2nd home beckons Costa Rica man
An exchange student returns to Cedartown after a nearly 30-year hiatus.
CEDARTOWN — Home. It’s the place we lay our head, the place we find our hearts. And for some, it’s a place we find through trial and tribulation.
For Randall Olivares, home lies in two places. One home is more than 3,000 miles away in a small village not too far from the outskirts of the capital of Costa Rica, the city of San Jose on the Pacific Ocean side of the country where he was born and still lives today.
However, Olivares also calls a house on the outskirts of Cedartown home as well. For seven months of his life back in 1987, Olivares gained a new family, the Vanns.
Back then, a teenage Olivares was housed with the Vann family while attending Cedartown High School through a 4-H foreign exchange student program.
And Olivares took to the American way not long after arriving. Showing off soccer skills in the parking lot at Cedartown High got him on the football team as the new kicker at the age of 15, having never before played the sport.
Opportunities to have fun with his host brothers provided all kinds of mischief too, said Ann Vann, who played Olivares’ American mother for his time here.
“One day, he was out in the yard with my two sons and on the riding lawnmower, just doing donuts out in a particular spot in the yard,” she said. “I went out there and told them, ‘it’s not good. I just dusted and cleaned the house.’ And I don’t know which one, but they looked up and said ‘ but look Mom, no more rocks!”
That day and many more provided plenty of memories to look back on last week when Olivares, now much older and wiser, came back for a brief visit.
He said his seven months here in Cedartown taught him much, from the importance of having a clean community to recognizing the role nature plays in modern civilization.
Costa Rica, after all, contains some of the world’s most beautiful tropical jungles, he said, and plenty of national parks.
“You can go from the beach to the rainforest in just one hour,” he said. “You can cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean in just a few hours. There’s plenty of things
you can do in Costa Rica, but I’ve come to see how important these places we have our.”
Olivares — who became a surveyor after finishing high school and attending university in Costa Rica — then became an engineer, got married to his wife Melissa, and has two children.
He brought the whole family along — after going through a long and exhausting visa process with U. S. Customs to be able to visit — for a trip to Florida, and one last stop in Cedartown to show off the sights before heading home.
His kids Gabrielle, 12, and Fiorella, 7, not only got to enjoy their time at Disney World and in Miami, Olivares said, but also got to connect to a part of his past he said he’s always talked about over the years with his family.
His goal was to see how Cedartown had grown over the years, and to reconnect with his American family having not spoken to them in years. Olivares kept in touch by letters through the mail, and finally got to see the high school, Berry College and other places along the way.
Vann said she was glad to have him back, and looked forward to trying to make another visit happen in the future.