Party Time Pickle!

So we all went to a fancy pants reception and swearing in party, but what should your first actions as a Peace Corps Volunteer be? Well, party of course! After the reception we went out on the town, got some food, and hung out in the area of Casco Viejo in Panama City for the night. It was a lot of fun filled with some good food, dancing, and even an hour of rollerblading down a bike/run/rollerblade path. The next morning, way too early in the morning, we packed up our things and left the dorms at the office and headed to our last hoorah, a night at a beach called Playa Malibu near Gorgona, or something like that. Basically all 50 of us (or very near it, I think 2 or 3 didn't join) went and stayed at a hostel on the beach and hung out for the day and night. It was a blast and unfortunately too fun/short for me to get a lot of photos. It was hanging out with people as much as I could and no time to step back and snap some photos so for that I almost apologize. Only almost because I regret not having the photos to share, but I do not regret spending all my time with my friends. The morning after the beach day we slowly said goodbye to our friends as they loaded up in taxis to start their journeys to their sites. I will go ahead and admit that this was a pretty sad morning. Best case scenario we will see each other again at the beginning of December, worst case scenario we see each other again middle of January. This doesn't seem like too long, but when your friendships were forged through being in a tight-knit community together all the time for 10 weeks straight it is quite a long time without seeing each other. Well now that the party is all over I find myself waiting in anticipation of arriving at my site. We only have a couple days a week that the boat runs in and out of Taimati, and I have to wait until Thursday in Meteti for the boat to arrive. Here I wait in eager anticipation of the journey that lies ahead of me. I know that there will be lots of ups and downs, but it will be an experience that helps shape my life and I am happy to have the chance to go through it. So here we go I suppose!

The Edge

Well ladies and gentlemen, I write to you now my first post as a true blue American Peace Corps Volunteer. These past weeks since my site visit have gone by faster than the plane which brought us to this beautiful place. It is just now that I am able to sit and reflect on the events that have passed and be amazed by both their velocity and significance. As you are well aware I went to my site visit a few weeks ago and now I am on my return journey there, walking off the edge of my largest leap so far in this grand experience.

To be honest, the majority of the past few weeks has been mundane, just review of training and preparation for our final departure. We did leave our training communities this past Monday and it was sad to say goodbye to Mama Rita. We had a nice going away party though with all the trainees and their families that doubled as a cultural exchange event, so of course we presented them with a show of our different states and gifted them such great tunes as the cha-cha slide and electric slide...they probably think American music is super wierd now to be honest.

After we left Santa Rita we spent the next couple days in the Peace Corps office and dorms there. This was a fun time since we were able to hang out with the trainees from the Sustainable Ag. Systems sector. Filled with mostly last minute administrative duties and review of what we had learned before, these days passed quickly which lead us to THE DAY that we had been waiting for...swear-in.

I am sorry to say that I do not have that many photos from Swear-In Day, but it was held at the ambassadors house and did not feel quite right to be snapping up photos during such a fancy pants event. I do have a few though which I took myself and a few that I can take from other people. There is a word here used fairly often, ye-ye, it means the Panamanian equivalent of "hoity toity" or something like that. Suffice it to say however, that the ambassador's house was quite ye-ye. A large house with  staff and bathrooms significantly larger than my future Peace Corps home, it expressed more of a feel of some official building than a place I would want to be my house. The ambassador himself was quite the opposite though, a nice guy with a down to earth sense about him. The swear-in ceremony started promptly at 2:00 and went until approximately 2:45. We heard short speeches from the ambassador, some leaders of Panamanian organizations and a representative we chose from the EH and SAS sectors of our training group. We also sang the Panamanian national anthem (it went horribly, the music played quietly and much faster than we had practiced...the ambassador even made a joke about how it is fortunate that we did not come here as a choir) and the US national anthem (which proceeded substantially better). After the singing we all recited our swearing-in oath and then adjourned for a lot of hors-d'oeuvres. Finally, 4:00 on the dot we left the ambassadors house, took some pictures, and went on to our post swear-in celebrations!

