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Photo by Tom Campbell

Whether it is summer in Costa Rica (top) or autumn in Indiana (bottom), Tamara Benjamin is awash in the colors of her two homelands. In Costa Rica, Benjamin encourages local farmers to make the most of the land, such as by growing beans between rows of coffee plants. Benjamin and husband Allan Esquivel still enjoy the fall foliage on the West Lafayette campus during their annual visits to Purdue.

Tamara Benjamin is deep in the heart of Costa Rica, completing part two of a two-country marriage with a man she never wanted to meet.

The Peace Corps assigned Benjamin to Central America in 1991 after she graduated from Hamline University, a small (about 4,000 undergraduate students) liberal arts school in St. Paul, Minn.

She wanted to be a high school biology teacher. But wanderlust, and the desire to learn a second language, knocked her off the career track and deep into the Costa Rican rain forest, from which she emerged to earn two Purdue degrees and where she has returned to a career as a Purdue Extension forester.

“I was working an area within a 100-mile radius near the Nicaraguan border,” Benjamin says of her Peace Corps days, “trying to show about 60 local farmers the incentives for reforesting their lands, teaching them to use all the land between their trees, not just their open farmland, so they could maximize their production.”

Sometimes, she thought, she would have an easier time selling ice to the Eskimos. Costa Rican farmers can be as hard as a hurricane.

Here were, for the most part, subsistence farmers, working the same ground for countless generations. And they were expected to listen to and implement ideas from a woman … from the Peace Corps … from Minnesota?

“Some listened,” she says. “They are independent, hard-working people in tune with what is going on around them. They were a lot like farmers in this country.”

One listener caught her eye

One farmer listened with keen interest. Allan Esquivel was a young farmer with a small plot of ground his father and his father before him farmed. Right away, Benjamin knew there was something different about Allan.

He wasn’t like so many single Costa Rican men she had been warned about, the ones interested in meeting and marrying American women as a one-way ticket to the U.S. and access to all the benefits that American citizenship has to offer.

But between teaching new-school ideas to old-school farmers, learning a new language, and living 3,500 miles from friends and family, Benjamin had way too much on her plate to even think of romance at this stage of her life.

“I told my mom, ‘If I ever get a boyfriend, I want you to come down and take me home, because I must be out of my mind,’” Benjamin says.

And that’s exactly what JoAnn Benjamin did in January 1993, after Allan’s name popped up regularly in Tamara’s messages home. Armed with American enticements such as chocolates, cereals and bags of Doritos, she flew to Costa Rica to talk some sense into her daughter and drag her back to their Minnesota home, if necessary.

Mom faces obstacles

But there were a couple of things working against mom’s plan.

First, there was the weather. Who would trade sandals for snowshoes to return to Minnesota in January? Heck, after seeing Costa Rica for the first time, it wasn’t a sure bet JoAnn would return. And Tamara? Forget about it.

Second, there was Allan. He was everything JoAnn could have wanted for her daughter: charming, hard-working, self-reliant and industrious. JoAnn and Allan even shared farm backgrounds.

But above all else, she could see that Tamara and Allan were well-suited for each other and deeply in love, too. So mom went home alone, and Tamara stayed to continue her Peace Corps work.

Tamara aims for grad school

Through her work, Benjamin had become intrigued with agroforestry, the concept of maximizing the food production of forest grounds in a land-scarce nation such as Costa Rica.

But she knew she would have to further her education to truly make a difference with her life.

“I knew I wanted to go to graduate school,” Benjamin says. “I had become so intrigued with agroforestry, and there just wasn’t much research being done in that area.”

But that would mean returning to the United States. Benjamin feared that convincing Allan to leave the family farm and follow her back to a college campus as distant and unknown to him as the moon might be as tough as selling agroforestry to the native farmers.

His roots were deep in the rich, volcanic dirt of Costa Rica. One of the things that attracted her to him in the first place was that Allan was one of the few people she met who had no interest in leaving Costa Rica.

“OK,” he said when she floated the idea. The ease with which he accepted caught her off guard. But that’s what love does.

“I’ll go with you,” he said. “But for all the time we spend in the U.S., we must spend an equal time in Costa Rica when you finish your degree.”

Deal. Who would have thought a pre-nup agreement would include time served?

