Be Not Afraid

I was a 20-year-old study abroad student at la Universidad Veritas living in San José, Costa Rica in 2009. It was a normal school day, but we celebrated an expat American Thanksgiving dinner on campus that night. We pretended the yucca mash was mashed potatoes and were eager for our trip to Panama the next day.

Only nine hours on a public bus and we make it to a little shack at the border where our passports are stamped. An official points to this bridge. We look at each other with wide eyes and start across the old train tracks on foot—clinging to the chain link fence on the right when the semi trucks whizz past us. The motorists seem to have brazen confidence in the single-lane shaky old bridge between the two counties.

We, too, have brazen confidence. I am emboldened by my dark hair recently dyed (from a box I picked up at the local Pequeño Mundo) to look more like a Tica. The week prior, two classmates had been held up at knifepoint, or was it gunpoint? One of them had blonde hair. The girls didn’t get hurt, but they were relieved of their cash and—most heinously—a digital camera full of irreplaceable memories. My hair wasn’t blonde, but why take the chance?

The long weekend in Panama was heaven. We slept in hammocks on a floating hostel that wasn’t connected to land at all. We let poisonous baby frogs leap on our noses for a picture and tipped their prepubescent ‘handlers.’ We snorkeled with dolphins. We wandered around Bocas Del Toro with wonder and abandon and, most importantly, after another nine hour bus ride, made it back safe and sound.

Of all the things I learned in Costa Rica, my favorite lesson: Be not afraid.