 G-75 EH Group Photo

G-75 "Samboozers" (a.k.a the guys going to live in the Sambu region)

Photos!

So I have photos of my site visit that I was hoping to get out here and thought I'd just put them in their own post so ya'll can have something nice to look through while bored.

Ok, this first one isn't my site visit but instead it's a picture of the ever so kind Mama Rita that has been housing me for the past several weeks.

Now we will begin with the site visit photos. Hold on to your seats!

Puerto Quimba: our boat's launching point

Mateo (my neighbor) at Puerto Quimba

The city of Las Palmas

THE street of Las Palmas...the only street

First glimpse of Taimati!!

You may have heard of "The Strip" in Vegas? Yeah, this is kind of like that...but not at all.

My host family house for the next three months.

Ugh! It's such a long walk to the beach from Taimati.

When the tide goes out here it only leaves about, oh say, a MILE of mud flats.

A mountain view over some mangroves? Can't complain.

Wider view including Marta, my community guide.

Shore to the left.

Shore to the right, including the fish market house thing?

Local school where I will maybe try teaching some english, we shall see.

Our fútbol field. (That's soccer for you readers back home)

Pretty flower photo, because why not?

My latrine, this is a super nice one. Brand spanking new too!

The boat ride has some great views.

Some really cool stuff out there.

The boat ride is expensive by Peace Corps standards ($15 each way) but the scenary is worth it.

Well there you have it! My first photos of my new home. I hope you enjoyed them and don't worry, there will be plenty more to come.

This Time it's MY Jar

I have glimpsed the future, and it smells fishy. That is to say I got to finally glimpse my home for the next couple years with my site visit. Boy I tell you what though, it sure did come with a rollercoaster of emotions.

First lets start with site entrance preparedness day. This was a day spent in the office as we got to discuss what to expect this week, our paperwork we needed to get done, and we met our "community guides" a.k.a. the first people we would meet from our communities. It was their job to lead us out to our sites and help show us around for the week after we got there. As we showed up in the morning all the guides were standing around with signs for their province and wearing both their own name tag and one they had made for us as well. My guide was Marta, and my first impression of her was that she was super nice and also high energy. This is very helpful to have as your guide since going into a new community with a guide that is very shy can be a difficult task. Throughout the rest of the day we had various seminars on what to expect from both the point of view of the trainees and the guides as well as some talks about differences in cultural norms. The rest of the evening was spent relaxing in the dormitories there at the office compound in full anticipation of the coming days.

The next day we woke up to take a bus from Panamá City east to the town of Metetí (6 hrs). In typical Panamanian public transportation fashion we nearly missed the last chiva ride from Metetí to Puerto Quimba (where we would take our boat from) (30 min) which also meant we had to call ahead to the boat to make sure they would wait for us. We boarded the boat and rode to Las Palmas (30 min). We stayed the night in Las Palmas which is a cool port town with houses all up the hill and one road through it, and in the morning boarded the final boat to my site, Taimati (a bit over 1 hour). I keep saying we because of course my guide was with me, but so was another volunteer, Mateo, with his guide. Mateo will be living in a site only 20-30 min by foot from my site. This is rare in the Peace Corps world but will be nice since the next closest volunteer is a nearly 3 hour hike away after that.

So I finally arrived at my site, although first I must say that the boat ride to Taimati, while being a little long, is not without its fair share of beauty. Where the bay meets the ocean, rocks covered in vegetation jut out from the water, and the shore line along the entire trip is covered with ancient looking rainforest that appears as beautiful as it is ominous. But alas, to discuss my site. As I approached Taimati I could see a beach shack, several boats all beached along the shore, and several more people waiting for our arrival. We beached our boat, jumped into the shallow surf and locals helped us get our luggage to the shore. I was greeted by several people who's names I will not remember for some time I'm sure (there are over 300 names to learn), and all of the sudden there I was, standing on a new shore in the far reaches of Panamá. A new shore that I will call home for two years. A new shore that will be the starting point for many adventures. A new shore that will surely shape and change my life during these two years of development of Taimati alongside two years of development within myself.

