My Own House!!

The long awaited day has finally arrived- I now have my own house! I think I've mentioned before that we are required by the Peace Corps to spend our first 6 months with host families and, yes, I have just reached the 6 month mark! For the past few weeks my friends and I have been leaving our host families en masse, moving into our own places. Living with a host family is a really great experience (so much so that some volunteers choose to stay with one their entire 2 years) but it can be, well, obnoxious, always having to explain where you're going, when you'll be back, why you didn't eat your entire 3 cup serving of white rice (no, I'm not sick and I love your cooking, it's just that I'm not used to eating so much rice!). I was really fortunate to have such an amazing host family whom I sincerely adore but I'm thrilled to be living on my own. And, I'm only 4 blocks from my host mom if a craving for white rice strikes.

So this is my house. Isn't it cute? Can you see my hammock up on my porch? The most wonderful thing about it is that it is up on a little hill and gets a great breeze. It's a little too big for me and way too expensive, but it was all there was available in my town. I pay $80 per month, which is double what most Peace Corps volunteers pay. Before you laugh at my rent, keep in mind that I only make $10 per day (a dollar an hour after taxes) so $80 is a small fortune to me. I do, however, have some luxuries that many volunteers don't, like electricity and running water. I also have, like most people in Panama, many many cockroaches. They are gigantic. And they fly. It's almost enough to make me quit this whole Peace Corps thing...


When you walk through the front door you are standing in the living room, looking at the dining room, with the little table, chair, and stool that my host mom gave me. As you can see, I don't have a whole lot of furniture. The door against the back wall leads to the kitchen and there are two doors on the right wall that lead to the bedrooms. The picture on the right is of the front door and living room. Someday I would like to have a couch or a chair or something but it won't be in the budget for awhile. Hopefully people in the community will take pity on their poor volunteer and donate some old furniture.


This is the kitchen, with a back door out to a small cement slab/patio. I don't have a refrigerator, a stove, an oven, or a microwave. I'm saving up for a propane camping stove (a propane tank is $50!) and (in the distant future) a refrigerator. It's too hot here to not have cold water to drink. I do have a little electric burner (on the pink table) which is obnoxiously useless. It doesn't boil water. What's the point of a stove that can't boil water? Drives me crazy...

There are two bedrooms. This one is the "guest" room. My host mom is lending me the bed, a short twin size bunk bed. I'm sleeping in the guest room until I can get a mattress for my bed in the other room. It's a pretty cute little room anyway.

This is the master bedroom. A volunteer who completes her service this week gave me the bed and a mattress is at the top of my priorities. I'm hoping to be able to afford one in about a month and a half. I cannot wait!! I'm just so thrilled to have my own space. I really love my host family but I love not feeling like a guest and being able to let my hair down, so to speak. Also, this is excellent news for anyone who wants to come visit because now you've got a place to stay (and I might even have another chair by the time you get here!) :)


I forgot to take a picture of the bathroom.. It's the least wonderful part of my house because it's pretty small and cramped. Also, I have a pet bat named Murci (short for murcielago, the Spanish word for bat) that lives in the roof and uses the shower for his bathroom. I guess it's nice that he goes somewhere that's easy to clean. I've never actually seen Murci because there's a thin ceiling between us, with a little hole that he poops in. Apparently he is potty-trained. He is also very irritable. Whenever I use the bathroom I turn the light on, which wakes him up during the day and he chews me out for it. He sounds like a very angry squirrel. I try to calm him down, I've even tried explaining that of the two of us I'm the only one that pays rent. But he insists the bathroom is his territory so I've conceded the point. Honestly, it's kind of nice to have someone to talk to.

So now you know where I live. I really love it. I especially love the hammock. Sitting in the hammock on the front porch with a good book is one of the simplest and most wonderful things. You'll have to come visit me and see what I mean.

What do you DO all day?

People back home are always asking me what exactly I DO in the Peace Corps. Honestly, there is no real answer- it isn't like a 9 to 5 job. Half the time I don't know what I'll be doing from one day to the next. The first three months in my community were mostly focused on getting to know the people in my town, and them getting to know me. Building trust, I guess. It was also a lot about learning Spanish. I'm still learning but it gets easier every day and I've really started to feel like I fit in here (as much as I can fit in, with my blue eyes and 1st grade vocabulary).

Anyway, the job that Peace Corps lined up for me was working with a youth cooperative. As a business major, my primary assignment is to help the kids of an all boys private Catholic school with their chicken and pig projects. Basically, they buy baby chics and pigs and raise them, fattening them up, and then sell them for a small profit. Because the private school is focused on farming, this is a great project for the boys, relevant to what they will be doing after they graduate. My job is to help them learn to manage their books and offer advice/suggestions to improve efficiency, etc. I think it will be a pretty awesome job once I get into it but right now the kids are on summer break so I haven't met with them since early December.

In the meantime I work with two other youth groups. The first is an EcoClub that focuses on encouraging environmentally healthy practices at a very basic level, such as not throwing your trash out the window of the bus. Depressingly, Panama can be very ugly along most roads. We are, one step at a time, trying to increase awareness and encourage responsible living. They are a pretty great group of kids. They are between 13 and 17 and always friendly and welcoming. The community that I live in is pretty wealthy (relatively) and the kids have had access to a comparatively good education. Most of them understand a fair amount of English and some of them, though shy, are nearly fluent. There are definitely a few I wish I could take home with me, they are such amazing kids!

