Just back from the Darien

This is the house that I´m staying at in Santa Clara. We are, more or less, in the middle of the forest. The village is pretty small and the people are very friendly. I live with my host mom and dad and their three kids. The oldest son, Iran, is 12, the next son Gabriel is 10, and the daughter, Irania, is 7. They are amazing. We have a lot of fun together playing card games and swimming in the pool. I´m also teaching them to golf (I squeezed my 9 iron into my luggage). Iran is the next Tiger Woods, I swear!

The house itself is small. There is a common living area and two bedrooms. I have one bedroom and the rest of the family shares one room. There is very little privacy, as the walls don´t reach all the way to the ceiling. We have an outdoor shower though I take bucket baths often since the water doesn´t run reliably. And there is a latrine about 50 feet behind the house. It smells and is very uncomfortable, but it´s pretty clean compared to others that I´ve seen.


One of my favorite things is the house lizards. Since the homes are open, without glass windows, there are a lot of bugs but the house lizards (which look like small geckos) live on the walls and eat most of them. There are also chickens everywhere, which is fine except for the roosters that can´t tell time and sing at all hours of the day and night.


These are the little birds that live in everyone´s front yards. They´re really cute and friendly. Most people have dogs, too, but they don´t treat them very well, which is a little hard for me to handle. Typically the dogs are skin and bone and very used to being beaten. It´s pretty depressing. My family is generally okay to their dog, though. They only hit him when he comes in the house, which he knows so they only have to raise their arm and he runs outside. He´s a really sweet dog, though, so it breaks my heart.




This past weekend I visited a volunteer who is just finishing up her two years in the Darien Province, which borders with Colombia. There are parts of the Darien that are too dangerous to pass because of drug traffic but she lives in a small indigenous community on a small river. There are about 350 people in her village and recently she helped them set up an artesans co-op. They sell the most amazing baskets and figures carved from a particular kind of nut or hardwood. The community is very remote, though, only accessible by boat after a 5 hour bus ride from Panama City. The above picture is the volunteer´s house. It is very open and we spent a good chunk of our time reading in hammocks. It was wonderful.

I´m back in Panama City now, about to head back out to Santa Clara. Next week we find out where we are going to be placed. I can´t wait!