After moving my stuff into the house of my new host family, comprised of a couple in their 60s and a 12 year old girl that I believe is not biologically theirs, I met up with Marta to pasear the community. I don't recall if I have described pasear-ing or not but just in case, pasear-ing is the act of going house to house and saying what's up and generally hanging out for a little while. Often times this is accompanied by the receiving of fruit juice and/or food. Speaking of food, now is a good time to describe why my future smells fishy. This is not because it literally smells of fish but because many people in my community are fishermen and so fish and shrimp will become staple items for me in the near future. I love seafood and have no problems with this at all. Many sites have a lack of protein sources, so a fishing village site was met by me with much excitement. That evening I watched poorly dubbed over Disney movies with my family and then went to bed. "Wait wait wait. You watched movies Austin?" I hear you anonymous blog reader, and believe me I was just as surprised. As it turns out many people in Taimati have their own little generators and although gasoline is quite expensive, they run them for a couple hours each night when they do have gasoline. There is also a big generator in town that was brought in by some organization to light up the streets at night when there is gasoline for it.

This brings us to the following day. My only full day in Taimati. I discovered on this day the terrible side of Peace Corps that for so long had eluded me. On my Peace Corps roller coaster there have been many, many highs, but this was certainly a low...home sickness. So far Peace Corps training has kept my days extremely full and I have been surrounded by my friends, the other trainees. This morning in Taimati I woke up and was greeted by the thought that here I was, alone and with no schedule of things to do. As I walked around a little I realized everyone else has thier daily activities, but at this point so early in my service I have none. This forced me to face the daunting task of what I have signed up for: to come out, alone into the far reaches of Panamá and to help the people in areas of environmental health development for two full years. I survived the morning and in the afternoon people started to emerge for the socializing and my homesickness subsided. Marta and I did some more pasear-ing just after lunch and also visited the water filters of the town. I will reserve a future blog post to discuss the town's water system. After more Disney movies in the evening (one's dubbing was 8 seconds behind the video...unbearable) I slept and prepared for the journey home the next day.

The thing about Taimati is that the boats only take trips out for passengers twice a week. Normally Wednesdays and Saturdays, but this week they decided Wednesday and Friday which is why my trip was cut so short. This is also why I was so worried when I heard that our boat left without us. Fortunately for Mateo and me, there was another boat leaving the same day that happened to be there for some government organization meeting. We hopped on that boat and made it back to Puerto Quimba. We had extra luck because it was a government boat so the trip was paid for and we both saved $15! That's a lot of money in the Peace Corps. After spending the evening in Meteti we caught a bus back to Panamá, spent the afternoon in the city and returned that evening to Santa Rita. I realize the next two years will certainly come with challenges and lows, but I am super excited to work in Taimati. The people there are extremely nice and seem motivated to work together on projects in the future. I look forward to sharing future posts about Taimati, and will post pictures soon! Thanks for sticking to the end of a real long post. Also we have a Bible study group here during training. Our next chapter has this verse in it:

James 3:18 (NKJV) – Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

Pretty cool, huh?

Placing a Pickle

So placement day finally arrived. The day we had all been waiting for since stepping off that plane. The day we would learn where and with whome we would live for the next two years. We started off the morning going to the office in Panama City just like any other day, except when we entered the meeting room there was the map awaiting us.

