My community has 300 people, 70 houses, and electricity! I’ll be headed out to a site next to mine for Cultural Week where the Aspirantes of each Province gather together to learn more about the food, language, housing, etc that each has in store for us. My main projects are reforestation, environmental education, ecotourism, and aqueducts. I’ll need to have an EH (Environmental Health) volunteer come visit to help me with the aqueducts as I know nothing about them and won’t be learning anything in this first ten weeks of training. We do have IST (In-Service Training) where we can get specialized training on topics relevant to our work, but that won’t be for quite a while.
The school in our training community has been closed all week as the community leaders decide what to do about the fiberglass panels that make up the ceilings of most of the new classrooms. The decision has been made to start class up again next week in various locations around town (four in La Casa Cultural, some in churches, some outside…). The school won’t be used until August since they’ll fix the problem in the two week break in July. “Fibria del vidrio”, as it’s known, is a hot topic throughout Panama with some schools without class for over a month. Kids go to school for about 4 hours a day in the morning or afternoon, so hopefully they’ll get them back and learning again soon.
We were going to be doing an Eco-Parade with the kids at the school, but since we haven’t been able to sit in on any classes and pump the kids up about it or anything, we’ve canned that idea. Hopefully we’ll still be able to do more of an Eco-Festival. I’m heading it up, so cross your fingers for me!
Last night a bunch of us were hanging out after dinner. It turned out that all six of us who went swimming earlier in the day were there, plus another CEC and one SAS. (After checking out another finca, aka farm, and riding horses for tech class, Carlos and Francisco took us for a break at the chorro, aka waterfall. Three guys and three girls jumped in while the rest just sat on the rocks around the pool. And boy was it nice to cool off!) Anyhow, we’ve got a great group of people down here!Our garden is looking amazing too. We’ve got it all fenced off with chicken wire complete with a swinging and locking gate made with some bamboo and other materials. Our seeds have sprouted in our semillero. We’ll be transplanting the tomatoes later tonight before we head off to a baile in the town next door. Our beds are sprouting too with cilantro, peppers, beans, some natural insecticide, and a bunch of tuber plants. We just planted some pineapples yesterday so I can’t wait to see if that takes. Our medicinal plants are just about ready to transplant into our double dig beds, made with our very own compost. We’ve also built a huge structure to shade all of our little plants until the rainy season really takes off and the sun isn’t quite so harsh on them. We were going to try to make a whole Swiss Family Robinson-style watering system for all the beds with bamboo, but we decided that it might be too much work for the one day we have before we take off for two weeks. Hopefully one of the families in town will water everything while we’re gone or the rains will start!
I leave early tomorrow morning, perhaps 4:30am or 5am, to catch a bus into Panama and then another bus and chiva to Cultural Week, followed by Tech Week in the middle of the country. I’ll try getting online between the two, but I can’t make any promises! Oh, I have a phone too now. So if you want, you can call me at: 011-507-6602-9142! (That’s complete with country code, cell phone 6, and my phone number.)
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