Three months into our new tropical lives in Costa Rica, my wife and I were living in a small second story apartment in the yard of nice Tico family in a sleepy little beach town on the coast of Guanacaste. My wife was busy being the new head of an education-based nonprofit in town. Her days were filled with meetings with community members, coordinating a host of different classes, and wrangling a group of young expat volunteers who made up the majority of the staff.
My schedule on the other hand was, let’s call it, more open. I had no job, I could speak no Spanish, and the only person I knew in the whole country was busy taking meetings, coordinating classes, and chasing young people around. So I spent most days either sitting under the shade of a big tree on the beach trying like crazy to learn Spanish via a pile of books or literally wandering around for miles just looking at stuff.
The morning of September 5th, 2012 was like most other mornings in the previous three months. My wife was buzzing around the apartment preparing for a big day of whatever she was about to do, and I was preparing for the one 30-minute appointment that I had that day, my weekly Spanish class with my Spanish teacher Ivette. I had diligently studied under my tree the previous week, and I had a notebook full of questions that needed to be answered if I were to ever understand what was going on around me.
At 8:42am I was brushing my teeth while wandering around the living room, and the whole apartment started to shake. It shook and shook and kept shaking for 45 seconds. I felt the building wobble. I noticed the furniture shifting. I watched as a vase fell off the top shelf of a bookcase and shattered on the floor. Eventually the trembling stopped, and my wife looked at me visibly shaken. As she looked at me the fear in her eyes slowly transformed into puzzlement, “You never stopped brushing your teeth.”
For one reason or another, what I would later learn was generally agreed upon to be a very scary event, did not frighten me. I realized it was an earthquake, and I just waited for it to be over, apparently while brushing my teeth the whole time. With the supposedly scary part over, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do so I thought I’d go to the one appointment that I had that day and started walking across town to Ivette’s house. I passed a number of frightened people in the street including the daughter of the family whose yard we lived in. She was rushing home from school crying, and I wanted to say something comforting, but I didn’t know any of those words yet, so I just waved.
When I arrived at Ivette’s house, she greeted me completely bewildered as to my presence on her front porch. “There was an earthquake. Class is canceled,” she said with the look in her eye adding ‘You psycho!’ to the end of her statement. At this point it dawned on me that I was acting a little too calm and should probably try to be useful somehow. I ended up helping my wife gather up and comfort all of her organization’s volunteers who were appropriately startled by the events of the morning.
The magnitude 7.6 quake was the second largest in Costa Rica’s history. Though the epicenter was in Nicoya, it was felt throughout Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama. It caused two deaths, power outages, and 45 million dollars in damage, which means it was a traumatic event for many of those who experienced it, especially in Guanacaste. That is, if you feel the appropriate emotions at the proper time.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica. Learn more about his projects on facebook or instagram. You can also email him at: vincent@guanacastewildlifemonitoring.com
