In Costa Rica, we participated in homestays. My house consisted of an elderly couple and five of us students. This experience served to deepen our appreciation of Costa Rican culture to a far greater extent than if we had simply been packed away in a hotel for two weeks. Poor Louis XVI to have been the only individual in France who wasn’t actually French. Or, maybe as he would put it, to have been the only Frenchman. I hesitate to explain the preceding thought, for the explanation is what ruins its beauty, as Emerson claims that the intentional regard of nature is what flattens the mountains and dims the stars. Even if I act a fool, I enjoy pretending the opposite. At this point I’m simply saying things for the pleasure of it, and I hope you, dear reader, have come to disregard the last several sentences. They’re for my own amusement.
As hoped, not all would be smooth sailing with a homestay. The greatest challenge we faced was communicating. Collectively, the five of us students spoke a modest amount of Spanish, the father speaking about the same amount of English. The mother spoke only Spanish. As a result, be it with regard to the nature of our day, what time to expect dinner, or perhaps to offer thanks for freshly laundered clothing, conversation between student and parent often was more greatly comprised of hand gestures and implied and assumed phrases than words. It amazed me, some days in, when reflecting that I could discern an entire sentence from an amalgamation of three or four words, various gesticulations, and dynamic facial expressions. Magically, there’s an entire universe full of unarticulated dimensions of the nature of communication.
Being a member of a household with five students, everything we did throughout the day was as a group. We awoke, ate breakfast, walked to the bus stop, and returned at the day’s end together. Certainly there was tension at times between members of our five-man crew, but that did not liberate any of us from the presence of any of the others. More than commenting on this as having been a challenge, I’m more struck by the distinction between this communal day-to-day during the trip and my solitary lifestyles before and after the trip. For the entire academic year, I had a room all to myself. My roommate never showed up in the Fall. Although I was in a suite of 5 guys (supposed to be 6, but again, my absent roommate), I largely operated independently. Now, after returning from Costa Rica, I’m living alone again. I’m subleasing a home in South Oakland so that I can stay on campus to better engage with my summer endeavors. To be blunt, both during the year and now during the summer, I’ve felt lonely. The two weeks I spent living with four other guys were a welcome respite from that isolation, and I eagerly await seeing all my friends again at the end of the summer.
One of the experiences I most enjoyed about the trip was our commitment to playing pickup soccer whenever we had the chance. On the first day, I bought a ball which we took to a mini court near a house where two of the other students were living. For hours, our group of 20 played nearly nonstop. That afternoon gave us a meaningful opportunity to bond early on in the trip, no doubt improving the experience for the two weeks to come.
