The Story
Greetings from Costa Rica!
I never thought of myself as particularly "outdoorsy." My family would go camping for one weekend a summer, and we were fair-weather campers: electricity and hot showers were assumed prerequisites. Many people go abroad to spend a semester taking a break from the grind of school and relaxing on beaches or in bars. I wholeheartedly endorse that; I spent the past summer exploring Europe in this way, and it was amazing. This spring, however, I decided to come to Central America, a magical place where you cannot flush the toilet paper and central highways are unpaved and two lanes.
I am studying tropical ecology and conservation in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Monteverde has one of the largest rainforest preserves in Central America, and it harbors countless endemic and rare species. My program is through CIEE, an international study abroad company. It is a field studies program, meaning that we spend the majority of our time observing plants and animals in the rainforests of Costa Rica. Interestingly, I am not a biology major, and my last experience with the subject was rejoicing after my AP Biology exam junior year of high school. I am also not a die-hard hiker or backpacker. In fact, I had never heard of the majority of recommended supplies on the pre-departure list and frantically raided REI the week before I left.
Two months and five hundred dollars in equipment later, I am writing from the balcony of the Estación Biológica de Monteverde, overlooking the evergreen forest of western Costa Rica to the Pacific Ocean. It has been an overwhelming, disappointing, fantastic, unbelievable, every-emotion-imaginable trip so far. I just returned from a two-week long field trip along the Caribbean coast of the country and into Panama. Before this trip, I didn’t know there were actual terms for the arrangements of leaves on tree. Yet for my last exam, I learned over one hundred tropical plants and animals. I did not own a pair of hiking boots, and on my last trip I hiked for over thirty miles with a fifty-pound pack.
When I arrived in Costa Rica in February, we started the semester off with a two-week field trip along the Pacific Coast - from the Nicaraguan border down to Panama. Then, we traversed a perilous and winding road to Monteverde for three weeks of straight lecture. These classes lasted from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. It was then that I was insanely jealous of my other W&M friends in Sevilla and Prague, Barcelona and South Africa. I thought about coming home, and I considered the options of losing $15,000 and an entire semester’s worth of work. But my parents and friends (and my conscience) encouraged me to continue. Studying abroad is an up-and-down experience. It is real life. It is not a vacation. You lose things, you still have to do your laundry and sometimes you would give anything to wander into a Wawa at 2 a.m. with your best friends.
I am going into my third month of being in Central America and into the final part of my program: an independent study and homestay in Monteverde. Since I arrived here, I have been spending 100 percent of my time with 27 other gringos, two professors and three Costa Rican teaching assistants. The program has not been anything that I expected, and I am sure that my homestay will be as far from my expectations as everything else. Studying abroad changes your perceptions of yourself, your friends, your country and the world. It’s trite, but experiences like this make you consider who you are, who you want to be, and how you will get there.