Grassroots meets Government...

I guess you could already say that the Peace Corps is an organization that works on a grassroots level, through the government, but this week our training group had the pleasure of meeting the new U.S. Ambassador to Panama, and got to truly see how our work affects so many people on so many levels here!

On Tuesday, the Ambassador visited us and we had a pizza lunch and then shared a little bit about who we are and what we´re here to do. After lunch, we broke into groups by sector and had a more in-depth discussion about our role here as ¨Community Economic Development¨volunteers and what that means. We had some interesting discussion about challenges and measuring our success, as well as how the Ambassador´s office, and the U.S. government and Peace Corps can work together for change. It was an interesting meeting, and Ambassador Stevenson is a fascinating woman!

The rest of our week was pretty much routine. We were back in our training community and spent our days attending technical class and language classes. On Wednesday, Ben and I facilitated a portion of the technical session about accounting and bookkeeping concepts (although it´s been about 5 years since I studied or tutored in accounting concepts!). We´re also in separate language classes now, Ben has been in Spanish classes, and I´m in Ngabere classes. Techinically, at my ¨mid-term¨language test I scored higher than required for passing the Spanish, so that might play into it. I guess it´s also meant to give us a bit of a mix, although I would love to learn more Spanish as well. Right now we´re gearing up for our site visits - we leave the training community on Tuesday afternoon and meet up with our future site counterparts in a location in Cocle, and then on Thursday morning, we´ll travel with our counterparts to our communities, returning back to training on the next Tuesday.

During our visit, we´ll be tasked with figuring out our host family arrangements for the first three months in site, and with developing the beginnings of a work plan with the community. We are excited to get our feet wet and see where we´ll be living and working in just a few short weeks now! That being said, we really are enjoying our family situation in the training community and know that we will miss them a lot! It will be hard to say goodbye to them! They´ve done so many great things for us in our time here, and our time has flown by!

Shorter edition today, but more soon after our site visits! Thanks to everyone for their continued support! We miss home, and everyone, but we´re happy and doing well!