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.