Amigos

"Hey, you guys are not supposed to be on your phone," I gently reprimanded my students.
"We’re checking out Marvin’s Facebook!" they declared back to me.
Speechless, I watched as Marvin pulled up his Facebook on his tiny mobile phone, connecting to the Internet from deep in the mountains of Costa Rica, and added each of us as “friends.” Friends we were, indeed.
We had arrived just a few days prior, tired from a long journey and nervous to meet our new host families. We had come to this village to work with the community members to construct an indigenous style hut in which the children would be able to learn their native customs, language and culture in order to preserve them in a rapidly changing world; one in which we were “friend-requesting” in a village you can’t even find on a map!
I was surprised how quickly our two worlds melted into each other. We were each placed in a new home on the first night and became a family instantaneously. At work we dug deep into the earth, leveled the ground, sawed wood, built skyward, arranged palm leaves for a roof and wove hundreds of painfully-stripped-by-machete cane stalks to form the walls of the new school. Along the way we took breaks to learn how to survive in the jungle off of termites, open young coconuts to drink the milk, make tamales, paint Borucan masks to ward off evil spirits, celebrate mass, hike to waterfalls and play lots of fútbol!
From nervous introductions to Facebook we were all in tears as we left our new home just five days later. The impact we had had on each other was palpable. Yes, we completed our assignment, but we really achieved much more. We all had crossed borders of land, language and culture. We bridged two communities once thought of as separate and joined the global community, realizing we are uniquely different and yet exactly the same. We found ourselves not just in the world but a part of it because now, not because of Facebook, but because of what we've done, we are friends forever.