She studies, he takes McJob

Tamara and Allan moved to West Lafayette in 1994 and married. She started grad school in forestry, working on the economics of growing corn and walnuts together in the Midwest. Allan started at the West Lafayette McDonald’s, working on the economics of the Big Mac.

“Purdue was a great situation for both of us,” Benjamin says now. “It was a place where I could better understand my views but still open myself up to the views of other people. Purdue became a second home for us. There is such a caring and loving atmosphere at Purdue.” Both of their daughters (Sofia, 9, and Fatima, 6) were born during their tenure at Purdue. Benjamin finished her master’s degree work in two years but decided to stay and complete her PhD.

“The original plan was to go back to Costa Rica after two years. But once we were here, I felt that going back so soon would have been a waste of those two years,” Benjamin says. So they stayed another four years, until she earned her PhD in 2000.

They then returned to Costa Rica, where Benjamin now has spent more time with him than he spent with her in West Lafayette. But who’s counting? That’s what love does, too.

Their farm life is idyllic

On their small farm overlooking the Reventazón River near Turrialba, a city of 30,000 people in the central valley region of Costa Rica, Tamara speaks nothing but English to her children. Allan speaks nothing but Spanish. They produce their own milk, meat, cheese and fruits.

They are growing cocoa plants with hopes of producing cocoa beans in three or four years. Allan has started an equestrian center to teach children how to ride horses.

If it all sounds idyllic, it’s because it is.

“I really have the best of both worlds down here,” Benjamin says.

Benjamin holds a research scientist appointment with Purdue University (forestry and natural resources) and an appointment with CATIE, the tropical agricultural research and higher education center in Costa Rica. CATIE (Centro Agronómico Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza) operates throughout Latin America. Benjamin was named best professor in agroforestry at CATIE for 2006.

She co-teaches a Purdue summer course titled “Biodiversity in Natural and Agricultural Systems in the Tropics,” exploring issues in tropical biodiversity, agriculture and agroforestry.

And she is dedicated to bringing undergraduate students from Purdue’s College of Agriculture to Central America for both short- and long-term research projects.

“I like creating linkages between students to help them see the world differently,” Benjamin says. “Life isn’t over if you don’t have a cell phone attached to you. You can take away someone’s Internet and other traditional comforts of home and there is still so much to learn from other people’s cultures. Things may be slower in the tropics — I don’t even wear a watch — but there are things to do and experiences that will make you a better person, a better student, and, ultimately, a better employee after you graduate.”

Learning is a two-way street

Rob Swihart, head of Purdue’s forestry and natural resources department, says: “Tamara is a driving force in making international experiences available to both graduate and undergraduate students.

“She has also facilitated faculty sabbaticals at CATIE while conducting her own research.”

But she is also helping forge a new mindset in the way Purdue Agriculture looks at international programs in agriculture.

“It used to be that Purdue would go wherever we could in the world and help by offering our expertise and helping build up institutions in other countries,” Benjamin says. “Now, we want faculty, undergraduates and graduates to have a more international vision of the world, to realize that they can learn as much, or more, than those they interact with by learning languages and cultures. The more often we can get our students in Central and South America, the better prepared they are going to be when they enter the job market. It’s my job to be on site and help the university find these opportunities. But you have to be there to promote it and keep it moving, to keep the momentum going.”

Her work is interdisciplinary

Every six months, Benjamin returns to Purdue to teach classes, reconnect with faculty and sell students on the educational benefits of Costa Rica. Every trip, she says, “is a new opportunity for new ideas and possibilities to broaden the perspective of the students and the faculty.”

Although Benjamin’s Purdue appointment is in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, in her role as a Central American liaison for Purdue Agriculture she works with faculty members in entomology, botany and plant pathology, agronomy, and agricultural economics, and with four assistant deans in agriculture (Academic Programs, Extension, Research, and International Programs) to help earn the Purdue portion of her salary.

“Right now, I want to focus on getting more undergraduate students involved in internship programs here in Central America,” Benjamin says. “And I will probably be spending a large amount of my time searching for new funding to get other faculty from Purdue involved in research projects in Latin America. There are interests in the HTIRC (Hardwood Tree Improvement and Regeneration Center), organic agriculture, weed studies and biodiversity studies in agroforestry systems, to name a few.”

The college recently extended her contract, which will keep her in Costa Rica for at least another five years.

And this time, nobody is keeping track of the time served. That’s what love does, too.

Contact Benjamin at tamara@catie.ac.cr