These past few weeks have flown by. After quarantining at the Monteverde Biological Field station for a week, Beth and I finally got our negative COVID test results back and we jumped around with joy, filled with excitement to join the campus bubble. The next morning we woke up right as the sun rose to eat breakfast and move to campus. After dropping our bags in our room, we jumped into field work with the other two students on our program. I spent the next few hours running around the regrowth plot on campus, which was used for farming up until the 1990’s when it was allowed to regrow naturally. We were measuring trees that had little metal tags on them which chimed in the wind. There were only a select number of trees that were in the species we were measuring and we joked that their tags chimed in the wind to taunt us. We were running around this huge plot, scrambling up and down the slopes, trying to find the right serial numbers, yelling out the numbers we found to our professor who couldn’t hear us over the wind, and then finally measuring the trees and cheering when we found one. I had so much fun running around this plot, laughing at our disappointments and cheering at our victories, I felt like a kid again. We saw a cool snake in the process, and thanked it in our acknowledgements when we presented on the data later that day.
After a full day of fieldwork and getting to know our TEC* crew, I was tired and not super in the mood to socialize. However, it was Friday night and the activity was karaoke- it was calling my name! I promised myself that I would leave early, especially since we had to get up early the next morning for our all-day Saturday class “Humans in the Tropics.” When I arrived, all of the students, RAs, and professors were there. At first I was watching the festivities from the sidelines, but I quickly grew comfortable and wholeheartedly joined in. In this field-station type environment it is normal for everyone to hang out, with less weight placed on the hierarchy of our roles here. This was a welcome surprise for me, especially after almost a year of social-distancing and quarantining. Suffice it to say I did not leave early. The structure was less like karaoke and more like dancing around, singing songs as the lyrics projected onto the wall from whatever YouTube karaoke we could find, and passing the mic around the group.
The studious but relaxed environment of this campus is exacerbated in our program since TEC is a group of 4 students and 2 professors, in a program that would usually have 15-30 students. I’m really looking forward to our trips to other field stations to study the different life zones of Costa Rica with our little cohort of 6. It is such a unique experience to be around my professors and my 3 classmates all the time. Last night we talked on the main campus porch with the RAs and professors about movie titles that are translated in funny ways to other languages and all of the ways that our names have been spelled wrong by people. I laughed the hardest when Pablo, the academic director, talked about Starbucks baristas writing everything from Pepe, to Bablo, to Puvo for him. Sometimes when we’re eating one of us will look over at the table where the RAs and professors eat together and one of our professors makes a face at us that makes us laugh so hard. It surprised me how fast I grew accustomed to being in a bubble with these people, not wearing masks, and feeling safe with them. Eating meals with a large group of people in a dining hall is an activity so familiar and mundane that I sometimes forget how novel it is at this moment. Every now and then I stop and think to myself how lucky I am to be here.
*Our program is called Tropical Ecology and Conservation, so we call it “TEC” for short.