You’re Miss Move Abroad, so I don’t expect you to agree with me. But I dare you to print my letter.

Been There, Met Them

Dear Mr. Been,
How did you know that I can never resist a dare? That’s probably why I’ve lived in so many different places over the years, loser that I am.

But believe it or not, I can see where you might come to your conclusion. Many people flee their home country to escape—from the law, from child support payments, or from their own unfathomable selves. And it’s true that in expat communities all over the world you’ll find some pretty shady characters, people who come for lax law enforcement, the cheap drugs, the discounted sex. Those who in their home countries are either unwanted or wanted (think notices on post office walls).

This, however, is only one of the many varieties of expat, and your views make me suspect that you’re a Layover Larry, with your experience heavy on airports and underlings. Have you ever been to the homes of your colleagues overseas? Do you stay on after your business is concluded, to see what the place is like without your “work” filter operating? You may also be unwittingly narrowing your experience of a place. Do you work hard all day in a sequestered setting and then spend your nights in an expat bar surrounded by herds of expaticus alcoholicus complaining about the natives as they slowly slide off their barstools? Needless to say, these folks aren’t the best representatives of the expat species.

If you take a little more time and seek out other kinds of expats, you might find Peace Corps volunteers, academics or scientists chasing after their subjects, students on a gap year abroad, artists and writers looking for new material or a place cheap enough so that they can concentrate on their vocation rather than on being a wage slave, students of the language or culture, parents who want to broaden their kid’s horizons, or retirees who can finally live where they want regardless of work opportunities.

And Mr. Been, if I may ask, what exactly would cause you to exclaim, “Now there’s a winner?” Seeing yourself in the mirror? Does a person have to match up exactly with your version of success to be worthy? Sounds like you’re ripe for a long-term experience in a radically different culture, if only to show you that there are many, many definitions of success, many of which will look nothing like yours.

My question may be long-winded because I’m sorting out many issues about my decision to move abroad–to Israel.

Here’s my background:  At 26, after completing two degrees in software and engineering-related fields and working full-time for just over 2 years, I quit my job in San Francisco and bought an around-the-world trip ticket. My friend and I traveled from February through July last year. Nearing the end of my trip, I asked myself what things in my life I wanted to do—thing that if I didn’t do, I would regret on my death bed.  One of them came up as living abroad.

Back from the trip now, working freelance, and living at home, it seems like the perfect time to tackle this dream.

I have been to Israel four times in my life, speak enough Hebrew to get by, but have no relatives there, and just a few friends, none terribly close. I always love it every time, and even tried applying for a Fulbright to move there a few years back.  I’ve done all my research on job opportunities (they exist for people in my field) and the benefits the state offers to Jews who would like to move there. They actually pay you to move, roughly $4500 over the first 7 months, free health insurance until you get a job, and 5 months of Hebrew classes, just to name a few of the benefits.  It seems, by the facts, that this should be a relatively easy decision. But it’s not.

What’s nagging me is whether I am running away from a good thing in the States. I have a great education, and lots of well-paying job opportunities. Though I have a free spirit and crave adventure, I’ve learned this year that stability is really important to me.  Needless to say, the transition home has been very difficult for me as I haven’t yet gotten my independent life back.  So one of my concerns is how long it will take for me to really get settled in Israel, and if it’s a process that I can withstand mentally.

The next concern I have is that I’ve been far away from friends and family for a while, going to college out-of-state and graduate school on the other side of the country. This gives me the independence I need to be successful abroad, but also makes me wonder if it’s a good thing to continue to endure the stress it takes to create a new life each time and to be lonely until the new friends become great friends and pillars of support. Ever since kicking off the process to move to Israel in August, I’ve addressed these concerns each month, to great distraught.

Finally, as a seasoned backpacker and solo female traveler, conquering coco huts in 3rd world countries with the best of them, I find myself torn between my material pleasures and my constant challenge to prove that I can live on less.  Moving to Israel would challenge me and my bank account (while their economy is thriving, Tel Aviv is one of the most expensive cities to live in when you compare the rent to the actual salary earned). When I’m feeling empowered and idealistic, I know that it’s worth it. But when I’m feeling a bit more realistic, I wonder who I feel I need to prove to that I can change my life so drastically. And I do have student loans that I need to continue to pay….

