Wow! These home stays actually are nice. They are actually houses. I thought that they would be worse. I thought as I sat on my gray seat. I am in Costa Rica and in a tour bus that is dated, its front mirror broken off because earlier we had hit a telephone pole. My spirits were every much lifted. I had been expecting the houses to be just made out of mud and sticks, but they were quite nice. I settled back into the comfy seat and was going to close my eyes in relief, but Max’s headphones jerked me awake. I looked over and even though his headphones were over his ears, I could still hear the music from four seats away. Then I looked over to Matthew (who was bobbing his head to Max’s music), Nicholas (who was playing the music off his phone), and Raphael (who was just staring off into space). Then, I heard over the intercom, our tour guide, Inti, promise us that our home stay was going to be a lot of fun because it was on a farm. That was the first of my “Great Expectations.” As we got closer, I started not to see any nice houses and then as we stopped, the great dust cloud that had followed us the whole time enveloped the whole bus and it was like a magician uncovering his magic trick and there the house stood.

The house was more like a shack than a house. We exhibited our disappointed faces, but put up our happy poker faces while Inti bounded up the driveway to the family to announce our arrival. As we stepped out of the bus into the sun, we were greeted with the horrible smell of cow manure. I thought: No! Not this smell. I will never get used to this smell. While we were holding our noses, we got our luggage and went up the steps to the house. When we got to the place where they put all their vehicles, it smelled of gasoline mixed with cow manure. I thought again, Whew! This is worse. I’d rather smell the cow manure than this. I was very disgusted.

“This is now your family for the time being. Call each person as you would call each person in your family,” Inti said. According to Inti, the family had a lot of siblings and a lot of them had already moved out. We only saw three siblings. The oldest worked his carpentry business with his father. Then we saw a boy who was going to high school and his sister peeked out behind him. The sister was the youngest sibling in the family and she was our age.

After the introductions, I surveyed the grounds: the place where the family dined was outside and under a concrete roof. The garden or “forest” was littered with car parts and various types of plants. Animals were within the cages that were nailed to the trees. Then, there were five acres of pastures past the small forest that were filled with cows. After a few minutes of observing our temporary new home away from home, we turned back into the house and went to look at our room. Since we were six students and there were only four beds in one room, Max and Nicholas had to relocate to the second floor. My room had two beds stacked on top of each other. I had already called the bottom bunk because that was the easiest to get to and Daniel was on the bed that was on top of me. The bed kept on shaking because it was very flimsy. Later during the night, every time that Daniel moved, it would shake both of the beds and it would keep on waking me up. After visiting the upstairs bedroom, I saw that Nicholas and Max had it worse. Upstairs, there were window, but there were no window panes, so it was wide open for mosquitoes to come right in. It was also made entirely of wood, so it was not stable.


Man, this is very bad. I don’t even have a mosquito net so I am very lucky to mot be sleeping in this room. At least Max and Nicholas have full body mosquito, nets, or else they would be free blood buffet for mosquitoes.

After we were done looking about in our rooms, I walked around the house, exploring to the right of the house, there was a farm that had cows, chickens, and pigs. Further away, there was a pasture for cows. Inti told us that the father did everything. He was a farmer, mechanic, an inventor, and most of all, a family man. After the rest of the buys were done unpacking, we had lunch. The mother made cheese tortillas for all of us. We also had the best juice on earth, it was strawberry juice. Then, after we were full, Inti took us to milk cows, but first, we had to round up all of the cows, a task which involved our trudging for hundreds of yards under hot sun to find all the cows on their five acres of land. I was thinking: Ugh! Can’t stand any longer. Need break! After we were done rounding all of the cows up, we were all sweaty and ready to sit, but we still walked back to the farm to milk them. We had to fill up the bucket so that we could go play soccer with the other houses. We all thought that milking a cow would be easy, but it was hard. All of us kept on pulling on the udders, but we were supposed to squeeze and pull. As we all stood around him in the barn watching, Inti sat down on the stool in front of a large black cow and started milking her, using a squeezing gesture. Thin laser beams of milk pelted the bottom of the bucket. He mentioned for me to try, but I still couldn’t do it. After filling only the bottom of the bucket, we played the soccer stadium. We learned that the girl, who was about four to four and a half feet, was our age and was taking hormones like the rest of the village to grow taller because there was not enough calcium for them to grow because any milk that they got was gold at local market.

After we were done playing soccer, we had to take showers and the home stay only had one shower. Inti had told us to be careful of the wires above the shower and not to touch the wires because they could electrocute us. He said that he would adjust the showerhead to his height for us. After taking his shower, Inti told us that he was wrong and the wires on top of the showers did not have electricity running through them, and that the water was cold. Everybody in my group was thinking the same thing: Here we go again. Cold showers. When I went into the shower, the shower nozzle was like a futuristic invention with electric wires going everywhere and some going into the water pipe attached to the shower nozzle. I was pretty tentative when I went under the showerhead and the cold water felt like I just jumped into the Arctic Ocean. I couldn’t believe that they took showers in this type of temperature. After tentatively taking the shower, I helped with making the food. Inti told us that the family usually did not make this much food and today was an exception because we were here and they wanted us to have a full stomach. There was so much food. We couldn’t even finish it. The mother saved all the scraps so that they could eat up later. Then, after hearing this, I thought: Wow! They are very resourceful. Right then, I was very sad that we had to leave because I knew that we didn’t learn everything that they could have taught us.

Clearly, this home stay opened my eyes to the real world and how not everybody had the best conditions. Even though the family didn’t have that much money, they were still happy, unlike back home, where when we didn’t get something, we would always whine until our parents gave in and got us what we wanted. Even though the children did not have much, they didn’t lead sad lives. They helped a lot on the farm and played against other neighbors in soccer. If we play with our neighbors, we buy games and play at home and sometimes are very selfish. Also, they are very conservative; they don’t just throw away the scraps at the end of each meal, and they will leave it and save it for the next day. All in all, the home stay really helped open up my eyes about how humble they were and how they still led happy lives. I hope that his benefit me in the future when I don’t have that much money and I think I will still have happiness.