4 Weeks on a Farm in Costa Rica
Part 1: Securing the Adventure
It’s been a little over a month since I returned from Costa Rica, after spending four weeks living on a permaculture farm and five more in the jungle just beyond a small coastal town. I’ll never be able to fully capture this experience in words, but I feel ready to try. I am not exaggerating when I say that this experience changed my life, and potentially threw me on a new life path. I will be eternally grateful.
The biggest question I’ve gotten since I returned is how I ended up on a farm on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica in the first place. Truthfully, I must be lucky, blessed, or both - I’ve got some amazing friends, one of whom is half Tico (the word for a person native to Costa Rica). Eric has been a friend of mine for almost five years now, and we talk a lot about life’s adventures; past, present, and future. We’ve talked extensively about how cool it would be for me to leave the country (for the first time, really) and spend some time immersed in another culture. So on a fine day this past February, without any context, Eric sent me an Instagram post from Talamanca Chocolate, a permaculture farm near Puerto Viejo, Limon Province, which specializes in making tree-to-bar chocolate and hosting classes. Their post simply read “experiential learning in the tropics, dm for information” and I thought, hey… I could do that. So I did.
I almost immediately received an email from the farm’s owner and caretaker, a Scottish woman named Ancel Mitchell, that included a description of the program and an application. I read over the details, and found so many things I was interested in - medicinal plants, chocolate making, fermentation, animal husbandry, and Caribbean cooking - and so many more. Then, I let the email sit for nine days. There was no doubt in my mind that this was something I wanted, but making big decisions like this is scary! There were one or three-month positions available, and after shoving away the initial anxiety and executive dysfunction of doing Anything At All, I chose to interview for one month. I wanted an adventure, but the what-ifs filled my head when I thought about going for three months: primarily, what if I don’t like it?
Fears tucked away, I wrote and submitted my application. I talked about how curious I’ve been about permaculture for the past few years, how I’ve been trying to be more conscious within my existence on this earth, how much I freaking love fermented things, and how I felt ready to dive into something entirely different from Life As I Knew It. My fingertips were buzzing as I wrote—passion and anticipation were taking over on my keyboard. When Ancel called me for an interview, past her accent I could hear the chickens and ducks in the background, and the buzz of the jungle. I could almost feel the humidity in the air, the impending rain.
Though our WhatsApp conversation cut out a few times due to poor signal, we managed to get through the basics of conversation. In addition to my initial interest in the program, Ancel also asked me if I was afraid of bugs (thankfully, no). She asked how my tolerance to noise was—apparently, the birds and frogs aren’t sensitive to nighttime, with much fewer people sleeping. She asked about my ability to multitask, and what I was up to in my “normal” life—which was working at a sports bar and teaching fitness classes once a week. Ancel also told me that the program was intensive, but could be morphed to the individual. It didn’t take much. I was sold, bugs and all.
I only told my close friends, maybe three people, that I was applying. After a week or two of silence, while sitting with my coworkers at a dive bar sometime past midnight, I checked my email (you know, like everyone does at the bar), saw Ancel’s name and shrieked—yes, out loud!—she said I could come as soon as next month.
While the decision to go to Costa Rica after being accepted was a HELL YES, I stressed a lot about taking the time off work. Neither of my jobs is long-term career choices, but I have a deep-rooted fear of letting people down and some subconscious beliefs that make it difficult for me to do things for myself. What if they say no, what if they think I’m selfish, what if I’m not doing enough to help? But I would never know if I didn’t ask, and everyone was shockingly supportive of my decision. The manager at my serving job actually had the best comment when I told him my plans: “We don’t want to make you feel like you can’t live life outside of this place.” Man, how’d I got so lucky? So on March 12, while sitting in a ball on my friend’s couch with butterflies flying through my whole body, I bought a red-eye flight to San Jose, Costa Rica for 6 pm on April 12—and didn’t pack a single thing till about 3 pm that day.
To Be Continued. Part 2: “Immersed in the Jungle” coming soon!