I grow jealous of people who have lived abroad and can speak other languages, but I crave my stability and would like my older friends and close family in my life more.  I feel this yearning to be in Israel, yet this body-encompassing lament that I will do it alone, and feel lonely constantly in debating this decision.  Sometimes I wish someone would tell me to stop being foolish and stay, or visa versa.

Did I just pour my heart out to a stranger?  Any advice would be much appreciated.

Torn between the heart and dreams

_______________________

Dear Heart & Dreams,

Your letter got me thinking, and when I think, I write. But although my reply will no doubt be even more long-winded than your question, I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’ve been in your place, wishing someone would make a hard decision for me. But (as you already know) no one but you can make this call. If I tried, you’d protest that I didn’t have the full picture. And you’d be right. The full picture only takes shape in your own heart, and maybe only in the wee hours of the insomniac morning.

For me, decision-making is infinitely more mysterious than rationally weighing pros and cons. I’ll be obsessing for weeks, maybe even months, and then I’ll see or hear something—a line in a book, a scene in a movie, a snatch of overheard conversation in a café—and suddenly the decision in made. (Note the passive voice—as if the decision is out of my hands—a good strategy when pitching the move-abroad idea to employers and mothers).

I like Steven Johnson’s idea that good ideas (and decisions?) come from the collision of various small hunches, some of them residing in different minds. Here’s a cool animated video of that idea.

But back to your letter. As I read, I found myself nodding, thinking, yes, that’s the crux of it, isn’t it? Or rather the cruxes, as there are many axes on which the move abroad question pivots. I’ve got a few decades on you, and yet I must report that the issues don’t really change as you get older. As a serial relocator I confront similar questions each time I make a move.

The question of how moving abroad affects your relationships is perhaps the thorniest of the issues you raise. I know that when I return after extended travel or living abroad, friends and family are not so quick to let me have my old place in their hearts. Even if they were supportive of my move, their lives have moved on while I was away. They’ve adjusted to my absence, and it may be years before they really believe that I’m back.

And, like you, each time I go I ask myself if I’m running away from ‘real life’ and wonder how many more starting over’s I have in me.

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I do know that each question is a world onto itself, and that even the way we frame the questions betrays an array of assumptions that (for me) are revealed and sometime subverted by brushing away all my fears and making the move abroad.  Let’s take the ‘running away from real life’ question. Is our idea of real life so narrow that it can’t include interruptions of the proscribed life path—school, more school, work, family—that so many of us are on, or think we should be on?  Are we running away or are we lurching towards a life that is far my real than our habit-bound workaday existence, where daily repetition has dulled any sense of wonder or possibility?

Reading the particulars of your situation, I was struck by how you seemed to be trying to talk yourself into (or out of) something. I, for one, have never been paid to move anywhere, and there are often meager job opportunities on offer where I end up. You, on the other hand, would be paid to move to a country you already know you enjoy and where there are jobs in your field. The timing for you seems perfect, as well. With no apartment and no fixed job, you don’t have much to extricate yourself from. You didn’t mention anyone you’d be sorry to leave behind, so I’m assuming there’s no significant other. If there is a sweetheart in the picture, then you’re not telling me (or yourself) the whole story. Sometimes we want that sweetheart (or potential sweetheart) to hold us back from a radical move, to prove that they really care.

Another thing about timing: Often the 20s are considered a time to get travel and living abroad “out of your system,” after which you will presumably settle down and never stir again. But for those who are drawn to new experiences and new cultures, the ‘right time’ will come again and again, at various turning points in your life. Throughout my life I’ve been drawn to travel or living abroad when I need a new perspective, when I feel mired in the everyday, when things are closing in and I can’t see the forest for the trees.

If you’re having serious doubt about a move to Israel right now, it’s not as if this will be your last chance. You could even move to Israel, spend a few months there, and then decide to come back to the US. Would that be so bad?

If we look at the urge to move—to hit the road, get the hell out of Dodge, start fresh—not just as an individual impulse but a global one, we might say that it’s time to stay put and to stop running. Time to stop burning fossil fuels on our own personal long-distance quests. Time to face up to who and where we are, time to get our own house in order.

On the other hand, in most of nature, stasis is not an option. Animals roam far and wide to find food, shelter, and mates. Humans add to that the search for work, for recreation, and for that ineffable quality of brand-newness that reminds us that we’re alive and that the world is, despite all the fiber optics connecting us, a very big place. Big enough to get lost in.

