November 22, 2010: Going Home

As some – or most, I imagine – of you already know, Lena’s father had a heart attack about two weeks ago. He’s fine – I’d be tempted to qualify him as doing great, especially for someone who had a quadruple bypass – and improving daily. As we didn’t qualify for family emergency leave, we were only able to stay a couple of weeks, but it was enough to see John move from a pale, quiet man at the hospital back closer to his red-cheeked, dry-humored self. We are extremely thankful for his recovery, his presence, and the continued support of friends and family for both him and ourselves.


We almost didn’t make it out of the country. The day we left our site (November 2nd) was the beginning of a storm that paralyzed most of Costa Rica for the next week. We took the earliest possible bus from our town, carrying our luggage to the bus through the water that had already started to pool outside our house. Over the course of our 5 hours on the bus, the rain grew steadily worse, falling in thick sheets that hid mountains and trees, and we twice plowed through water that had jumped the banks of rivers and was churning in brown curls across the highway. The running dialogue between the driver and passengers (“Can we make it?” “We can totally make it.” “How high off the ground is the engine?”) didn’t do much to soothe the nerves. We must have been on one of the last buses to make it out of the Central Pacific region – within 24 hours, nearly all the highways in the country were closed due to flooding or landslides. Since coming back to our site, we’ve learned that water was waist high in the parts of town near the beach, and several families were evacuated from their houses and had to live out of the elementary school for two weeks. Amazingly, our house, 20 meters from the creek that runs through the middle of Matapalo, the same one that jumped its banks and knocked aside trees and left the high school’s cows standing in the middle of a gigantic, muddy lake, saw no flooding. The worst we had to deal with was a skillet we left uncleaned in the rush to leave the country. It was really gross, but I will gladly take scrubbing mold over a flooded house.

We hadn’t planned on going back to the United States at all during our service. Part of this was a bit of romanticism: we thought the experience wouldn’t be as “authentic” if we interrupted it with a return to our state-side privilege and comfort. The other part was probably emulation: Lena’s parents served in the Peace Corps in Morocco in the 1970s. They not only didn’t go home during their service, they didn’t even call home – flights between Morocco and the U.S. were prohibitively expensive, and international calls involved going to the post office and waiting in line for hours. We, on the other hand, live in a country which is an international tourist destination, meaning flights here from Denver are often cheaper than flying to Ohio, and we have a cell phone. All of which, I suppose, reinforces Peace Corps Rule Number Three: “Never compare your Peace Corps service to that of anyone else, including those in your own country.” For those who don’t know, Peace Corps Rule Number One and Two are, respectively, “You will never be able to kill all the bugs, so stop trying” and “Try to think of skin diseases as interesting rather than disgusting.”

The really odd part the whole experience was we didn’t have much chance to notice we were home. The reason we were there curtailed any sort of reflection; we were too busy worrying or cleaning or running errands to mull over the lessons learned in our eight months in Costa Rica or analyze our personal growth and change. (That had to wait until we were back in country and woken up by a backhoe in our front yard at 5:30 in the morning, just an hour after we had chased off some long-clawed animal crawling in the ceiling above our bed, thus giving us the necessary impetus, if not the rest, to wake up and type this.) It was remarkably easy to slip back into life in Colorado, with only a couple of exceptions:

1) I felt simultaneously guilty and elated every time I flushed toilet paper down the toilet (Costa Rica functions largely on a septic tank system, meaning you can’t wash your toilet paper down the bowl, and instead throw it out like other trash).

2) I had to suppress the urge to say “hello” to every person I came across on the street or in stores, as it appeared to make most people uncomfortable.

3) Lena reports feeling odd not kissing everyone she knows when greeting them. Costa Ricans greet people with a kiss on the side of the cheek – not actually on the cheek, but an “air kiss,” shot broadside of the face. Being a person who sometimes feels awkward hugging people I know and love, I didn’t feel the same.

4) There is a marked lack of ants swarming over everything you own in Colorado.

Deeper reflections have had to wait for our return. It has been, if we’re to be honest, a difficult couple of months for us, with frustrations over our work (or lack of it), doubts about our plans and priorities, and watching fellow volunteers leave to pursue other opportunities. The chance to step back a bit, to receive advice or a pep talk from friends and family, was valuable. We come back, we make new plans, see familiar things again and forget all our Spanish. Our goals change, they contract or expand. Some things you think you’ve learned you have to repeat again. You repeat vague platitudes to cover up the fact you have no idea what you’re doing. And you take pride in the small successes you achieve. Sometimes they are very small: today I figured out, after three months, how to pay the garbage man. Welcome back to Costa Rica.