John Evanishyn
Guest Writer
Somehow studying away can be made possible from your couch, favorite reading nook or porch-step back in the states. Humanity is able to pull off some pretty amazing feats in the face of a pandemic.
For fellow Lutes wondering how students that went abroad for the semester are continuing their experiences from home, I would say I am having an experience the same as yours. My classes have been moved online and I Zoom my professors. More striking perhaps is the internship portion of the program, which was impressively moved online.
Since being home from Costa Rica, I have both started and completed my internship in sustainable landscaping. The original plan was to landscape a field station property owned by a local non-profit. I would have been installing native plant gardens, building seating areas, and networking with the community to source materials locally. The plan was also to get toned and tanned from lifting hundreds of rocks under the sun every day. At first, I imagined the online internship being a lot of clicking and dragging of virtual rocks on a computer program much alike to The Sims 4. But the internship more rationally focused on the design portion of landscaping. And so I was drawing day in and day out, creating over a dozen different proposal plans for seating areas, native plant gardens with specified species and trails for the property to use in the near future.
Though classes from the computer are far from ideal, the adaptiveness of my program has been incredible. And as uncomfortable as life in confinement is, there’s a lot of comfort in knowing educational institutions can still make education available to us in times when health needs the highest priority.
Studying away remotely has also given me an interesting perspective with feeling present. At home, my focus has been on staying mentally and physically healthy, but my Zoom meetings always bring me back to Costa Rica. I’m living in two worlds.
When I think back on the summer freedom I crave so badly right now, I think about watching the stars from the grass and the ocean waves come and recede off the sand. These activities always get me to thinking about how waves are ebbing and flowing all around the world. I think about how I’m sharing the sky with billions of other people, and though it’s night time for me, people are bustling about elsewhere. So easily we get focused on our own existence, that it can feel crazy to think about how many other people are sharing our struggles, or are facing worse.
The economy of Monteverde (the town I studied in) has collapsed with the absence of tourism. Most people are without work, and many people are turning back to subsistence farming to get by. Though I’m studying from home, I still feel a connection to the people I met in Costa Rica. I can’t help but know they are toughening through this time like myself and those around me. And being reminded that the world is in this together is where I draw the most comfort in these such unusual times.