And as the writer Andre Gide says: One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

Sincerely,

Miss Move Abroad

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with the West African nation formerly known as Dahomey: it is infrequently mentioned by the international press in a continent where no news is good news. A French colony until the 1960s, Benin is a tiny nation tucked under the Elephant Ear of West Africa, and is best known for being one of the continent’s stronger democracies.

I live in the city of Cotonou, whose name in the local language (Fon) means “River of Death.” And regardless of what Cotonou is today, it will forever retain the soul of a slaving hub at the mouth of a river that carried an unfortunate cargo down to the waiting slave ships.

For the moment, Cotonou is my home, and this message comes to you live from the River of Death.

In the three years I’ve lived here I’ve drunk whiskey with kings, been the victim of a mob throwing coconuts, surfed a couple of decent waves, and rubbed elbows with a culture that three years later, I still barely know and perhaps never will.  This is, of course, the thrill of travel and of living in a foreign country.

The expat life in Cotonou isn’t bad. Benin is essentially a safe country, especially compared to Nigeria, our neighbor to the east.  Here, you are at constant risk of annoyance, hassle, and occasional petty theft, but physical aggression is rare, very rare and frankly, I’m safer here than I would be in any large American city (see exception at end of article).

Cotonou is less a city than a large village; large parts of the streets off the principal arteries are sandy and potholed. “Downtown” is little more than a few dozen shops and a traffic jam, and most Africans do their shopping in the sprawling, chaotic Dantokpa Market, at whose heart lies a vibrant Voodoo fetish market.  We can get better tasting croissants and pastries here than in Washington DC, but we’ll wait for weeks before one of the local supermarkets has cream cheese.  We’ve got talented leather workers, tailors, and artists, but can’t get the parts to fix the air conditioner. And though we successfully dodge the bullet of the European winter, it’s frequently so hot outside that we sweat while toweling off from the shower.

Cost of living

Benin is expensive. The country produces little in the way of agricultural products, and as a result, most of what we consume has been imported at great expense. I’m speaking about expat staples like milk, wheat flour, jam, butter, breakfast cereal, cookies, and such: they’re not cheap. The dependence on imports makes just about everything expensive, from gasoline to bread to shoelaces to butter: it all comes in on ships.

We also have the option of the local food.  The Beninese diet is similar to the cuisine across much of the continent: starchy pâte, a sticky, doughy blob usually made of pounded yam, corn, or manioc, over which a spicy vegetable or meat sauce is poured.  It’s spicy, and too heavy for every day, but not bad when I do eat it.

Dinner parties, orange sand beaches, and infinite minor hassles

Cotonou’s two biggest defects are that (a) everything is harder to accomplish than it should be, and (b) there’s not a whole lot to do.  We don’t even have a movie theater (and never will, given the thriving market for pirated DVDs).  As a result, the expat community takes care of itself in the old way: endless dinner parties, cocktail hours, and invitations.  I’m not complaining, and it’s a healthy reminder of how communities behaved in the days before everyone sequestered themselves in their personal pleasure palaces with their video game consoles, broadband Internet, and other toys.  It’s a revolving community as the expats rotate through, but participating in such a diverse and friendly community is pleasant.

Weekends I’m at the beach surfing (there’s a halfway decent bar break along the coast), or relaxing on the orange sand beach. Evenings I walk the dogs around the neighborhood’s sandy streets, read and write. It’s a simpler lifestyle than the one I lived back in the States, but it has its advantages, and I personally find elegance in simplicity. I also experienced the Harmattan for the first time here, an awe-inspiring meteorological phenomenon born in the Sahara desert: the wind turns 180 degrees during two months and comes from the Sahara, bearing a fine sand that settles everywhere and darkens the afternoon skies.  I sometimes think that experiencing things like this are why I travel, although putting down a shot of whiskey with a king is a pretty cool reason too.

The fact that everything is harder than it should be, though, is the one that slowly eats at your soul: parking, driving through chaotic traffic, arguing with the same people over the same prices every single time, dealing with lousy service, bureaucratic processes that seem both pointless and endless, and the infinite minor hassles that accompany every single transaction is tiring.

Tiring, too, are the repeated power outages, water outages, cell phone outages, the system resets at the Internet provider, the fast broadband that’s actually slow, the saturated cell phone networks, and the phone lines that don’t permit easy calls.  I think back to the days before these services and remember I should be grateful.  But the constant outages are wearing, and in sum lead to the only remedy possible: travel to someplace else once every 4 months.

