A Quick Hello!

I don't have too much time to write, as I'm currently using the computers at the volunteer lounge in the PC office, and we start our morning sessions in about 20 min. I have a lot of photos that I would love to post but alas, the wifi here is pretty awful and they're not going through. We finished our second week of training, and again it was a great week! The first few days here in Santa Rita I was feeling on top of the world, proud that I was able to communicate with my host family in Spanish - but this week I was definitely thrown off my rocker as I've been slowly realizing how much Spanish I DON'T know. My host mom is wonderful about speaking slowly and clearly with me, but when her friends and relatives come over and try to talk to me I am lost. My host grandfather asked me point-blank this week, "Why can't you speak?" So if anything, I want abuelito to be impressed with my speaking and comprehension by the end of the 10 weeks in Santa Rita. I've been working on expanding my vocab and re-learning complex verb tenses...

We've made several trips to the river to swing from a rope swing and in a waterfall, I've played soccer with a bunch of other aspirantes and local kids (10-year-olds wearing flip flops and skinny jeans kick my butt), we went to a Santa Rita water committee meeting and learned a little bit about some of the problems the community faces with their water supply, I watch the news every night and am way more caught up on what's happening in Panama than in the US, and on Friday a bunch of PCVs got together and I learned to dance the bachata. My host dad isn't around a lot and I haven't gotten to know him too well yet, but we had a nice lil bonding moment on Friday when I told them I was going to go dancing - he belted out "Thrillerrrrrr" and tried to do the dance - it has been a while since I learned the Thriller dance but I attempted to show him how it was actually done :) 

We went to Panama City for a scavenger hunt-type thing on Saturday and it was very fun! Checking out the downtown, visiting the mercado de mariscos for some ceviche, walking through the Old Town neighborhood, getting some great views of the city skyline, etc. Yesterday my family and our neighbors spent about five hours preparing arroz con pollo for my host mom's birthday, one of the more decadent dishes here in Panama. We made a pot that probably could have fed 30 people, and it was so good. I would totally eat that every day for dinner this week, but tonight I actually leave Ciudad del Saber and head to David, the provincial capital of Chiriquí, and then to the Bocas del Toro province tomorrow morning! I'm visiting a current volunteer, Chelsea, in her site for four nights. I am so excited to experience real campo life for the first time! 

That’s a bread truck & McDonalds is in my backyard

Hola! I’ve now been in Panamá for a little over a week. We spent four nights in Ciudad del Saber, which is where PC Panama HQ is located, and then moved in with our host families on Sunday. Days 1 and 2 were mostly administrative things, language placement interviews, health interviews, lots of icebreakers, etc. Ciudad del Saber is awesome. It used to be Fort Clayton (US army base) and now it is a retreat center, home to other countries’ embassies in Panama, an interdisciplinary research facility, and other uses that I’m not sure of. The dormitories we stayed in were LEED Gold-certified too, which was cool.

We went to Albrook terminal & mall, Panama City’s main bus & train terminal and the largest mall in Central America, to get some supplies and set up cell phones and whatnot. I now have a Panamanian cell number – if you want to contact me please do so through Whatsapp! It is cheaper (it’s all pay-as-you-go here) to talk through Whatsapp than text messages. On Saturday we visited a current volunteer, Sentel, in his site in the Cocle province. We got to hike to see what he is working on (constructing a tomba, rehabilitating a water distribution system), meet people from his community and even catch and kill the chickens we ate in our sopa for lunch. !! I didn’t catch or kill any…might take me a while to get comfortable with that.

I now reside in Santa Rita, with my host parents, José Luís and Milvia, and host brother José Ismael who is four. Actually, it’s a little strange because I’m 13 years younger than my host mom and 18 years older than little José so really I’m more of a parental age…? My host mom is awesome. She’s a great cook, and is trying to eat healthy because she’s 7 months pregnant with a little girl! She loves coffee and cares a lot about the environment (we’ve discussed solid waste management, water quality, food waste, recycling – rather she has talked and I’ve hardcore struggled along en español) so I already feel a connection with her :) Much of her extended family lives right here on the same street in Santa Rita, and her father runs the town barber shop in the house right behind ours. José Ismael and I have played cards, drawn pictures, done puzzles, and the first night we lost power so I gave him my phone to play with and now he follows me around whenever I’m home asking Tu celular? Tu celular? on repeat. My host fam speaks no English so it’s total Spanish immersion which is awesome. In the morning we have four hours of Spanish and Panamanian culture, and then in the afternoon we have four hours of WASH (Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene – my sector) technical training. Our group of 25 WASHers is amazing – many of us are civil & environmental engineers, the others come from all sorts of backgrounds but I can already tell we are going to have a very fun two years together.

