Saying Goodbye and Returning Home

Tico 22 set our alarm clocks, crawled into our unfamiliar hotel beds and tried to catch a few winks of sleep before our early morning flight. Sitting in the lobby at 2am the next morning, dreary eyed and anxious I began a journey with 32 strangers. Over two years later, only 22 of us have held on for the ride, a rather fitting number. In the months of April, May and June our journey will come to an end. We have fulfilled our 27 month commitment. My Rural Community Development peers have become my adopted family. We celebrate holidays together, we support each other in times of need, and we make the daily phone calls- just to check in. I am grateful to each an everyone one of them, in ways they know and will probably never know.

Saying goodbye to my fellow volunteers was difficult. I am excited to begin my new journey as an extension 3rd year volunteer, but every time I look at my cell phone and pass by all of the numbers that represent friends who I can no longer send a text to, or meet up with in San Jose, I feel disconnected. Life in my site continues as normal, English classes, grant writing, computer classes and the like. But every once and a while I stop and think about my adopted family, who are now back in the United States, eating delicious foods, hugging family and confronting the uncertainties of life. They have always been the people who understood me, they knew what culture shock felt like, how frustrating language learning was, how challenging isolation could be, and how exhausting it can be playing the motivator. And now they are undergoing new challenges and readjustments. And I am in my house, washing dishes, wishing it would rain.

I am lucky that there are other volunteers in my region, and I am looking forward to further developing friendships with them. And I have wonderful relationships in my community. So I will be fine, in this next year I will have the opportunity to work with motivated community members, execute important development projects and delve even further into rural Costa Rican life. And I wish my adopted family the best of luck, we may drift apart as the years pass on, but you will always be part of my transformation in Costa Rica.