On becoming citizens of the world.

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Last week I was invited to write and present a 6-minute memoir on a moment of epiphany in my life. I decided to write about our decision to live life as citizens of the world. I'm posting it here as it revolves primarily around our past (and future) experiences living in Central America. Here is my piece:



“Citizens of the World” by Dan Medakovic


Hello, my name is Dusan Ivan Vicko Medakovic and by my name alone I’m sure you can tell that I’m a proud Canadian. I was born in Toronto in 1968, the son of Croatian immigrants who, 3 years earlier, had escaped from Communist Yugoslavia with no English, 3 children, $50 dollars and a dream for a better life.
I was raised to believe that Canada is the best country in the world, and Canadians make the world a better place.

You know the Canada I’m talking about; moosey woods, flandered fields, crystal lakes and rocky shields… bi-lingual beavers, passionate leaders, optimistic citizens - our home and NATIVE land.

Our contributions to the world include hockey, insulin, pablum, peace-keeping, the manure spreader, and let’s not forget the little Canadian-Flag pins made in China and worn by American backpackers to help them travel safely throughout the world. (read in deep southern accent) “Me? HELL ya, I’m from KWAY-BECK.”



Sadly, a few years ago, after a slow and painful decline, the heartbeat of our beloved country just flatlined. Beeeeeeeeeeeeep. Its arteries increasingly clogged with each vote counted in favour of Stephen Harper’s re-formed Reform party. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, there wasn’t even a funeral – Canada, like a character that you’d come to love in The Walking Dead tv show, was simply killed, reanimated and thrown back into action before you could say “Quick! Stab it in the eyeball!” My beloved Canada - reborn as a zombie puppet of large corporations, controlled only by the tiny oil-sucking part its brain, void of all emotion and smelling of the grave – or maybe that’s the tar sands. Worst of all, we created the monster. My fellow Canadians chose this for themselves – for ALL OF US.

It was, to say the least, disorienting. My wife Cheryl and I were feeling like outsiders in our own country - and then it came to us: we were more than Canadians, we were EARTHLINGS dammit, and this was our WORLD. As children of immigrants, this should have been obvious. This was our epiphany.



The reality is – we’re not a winter family. We spend about a 1/3 of our days bundled indoors, essentially canning ourselves each fall and then waiting for spring so we can leap forth and resume our lives.

We also hold radically different values than those demonstrated by our current Canadian Government.

For example: we believe that scientists are smart and that we should listen to them, we believe that it’s our job to take care of the planet, we believe that the decisions we make today should benefit future generations - not punish them for being born too late.



We also happen to like things that are just difficult to find or to do in Canada: living in shorts and flip flops year-round, swaying in hammocks under palm trees, devouring fresh, locally grown mangos and pineapples every day. We love exotic scenery, Latin music, swimming in a warm ocean. Yes, we are Canadian but guess what? We are also citizens of the world!

It was time to sample a life that aligned more closely with how we defined ourselves. It was time, we decided, to go live in Costa Rica!


Why Cost Rica?



· It has one of the highest life-expectancies in the world.

· While poor, it is ranked as the Happiest Country in the world, due in part to the fact that they disbanded their army over 60 years ago and redirected funds to education and healthcare.

· It’s a land of wild beauty – with over 120 volcanos and 5%!o(MISSING)f the world’s bio-diversity

· Costa Rica has reversed deforestation with 25%!o(MISSING)f its land dedicated to national parks, and wildlife reserves.

· Its government just unanimously passed a law that bans hunting for sport.

· It has a female President, and legislation to ensure that at least 40%!o(MISSING)f political candidates are female.

· It has fully embraced clean energy with over 95%!o(MISSING)f its power generated by renewable sources.



Now THIS sounded like a place to call home!


Thanks to the internet, our jobs are portable and we can live almost anywhere. So we made an initial scouting trip in 2011 – which included a few chilly days in Denver because I booked us tickets to San Jose, CALIFORNIA instead of San Jose, Costa Rica – we eventually found a wonderful little surf town in the Pacific Northwest and returned last year for a 6 month stay. The kids were enrolled in a local school which had a mix of expat children and local Ticos.

We embraced the opportunities presented to us:



- Learning Spanish
- Eating fresh, delicious fruits, vegetables and seafood every day
- Paddling with the crocodiles in our backyard estuary (I paddled, they lurked)
- Learning to surf, which surprisingly involves a lot of eating sand
- and watching the monkeys and parrots play in the trees around our house



It was beautiful and yet it was exceedingly difficult at times.

Even though we were prepared for challenges, there were many moments when I was ready to pack things up and return home.

Our daughter Ella absolutely hated school for the first 3 months – eventually being hospitalized after an anxiety attack which doctors mistook as a symptom of an enlarged left ventricle. It took a 5 hour drive to the hospital in San Jose to prove that this was a misdiagnosis.



Cher’s mother visited and, only a few hours into what we thought would be a safe and leisurely bus tour of Nicaragua, she tripped in Granada’s central park and tore her hand in half. The ambulance got in a car accident a block away and never did arrive. The doctor at the private hospital was nowhere to be found, probably because it was a holiday week and he was out drinking. The public hospital had no supplies and left dirt and rocks in the wound which lead to a life-threatening staff infection. It turned into a week-long, nightmarish, near-death story that I don’t have time to tell. But you can read about it on my travel blog if you’d like.


Eventually we settled into the rhythm of life there, embracing the country’s national saying – “Pura Vida” or “the Pure Life”.



Expats living in Central America will tell you that what they love most about their adopted home is that it feels like Canada or the USA 30-50 years ago. They are talking about a much slower pace, a focus on simple pleasures and an expectation that things rarely go as planned. There is a deeper connection between people brought on by shared values and mutual dependence.
In the end this is what we most appreciated about our time in Costa Rica: the incredible sense of freedom and the feeling of going back in time.

Since that trip we have fully embraced the ‘Citizens of the World’ concept, having purchased a condo in Costa Rica and a jungle property in Belize upon which we will eventually build an off-grid eco-house.



And so what we’ve learned is this: it’s comforting and natural to feel rooted at the intersection of our own history and geography, but it’s far more <em style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16pt;">enriching to take a chance, and discover the joys of traveling through both space and time. Pura Vida, eh!

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