Getting Started

We´ve been in our new community for a couple of weeks now and are really enjoying it. There are a lot of business opportunities surfacing with each new meeting and the people seem really motivated to try to capitalize on them. Of course, some people appear to be most concerned with the money that might come with our support, but we just explain what Peace Corps is over again. We get the random ¨give me money¨shout out, most recently (in site, since I was called out to on the street here in David when we arrived) while I was gathering firewood from a little kid claiming he was an orphan. Not knowing whether he was or not, and being the bleeding heart that I am, *snicker snicker* I talked to him and his two friends about Alaska and how poorly hand-outs have gone for the indigenous there over the past three decades. I´m not sure if it sunk in though; when I finished, he tried to negotiate it down from $1 to 50¢ and then 25¢.

Its assumed that we gringos all have money to give, and the culture here is strongly weighted towards hand-outs after a generation or two of the communist experiment. Although its a bit discouraging at times, you do have to stop and say to yourself, well, we do have money, don´t we? Nevertheless, it won´t help them out to continue to get a hand-out instead of a hand-up, or as I told the ¨orphan¨, by not giving you money, I´ll help you learn to take care of yourself and not rely on anyone else to live.

We live in a part of a house with the family that we visited during our site visit week. They have young kids that seem to have really taken to us, almost too much at times. We are not sure how much longer we are going to be staying with them, but we have made some basic improvements for our comfort so we could probably stay for quite a while. There are some other options to explore, and some minor annoyances provoking us to try something new, but we are having fun with them and they are very nice. Besides, we´ve had so much on our plate that we haven´t had much time to just walk around and talk to people...what they call ¨pasear¨here in Panama.

We´ve been holding meetings with groups and individuals almost every day. When we are not learning more about the businesses in town or learning their weaving techniques, we go out to the farms to till the soil, or chop and clear the weeds, or clean up the corn fields. Usually, we have to walk for hours in the mountains just to reach the farm, but they usually feed us lunch when we are out there all day. We have some wicked blisters on our suave office hands!

We have entered the rainiest time of the rainy season. Its awesome to see the clouds rapidly roll in, like they are a living thing. Occasionally the rain will last all night, and, a few times too often, we´ve been caught out in it while we are walking or farming. It can be a little chilly, but nothing that would threaten our health. We are really close to the equator here afterall. Although many people talk about how much it rains, its still not as much as Southeast Alaska. There is time to almost dry your clothes in the hot sun each morning!

We´ve gotten out of our site a couple of times now. Its been nice to have a period to settle in. We were supposed to have something akin to that through our training, but not much really prepares you for the poverty level of our site, or the pace of life. Our training site could have been a rural town in America (and I´m not the old person who says that!) It did work for our Spanish proficiency and for the basics Spanish culture (like the soap operas on the TV in the internet cafe right now) and, of course, for our understanding of our job and Peace Corps.

That not withstanding, its good to come to David. First, to see Obama win, as Lisa quickly posted last week, and now to have a meeting with the regional office of IPACOOP, one of the main agencies that we will be working with as business volunteers. A good many volunteers from the western part of Panama came into this city for the elections. We had kind of a party atmosphere, with the newer volunteers heading to the casino (where the operators had been persuaded to put up CNN on four of the dozen TVs) for food and beer while the seasoned volunteers had themselves a much cheaper pre-party in a larger room of the hotel, cheering each new breaking news as a state was called. I believe that everyone of us here (not surprisingly) was rooting for Obama and hoping for some good change. Most of us are at least partly concerned with our nations reputation overseas!

Unfortunately for an old news hound like myself, I couldn´t hear the TV in either the crowded room at the hotel or in the casino. And the casino only turned on the volume during the acceptance speech, which apparently was just a little too long because they brought out the dancers and switched on the music right before he finished. Instead of hanging out with the groups, I spent my evening walking between the two places (escorting our female counterparts if they were planning on going alone because it was also a holiday week here in Panama) and checking on in with our laundry lady who perpetually needed just 20 more minutes. In between, I lounged with my six-pack in our little hotel room switching between the two biased news channels of CNN and Fox News, trying to soak up as much information as possible. And really, I had a ball. Later, I walked Lisa back from the casino and we watched together when they called the race and had the speeches. Damn proud to be an American.