Why Costa Rica?

I'm writing this from the Monteverde Institute, a research and education center a few minutes' walk from our front door. It was built by the Quakers who settled on this mountain decades ago, and today it hums with scientists, students, and teachers. I come here most days — for my work, and lately for something I never expected to be doing at forty: my first Spanish lessons.

Two months in, this is the letter I promised you: why Costa Rica?

The answer starts a long way back. When Megan and I married, we thought we were headed for a life abroad. Then Kenya ended — suddenly, a year and a half in — and we landed in Texas almost by default. We meant to stay a little while and move on, but we looked up eight years later and realized we'd never really chosen it; we'd just stuck around. A couple years ago, we changed churches to one we love, twenty-five minutes away, and felt the daily ache of wanting to do life with those people instead of commuting to them. We could feel the pull to move. But if we were going to move, we were going to move big.

There was a harder reason, too. The suburban, desk-bound years had been wearing my body down — years of back pain, tension, and migraines, and then my shoulders and hips. I was in real pain, and I could see the future it pointed to: a man who couldn't keep doing this work, or keep up a five-year-old's energy. We could also see the environment affecting Pax's physical development. He loved climbing trees and digging holes, until the Texas summer heat drove him back inside.

So here is the heart of why we moved, and why here:

We can do this work from almost anywhere — so we chose the place where our whole family could actually thrive. Not as a reward. As a kind of stewardship. People who are flourishing last longer, serve better, and are more generous with the people around them. A family that is well can bless others; a family running on empty eventually cannot.

And there's a second reason: living across cultures forms us. I've come to believe the best missionaries aren't people who export the culture they came from. The best ones are learners: they let the people they're among teach them how to see God through another set of eyes, and they are changed by it. That formation is not a side effect of the work. For us, it is the work — and it only happens in relationship, in a place, over time.

That conviction didn't make the choice easy; it made it rigorous. We searched for years, and we looked hard at the places our organization SIL worked. We weren't hunting for paradise. We were optimizing for a short, stubborn list:

a walkable life, where we weren't trapped behind a windshield;
a school where Pax could learn the language like a local, move his body, and grow up playing outside and thinking freely;
a long-term community where we could stay — no uprooting him every year or two;
language footing for the family; and
clean air, green spaces, and a climate we could live active, healthy lives in.

Places fell off that list for real reasons. Germany we loved — forest schools, wonderful for walking — but we could only have stayed a year or two at a time, and none of us knew the language. Cameroon and Thailand meant driving everywhere: compounds and barbed wire in one, coworkers reported living car-first in the other. Trash fires put toxic smoke in the air. The Philippines pulled at me because my family is there, but the heat and the language were the same wall. Mexico had coworkers and work, but the schools and the safety math didn't add up the way they do here.

The thing that finally pointed us to this specific mountain was a school. Megan had gone looking for forest schools — the idea had lodged in us after watching friends in Germany drop their kids at a wilder Kindergarten, where children spend the whole day outdoors, rain or cold, bundled up and thriving. She found a worldwide database, struck out nearby, cast wider — Oregon, Washington, North Carolina — and then found one in the cloud forest of Costa Rica. That's what put this place on our list to visit.

Pax leaps past orange cones on a school field at the edge of the cloud forest while classmates watch from the grass — Pax jumps a cone on *la plancha* at the Cloud Forest School.

And then we came, and the spreadsheet stopped mattering. I watched Megan and Pax come alive in a way I'd only hoped for. It felt, simply, good for the soul to be here.

Pax sitting on a low tree branch outside a shop while Megan looks up at him; the grocer's cat sits on the branch beside him — Pax and the grocer's cat climb a tree.

Two months later, I understand why. We walk everywhere; we don't even own a car. The grocery store, Pax's bus stop, this place where I work, and our church — all of it on foot.

Pax, seen from behind with a backpack and walking stick, walks a dirt path through the forest — Walking to an event through the forest.

And because we walk, we're known. The same faces turn up on the trail, at school pickup, in my morning workout. People stop, you catch up, and you belong to something. (There's a growing body of research that this kind of everyday connection matters for our health and longevity as much as quitting smoking — but we didn't need a study to feel it. If you do, see the appendix below.)

