I´m Moving!

I’ll be keeping my address, aka Entrega General David, Chiriqui, Panama. Hehe. I love the mail system. They keep it so simple. My house is the first house you get to in the community, so that means my chiva ride is only $.75 instead of $1.50 to my last house family, or $1.00 for anywhere else in town. And my neighbor is the chiva drive, so I can catch a ride more often than the two trips a day. Or I cut about a half hour of my walk down to Potrerillos Arriba. Either way, transportation wise, it is better. It also means that it is a half hour walk back uphill to the center of town. Hmmm.

It has electricity, with a total of three bulbs inside and two outside. Plus it has a flush toilet, shower, and sink inside. The bigger sink to wash dishes is outside. You can think of the house as a square with a wall down the middle that divides the two rooms. The main room is your kitchen, dining room, seating (hammock) area. The lady I’m renting from switched the table on me, so now I’ve got one half the size to store all my pots, pans, dishes, cook, eat, and work on. I’ll have to find a better solution, as it’s not gonna fly. But I can’t blame her, my other neighbors got her to lower my rent from $40/month to $30/month since the going rate in town and what the previous volunteer paid was just $25/month.

The other room has my bed, complete with my mattress atop an old mattress. I feel like the princess and the pea as it is so soft. Maybe it is just normal and I’ve been used to an inch of padding over wooden boards or else springs poking through an ancient mattress. We’ll see if I feel up to moving the mattresses around again. I’ve got lots of hangers for my clothes which I can dry outside on hangers and then just hang them up inside. I’m gonna love it. And then the bathroom is in the back of that room.

All the interior “doors” are curtains. So you gotta be careful if the front door is open, the wind is blowing, and you are sitting on the toilet. I’m going to hunt for some weights I can sew onto the bottoms of the curtains. And I’ve got to find some brighter bulbs, cause these ones aren’t quite cutting it. Shelving is also on my list. Besides from that I’m all set to move in.

I splurged on my moving-in allowance. I bought a fridge for $230: the LG ExpressCool, and I love it! I also bought a $25 blender with a 3 year warrantee and a toaster over for $40 with a 2 year warrantee. I already cooked a bunch of cakes in it and it works fabulously. I can’t wait for pizzas, roasted chicken, and all the other non-fried food I’ve been craving. Then I bought Kirsten’s stuff (mattress and cookware) for $45. So out of my $300 allowance, I’ll probably end up spending $400 to be comfortable. I just don’t do the keeping meat on the counter for days thing that seems to be popular around here. My stomach has told me time and again over these last three months that it just doesn’t work. Therefore although I can get Pepto for free from the med office, I think the fridge is the wiser investment.

Oh man, I called the med office last Thursday asking for more Pepto. She offered sending it with Francisco during his visit yesterday. That sounded great at the time, as it was just because I was out, and not sick or anything. By Saturday though, my stomach was rumbing. I barely made it around town Sunday and stayed in bed all day on Monday. This was all leading up to the time when I needed to be out and about the most for my big presentation.

By Tuesday I had recovered with the help of my host fam’s bottle of Pepto and I took off to David with the chiva driver’s wife to buy my fridge. It turned into a shoe shopping trip, and after waiting in a hair salon, I split to run some errands and make it back to town. The 2:30pm chiva never left town, so the 3pm trip back up didn’t happen and I had to wait until 6pm for the chiva. I got back to my host family at 7pm and started baking at 7:30pm after dinner. I didn’t finish until 10pm popping my half sized cakes into the toaster oven one at a time. But I finished!

The cakes were a big hit. Super moist cakes (out of the box) are not only a lot cheaper than the cakes they all buy for birthdays, but soooo much more delicious than their thick, dry desserts.
My visit went great and my boss was very impressed with all the work I have been doing, especially since my visit was the earliest. Yes! Now I’m off to print out my 25 page analysis and to help my friends do the same since their visits aren’t for another month.