My third group is the Muchachas Guias (Girl Scouts). Working with them is more of a relaxed, playful job, though I want to step it up a little bit and start teaching the older ones about sex education and STI's, which are relatively untouched subjects in the public schools. As a result young pregnancies are heartbreakingly common and it isn't unusual for many generations of a family to live under one roof, with a (young) grandma helping to raise the little one. And, often, the mom drops out of school. Because my site is, like I said, more affluent (and, as a result, better educated), this isn't as common, but my site is also very Catholic and talking about sex can be taboo. Hopefully I'll be able to increase awareness without stepping on any toes. And with the little girl scouts I want to start focusing on self-esteem and leadership.

Because I work with kids my schedule works around their school schedule. Since the younger kids don't get out of school until noon and the older kids don't start until then, I usually have my mornings free. But since we're on summer break I generally meet up with the kids three or four times a week, depending on what projects we have going on. Like I said, I don't have a set schedule, which can be frustrating but also very refreshing.

They say that the job/life of a Peace Corps Volunteer is 24/7 and it is true. We are always "on". When you live in a community where everything you do sticks out because you stick out it can be exhausting. My door is always open and I always smile even if I'm having one of those days where all I want to do is scream. It's important to me that they know I want to be here and I want to be a member of the community. Because, at the same time, I need to know that they want me here. I need their support. I need to know that when I leave in two years they won't think back and wonder why I was even there.

This whole experience is so emotionally and mentally exhausting sometimes I wonder if it's worth it. I miss home. But, at the end of the day, I know that I will never regret the decision to come here or the (sometimes daily) decision to stay. This is where I live now. This is my community. And every day it feels a little more like home.

Feliz Navidad y Año Nuevo!

Last month I went to a rural village up in the mountains with my host family. I got a couple of really great pictures up there. The first is of my host mom, Gudelia, and her grandkids, Yosuet (the little boy) and Yuri (the little girl). It was a really great experience.

The day after we arrived was the final day of celebration for the Virgin of Guadeloupe. People in neighboring villages had come from miles around (some walking for as many as 10 hours through the rocky, hilly, winding roads) 7 days before and had camped for the past week in the shrubs behind the church. My host sister, Yaneth, took me through the “hotels” so I could take pictures. I felt like I was a National Geographic photographer and she was my guide. It was very awkward. But, for the most part, people were open to being photographed. They were definitely roughing it, though. There were at least 50 people sleeping in the bushes, on newspaper laid on the ground. There were no tents or tarps. What you see in the picture is exactly what each “room” was like, though they did have a little fire pit for cooking off to the side. As we were leaving the next day it was crazy to see all of the people walking home, knowing that they had many hours ahead of them in the 90 degree weather, with baskets on their backs.


For Thanksgiving I was also up in the mountains but in a completely different part of Panama. The volunteers rent out an entire resort every year and take over the kitchen so they can cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. It was a lot of fun, though I didn’t take many pictures. This one is of Andrew, Deborah, and me, with other volunteers playing touch football in the background.

Christmas here is a lot like it is in the states, at least it is in my part of Panama. The whole town was decorated with lights and nativity scenes. It was absolutely gorgeous. And my Girl Scouts group went to the local children’s hospital and put on a Christmas play for the kids there. They were really cute.

For Christmas Eve and Christmas day I wanted to be with friends, speaking English, so I rented a house up in the mountains with 9 other volunteers. To get there we hired a random guy to take us in the back of his pick-up truck (though I don’t think his wife, who was in the front seat, was very happy about it since it was a 3 hour detour on their way home from the grocery store). The house we rented was amazing. It was all by itself on the side of a huge hill and the views were breathtaking. There wasn’t a neighbor in site and all around us was. My mom sent me a package that I got a couple of days before Christmas (thanks, Mom!) and inside there was a miniature tree. I brought it with me and we set it up in our rental and put all of our presents for our White Elephant gift exchange underneath it. It was perfect.

On Christmas day a group of us spent most of the day in the kitchen cooking. In the very back of this photo are me and Mike. Then there is Shawn, Andrew and Coco, with Kelly in the front. We had a really great time.

These are some random photos:

The first is a shot of the canal from a bridge just outside of Panama City. I love going over the bridges and seeing all of the container ships. I'm kind of a dork like that.
The second shot is a cool flower I came across that was very photogenic.



The hand is Greg’s. I think I’ve mentioned before that all the men here carry machetes but Greg accidentally slipped and sliced his hand open on his. The worst part is that the first doctor didn’t do a very good job and it had to be re-opened and re-sewn. At least he’ll have a pretty cool scar.




The final photo is my friend Whitney. I’m pretty spoiled and have a washing machine in my house (no dryer), but Whitney lives in an indigenous village called Ngobe Bugle and has to do her laundry by hand in the river. I think it’s really cool, though I’m sure it gets really old pretty quick... ☺


That’s it for photos. In general things are going pretty well here. I miss home like crazy and it was especially hard during the holidays (this was my first Christmas away from home) but now that it’s January and I know I’ll be home to visit in six months I think I’ll be okay. This month is going to be pretty busy, which is always good for homesickness. Anyway, that’s all for now!