By Chris Mac Kenzie
The Alpine Sun

     COSTA RICA — Brigitte Wesselink loves adventure. Only 25 years old, she has already been to 23 countries, sailed with Semester at Sea where she visited India, and has gone on mission trips for her Journey Church as well as USD’s exchange program. She has experienced almost no gravity as a part of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, participated in a service trip to help a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, and had a one year internship at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
     Brigitte did all this while attending University of San Diego for a five-year engineering course earning a B.A. and a B.S. She used semester and summer breaks to fit in all this travel.
     Her exciting life also taught her that she wanted to become a meaningful part of a foreign community, helping others who might be less fortunate. Brigitte is well on her way to doing just that. She arrived last month in Costa Rica as a Peace Corps volunteer where she’ll use her education as an industrial and systems engineer as part of the country’s Community Economic Development Program.
     Brigitte will be a micro-enterprise advisor, teaching the Costa Rican rural villagers how to learn simple skills that can help them create income and support their families. This young woman is pretty excited about this new adventure as she has wanted to join the Peace Corps since her early teens.
     A graduate of Mountain Empire High School, where she was valedictorian of her class, she went on to the University of San Diego and was president of the Society of Women Engineers. She even managed to fit a lot of things into her busy schedule. She was elected Miss Teen Alpine and later in 2002 Miss Alpine. Fulfilling the community service duties this involved, along with the volunteering always encouraged by her parents, Barbara and Simon Wesselink, she strengthened her desire to use her skills to help others.
     With 52 other new Peace Corps volunteers, she is spending three months in training to be ready for the job. First they reported to a mountain retreat at 1,800 meters altitude.
     “The view is magnificent,” she wrote home. Then she was assigned to a community where she is learning the culture of the country, brushing up on Spanish and discovering what kind of help is most needed. After three months, she’ll be assigned to work in a village. The total term of Peace Corps duty is 27 months.
     Right now Brigitte is living with a single mother, Mama Tica and her two young daughters, three and eight. She writes home that she loves having two little sisters — “They are so sweet,” — as she grew up with three sisters and two brothers. “My family is really amazing — I’m spoiled. My little sisters are so cute and even though they sometimes don’t quite get the idea of my ‘me time’ (like at this very moment), I love them.”
     She is enjoying Costa Rican food, reporting that it’s fortunate that she likes rice and beans, but especially likes all the new kinds of fruit and vegetables.
     Her training included a site visit, when she traveled through the country almost to the Panama border to see how a Peace Corps volunteer is functioning. She got to attend a wedding and the party afterward, with a DJ and dancing. The next day it was a barbeque at the home of a PhD student who is working with the coffee farmers.
     Brigitte has already discovered that her training in finance will prove to be important. The internship at Disneyland where she helped to assess and improve the way attractions, the food and beverage departments and maintenance lines performed their duties, will be especially helpful in this new adventure. Part of her job is to work with women and youth, helping them to handle money while stressing environmental and social responsibility.
     These new experiences are so exciting that Brigitte believes that she has found her purpose in life. She calls it Pura Vida de Brigitte. To read about Brigitte’s adventures follow her blog at brigittewesselink.blogspot.com.