The final weeks of EAP

Its hard to believe how much time has actually passed since I last posted. Harder still to believe just how much has happened in these past few weeks and where I am now. Where am I? sitting in a hammock at 6am surrounded by twinkly lights and coconuts carved to look like fish on the balcony of the hostel I’m staying at in Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. I can’t believe the program is over. Our group of 27 is now split up completely-with some of us starting travels around the rest of this country, some of us already back at home in the U.S., and some starting journeys throughout the rest of central and south America. I’m on the Carribean side with a group of 7 others: Madeline, Johanne and her brother Damien, Sarah, Marvin, Elizabeth and Hanna, and I’ll stay here for the next few days until I travel back to San Jose to hop on my plane to California. This morning we got up at 4:30 to watch the sunrise (Aimee you would have died). I’m going to try to briefly go through what the last few weeks have been like. Forgive me if I ramble on. I’m already pretty sentimental.

Homestay ended well. The Castillos were awesome and though they weren’t SUPER traditional Ticos (in fact they weren’t Ticos at atll—they’re Ecuadorian), we ended up getting along great. There were some serious initial frustrations on my part in the beginning, simply because I was struggling so hard to communicate. In having to suddenly participate in day-to-day Spanish conversations it suddenly felt as though I had never taken a Spanish class in my life. I would get extremely nervous any time I tried to speak, and ended up spending a lot of time sitting silent and awkward at the dinner table. But by about day 8 I sort of turned a corner and my confidence got a serious boost. I’m sure now that I’m not forced to do it everyday, my Spanish will deteriorate exponentially, but at least I can say that at one point, I was barely able to communicate. It also helped tremendously that there was another girl living with the family-also named Katie and from California. She’s awesome and an excellent Spanish speaker—needless to say I took advantage of her skills quite often. During all this I was spending 2 to 4 hours a day sitting in Bajo del Tigre—a trailhead in the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, observing and taking notes on my independent research species, the long-tailed manakins. They really are the cutest birds ever. I miss those guys now, they got me through a lot.

Once homestay ended 2 weeks later, I was back at the station with everyone, and I was ecstatic. I loved my homestay, but I also loved the freedoms of the station—being able to go out hiking whenever I wanted, constantly having snacks around and cooks making us delicious meals, company 24-7. However what I did not anticipate was the amount of work we had coming once we returned. Within our final two weeks at the station we were required to put together a final project first submission, complete 4 finals, an agroecology video project, an 8 minute power point presentation on our independent projects that we had to present at our symposium, and a final submission of our project ready to be published. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more sleepless two weeks. There were probably about 7 days in total in which I did not leave the library at the station except to eat and use the bathroom. It was one of the more intense academic experiences of my life, and in the meantime, we were all desperate to have fun in our final days together, so any time we had even the slightest break in our workload we headed out to the bars or tried to create some kind of festivities at the station—needless to say, it was sleepless.

Finishing everything felt incredible though. Our symposium was amazing. Seeing the fruits of everyone’s labor for the past month, and being able to share mine was pretty indescribable. And once we were done with the final submission the relief was enormous. I think one of my favorite nights of the entire program was the one right after I turned in my submission. Erick, our teacher that lived with us at the station decided that we should go surprise our other teacher Pati at a show she was playing at a place in town. It turned out to be at the beautiful house of a woman who opens up her kitchen to the town every Friday night, and makes her patio a restaurant, offering awesome food and wine to anyone who comes. Pati was playing guitar and singing on the patio surrounded by beautiful twinkling lights and tons of people we recognized from town, including more of our teachers. Pati is amazingly talented, and we were all just so happy and content to be there. I’ll never forget it

The last nights were filled with final talks from Frank about reentering the real world, getting our EAP shirts (which I designed!) and taking millions of photos in them, traveling back to San Jose and taking more goodbye pictures, a SERIOUS roast on all of us planned by the teachers and presented to us in Hotel Cacts on our final night, and then the strange goodbyes as people left one by one or group by group. I held it together almost until the very end. It still hasn’t really registered that I won’t see everyone every day anymore. We were literally always together (sometimes in complete isolation) for 3 months straight. I think once I’m back in the U.S. it will hit me a little harder, but for now I’m going to just try to enjoy the Caribbean sunshine with my remaining friends here and worry about all that later

The one thing I am REALLY looking forward to though is seeing my friends and family from home. It probably doesn’t seem like it from the blog but my time here hasn’t always been easy and thinking about you guys has gotten me through a lot.

Sorry for another long post. I’ll try to fit one more in before I leave on Monday. See you all soon!