Welcome to our Blog!

We´re just getting this set up, but intend on using this as our major mode of communication with home and friends for the next two years. We won´t have internet access a lot, and sending individual emails quickly gets overwhelming, so we hope you like our blog!

We´ve been in Panama now for over a month and overall, we´re really enjoying our time so far. This week we found out our site location for the next two years, and Ben & I will be going to an indigenous community in the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle. The community has about 1,000 people and they speak Ngobe first, but some people will speak Spanish as a second language. We will be close to other volunteers, and quite a few others from our training group. We will be working with a coffee cooperative, women´s artisan groups, micro-enterprises and youth groups in the community.

This next week we are going to the Comarca for Culture week, to experience life in a community similar to ours and start working with the people. The following week we´ll be in different locations for our Tech week, to learn specifics related to the jobs we´ll be doing in our communities. Ben will be going to the Veraguas province to learn more related to cooperatives, and Lisa will be going to the Chiriqui province to learn more related to artisan and youth groups.

Overall, life is good! We´re almost half-way through pre-service training in Santa Clara. It´s a beautiful, small town, and we live with an awesome host family. We´ve been very comfortable living with them, and have been picking up Spanish quickly from them, and our 4 hour Spanish classes every day! Their home is beautiful, we have a flush toilet and indoor shower, unlike many of the trainees. It´s very hot and humid here, and sometimes showering twice a day is a necessity. Our food so far is great, but our mom is a great cook who likes diversity in what she eats. A lot of the typical food is fried and a bit flavorless, so we´re happy to change things up!

In the Comarca, we can expect to eat a lot of rice, plantains and yucca - all flavorless, and with little nutritional value. The people are small and skinny (from what we hear), but hardworking and motivated. We expect them to be shy, but very friendly. We´ll be following up after another volunteer, who will actually continue to be in the site with us for one more year, so we hope to jump right into working side by side with the community. Our town is a bit of a hub for other communities, so we hope to be working with other volunteers in their sites as well.

We won´t have electricity, but we should have running water most days. We´ve been told that the homes typically have a thatched roof and a dirt floor. It rains a lot, but we´ll be in the mountains, so it will actually get cooler at night (than we´ve experienced so far). The higher mountain locations are the best for coffee growing, so we´re bound to become coffee drinkers (again for Lisa).

Keep checking in with us, we hope to post about every week or so, and leave comments! We´ll also be checking email from time to time for more personal stuff! So starts our adventure in Panama!