Late June of 2017, I was picked up by the scruff of my neck and plopped into a completely new world. I was the next Dorothy, the next Alice. Only, the roads were splintering cement, not yellow brick, and the scruffy cats would sooner gnaw off my fingers than grin at me and offer directions. That was fine by me -- coming to Quepos, Costa Rica to volunteer with GVI was my own, brand new experience. I loved the challenge of it, the way I never had a waking moment to slip into sleepwalking mode. There was too much to take in, and too many new things to do. Normalcy evaporated and I became a student of everything: the language, the flora and fauna, the culture, the dress code, even the currency. (Paying thousands for a meal is entirely normal. Who knew?)
The disorientation wore off quickly and I quickly began to learn about the community: Quepos is more tailored to tourists than I had expected, including ridiculously priced sunscreen and peanut butter, and even an air-conditioned Subway. But, one need only take the short bus ride to Manuel Antonio to find the absolute pinnacle of the tourist swarm. Any visitor could immediately notice the division: there are those laying out on the beach in daisy dukes, and there are those that the beach-layers wave away: the gaunt looking locals selling coconuts and bird-whistles in the hope of feeding their families that night.
Back in Quepos, one could both these tourists and these locals, living with a spirit of coexistence more than codependence (the locals dependent on the tourists to make a living, the tourists dependent upon the locals to offer authentic trinkets and a supply of coconuts). Quepos had more bustle and less glamour. We saw people who sleep on the sidewalks, and others who staggered through the town with hungry eyes. I don’t think food would have been enough to satiate them. Even so, Quepos isn’t the poorest community there is to see out there; it’s just the poorest one within the reach of the common tourist.
The community just across the water is what I and a handful of other volunteers came for: El Cocal. An island of outcasts. The government has entirely turned its face from El Cocal. There isn’t even a hospital on the island. If a mother goes into labor, or if someone faces an unfortunate slip of a machete, the slow, gurgling trip across the water awaits the patient before they can receive adequate medical attention. I find this humbling – and I find this terrifying.
It is because of the people in El Cocal that I’ve realized I may want to spend the rest of my life bettering the lives of people like them. The adults I taught English to inspire me just as much as the children I cared for, trying reduce their vulnerability to trouble on the streets. These people broke my heart with their goodness. It breaks my heart to know that some of the children I cared for might still stumble into drug addiction and sell themselves off into prostitution. I couldn’t offer my help in their darkest circumstances, but perhaps in those moments I spent with them, the people of El Cocal will remember the rainy afternoons of English lessons, laughing at me when I celebrate a grammatically correct sentence or a fully colored picture of the solar system.
My days were busy – Mondays: lesson planning on the paint-splattered and paper cluttered tables. I went food-shoping with the GVI staff members, picking fresh fruit and vegetables out at one store, and browsing a much smaller and simpler version of a Walmart just down the street for everything from sponges to boxed milk.
Tuesdays and Thursdays a few of us volunteers taught English lessons to the keen and unbelievably kind adults of El Cocal, and at night we would receive our very own lessons in Spanish from either Runia or Carlos, the two Spanish teachers who work with GVI. Wednesdays and Fridays, I had two hectic shifts of childcare in El Cocal, requiring a lot of stamina and adaptability, and creativity. It’s with the children that I first began to learn how my limited Spanish didn’t mean I couldn’t connect and communicate with the locals.
I could spin 3-year-old Judith around in circles like a princess, and her toothy grin would speak for itself. There was trust at that moment, and love, too. I wonder if her father knows how much she loves to be spun around. I could play sharks and minnows and scoop up Matias, and even though he’s supposed to pout and go become a ‘Tiburon’, he’d wriggle around to hug me and play with my hair, muttering in Spanish. It was indecipherable music to my ears. Every time a child said, “mira!” holding up a crooked drawing or performing a wobbly cartwheel, it filled my heart to offer them my attention and my approval. God knows that some of them will never receive it from their own parents – or, if they do, never quite enough. I’ve heard just a few yet all too many stories about the broken homes these kids return to once childcare is over for the day. I wished I could communicate to these children how much value they have even if they might not always be told just how wonderful they are.
The adults of El Cocal, however, were more of a challenge to me. Not because they were unwelcoming, but because I did not know how to converse in Spanish much beyond a greeting. When Amanda is around, she helps with translation, but I wished I could express my heart with the precision and quickness that I can in English. It is humbling to experience this and wonder how immigrants feel in our country, living like this full time - always not quite knowing what to say, but still having something to say. I loved my Spanish lessons, leaning into the opportunity to learn more. But I still would worry that it wouldn't be quite enough for these two weeks. I wished I had more time to learn Spanish and more time to try and make connections. I saw an uncanny connection between my struggle with Spanish and my students’ struggles with English.
As I think about this experience and how content I felt living with the GVI staff and volunteers, and trekking to the boats that brought us to El Cocal day in and day out, it really is such a wonder to me to see how the human heart is so much happier when challenged than when it lies in the comfort of what one knows best and what one can predict. Yes, I would sweat all day long and had no access to hot water. Yes, I had fifty-seven (I counted!) bug bites, but I was enamored with the experience. Yes, there were little crabs crawling into my shower, always shuffling the opposite of where I tried and nudge them.... but I was happy.
I had traded comfortability for vulnerability, and that right there is what prevents stagnancy and dissatisfaction in life. I’m was living, we all were. There is an abstract kind of thermodynamic entropy in this work when volunteering in a new place. The eager energy shared between the volunteers and the inhabitants of El Cocal will never die, only spread, like the lumbering palms of the trees on the beach, like the understanding of words in El Cocal like “when” and “octopus”, like the wild curls on Matias’s hair that rushed towards me when he threw his arms around my neck.
