Reflexión sobre el campo
Reflecting on my month in rural Costa Rica…
When I think about my time spent in Llano Bonito, my instinct is to be glad that I’m back in San José. It’s hard for me to describe what living in Llano Bonito was like, because I feel like a jerk for not loving it. But my time there was really tough for a lot of different reasons.
I didn’t feel very connected to my host family for a lot of my stay. I was more or less comfortable, but I had trouble finding a lot in common with my host parents, and my host siblings were all older and not around a lot. So without a strong connection to my family, and without friends in town, I often felt pretty isolated, and spent a lot of time in my bedroom reading or watching movies.
Also, conducting my research was not easy. I had to cold-call micro-mill owners, in Spanish, to schedule meetings. Normally, those meetings were in the middle part of the day in a town or two over. But the bus system in the region isn’t great, so for a 1:00 pm meeting, I would have to wake up and catch a bus at six ‘o’ clock in the morning, wander around until the early afternoon, and then wait until 5:30 pm to catch a return bus. Sometimes, those meetings were cancelled with no notice, leaving me stuck in town all day with nothing to show for it.
All of that being said, I think I learned some important abstract lessons from my experience. For one, I became a rock to small discomforts — I never chose my food, for example. I stopped minding too much when the running water stopped working, sometimes for the whole day. I even got pretty used to the cold shower by the end of my time.
I also learned that I like to be busy. Sometimes, life seems to go too quickly back at Lawrence, but too slow left me feeling unfulfilled and bored. In some ways, I really benefited from that — I had more time to think, reflect, read, and relax. But I mostly missed having a busy life. I even found that I had a harder time enjoying the beauty of the mountains when they were my every-day view.
I’m back in San José now, fully enjoying the city life — going out with friends, riding the city bus, and needing to be a wary pedestrian again. I think my time in Llano Bonito will always conjure up some uncomfortable memories. But I hope, as I get older and go into the future, I will see more and more benefits from living a different life manifest themselves.
The rural stay humbled me. Hardly any of my strongest skills were obvious in Llano Bonito, which made me feel useless and uninteresting a lot of the time. But in the long run, that’s a good thing — I’ve learned what it’s like to be completely out of my element, and for that I’m grateful.
Thanks for reading, and please check back for one or two more posts before the end of my Costa Rican adventure. If you have any questions that I can answer in a future post, don’t hestitate to comment here or email me: sextonc[at]me.com