Benin: birthplace of Voodoo (aka Voudoun)

I mentioned Voodoo. It’s Vaudoun, actually, but yes, Benin is the birthplace of the world’s most misunderstood religion.  Haitians are the second most populous followers of Vaudoun, but it’s because the slave trade carried Beninese to the Caribbean island that Haiti gained the religion.  If you’re thinking “Serpent and the Rainbow,” you are way off; Vaudoun at its roots is an animist religion with strong ties to the natural earth, and a belief in good and bad forces that would be recognizable by anyone who ever watched a Star Wars movie.  Large parts of Benin believe in Vaudoun, but there are lots of Christians and Muslims as well, and everyone seems to live together in a peace much of Africa (not to mention the Balkans!) should envy.

Legacy of the slave trade and modern-day slavery

But there’s no escaping the legacy of slavery here.  You see it in the disorganization, the mistrust, the difficulty with which the Beninese work together toward common goals.  As a white American who experienced the story of the slave trade in middle school textbooks and who thought of the whole story as ancient history, it is eye-opening to see the impacts of slavery in the 21^st century, and to learn that slavery is in no way ancient history in one of the countries that experienced it first hand.

In fact, slavery continues to this day, and not just in Benin.  Throughout Africa, families “lend” their children – sometimes permanently – to construction projects in the city.  These children are poorly paid, sleep on the ground, and remain uneducated for their entire lives.  Call it what you like, but slavery in some form remains a real part of life here.

An elegant austerity

But let’s go back to the fact that three religions and a half dozen ethnic groups have been able to live in relative harmony in one of Africa’s stronger democracies. Benin: quiet, mostly unnoticed, little understood.  It has suffered mightily, and never makes the headlines. Life as an expat here can be frustrating, but not necessarily dangerous. It’s expensive and somewhat boring, but in its simplicity and sparseness it brings elegance to austerity. And from the point of view of a foreigner trying to get a job done, I’d say that being at the center of such a whirling, swirling mass of humanity trying to better its situation is amazing. Life at the mouth of the River of Death is actually pretty peaceful.

Will we next see vacation home for swarms of winter-evading European retirees?  Not likely.  It’s the kind of place that sends you eventually on your way with more questions than answers, and the conviction you understand less of the world than you did when you arrived. In short, Benin will change you, as it has changed me.

——-

(1) There’s one notable, horrible exception.  Peace Corps Volunteer Katie Puzey was assassinated in her sleep in March, 2009.  A stellar volunteer, well-loved by her community and extremely well integrated into the village where she lived, the motives for this atrocious murder are not yet known, and to date, justice has not been rendered.  We will not forget!

Randall Wood is the co-author of Moon Handbook Nicaragua and Moon: Living Abroad in Nicaragua.  He currently manages a $300M development program in Benin and has lived overseas for over a decade.  This article appeared simultaneously at www.therandymon.com).

There’s a great passage about the difference between being a born traveler and a born expat in Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s sequel to her astonishingly successful travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love.

Committed is a skeptic’s look at marriage from all angles, sparked by Gilbert’s decision to wed Felipe, the Brazilian man she meets in Bali at the end of Eat Pray Love. (Javier Bardem plays Felipe in the upcoming movie, which almost makes up for Julia Roberts playing Gilbert.)

The eight chapters of Committed have titles like “Marriage and History,” “Marriage and Ceremony,’ and “Marriage and Subversion.” The event that started Gilbert’s exhaustive look at this hallowed and maligned institution was that she and her boyfriend Felipe were pushed into marriage because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security suddenly decides that Felipe can no longer enter the U.S. Now if she were married to a U.S. citizen, suggests a friendly Homeland Security agent, things might be easier…

But the official hoops they have to jump through and the strains it puts in their relationship are anything but easy.

Gilbert’s experience mirrors some of what I’ve been through—marrying for immigration purposes to a foreign-born lover you’re already committed to, so hey, Why not make it legal so that your lives are easier in the face of capricious and punishing laws? And then the fun (aka trouble) begins, especially if you both have different ideas of just what marriage means.

