Empezar

Blogging is literally, LITERALLY so hard for me to find time to do, I only have time at night in the dark when my screen beckons all the unseen insects in the darkest corners of my room to show themselves by repeatedly dive bombing not only the illuminated screen of my tablet but my face as well. It’s possible that this blog is increasing my risk of dengue by 30 percent, possible. Yet here I am selflessly blogging in order to keep the ones I love informed about the goings on in Panama.
What is crazy is that after an eventful and tiring week in vallerriquito for tech week, today while returning from language class I found myself saying to myself it will be good to have a few normal days of class and routine to relax a bit. If you didn’t catch the subtle message in that, it is that today I considered living in panama to be not only normal but a little mundane as well.
Panama is starting to feel like home halfway into training. Novelties are becoming commonplace and I find myself getting upset when a bus costs over 45 cents or when I was charged 1.50 for a beer on the beach.
Things have happened since the last blog. Probably most notably was tech week but there were other things as well.
A couple of days after that blog we spent a day in Panama city learning how the metro buses work and where important things are in the city like a grocery store with American food, a medical center, a couple of hotels, a fish market with dollar beers and a brewery that charged five.
Then there were days when we worked in the school in Santa Clara and I helped to teach a group of kids where their food comes from and what their food needs to grow in Spanish to the best of my ability.
There was also a day we took a long walk to a river jumped off some different cliffs and played tag like small children while listening to Ryan Seacrest tell us the top 40 songs in America on a portable radio.
And then there was a busy and stressful and amazing and truly beneficial week in Los Santos in the town of Vallerriquito. A town containing the most wonderful and kind people I have ever met. It was in Vallerriquito that I realized that no matter where they tell me I will be living and working for the next two years in Panama, I am going to be really really happy. The first night of tech week set the tone, I told my family how much I loved fresh coconut water and coconut in general and my host brother hunted down and opened a coconut for me with a machete, finding the coconut was easy but opening one with a machete is no easy task. He managed to hack into it in just a couple of minutes when a few weeks prior I tried without success for much much longer. It’s true that I am here to teach and help the people of panama but it is more than obvious that there is just as much for me to learn from them. From there the week continued with a lot of teaching not only in the schools with kids but also to other community members about waste management, recycling, and how to have an organic garden. I was at first intimidated and really stressed about needing to facilitate so much in a language I’m only just beginning to comprehend but the experiences were truly great and helped immensely to boost my confidence and shrink the peña I have about speaking in Spanish. In fact every day in Panama my confidence in myself and my ability to communicate grows.
For the entire time I have been in Panama the office has been telling me that flexibility is key and I think I kind of have just been shrugging it off up until now my future in Panama has seemed so unknown and foreign but tech week gave me a real taste of what it is like to be in site and how common it is for things to change and how often they do change. I think more so then technical skills, the main thing I learned during tech week is that it is important to choose battles, one, and more importantly, most importantly take pride and find joy and fulfillment in the smallest of victories because in the peace corps a butterflies wings truly is enough to cause a hurricane. A good hurricane a hurricane of sustainable development.
I am not here to build a million stoves or dig a gazillion latrines, or even reforest a watershed, I am here to empower and give the local people the skills they need to help themselves.
My site for the next two years in Panama, the town I will be devoting two years of my life to is Pueblo Nuevo de Bayano in Panama Este.