I met Terry while I was pursuing my Master’s degree in Costa Rica from 2008 to 2009. I was attending school at the United Nations Mandated Graduate School for Peace and Conflict Studies, also known as the University for Peace. During that time, I would often travel to the capitol San José from Ciudad Colón, the town I was living in, to teach English or take classes in the city. One day in February 2009, I was returning with my friend Catharine from the community known as La Carpio, where we had been volunteering, when I saw Terry for the first time at a bus stop in the center of the city.
Terry was taking a computer class in San Jose, and was headed home for the evening. When he came around the corner, I immediately forgot what Catharine and I were talking about – I was distracted by how drawn I was to this person I had never even spoken to. Terry fatefully boarded the same bus as us, and feeling completely enamored, I playfully told Catherine, “That is the man I am going to marry,” knowing deep inside myself that it was actually no joke at all. I scribbled my name and number on a piece of paper and gave it to him as he was getting off the bus – something I could never have imagined myself doing any other time in my life.
He called me shortly thereafter, but we had a major obstacle: I barely spoke any Spanish, and he spoke very little English. We used our bi-lingual friends to coordinate our first dates, but from there we had to figure our how to communicate in our own way. Both overcome with a love beyond words or anything we had experienced before, we were determined to make it work. Through love and an incredible amount of patience, Terry taught me Spanish and I have now begun to teach him English.
Terry and I were practically inseparable for my last few months in Costa Rica, until in June of 2009 I went to participate in an internship in Guatemala. I found I could not forget about him, so I went back to visit him in September, on my way back to Colorado. Then, Terry and I went nearly nine months communicating through emails and internet phone calls before I finally decided I would go back to visit him, this time in his home country of Nicaragua. In July of 2010 my sister Annie and I stayed with Terry for two wonderful weeks in his home near Managua. My sister’s intuition and adoration for Terry confirmed what I had been feeling all along; I could not leave this man behind. So we made the thrilling decision that we wanted to get married, and commited ourselves to one another forever. We knew that even though it might not be easy, we had to do what it would take to be together.
