COMMUNITY
ALUMNI | PROFILES AND INTERVIEWS
MERCY ROME ’95 Mercy Rome graduated from Seattle Academy in 1995
and attended Colorado College where she completed her B.A. in Theatre and met her husband and former SAAS faculty member, Canuche Terranella. After graduating from college, Mercy co-managed her family’s real estate development and property management firm. Mercy went on to work as a Housing Developer at Beacon Development Group where she managed projects for affordable housing around Washington State. Mercy & Canuche spent a year traveling the world in 20072008. Upon returning to Seattle they both completed their MBAs in Sustainable Business at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and started their family. Mercy raised the kids while working on residential remodel and construction projects. Canuche worked at SAAS as a science teacher, coach and trip leader from 2000 to 2007. After completing his MBA he helped launch Green Canopy Homes from 2009 until 2015. In 2015 Canuche and Mercy decided to take a break from urban Seattle and moved to Samara, Costa Rica where they run an eco-conscious family focused vacation destination called Villas Espavel. The piece below is a description of life in Samara as told by Mercy. Our days start like most parents; hurry-hurry, get the kids up and into uniforms, feed the dogs, stir the oatmeal, don’t dawdle kids. Then woosh-crack and a small body falls through the branches. Breakfast is forgotten as we all tumble out onto the patio to see the invasion. Small black forms are dropping from the towering espavel tree into the papaturro tree. The tree writhes as though alive as we stare, mesmerized, at 82
the troop of howler monkeys feasting on pink strands of beach grapes dangling in the dense green foliage. There are seven in total, one with a tiny baby clinging to its back. The hurry is forgotten. Our daughter’s school braid hangs half-finished down her back. The fruiting of the Papaturro and its accompanying fauna have given me pause to appreciate the depth of our changed life. This week we sit at our desks working and instead of lifting our gaze to the rush of traffic on the highway, we see the bright yellow breasts of Trogons and the improbable tail feathers of the Turquoise-browed Motmot as they flit in for grapes. At our wedding we read the poem by Edward Abbey: “Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” Our crooked trail took us on a four-month sabbatical to Playa Sámara, Costa Rica where we fell in love with the slower pace of life, the novelty around every corner, the hammock time with our two kids and the adventurous play in Sámara Bay. Our desire for Spanish fluency, to integrate into an international community and share beauty with others led us to settle here in Playa Sámara and create Villas Espavel. Opened in December 2016, Villas Espavel is a collection of six small villas clustered on a seasonal river fronting a hillside of verdant jungle. The five guest villas and our home share a tree-top yoga space and glorious pool. Villas Espavel is a magical place, when you are here you feel wrapped in nature but when you step outside our gate you are a 2-minute bike ride from town and the beach. We love giving guests the opportunity to shed the tension of city-life, dig their toes into the soft warm sand and dive down into the turquoise waters. Our