About fifteen people from a calisthenics group gather around a long wooden table loaded with breakfast in an open-air forest kitchen, smiling at the camera — My calisthenics group at Riochante. I work out with them every single day and see them all over town. Here we are celebrating a birthday and a new job with a big breakfast after our workout.

Two boys and a dog on the grass in the town square, one boy digging in the dirt — Making friends in the town square.

The climate is the best I've ever lived in — tropical and mountainous at once, consistent but cool, so we live without heaters or air conditioners, in the same air the forest breathes. There's no hard border here between inside and out, and that freedom makes a walk outside just a step away.

Pax points at a huge fallen tree trunk beside a road — Pax comes across the huge tree that had fallen and knocked out our power for a whole day. It's thicker than he is tall!

Two white-faced capuchin monkeys on a tin roof and wire among banana leaves — The monkeys are here to take our bananas!

And the people who choose this mountain tend to be curious — scientists, teachers, an anthropologist down the road — people who care for the forest and want their kids to care for it too. The Quakers who built this community came as conscientious objectors who had been jailed for refusing to fight in Korea, and settled in a country that had just abolished its army. They put down deep roots. It is a place that holds real difference graciously, where we can share faith and practice without anyone needing to win — and that openness has been a gift to us at exactly this moment. Megan, who majored in Spanish, is flourishing; people feel the respect in her effort. Now it's Pax's turn, and mine.

An iridescent blue-green feather lying on dark forest soil — Something to be curious about everywhere we go — like this feather.

Megan painting dye onto a silk panel at a workshop, with other participants beside her — Megan at a silk-dyeing workshop.

Costa Rica has been so good for us that we were willing to step into the unknown and leave an organization we'd walked with for sixteen years — even while we're still passionate about the work and the people we serve. It's an enormous change, and we didn't do it lightly. We did it because we finally found a place where we could be whole, and we believe whole people serve farther, longer, and with more love.

More soon on what comes next. For now — thank you for walking this road with us.

The research behind everyday connection

The letter makes a modest claim: that a life of walking, being known, and being outdoors is good for a body and a family. Here is what that rests on. Almost all of this is observational research — it shows associations, not proof that any one change causes another — and none of it is medical advice.

Relationships and how long we live

Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010), Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review, PLoS Medicine. The authors pooled 148 studies covering 308,849 people. Those with stronger social relationships had about a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period (odds ratio 1.50). The effect held across age, sex, initial health, and cause of death, and the authors judged its size comparable to well-established mortality risk factors.
What kind of connection matters. Measures of being truly integrated into a community were the strongest predictor (OR 1.91). Merely living with someone, versus alone, was the weakest (OR 1.19). Being woven in seems to matter more than being merely near people — which is what a walkable village offers.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development. Following participants since 1938, it has found that the quality of people's relationships is a strong predictor of who stays healthy and happy into old age — more than wealth or fame. See PBS NewsHour's report. Caveat: the original sample was 268 Harvard undergraduates and 456 boys from poor Boston neighborhoods, so it doesn't represent everyone.

Walking

Ding et al. (2025), Daily steps and health outcomes in adults: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis, The Lancet Public Health. Compared with 2,000 steps a day, 7,000 steps a day was associated with 47% lower all-cause mortality (hazard ratio 0.53). The benefit leveled off at around 5,000–7,000 steps, so you don't need heroic numbers. This study measures steps, not neighborhood design; it doesn't show that living somewhere walkable causes more steps, only that more steps go with better outcomes.

Time outdoors

White et al. (2019), Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing, Scientific Reports. In nearly 20,000 people in England, those who spent at least two hours a week in nature were significantly more likely to report good health and wellbeing than those who had none. The benefit peaked at 200–300 minutes a week, and it didn't matter whether the time came in one long visit or several short ones. Caveat: health was self-reported, and this study didn't measure mortality.

What I'm not claiming

None of these studies says that moving to a cloud forest will add years to anyone's life. They say that connection, daily movement, and time outside each track with better health — and that our old life had less of all three than we wanted. That was enough to take seriously.