Cleary, I Took the Teaching Job and Rob and I Moved Back to Monteverde, Costa Rica One Week Ago

It is sort of impossible to live here, physically. I have just spent quite a while reading the fun and informative blogs of other US city folk living in Monteverde and they all devote a lot of time lamenting the damp. There is indeed no magical realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels; I still love them, but the pervasiveness of the jungle is all too real realism- ain’t nothing made up about it. Since it does seem to be the lot of those temporarily living here to describe what rain is here, I will too.

We’ve been in our house for one week and my passport and several books have already started to wilt, crumple, and warp. I left a handout on a table at school today for one hour and when I came back it felt as if it had been dropped in a lake- emphasis here on the fact that it had not been raining. We were here in the spring and therefore are experiencing the rainy season for the first time (although I’m pretty sure that the dry season in Monteverde involves more rainfall than yearly averages in many places). We have been duly warned that our clothes will sprout mildew and take days to dry on the line and we are frightened enough by the inevitable mold attacks on the walls to acquiesce to a professional cleaning woman once every three weeks who will scrub them.

And, I’m cold all the time. Northern-California-can’t-get-rid-of-the-chill cold, but worse because everything is always some degree of damp. I’m cold all the time except when I’m hot and sweaty. We walk everywhere; I was expecting to walk everywhere since that was our experience four months ago, but the final hill up to the CEC, where I’m teaching 7th-11th grade English, is a ten minute leg-breaking, heart-pounding, sweat party. However, there is an upside to everything (Right? Right? Please say, I’m right…) and walking everywhere means that I feel healthy and truly hungry (not just it’s-been-five-hours-since-I-ate-so-I-should-eat-again hungry) and I sleep marvelously.

Continuing the upside theme, our house is lovely. I’ve used the word lovely a lot and now I know that I’ve never really used it so aptly- our house is truly lovely. It’s bright blue on the outside, so you can see it peeking through the jungle leaves, and orange and blue on the inside (trust me, it works). There is a marvelous energy in the house, which was only confirmed when we ran into a friend at the farmer’s market who had lived there before and she started crying because her memories of the house are so good. Our landlords are an amazingly warm and generous couple. They live behind us (they built both houses, of course) and we enjoyed a delicious and delightful breakfast at their place last Sunday. The house is also full of windows, clever places to sit and read, and it’s minutes from the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, so we are constantly treated to the calls and colors of amazing rainforest birds.

Back to the difficult side of things, this is a hard transition for me. Of course, you all know that change and transition are not my strong suits and some PhD student should research me as THE case study on homesickness. I worry a little that a year without museums, busy streets, movies, plays, and crowded bookstores will be unbearable for me. However, when we went to the community’s kid production of “Oliver!” (which was awesome) on Saturday night and ran into old friends and faces from our time here before, everyone was so open and friendly in a way that is special to this mountain hamlet. Also, my fellow teachers at the CEC are an enthusiastic, excited bunch; so I keep telling myself, I may miss urban life and knowing what it is to be dry, but the people here couldn’t be more welcoming. Learning Spanish too, has become the big goal of this year and one that I’m already progressing in. It’s mentally exhausting to try to learn a new language and speak it to new friends and colleagues, but just like the walking, it’s wonderful to be really spent at the end of the day.

And, of course, it’s the rainforest. It’s powerful and soothing all at the same time and as I walk up the path to my classroom (yes, to get from building to building at my school, hiking is involved ☺ I hear the oh-so-cheesy and oh-so-accurate refrain, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”