, the more time you put into your relationships with members of your community, the more you´ll learn from them, the more you´ll understand them, and probably, the more they´ll learn from and understand you. Life and the relationships that make it meaningful are, of course, two-way streets. I think I´ve always known that, but maybe it didn´t really hit home until about the 30th time I was awkwardly sitting in someone´s house sipping afternoon coffee, making small-talk, and eating some strange food even though I wasn´t even hungry. As much as I love being able to get away from it all and curl up with a good book – and I spent many evenings doing just that after everyone else went to bed – I found that as a PCV my level of happiness was directly correlated (positively) to the number of times that I got out and interacted with other people in my village, regardless of what we ended up doing. In Peace Corps and in life – you just gotta get out there.

• Peace Corps, while not perfect, is an important program. I´ll be the very first person to admit that Peace Corps isn´t perfect (but then, what is?). Sometimes there´s a lot of downtime, little supervision, and adjusting to a new culture and pace of life can make what seems like it should be a simple project take frustratingly long. Maybe you could accomplish more – in a concrete, resume-building sense – by volunteering with an NGO or being in a formal work setting. But I can say with a very high degree of certainty that there is no better way to actually work with and get to know people in developing countries on the grassroots level. There is no better way to really understand a culture and a language than to live with a host family for two years. There is no better way to learn what people really want, what they need, and how you can help them than to spend two years as their neighbor listening to them. In Peace Corps there´s no office to retreat to, no condo to ensconce yourself in. For those two years (and maybe even beyond), you ARE a member of your village, of your community. And I know this too – if more people served as Peace Corps Volunteers, we as Americans would be more culturally understanding, more adaptable to new situations, more willing to listen, and, I believe, the rest of the world would respect us more for it.

• If you really want to, you can probably become a Peace Corps Volunteer (or something similar). While you do have to be medically, legally, and financially cleared to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, the program is really pretty accessible for most college graduates. If you have a chronic health situation, Peace Corps will often work with you. If you have federal student loans, Peace Corps will allow you to defer them (and in the case of Perkins loans, even partially cancel them). There are volunteers right out of college and some that have been retired for years. There are assignments which require prior language or technical skills and others that don´t. There are assignments in cold places and assignments in hot places. You can´t pick a country, but you can express geographic or cultural preferences during your interview. In sum, you have input in the process, and I honestly believe that while Peace Corps is a very challenging experience, it´s something that most people can do if they want to. But even if you for some reason can´t, or don´t want to, become a Peace Corps Volunteer, there are lots of other ways for you to get involved, become part of a community, learn a language, help others, etc. Peace Corps might be one of the most famous service options, but it´s not the only one. Oftentimes it´s just a matter of taking the time to do some internet research or talk to people. Whether you want to live abroad or volunteer after work in your own backyard, I think the most important – and maybe the hardest – step you´ll have to take will be the first one. Like I mentioned before, in Peace Corps as in life – you just gotta get out there.¨The Trip

I´m not going to go into great detail about this topic, as it will be the subject of the next posting, which I should put up within the next day or two.

Basically, I´m not ready to go home yet. Tonight at 11pm I will catch a bus to Panama City, Panama to start off a 10 week, 5 country trip taking me through Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

I will be traveling with friends during parts of the trip, and alone on some legs. This is just something that I want to do, and now being a unique time in my life, I´m going to do it.

I hope to keep the blog well-updated with stories from my travels and the places I visit. Expect postings about twice a week. I hope you can follow along with me on my adventures.