2

RETURN OR REIMAGINE

You wake up to the sound of Howler monkeys. Even after seven weeks of this alarm clock, the barking howl still takes you by surprise. You and Sam have been staying with neighboring host families in a small town in southeastern Costa Rica and have been teaching English and math at the local elementary school through a year-abroad teaching fellowship. It pays very little, but for the moment, it’s just enough to make ends meet.

Of course, this is doing almost nothing to address your student loan debt and not much more than that to build the experience that you anticipate will be relevant to your career. But you’re having the most fun and eye-opening experience you have ever had.

With daily practice to improve your rusty high-school Spanish, along with the training that the volunteer abroad program provided, you feel equipped to teach the eight-to-twelve-year-olds in your classroom. And yet you can’t help wonder who is really benefiting the most from this experience. As you watch a fellow volunteer take selfies with some of the children, you feel a pang of embarrassment over the white savior complex that could be derived from this experience. You try to push that guilt away and make the most of your days, because the children you work with are the best part of it.

In the evenings, you and Sam often ride rusty, single-speed bicycles down the dirt road into town and go dancing at one of the reggae bars. It is on one such night that you end up chatting with a local gentleman named Eddie. He’s from Argentina, but lives in Puerto Viejo now, and is doing research on the mating habits of sea turtles. You hit it off instantly, talk into the night and, after a short, but heart-stopping good-night kiss, agree to meet for a beach hike the coming weekend.

Thus begins your Costa Rican romance. You slowly find yourself spending more and more of your free time with Eddie. Even though you are both foreigners, your budding relationship with him makes you feel even more connected to your new locale.

Unfortunately, the relationship is having the opposite effect on your friendship with Sam. She is bummed that Eddie is getting so much of your time and completely sick of hearing about him when you two are together. You assume that is a large part of the reason that, at the turnover of semesters at the elementary school, she announces that she’s going to head to Argentina to volunteer on an organic farm. She half-heartedly asks if you’d like to join her, but you both already know the answer.

And so you go through the next five months in your enjoyable new reality. Teaching children by day, eating occasional meals with your host family—they are an older couple whose children are grown and they enjoy your company but don’t expect it—and spending the rest of your time exploring both land and mind with Eddie.

Before you know it, your year-abroad program is coming to an end. That means that your teaching gig, work visa, and host family accommodations will be ending soon. On the afternoon of your twenty-third birthday, you and Eddie have a picnic on the beach and discuss the options in front of you.

If you were to stay in this village, there wouldn’t be much to do career-wise. You might be able to get hired as a fulltime teacher at the school where you’ve been working, but, as much as this experience has been fulfilling and eye-opening for this finite amount of time, you can’t see yourself teaching the same lessons over and over again. And, although your feelings for Eddie are as close as you’ve ever come to being madly in love, you’re not quite sure you’re ready to make a pivotal life decision at this point in your life, just one year out of college. Eddie has at least four more years of this sea turtle study left before he can consider relocating (and he’s not itching to move either, and certainly not to the States).

At the same time, the idea of returning to the US to begin adulting sounds downright claustrophobic, especially after the freedom you’ve experienced here. You do still feel a desire to both prove yourself and make the world a little better; however, your conviction for the former and your belief in the latter as being attainable from within “the system” have both diminished from a year ago.

You feel like you’re going to be hit with heartbreak either way you turn. But, alas, you have to act, one way or the other.

If you decide to stay in Costa Rica indefinitely, get a teaching job, and shack up with Eddie, turn to Chapter 5.

If you decide to stay in touch with Eddie but return to the States to follow through with your intention to dive into your career after a year abroad, turn to Chapter 3.