Weekly Reflection #1

 My First Week Back

Returning to Costa Rica for the first time in two years was both oddly strange and familiar in many ways. I could feel the emotions of excitement and ecstasy that I once felt as a younger, slightly shorter sophomore right as I left the airport. Unlike our first trip to Monteverde, however, River and I had a lot more responsibilities that we had to deal with ourselves. The first thing was acquiring a rental car, a process which was made much more stressful thanks to the fact that River’s credit card didn’t have enough money so we had to use a debit card but the rental car guys wouldn’t let us pay for the standard insurance package with a debit card for some reason so river and I had to use both out debit cards to pay for the most expensive insurance package, hence why I keep referring to our car as the “overpriced blue Toyota” on my blog. When we finally got our car, I was in charge of navigating to Monteverde, a task that I took for granted when Proctor’s Monteverde coordinator, Kathia, did all of the driving and navigating herself. When we finally got to Monteverde, the adulting didn’t stop; the first thing we did was go to the grocery store and get all of the food that we needed. Knowing from past experiences that the quality of beef in Costa Rica is rather poor, and lacking confidence in our ability to properly prepare fish, we decided to go for the safe bet and get chicken breasts as our choice of protein. The first meal I cooked was a dish of shredded chicken and rice which turned out surprisingly good, a fact that made me feel a bit more confident for my future self. 

One thing I couldn’t help but notice was how the Monteverde region has been changed by the pandemic. On the surface, it would appear that the region fared well, with only a few of the restaurants no longer existing and a few other businesses relocating. However, after hearing many stories from locals, it’s clear that it took a lot of teamwork, selflessness, and hard work from many individuals and organizations to keep the tourist-reliant region afloat during a period where they saw no tourists. While River and I were not here to help during the middle of the pandemic when the Monteverde Institute did a lot of work to feed the local community, we are playing a role in their long-term plan to reforest a massive corridor in the country. The goal of the institute is to completely reforest the whole area from the Cloud Forest to the gulf of Nicoya, a massive objective that will take decades to complete. While we haven’t planted any trees directly into the ground, we spent a lot of time moving thousands of saplings to tree nurseries and filling bags with dirt and seeds that will one day be planted too. I believe that I have personally benefited from being here so far because I can now properly cook chicken (sometimes) and I can make a lasting contribution to not only Monteverde, but a large portion of Costa Rica in general. My goal is to help Monteverde in any way possible, and filling the now barren hillsides with rainforests once again will help make the area even more beautiful and environmentally stable.