Although the book is a kaleidoscopic exploration of just that–what marriage means–I’m not finding what I was looking for in Committed. For my tastes, there’s not enough about cross-cultural relationships, or about how a relationship can change (and not always for the better) when you make it official. But of course that’s not the book Gilbert set out to write, so I can’t really fault her for not writing what I most want to read. As many writers have noted, when you don’t find what you want to read, well, then go write it yourself!

What I did find in Committed, on pages 216 – 221, was a sharply drawn description of the differences between a born traveler and a born live-abroader.

Here’s the background: Gilbert and Felipe, her Brazilian honey, are homeless, waiting to have his visa approved so they can both return to the U.S. and start building a life there together. They’re wandering through Southeast Asia, and after six months of such travel and of being with each other night and day, tempers are fraying. Gilbert has been hurrying them from one cheap hotel room to the next, trying to keep their anxiety at bay, when she realizes that that technique doesn’t seem to work for her partner. Gilbert writes:

“Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep in a moving car, I have always been comforted with the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle; since he was the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to enjoy any of this drifting.

…The reality about Felipe, as I was beginning to realize, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds—all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume that the man is not fit to be a traveler at all.

But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.

This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South American to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.”

So how about you? Are you more of a traveler, like Gilbert, or a born expat, like Felipe?

Photo by Erin Van Rheenen

Here’s the trailer:

For those three or four people who’ve never heard of Eat, Pray, Love, suffice to say that it’s self-realization and travel porn for the thinking woman.

Despite my reservations, I won’t be able to resist seeing the film anymore than I could resist reading the book. Critics were less than kind. Maureen Callahan called the book “narcissistic New Age reading.” Lev Grossman said the author was “trying too hard to be liked.” Grace Lichtenstein said the only thing wrong with the book is that “it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.”

I agree with all of those critics, and yet I tore through Eat, Pray, Love, reveling in Gilbert’s incisive descriptions of far-flung locales and internal states, spouting select quotes to my friends, and giving the book as a gift to more than one (woman) friend. Gilbert is compulsively readable, and if afterwards I felt a little queasy about the fast food feast I’d just wolfed down, in the midst of the meal I thought I was absorbing valuable nutrients.

And the film? Well, Javier Bardem plays Felipe, the Brazilian guy Gilbert falls for in Bali. I’ll go just to hear how a Spaniard tackles a Brazilian accent.

First, they chose the place, driving the length of the Nicoya Peninsula, looking for a beach town with enough tourist infrastructure to run a business but without the overbuilding and overreaching that can spoil a place.

They came equipped, with backgrounds in business, real estate and construction, and a chunk of savings that would let them take a good shot at their dream. Rosy spoke Spanish, and Doug was learning.

Looking to Buy

Once they settled on Playa Samara, halfway down the peninsula and with a sweeping half-moon beach washed by waves gentle enough for swimming, they had local realtors show them what was on offer.  They looked inland, “in the jungle,” but it was too hot. Places in the town of Samara were “too noisy—roosters, cars, and chain saws,” says Rosy. And when they liked the location, the building didn’t seem right.

They remember that one realtor showed them a hotel, assuring them, “If you buy this, I guarantee you’ll make your money back in 5 years.” Being familiar with the ups and downs of real estate and business, Doug and Rosy knew that a realtor should never in good conscience make such assurances. They put their guard up even higher.

Howler monkey at the Hideaway Hotel, Playa Samara, Costa Rica; photo by Doug Ancel

One day, after months of searching, they turned off the coast highway onto a one-lane road that ran straight to the southern end of Playa Samara. Wouldn’t it be great, they agreed, to have a place within walking distance of the beach? But there were no hotels for sale on that road.

A little later, in April 2004, they heard through the grapevine that a German woman was selling a 1-acre parcel of land on the very road that inspired their ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ musings. It wasn’t listed with any realtors.

Doug and Rosy looked at the land and loved it. But it had no structures on it; their dream had been to buy and renovate an existing hotel.

The location, however, was perfect, and the price wasn’t half-bad. And so, after checking to make sure they’d have easy access to water, electricity, and phone line, and after some back-of-envelope calculations and late-night soul-searching, they decided to go for it. They did what most people moving to a new country or starting a business have to do at some point: change the master plan in order to accommodate an opportunity that may not come your way again.

Building a dream, from the ground up

Anyone who’s ever built a house or a hotel knows what comes next. It took Doug and Rosy a little over four years from purchase of property to opening the Hideaway Hotel in July 2008. I’m sure they could write a book about those four years, but here are a few high (and low) points.

