Official!

It’s official!  I am a Peace Corps Volunteer!  The Swearing-In ceremony at the US Ambassador’s house took place Thursday afternoon.  Taking the oath almost made me tear up a little – it’s been a long time coming to finally be able to say that I am a Volunteer, and there was something powerful and moving about saying that I will serve my country and the people of Panamá in the interest of peace and friendship.

There is potentially a lot to reflect on about the end of training – the last few weeks have been incredibly hectic.  It has felt a lot like the last week of a college semester, right before all of your exams, when you realize that you haven’t reviewed your notes all semester or started any of the projects or that ten-page paper, but you really just want to spend all of your time hanging out with your friends.  In this case, the sentiment was intensified because we all knew that we would not be seeing each other all together for at least three months after training ends.

The end of training involved some learning of the Ngӧbere language, which many members of my community speak besides Spanish.  It was fascinating to learn an indigenous language – completely unlike English or Spanish, and with a different degree of structural complexity and different range of vocabulary – and it makes for an interesting study of the concept of language itself.  Plus, I had forgotten what it was like to learn a language starting at zero – since my Spanish studies began a while ago – and how much fun it is to treat the language as a puzzle and set of formulas to piece together, like a math problem!

We also did some final projects, which included some participatory analysis tools with our families (like the map of the training community that my host sister Alexandra made with me), and writing some responses about things that we learned, such as the process of cultural integration and taking into account gender roles in our work, which are the topics of the limericks below:

Learn poco a poco don’ts and do’s:

Abstain in community from booze

And eat what they please

Clothes cover my knees

But at least those chacos are dress shoes.

To ensure a project does not fall

Victim to unequal outcome for all:

Women have a say!

Even find a way

For us girls to get to play fútbol?

The pictures are:

1.       My host sister Alexandra and the map we made of the training community

2.       The official host family portrait

3.       My role in a skit during our goodbye event with our host families (Nick – the other Missourian in my Environmental Health group – and I did a virtual road trip around the US introducing the various trainees and their home states)

4.       The coolest tree in the training community

5.       Truman the Tiger helps me pack up the rest of my things to move out of my training community host family’s house

6.       Looking sharp in my brand new Peace Corps polo
7.       The Bocas group all dress up for Swear-In!

Moving into my site for good tomorrow!  Very exciting – both eager and anxious about it.  There will certainly be plenty more to share the next time!

Mailing address for my site:

Packages and Envelopes (let me know if you have sent me something here so I know to expect it):

Alexandra Litofsky

Cuerpo de Paz

Entrega General

Bocas del Toro, Bocas del Toro

Republica de Panama

Envelopes only (I have my regional meetings here and it is slightly more accessible):

Alexandra Litofsky

Cuerpo de Paz

Entrega General

Changuinola, Bocas del Toro

Republica de Panama

My New Home!

Site announcements – finally! – followed by a week trying out my new home for the next two years.

In Quebrada Pastor they placed me,
Bocas del Toro’s where I will be:
They should not allow
Province of cacao,
Drinking chocolate all day by the sea.

I have just returned from a week in Quebrada Pastor, a community of about 1000 people along the Chiriquí Grande – Changuinola highway, in view of the sea, and yes, I may have had chocolate to drink five times in one day while visiting various houses.

Quebrada Pastor (“Shepherd’s Creek”) is a Ngӧbe community in the most northwestern province of Panamá (the yellow region in the map below that has all of our sites marked).  The Ngӧbe people are an indigenous people of Panamá that currently live throughout the northwestern part of the country.  Most of the people in Quebrada Pastor have previously immigrated from the Comarca Ngӧbe-Bugle (a semi-autonomous region in Panamá), and the main activity in the community is growing, processing, and selling cacao and other produce, such as bananas, limes, and coffee.

The people have been very welcoming to me throughout the week I visited, and they seem very excited that I am here to help with environmental health projects.  My community guide, Lucas, has had a lot of experience – having been the community guide for two previous volunteers – has held numerous leadership positions, has done a lot of community organization efforts, and is well-respected throughout the community; he will be (and already has been) a great asset.  My host family – Willy, his wife Mechi, their two-year-old daughter Heidi, and his father Bernardo – has also been very welcoming and treated me as one of their own; we’ve had some fascinating conversations, and I think we’ll get along well.

During our community meeting, I received the Ngӧbe nickname Chinӧre (roughly pronounced, “Chee-nwa-reh”), or just Nӧre.  “Nӧre” is like a term of endearment, like, “love” or “darling,” and “chi” means “little.”  The way Lucas described it, Chinӧre might be what you could call a kitten.  My understanding translates this roughly to “Pretty little thing.”  I’ll take it.  As long as they aren’t calling me “Gringa” to address me, I’m happy with it.

Unfortunately, toward the end of my visit, the chocolate-drinking – or some other consumption of contaminated water – seems to have had some very immediate consequences.  If I had had any doubts about the presence of water-borne illness – and hence the need for environmental health work, providing potable water and proper sanitation – in my community, all such doubts were alleviated:

Said, “I want to help, and sleep in a hut,
Live the problems I solve, no matter what,”
Then learned this could mean
Working in between
Diarrhea peeing out my butt.

It’s true, I was pretty miserable, between vomiting and diarrhea for a whole day, but I did appreciate the very vivid, personal, and intimate illustration of why I needed to be there.  Didn’t even take a whole week to figure that out, firsthand: mission accomplished.

Quebrada Pastor has experienced a lot of growth in the last twenty years or so, and as a result, there is a lot of opportunity for improvement.  I am the third Peace Corps Volunteer in the community – the first one primarily worked on composting latrines, and the second one helped to build several aqueducts.  I have the opportunity to work with the community to improve a twelve-year-old government-constructed aqueduct that no longer meets the needs of its users, to build new aqueducts in parts of the community that still lack water, to improve the maintenance and understanding of composting latrines and to provide new ones, and to improve the overall understanding of the hygiene habits and connections between sanitation and health.  The members of Quebrada Pastor seem very interested in working on these solutions; I think one of the most significant challenges will be trying to work with and coordinate all the different parts of the community, which consists of distinct groupings of houses by family, separated by the terrain, as well as leaving the community self-sufficient to continue to solve these problems themselves in the future, without a volunteer.

I have a lot yet to figure out during these last three weeks of training – but it is exciting to finally have a place upon which to focus my learning efforts, and to know the community I will be calling home for the next two years!  The Swearing-in ceremony will be August 28, and I will be arriving back in Quebrada Pastor the 31st.  Plenty to do between now and then!

Inevitably, my camera battery died during the trip out to Quebrada Pastor, so the only pictures I have are two of the mountains in the Chiriquí province, and one tiny picture that I took with my little cell phone from the porch of Lucas’ house when I first arrived.  There will be plenty more to come the next time I am in site.

The other pictures are of my training host parents (and myself) enjoying some chicken jambalaya that I fixed for them the day before I left for my site visit.  The dish was lacking cayenne pepper and had proportionately too much rice for the recipe, but fortunately, this made it even more perfect in the mind of the average Panamanian.

And finally, a sign in Casco Viejo in Panama City reminds us all to Don’t Stop Believing.

Leave me a comment if there is anything else you would like to know about my community!