As you can see the map has all of our pictures across the top and then blue and green stars scattered across Panama. The green are for the SAS program and the blue are for EH (me). The map would look quite different by the end of the day. After some pep talks about how we should have no expectations of what we "have to have" and some videos of old Peace Corps commercials it was time to start the reveal. A pot contained the names of all our sites and one by one they were picked out, the site name read with a very short description of where it was and whether it was a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd volunteer (for EH at least. For SAS it was what type of Ag they were doing), and the volunteer's name called that would be sent there. It was a very exciting process an we were all on the edge of our seats waiting to hear our name. Then it happened...I was sitting there listening to them move through sites and announce the winners, when suddenly I heard my name called. It took a second to recognize my own name, but when I finally did I lept up with excitement and went to the front to receive my packet. I took my photo and placed it on my little blue star with all the realization of all the weight that little sticker held. It represented my community, it represented my home, and it represented my future. I then drew the next site and promptly sat down to tear through as much information in my packet as I possibly could.

                   Photo placement

The rest of the afternoon was filled with normal informational sessions after meeting with our regional leaders to discuss our provinces. During every break I would just open my packet again and look through my info packet. On a quick side note my regional leader is also a UF alumni so that is pretty awesome.

I suppose I can include a little information on here about my site, or at least what I know so far. From what I have reas and heard, I will be going into the Darién region (yup the side near Columbia) to a site of about 500 people. The site should be an interesting mix of cultures as it is an afro-indio fishing village. I have my first visit to my site this coming week, so I will have a better idea of the details and more to write on it after that. Until then enjoy these pictures of the completed map!

                  Can you spot me?

       There I am! (Top left guy of the cluster in the bottom right)

Out of the Jar and into the...washing machine?

Freedom! Sweet sweet freedom! For a weekend at least. At the end of tech week we had one free night to spend however we wished, so a few of us...*ahem*...all 50 of us decided to stay at these cabañas at a beach near our tech week called Las Lajas. It turned out to be pretty incredible. The beach was lined with coconut palms and sea grapes. The tide brought the ocean to our porches at high tide and left a quarter-mile expanse at low tide to reach the water. The night was clear enough to see the milky way and the day was warm enough to promote swimming in the strong surf. A quarter mile walk down the beach took you to a restaurant American enough to serve bacon cheeseburgers and blueberry waffles. It was all a welcome relief from the contsant grind of day-in and day-out classes. Now my title is a reference to the strength of the surf. I may or may not have gone for a swim with a couple of friends out into the waves. Maybe I ended up getting out to where I couldn't touch, about 8 ft deep, amd then getting caught in the rough wake of a double wave crashing over me. I will say that things definitely got scary and I almost swallowed some sea water. I'm alright though and that's what really counts in the end, right? It really was a great weekend though filled with great food, tons of fun in the sun, and 49 amazing friends to spend it with. Here are some photos to show why Peace Corps Panama is probably the best country to serve in.

                        Our cabañas

               One view of the beach

                    The other view

A crafty cucumber

So we had a full week out in the field known as "Tech Week." A fascinating week, it was filled with learning about the contruction of our projects, working in the field, and awkward stares from locals that we were not able to communicate all that well with. We spent the week living with host families in palm thatch huts and eating whatever they cooked us (mostly eggs and yucca and rice, although I got some great smoked chicken twice!). Our days were still classes from 8-5 out in the field learning and practicing techniques or at the local casa comunal receiving charlas (lectures) on the techniques we will use in the future. We surveyed using water levels and abney levels, we built the plancha (floor) for some pit latrines, and we also constructed some ferrocement tanks for biosand filters. It was a very busy week, but also a lot of valuable experience and a lot of fun. It was interesting to live with a host family for a full week by myself in the comarca for the first time. The Ngäbe people definitely are good at staring at you, but while the women of our house did not seem to keen on chatting with me, the dad would gladly talk with me and ask and answer questions. Since we were out in the comarca there were also a lot of gorgeous views at every turn. Tech week was not a good week for creating blog stories though as it was a lot of education. I do have some pictures that may be interesting though! Hope you like them.

              My mosquito net set-up

              My host family's house

Host mom and one of many grand babies 

            My door is not high clearance

         Coral snake in our pit latrine pit!

                      The plancha

              Our ferrocement tank

            Gorgeous views all around

         Just hangin out in the campo

We also had some free days on the end of tech week, now those were nice! A short post on that to come.