Building the Hideaway Hotel in Playa Samara; photo by Doug Ancel

They knew what they wanted-a clean, contemporary design, high-quality construction to North American/European standards, and about a dozen spacious rooms. They wanted a pool, landscaped grounds, and a modern wastewater system that would allow them to irrigate the grounds with gray water and to give North American guests the privilege of flushing toilet paper instead of putting it in a waste container next to the toilet, which is the Tico style.

They got a good lawyer (key to getting anything done in Costa Rica), who introduced them to an architect who had a good reputation. “But he didn’t deliver,” says Rosy, so they set up meetings with several architect/ builder pairs, chose their favorite, and got to work. “The design process took some time,” continues Rosy “We wanted to be sure to choose the finishes, tile, granite, etc. ourselves.”

The permit process was also challenging. “We were held up in SETENA for 6 months,” Rosy says. “Apparently SETENA [the Secretaria Tecnica Nacional Ambiental] was backed way up at the time.”

“We were ‘next in line,’” adds Doug, “for a good 5 or 6 months.”

The web site costaricalaw.com explains, “the sole mission of SETENA is the administration of the process to review and evaluate environmental impact considerations. Builders and real estate developers cringe when they hear the word SETENA.”

“But our building permit didn’t take much time,” says Rosy. “You just present plans to the municipality and pay the fees.”

The pool before it was a pool at the Hideaway Hotel in Playa Samara; photo by Doug Ancel

Once construction got underway, Doug stayed on site as much as possible to oversee the work. The builder went over budget, and there were construction delays. But when the Hideaway Hotel opened its doors in 2008, it all seemed worth it. “Local realtors couldn’t believe it,” says Doug. They said, ‘You guys actually opened! So many projects end up unfinished ruins.’”

Their hotel is indeed no ruin; it’s a lovely place with the sort of amenities you really appreciate after having been on the road for while, from the spacious shower to the mini-fridge to blackout curtains for the times you need to adjust to jet lag or turn in early to make a wee-hours flight the next day. A hundred feet from your poolside breakfasts are trees often full of howler monkeys.

Advice on opening a B&B in Costa Rica

I asked Rosy and Doug if they have any advice for opening a B&B or a hotel in Costa Rica.

“Find one that’s been built,” Rosy laughs ruefully, although she also says she feels proud of how well their from-the-ground-up building turned out.

“It takes time to grow a business,” says Doug. “So you need operating reserves to tide you over. We planned not to make any money the first years,” he smiles, “And so far, we’re right on plan.”

But even in the months after I visited, their was an uptick in guests, and the hotel is getting great press in guidebooks and online-when I last looked they were the #2 Samara hotel on Trip Advisor. I have little doubt that the next few years will bring even more visitors and a return on their investment, both in financial and life-satisfaction terms. After all, they dreamed a dream and then, with hard work and imagination, they made it happen. It’s all part of the (somewhat flexible) master plan.

Photo of finished version of the Hideaway Hotel by David W. Smith

She’d been very active in a few local nonprofits, and she scaled back her commitments, quitting boards and letting people know that she’d be putting her energies elsewhere for a time.

And dammit if she didn’t write that book! In a year. I’m beyond envious—I’m positively inspired. I keep looking at little huts on the side of the road or up on top of mountains, thinking, Now there’s a good place to hole up and write.

The book is Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica. It centers around a garden on her land on the shores of Lake Arenal, an organic garden a longtime friend, Evelio, tries to create out of nothing. Evelio is a local, born and bred in the Arenal area, and he has a natural talent for planting and tending. But trying to garden organically, and on a plot ravaged by the winds off the lake, turns out to be more than he–and Sandy, as his enabler/landlord/cheerleader–bargained for.

Sandy describes the ups and downs of the gardening project, but more than that, she details how the achingly beautiful land around the lake is at risk of devastation. Not incidentally, a portrait of expat life emerges, as we learn of Sandy’s neighbors from Europe and North America and Costa Rica and see how they all coexist, sometimes peaceably, sometimes contentiously.

It’s a book about how we live on the land, how it nourishes us and how we should nourish it. It’s beautifully written and has a strong sense of place. I’m honored that Sandy let me read it and that she’s allowing me to publish an excerpt here.

