Staging and Pre-Training Retreat

OK, OK, OK. I realize that it has been a little bit into this whole Peace Corps training dealio without any updates as to what life is like. Hopefully this post and the next one will give some insight into how my days have been going.

Let’s venture back in time a little first to staging. Staging, the less than 24 hours we were given in Washington D.C. to prepare us for a journey to Panama. To start with, I met up with some of the other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) in the airport. They were easy enough to spot being the group of younger people with large hiking backpacks and duffel bags. We all got a van, split the fare, and headed over to the hotel. We then basically spent the day going through some administrative things and having lots of sessions on “What are you worried about and what are you excited for?” type things. It was a nice way to start meeting people in a more relaxed situation. The next day however, we had to check out of the hotel by 2 a.m. Yup, that’s not a typo people, that is 2 in the morning. After exploring D.C. for a little bit, since I had never been there before, I took a roughly two hour nap before waking up and hitting the road again.

Leaving our hotel by 2:30 a.m. allowed us to arrive at the check-in counter at 3. Ensuring that we were first in line to check in since it didn’t open until… well… 4:30 a.m. Although this seemed quite the bother at first, we ended up being thankful for it because our flight was at 6 or 6:30 (I don’t really remember) and a lengthy line had formed behind us.  We took that plane to Miami, and took that plane to Panama City, Panama. At approximately noon on Wednesday June, 18^th we had arrived to our destination country.

Ah, Panama City, Panama. The first thing you notice flying in is the many tall skyscrapers that are as nice as any United States capital. Why would Peace Corps be here? This place seems to be doing great. Well as you continue to bank into the final approach for landing you realize. Using one word to describe the justification for Peace Corps’ presence in Panama it would be this: disparity. As you pass the skyscrapers you start to realize that you could stand on the top floor and probably throw a stone into one of the poor neighborhoods, or barrios as they would be called. The acquisition of complete control of the Panama Canal has been rushing money into the country, but its distribution has been all but equal. Certain parts of the country are growing rapidly, other parts are remaining fairly stagnant, and the far reaches of the country are not even touched. That is why there are PCVs here, not because the city is turning into a great hub of business and trading, but because the rest of the country is not.

But I digress, back to the story. We arrived in Panama City and were swept off to our pre-PST (Pre-Service Training) retreat at the Peace Corps Office in Ciudad del Saber. This place is nice. I’m talking gated community/compound thing, wifi, warm showers, flushing toilets, A/C, tons of development agencies have training offices here…nice. We spent Wednesday to Sunday here, mostly doing administrative things and “Welcome to Panama here is health and security” seminars. It gave us a great opportunity to get to know people as we all started to bond and become friends. Everyone here is pretty fantastic. I will not bore you with most of the seminars that we had to go through, but on Saturday we took a trip to visit a nearby volunteer’s site. It was neat to see the work that they had accomplished and especially the relationships they had formed with the people in their site. They had worked on an aqueduct project and we got to see the final product since we arrived the day before they were going to COS (close of service) and leave. It was an understandably emotional day for them (it was a married couple, thus the plural usage), but really cool to see a volunteer’s site and what their daily lives would look like. On the way back from this site visit we stopped at a little roadside store to grab some empanadas that were supposed to be pretty good (Spoiler: they were) and I had an experience that will make an appearance in my next post, so stay tuned for more!