The Story
Part of a Tico family
I’m writing this at 6:15 am, a time at W&M generally reserved only for last minute studying before a morning exam. Two weeks ago, I moved in with a Tico (the term for native Costa Ricans) family and I will be here for the next few weeks. This morning-and every morning-the family’s three small children wake up at around 5:45 am. They spend the next hour until school starts with lively games involving high-pitched screaming and yelling. Since there is only a thin panel of wood between my room and their room, I’ve reluctantly become an early, albeit cranky, riser. I live about one hour’s walk from the major town, Santa Elena (population: 6,500) and the walk is really beautiful, passing lush farms and with a great view over the valley all the way to the ocean.
My Tico dad, Isitro, owns a small farm with about twenty dairy cows, and each morning he milks them and sells the milk to a local cheese factory. Yesterday, the family somehow received two small pigs (their origin was lost in translation). Besides that, they have a few chickens in a pen right next to the house. The mother, Cristina is only twenty-eight and stays home during the day. She spends her days cooking, cleaning, entertaining the children, laundry, etc. All of these tasks are significantly more labor intensive than in the States. For example, they don’t have a coffeemaker, and the filter water through a cheesecloth-like sleeve to make their coffee.
We have beans and rice for every single meal, with variations on four other side dishes: squash, fried cheese, eggs, and mayonnaise. My family has only had meat two times since I’ve been here. They treat meat as a specialty, and could never afford to eat it for every meal as most people do in the U.S.
The first few days of living here were the epitome of the College's most overused word-awkward. The first day, I didn’t know what else to do, so I watched Pokemon dubbed in Spanish for two hours with the kids. Moving into someone’s house in a different country is so weird-there’s no other word for it-and I only speak broken, and often grammatically, incorrect Spanish. My family doesn’t speak English. So, our conversations are pretty limited to the weather and whether I want lunch. Though we don’t talk much, my family has been really kind to me. Everything they have, they have offered to me. They live simply and within their means. With few exceptions, they seem genuinely happy. On Easter Sunday, the kids excitedly led me to their pond and we watched Isitro catch tilapia for lunch. We came home, Cristina and Isitro fried the fish together, and an hour later we were squeezing fresh limon on crispy fish in front of a heated Costa Rica-Mexico football game. It’s a good life.