Hey y’all!!
Time in Panama is moving so fast and so slow all at the same time. There were lots of training sessions this week and they blur together so convincingly that I have repeatedly lost track of which day is which.
So, here are a couple of schedule-type details about what my day’s look like.
I routinely wake up around 7:00am, I will have breakfast with my host family at 8:00 am. I am always surprised by what constitutes breakfast food here. For example, I had half a fish for breakfast a couple of days ago…mostly the tail. McDonald’s can suck it.
Group training begins at 9 am every day. I use the my morning hours before we all assemble as Peace Corps personnel to in self-directed Spanish study. This week was all about present tense verb conjugations and working on vocabulary that I use on a daily basis to navigate my life. At 9 am I walk 15 minutes down a dirt road to the other side of the community for another Spanish class taught by one of the locals till noon.
Here is a picture of me and some volunteers in our Spanish class! We must all have a vitamin deficiency as it seems none of us can keep our heads up straight.
After morning classes end I walk back up the road to my host family’s house and have lunch with them. It is always a mystery what will be waiting on my plate. Our community is relatively poor and that is definitely reflected in the food that we eat. We eat a lot of rice and meat. We have a old tree stump out front where the chickens that cluck all night long take their last nap before becoming lunch.
After lunch I return to our classroom for 3 hours of afternoon training in agriculture. This last week I’ve been learning all about different native plants and how to plant and care for them. My favorite class this week was prepping plantain roots to remove common signs of disease. I got to to take one home and prepare it with my machete for my personal home garden! More on that garden in future posts.
(Machete videos)
Walking back and forth to training between my house and the PC classroom I have begun to take notice of how differently I lived in the States and how I and others live here in Panama. Obviously, there isn’t a Walmart anywhere within a 100 miles of me. But, here in our little town there is a little store that is about as large as a poorly stocked 7-11. So, to fill the gaps with what one cannot buy here regional enterprising vendors come to our tiny enclave via car to sell whatever they have. They drive up and down our dirt road leaning out of their cars screaming whatever they are selling, “Pescaaaaaaaado!! (chocolate covered strawberries, I think).”
Yesterday (Saturday Feb 24), we had a self-directed field trip into Panama City to help us familiarize ourselves with public transportation. First, we boarded a Coster (10 person van) from out of our community to the main highway. Once our community dirt road joined with the main highway we hopped on a small local bus which took us into the city where we then boarded the Metro Train and city buses to take us around the city. It’s very crowded and loud and smelly. I needed some essentials so we stopped at a “mall.” I wandered through the stores and stalls and bought a towel (I had been borrowing one), pants (field work is dirty), and a range of other small items. Overall, it was fun/stressful shopping alone with minimal Spanish but I did it!
Ah! A little echo from home! There was a McDonalds in the train station! Wanting something familiar I bought an Egg McMuffin, and true to form, it was just as bad as what we all buy in the States.
Oh, as I was going through my photos for the week I found this little gem.
Sometimes when I sit and do my self-study in the mornings a random boy shows up. I don’t know where he lives, who he is, but he hangs out a lot with me. A couple of days ago he came over to show me his piano and we played it together until I had to leave for training.
One parting thought before I sign off for the week. Every day here is challenging and exhausting. The struggles I shoulder are not whether I have enough to eat, or perhaps I might be feeling excessively lonely ( which sometimes I do), but that every interaction I have with everyone can be challenging. Even the smallest things such as navigating to school and back, or buying toothpaste can be nerve-racking as I search for the right words, translate them in my mind from English to Spanish, queue up Google translate when my limited vocabulary fails me, and then strain to understand any response I hear. It is EXHUASTING!
But, with each passing day I speak a bit more, understand a tad more, and incrementally life gets ever so slightly easier.
This is part of the journey. And, any journey of real value is bound to be hard. And, I am here for it!
Till next week,
Chao!
