Into the jungle

Today is day fifty four in panama but tomorrow when I post this it will be day fifty five. Damn.
I have these moments here when I’m on the bus crammed with people, that hasn’t moved more than twenty feet in the last 37 minutes, pinned against a women that smells like eggs and the window in the seat right above the wheel, knees to my chest, soaking wet with sweat, backpack wedged between my legs, starving, with a really full bladder, just coming to the realization that I forgot my malaria pills, with a weird rash all over my forearms, after a week in my future site, holding god knows whose baby when I realize that I am really really happy.
My future site. Pueblo Nuevo. It is the site I dreamed of when I got my invitation to serve minus the ocean, but hey, they tell me I have to be flexible.
It’s a bus and a boat out of the city, I’ll say four hours to be safe depending on when a lancha is heading to town. It’s a small town with 152 people and 63 houses, spread out over a pretty good distance. The town has four parts Pueblo, Nuevo York, Barrio, and Isla. The highest concentration of people is in Pueblo and I live between pueblo and Isla. The church, comador, tienda, and school are all in pueblo. Barrio is mostly people not in the church and it has another tienda and a cantina. I didn’t visit Nuevo York but I hear there’s about six houses up there and Isla as well. My site is in the jungle, fruit and monkeys galore. There’s a couple rivers and alligators which I’m pretty sure are actually crocodiles but that’s one of those battles I’m not sure I want to tackle. There is not electricity but there are solar panels and some peoples are better than others. My host family’s home is on stilts, made of wood, and has a zinc roof, the shower is a spigot and a bucket surrounded by tarps, the bathroom is a latrine. I love it. The people are perfect, beyond nice and I have a really good feeling about integration.
There’re a lot of projects I can’t wait to try and tackle from forming an ultimate team at the school to pushing for a new aqueduct, from home gardens to eco stoves. And without electricity there will be time for me to paint my house, hammock appreciate, master the guitar, run, learn how to handstand and whatever else I decide is an essential skill. Maybe I’ll write a best-selling novel.
Day one in site, I get off the lancha to the whole school on the beach there to greet me. I met my host family who I will be living with for the next three months, Mirrian and her daughter Mani minus my host dad, Ovidrio, who was out logging. We bonded over sharing a last name. And then I swam in khakis and a button down shirt with my host sister in the rio, got some mango, tripped over a barbed wire fence and cut the shit out of my leg, and settled in for the most part.
On another day I went and helped mas o menos cook for a birthday party in barrio, a different part of the town.
There was a day I met the teachers at the school who are amazing and have a lot of great energy and ideas, helped to make a map of the town, taught a little English, swam some more, paseared, rode in the back of a pickup that was the first car to cross the river on the newly cut dirt road.
On a different day I went for a run on the new road got some avocados, got some eggs, saw some rivers, farms, and cliffs, bushwhacked to a large tree, got a weird forearm rash, and ate a couple breakfasts.
Another day started with a tour of the caves by some kids in the town which were beautiful, minus a well justified snake murder, a drowning bat, and a bit of trash. Later in the day there was a trip to the Darien for an evangelical church service involving a little speaking in tongues and a lot of clapping, an empanada, a police checkpoint, and a late night/early morning boat ride.
There was a day in there when a boat of tourists sank on their way out of town and had to swim to an island formerly occupied by a Columbian drug trafficker, and I stood on the porch unable to do anything to help, until we decided it would be good to get a better look.
On another day I visited barrio again to help make sancocha I think mas o menos to celebrate the new camino and I also helped to collect a lot of guava, got called out on only sort of understanding what was going on, and went to an ecotourism meeting where we all struggled to fill out my site locater form and I was given a cup of sugar with a splash off coffee while I learned the goings ons of the eco-tourism group that I really look forward to working with.
I’m worried about feeling isolated and how I will deal with such a large intense religious presence. I’m excited about literally every other aspect. Literally.