A common perception among some is that life in a tropical paradise like Costa Rica is a permanent vacation, a hedonistic existence of lounging on the beach, strolling through the jungle, lying on a hammock in the breeze, stirring occasionally to bite off a couple grapes from the bunch dangled by a half-naked Latina princess.
What I like to tell people once I have dispelled them of this “permanent vacation” notion, is that I work long hours here, but it doesn’t really feel like I’m working long hours. Labor seems easier when surrounded by sunshine, warmth, mountains, ocean, spectacular rainy season storms and in-your-face greenery.
I am appreciative of the fact that I live in an area that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide plan and save for all year for a week or two of escape from the rat race realities. I take the notion that visitors have that I am on permanent vacation as a compliment and bask in the glow of their smiling perceptions.
The truth, especially in my first years here, was the complete opposite. I was living in the village of Peje, about 90 minutes south of San Isidro del General. It is Del Monte country, surrounded on all sides by pineapple fields. If the thousands of acres of pineapple in our region was seen from above, it might have looked like a hurricane. Peje was the eye. We were the only English speakers for miles. I can’t give a logical answer as to why we went there to live.
There is no ocean or mountain nearby. Only a few wide shallow rivers that occasionally rise up with the seasonal rains and swallow some unexpecting local who never learned to swim, discharging his broken, bloated body miles downriver. It is not an area that anyone comes to and falls in love with. You won’t see Peje mentioned in any guides to Costa Rica. The number of tourists that visit each year is approximately zero.
During my year there I suffered from a skin irritation, tiny red welts that began under my arms and within a couple months spread down my sides, over my back and stomach, between my legs. My body looked like a connect the dots layout for degenerates. The itching that accompanied it caused me to do things in public that could have gotten me arrested in many parts of the world.
I eventually recovered, just in time to contact dengue fever– which I initially believed was food poisoning, as I had experienced a couple cases my first year here. The only treatment I found that worked for dengue fever was rest, fluids, lots of aspirin, and the constant, crazed repetition of my personal dengue mantra: “Oh God, please don’t let me die!”
The following year we took care of a farm that was so isolated that the nearest telephone was a thirty minute jeep ride away. We had been there about a month when I awoke one evening with a case of undulant fever. I poured sweat and shivered and saw sights that one usually associates with the consumption of mushroom tea. I repeated the treatment that had worked for dengue fever. Lying in bed, barely able to mutter my mantra, I wondered if my body had now become a repository for all the fevers ever diagnosed.
Fortunately, within a month, doctors at the Perez Zeledon hospital finally figured out why I had been feeling so poorly and made me better by slicing me open and removing a 2-by-5-inch ulcerating parasite from my intestines. (It looks even worse in metric: 5- by-12 centimeters). A fight ensued several days later upon my discharge from the hospital, because I wanted possession of the parasite. It was mine and it came from my body. I deserved to have it as a souvenir.
But no one knew where my parasite was. It had vanished while in the hands of the state. (Somewhere outside of San Jose, I believe exists a gigantic hole in the ground filled with every document, package, and personal possession ever lost while in the hands of the state.) All of the above happened to me in my first 18 months of living in Costa Rica.
There is nothing particularly heroic about anything I went through; when asked about the zipper abdominal scar I now possess, I wish I could say I was thrown from a kayak while shooting the rapids or took a knife to the gut while saving a señorita in distress, instead of having to explain the truth- that I ate unclean vegetables that harbored a microscopic parasite that lodged warmly and comfortably in my intestines and quickly grew into a hideous, ulcerating organism that was on the verge of killing me.
Ever since, any time any tourist has compared life here to being on permanent vacation, I respond by pulling up my shirt, proudly displaying my 5-inch zipper scar, and asking, “You wanna know the real story?’
