What are the odds?

by WADDAH DRIDI (Tunisia)

I didn't expect to find Costa Rica

"It’s a small world ". This sentence still sounds very cliché to me, even though I have encountered many people and situations in some unexpected places around the world (I bumped into someone I know, and I literally mean bumped to their shoulder randomly, while in the narrow and crowded streets of Brussels once). I have also encountered other situations that made me realize that the world is not small at all. So personally, I try to look at the probability of these happenings rather than just relate them to pure chance, I mean what are the odds of meeting someone from my neighborhood back in Tunisia in a country that have only two Tunisian residents out of a population of around five millions? Quite low right? Well it turned out that I was wrong. Last year near the beginning of summer, I was wrapping up with my internship in Paris while preparing myself to move to Central America seeking for new adventures. My destination was Costa Rica, were I was going for a second internship at an Architecture firm for three months in the capital San Jose. I have never been to Central America before, thus I was curious about so many things and among these things was the number of Tunisian residents in Costa Rica. I looked at the Tunisian Foreign Affairs ministry’s website to check it and it turn out that there are only two Tunisians living in Costa Rica. At that moment I thought to myself «No way that I am going to meet one of them» and I just forgot about it due to the small chance of crossing paths with them. One month after I moved there, I went hiking with some colleagues from work and we visited mount Irazù, the highest active volcano in Costa Rica. It happened that I was wearing my favorite Tunisian soccer team jersey that day, but I was also wearing my rain coat on top so you can’t actually see the jersey. We drove from San José to Prusia and then we hiked through the Prusia forest before heading to the top of the volcano. The weather was amazing and the view was breathtaking at the top and I remember some locals saying that we were lucky to get to see the volcano’s lake since it’s usually hiding behind the clouds. We spend a very nice time there while exploring the whole area to the point that we were too exhausted to hike back and decided to take the bus down. While waiting for the bus, we went to grab something to eat from a small restaurant near the station and then looked for some souvenirs at a gift shop. I was smoking a cigarette in front of the shop and I unzipped my rain coat for a moment to grab my wallet in order to check how much cash I have on me, it was merely for five seconds! but that was enough time for someone to notice what I was wearing underneath. A guy approached me and he said in Tunisian dialect "Is that Lefriki’s T-shirt?". Whaaat !? I was so surprised that I spontaneously replied with another question : "Are you one of the two Tunisian residents in CR or you’re just a tourist?" , And indeed he was one them ! Believe it or not, Nassim was a doctor living and working in San José, yet we didn’t meet there but rather at 3432 meters above the ground level and what was even more interesting is that he recognized that I was Tunisian through my t-shirt that was only visible for seconds, and to top this up, we turned out to be from the same neighborhood back home. Now that was a very unpredictable coincidence! Anyway, me and Nassim exchanged contacts that day and then took a selfie to document our very unique encounter. We ended up meeting again in the city, but what I really learned from this experience was to never overlook the probability of something happening no matter how the odds are low, after all the odds might be low but they’re never zero.