Let’s see… on the first day Milvia explained that José Ismael loves fries from McDonalds, and they have this common saying here that you don’t need to go to McDonalds because you have a mango tree right in the backyard! She laughed and laughed but it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand the joke. If you’ve never eaten a mango straight from the tree you are missing out. My host fam also grows a couple of other fruits and root vegetables (my brain is fried and I can’t remember any of the names at the moment) in the backyard, and they have an avocado tree (!!) but it’s still young and they said it’ll take a couple more years before it starts actually producing avocados. A couple of nights ago, I went to my neighbor and fellow aspirante Destry’s house and her host mom showed us how to make a dessert of nances, a fruit that grows here, flour, sugar, and water. While we were cooking, a very loud truck with a siren whizzed by the house. I asked if it was an ambulance. Turns out it’s a bread vendor. We all got a pretty good laugh out of that one. There are also trucks that come by selling fish and vegetables.

What else? I have been eating duros (homemade 25-cent fruit & ice popsicles that come in pineapple, tamarind, papaya, coconut, nance flavors) every day, my legs look like I have chicken pox because of mosquito bites, I bucket shower along with the cockroaches, mini-iguanas, and spiders, I fall asleep and wake up to a symphony of dog barks and rooster crows, I’ve hiked to several waterfalls with my neighbor and friends, Nicky, Sophia and I have translated the cup song (You’re Gonna Miss Me) to Spanish (we call it Cuando Me Voy) and are practicing that on cups and ukulele, the first night with my host family I accidentally rubbed chemicals in my eyes, woke up and couldn’t see or get to the latrine so I had to pee into a bucket, and I haven’t gotten diarrhea yet! PSA: this is the blog of an environmental engineer working in the sanitation sector in a developing country – you can bet that I will be talking about poop in probably every blog post, you’ve been warned :)

I know this is very preemptive, but I am feeling good about my decision to come to Panama. I love it so far & I definitely think this is the place for me.

Numero tres: Go with the flow

During our two-day staging in Alexandria, Virginia, I got to meet and bond with the other 47 PCVs in G79, learn a lot about service and the Peace Corps in general, and got really excited for Panama! We got to explore Alexandria at night and even ventured to DC on the Metro to watch the fireworks on the National Mall on the evening of the 4th of July. That was such a cool experience.

We focused a LOT on PC's ten Core Expectations for volunteers through discussions, acting out scenarios we may face, etc. We came up with a little tagline/catch phrase for each and shamelessly threw out these lines whenever possible throughout staging. The third core expectation is Serve where the Peace Corps asks you to go, under conditions of hardship if necessary, and with the flexibility needed for effective service for which our line was "Go with the flow." This has been our motto the past two days, as our travel plans got thrown for a loop. Our flight to Atlanta yesterday was delayed three hours due to thunderstorms, so we missed our flight to Panama. We were able to reschedule alternate flights for all 48 of us today; we had people flying through DC, Miami, Orlando, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, and El Salvador. I was in the El Salvador group, and we made it here but then weren't allowed to board our connecting flight to Panama City due to issues with our visas. So they put us in the VIP lounge of the San Salvador airport to wait for the issues to be resolved - we've been here all day enjoying the free food and wifi, hanging out, and we were able to get on another flight through a different airline tonight. Many thanks to the kind folks at the San Salvador airport and the hard work of some of our group members to get this all figured out.

Thank goodness for everyone's good sense of adventure and humor :) I am really geeked about how great my group is, I am so glad they will be my family for the next two years! And after a 25+ hour delay I can't wait to finally arrive in Panama tonight. Hasta pronto!