The Ten Things I Have Learned As an Ex Pat in Costa Rica
By Alexandra Lancaster

1. Patience is more than a virtue here. It is necessary in order to be happy here.
2. Resourcefulness: because I love it here I have found ways to “make do”, to “create”, and to substitute (while working in the kitchen,) that I never would have learned had I not moved here 13 years ago.
3. Awareness: because life moves slower here I have learned to look at the faces of people, at the roadside stand of flowers, at the landscape, and find new perception.
4. Through frustration and hardship, at times, I have learned to stick things out. The borders are close together here and I have learned to confront life because it is closer to me than any other place I have lived.
5. Listening. Spanish is not my native language. Therefore I have trained my inner ear, the one that not only listens to words, but listens to the meaning behind words...the hearing “eye”. Thus communication for me has changed and deepened.
6. Affection: In the States, where my life was more hurried and more anonymous, I drew back from people more. The Costa Ricans have taught me it is ok to pause, to hug, to touch with kindness in a way I would have feared doing in the States. This affection is a tonic for me in my village, San Isidro de Heredia...that I crave when I am feeling down. Go buy a cauliflower and get a hug and a quick joke from the vendors.
7. Letting go: A few years ago I stopped harping about things like Potholes, long lines, a lack of things I thought I needed to have here in order to be happy: now I try to focus on what I can change and I leave the potholes alone and stare at the small houses, people walking, the far mountains.
8. Mystery: The occult and peculiar nature of a culture that I will never fully understand: I have come to more or less (!) realize that it is this very mysterious quality that gives the country its charm. I believe I will never come to grips with some of the attitudes here and I no longer try. This is turn has engendered the next item:
9. Humour. The Costa Ricans have great humor and wit, which is accessed of course through their language, so I don’t catch it all. But I try to understand with my heart and thus I laugh with them and sometimes we are laughing about the same thing.
10. My priorities. When I visited for two months in the States recently, and observed how life has become there, I came back to Costa Rica and saw what has become important to me here: Clean air, love in its myriad manifestations, a lifestyle less spent on pursuing money, family life (my employees on the finca, I came to realize, are my nuclear family, and I missed them intensely...more than I might have known had I not left for a while), good health (which the U.S. cannot give me since I am one of the great Un insurables in the U.S., quiet time apart from the bustle that one becomes accustomed to in a society like the U.S. where upper class people barely even raise their own children.