Excerpt from Evelio’s Garden: A Memoir of Costa Rica, by Sandra Shaw Homer

All land has a history, and the history around here goes back a long way.  Satellite images have picked up old roads all over this canton, long grown over, made by the indigenous peoples of pre-Columbian times.  One of these roads runs along the south shore of the lake, uphill from the current road and downhill from the ridge that links Tilarán with the tiny villages of Silencio and Río Chiquito.  I have ridden my mare along one stretch of this old road that runs behind San Luís and Tronadora, much washed out and crowded with second-growth forest, and it took a man on horseback with a machete to cut open a way for us to pass.  Artifacts of the native people show up everywhere.  When the lake is low, you can go out in a kayak or canoe and explore along the naked shoreline for pottery shards.  In town, there’s hardly a house that doesn’t sport a metate, or corn-grinding stone, that turned up when the foundation was being dug.  It usually has a potted plant sitting on it.

Modern local history dates from the late nineteenth century, when there were gold mines south of here in Las Juntas and Líbano.  It was rough country then, virgin forest, and the only way in was by horse or mule.  The gold was shipped out in ox-carts.  (More recently it was taken out in helicopters!)  Gradually settlement drifted north, and people carved farms out of the ancient forests, establishing a fiercely independent, frontier life-style.  Even in the 1930s, it could take the better part of a week to get to San José – from Tilarán on horseback (oxcart took longer) to Cañas, where you waited days for a small boat to take you down the Bebedero to the Río Tempisque and the port of Puntarenas, then by all-day train up to the Central Valley.  The Inter-American highway wasn’t completed along its northern reaches until the sixties.  There was no paved road around the lake until the eighties.  (It’s still not finished.)  I have met retired school teachers in Tilarán who remember four-hour treks on horseback to get to their one-room school houses on the lake, sometimes in mud up to the horses’ knees.  The niece of one of these teachers told me that her grandparents owned our farm in those days, and that it was a much bigger property.  A lot of the farms around here were broken up when ICE acquired the land for the reservoir.  Since then, the process of development has been inexorable.  As long as there’s someone to buy, sooner or later a farmer will face the economic conditions that force him to sell, frequently just a small piece at a time, enough to give him ready cash to get along until beef prices go up, or the weather improves enough to let him get a good crop in.  There are still some fair-sized farms around the lake, but since the early nineties development has speeded up and been gringo-ized. (At least in Tilarán, the word gringo can refer to Europeans as well as to non-native-Spanish-speakers from north of the Río Grande. Our nearest neighbors are Germans.)

Earlier this year an 18-wheeler parked its trailer by the side of the road just uphill from Cinco Esquinas, smack in your face where the first grand view of the lake should be.  It was a mobile office with the name of an international real-estate company painted in large letters on its side.  This was beyond ugly, but it never opened.  Instead the world-wide recession brought local real estate sales almost to a halt.  Still the trailer sat there, month after month, until finally some locals couldn’t resist jacking the thing up to steal a pair of off-side tires, leaving it listing crazily on a slender pile of cement blocks.  Just the other day it finally disappeared.  How it was moved, nobody seems to know.  But nobody was sorry to see it go.  This little story – especially the part about getting that trailer out of there – is no doubt already brewing up into a local legend.

We’ve been here long enough to see people come and go.  Some can brave the remoteness, the vagaries of the weather and the strangeness of the culture, and some can’t.  Some people get attached to the land, and some don’t.

When I was growing up, my family never lived long enough in one place for me to become bound to the land.  We lived in some beautiful – and not so beautiful – places, both rural and suburban.  From my early twenties until I came to Costa Rica, I moved almost as frequently, living exclusively in cities.   It was a little shock to realize, when we started building this house five years ago, that I’ve lived on Lake Arenal, and on this particular plot of ground, longer than I’ve lived any place else in my entire life.

You can’t get attached to the earth in Philadelphia or New York.  How many millions of people never do?  It’s this attachment that fires my desire to protect it – but not just my attachment to this particular plot of ground, but to the whole thing, the planet.  It’s not such a giant leap of the imagination from the sight of a growing young forest to the image of a tiny blue speck in the vastness of the universe.  So, finally, it is the sense of place that has captured me and pinned me to the planet.

It is gratifying to be part of the history of the land, to be growing a farm instead of shrinking it, to be building a forest instead of cutting it down.  Here, in one tiny corner of the planet, the question becomes obvious:  do we add something by our tenancy of the earth, or do we take it away?