Our History

WHO IS DAVID KITSON?

By Beverly Kitson

There once was a man who came to Nosara, a very small rural town in Costa Rica, and fell in love.  He loved the sunsets, the warm ocean waves, the lush vegetation, the extensive wildlife, the river estuary full of fish, the view from his porch, and the challenge of living as a pioneer.  This man was David Kitson and the year was 1970. He happened upon the new urbanization or retirement community when visiting a Peace Corps Volunteer in the town of Nosara. The decision to buy a lot in the American development here was made in a split second.  Within the year he had overseen the building of a little wood cabin which served as a vacation home for him and his family for the next twenty years.

Dave came to Costa Rica as the Deputy Director of the Peace Corps program and was stationed in San Jose, C.R. for two years.  At the end of that tour of duty he and his family decided to stay on and find jobs on the local economy. For five years Kitson directed a new bi-lingual school, Costa Rica Academy, now called the International Academy. During that time CRA developed an exchange program with Ann Arbor, Michigan in which students came to Costa Rica for two weeks and learned about the many different micro-climates in the country.

By 1980, he saw the writing on the wall, he would need to go back to the United States and get a better paying job or he would never have the money to retire in Nosara.  The family, his wife, Beverly and their two children, Alden and Colleen, settled into life in the Washington D.C. area for the foreseeable future. But after only three plus years, they had the opportunity to return to San Jose with the Agency for International Development; Dave always called AID, the Peace Corps with money; the U.S. involvement in Costa Rica during the 80’s was significant and the work interesting and challenging.  Now even on long weekends the family could get to Nosara, at least in the dry season. The adventures that the family had just getting there are legend. His slides of this period, the 70’s and 80’s, are still worth seeing.

Through his job with AID he was able to promote interest in Guanacaste for future tourist development and worthy of U.S. dollars in infrastructure to get it ready for the tourist boom.  In this he and AID were visionaries, although the boom did not come until the mid-90’s, Nosara was ready with bridges over most of the 32 fordings. Kitson also worked with the Nosara community in his vacation time to establish a fishing cooperative.  As an educator he was interested in all aspects of the area’s culture and development potential.

Finally in December of 1993, his dream came true!  He retired to Nosara with his wife Beverly and began to work on the many projects that he had dreamed of for so many years.  But it was not to be. Within six months he was diagnosed with an incurable cancer and was gone by March of 1995. The David Kitson Memorial Library (Biblioteca David Kitson) was established in his memory and carries on much of the work that Dave would have done himself if he had just been given the time.

In 2005, enough money had been set aside to begin construction on a building designed especially for the library by Jim Wall under the auspices of Brenda Alí Esquivel’s Arquitectural firm in Nicoya.  In August of that year we moved into our spacious new building. And as they say “The rest is history.”