My Friends Left Me. And so did a French guy who never bathed.

There is bad news and there is good news. I’ll give you the bad news first:

THE BAD NEWS

My friends left me.

Due to heightened drug trafficking in the indigenous reservation  in Darien province, Peace Corps has decided to remove all Peace Corps Volunteers from the Cemaco area of Panama. This means that six Peace Corps Volunteers have unexpectedly had  to pack up their belongings and move out of the communities in which they live. (Hint: Some of those guys had been living in those communities for two years. Packing up and moving at the drop of a hat is not an easy thing to do.)

The moral of the story? Kids, don't do drugs. The demand you cause is what's driving this market! The money you pump into this business is the prize that drug cartels are out there killing people for, and it's what drug runners and innocent victimes are dying for.

Sorry to be dramatic. Back to the story at hand, and how this phenomenon is related to my little world.

So, obviously the communities and Volunteers in the indigenous reservation involved got the worse end of that deal. In order to get a moment to whine, I’m going to now talk about myself.

The sites that got closed are the closest ones to me, geographically. I live in the travel hub for those volunteers, and they come over my house to crash or hang out all the time. Not surprisingly, those six volunteers have come to be my closest friends in Panama. Now, the majority of them are moving to the other side of the country, and a couple may even possibly go back to the States.

So that’s the bad  news. It sucks when your friends leave.

THE GOOD NEWS

One of them is moving in with me! Danielle was one of the six who got her site closed, but she is now my new roommate! It’s me, her and cartucho for the next few months. This is super exciting! Danielle’s going to be an awesome roommate. We’ve already hung three hammocks in the new house and we made black bean burgers for the first meal cooked as ROOMIES!

More good news: I’m hoping to try and learn how to improvise (jam) to blues/jazz/pop music?? My struggle-buddy/East Side bro Danny came over to say goodbye to the Cemaco guys and to help me do an English seminar at the university. Danny plays the guitar and is a music snob extraordinaire, so he tuned my guitar, I whipped out my flute, and we listened to Stevie and Dave Matthews Band and Amy Winehouse and everything else and kind of gave Danielle a live concert, haha! Hopefully this improv thing is a skill I can pick up. Danny definitely gave me some helpful pointers.

Also there was a smelly French backpacker that overstayed his welcome camping behind my house. I let him pitch a tent in my yard for a couple of days and shared food with him one time, but then all my super-hospitable Peace Corps friends kept coming over and being nice and offering him beers, so then he kept staying. And kept staying. And kept staying. I was super annoyed by it, but I finally kicked him out today and  he’s gone forever!!! Yay!!!

THE NEUTRAL NEWS ABOUT LIFE

You know how I was indecisive? I don’t feel that way anymore. My mojo was killed just a little when my friends left, but I think coming back to Meteti in general made me realize that I don’t need to stay another year in Panama. I LOVE it here, but in order to move forward (because let’s be real: I’m a goal-oriented person), I gotta do the grad school thing. I think that’s what I’m gunning for.

I’ll be able to waive my fee waivers for both Berkeley and Michigan! That’s $130 saved. I’ll be writing a ton of essays over the coming year. Hopefully it’ll all end in grad school admittance and some money for mah studies. We’ll see where I’m at this time next year. Ya never know where life takes ya, sometimes.

San Blas/Mid-Service Training/WhatamIdoingwithmylife

So, a couple things happened recently. I took a vacation, and then I went to Panama City for Mid-Service Training.

SAN BLAS

Being in the Peace Corps has its difficulties at times, but being in the Peace Corps in Panama most definitely has its perks.

San Blas, also known as Kuna Yala, is an indigenous reservation located on the Caribbean coast of Panama, East of the Canal. In addition to being home to the second shortest people in the world, it is also a popular tourist destination for backpackers in Panama, given that it has some of the clearest, most beautiful waters in the world.

Living in Eastern Panama means that, strictly geographically speaking, I don’t live very far from this Caribbean paradise.

A vacation in San Blas generally doesn’t run you too much, and a few of my friends and I got a pretty sweet discounted vacation when a fellow PCV (Amber) had to cancel a San Blas trip with her parents and brother after they got sick following a trip to her site in the Comarca Embera-Wounaan. They had to cancel the trip at the last minute, after having already paid the deposit.

This was very unfortunate for Amber’s parents. It DID however, mean that Amber, three other PCVs and myself were in a great position to take advantage of a discount trip to San Blas. Cover the half of the trip that was not paid for by the deposit and—just like that—we’ve got a four day, three night vacation in paradise!

It was a wonderful break for a Peace Corps Volunteer. We stayed on a small island with beautiful beaches and crystal clear water, we snorkeled over to a neighboring island, looked at beautiful coral and fishes, toured out in the boat, and played beach volleyball for about three straight days.

The best part of the trip? Kuna people. I would have thought they’d be jaded by the amount of tourists that constantly come to their island, but it turns out that they rotate tourist duties every three months. There are many San Blas islands, some serve as homes to the Kuna people who live there. Others have been set up as tourist destinations, with cabins for guests to stay, toilets and showers for bathroom needs, and restaurants to supply meals (included in the vacation package!). A person charged with working on the tourist island is only there for three months at the time, and then returns to their normal life at home while someone else in the family takes up their post for the next three months.

Because of this (I’ve decided), the Kuna people are always ready to play volleyball with us. It’s awesome. As soon as they get a free minute from their duties (driving boats, filling water tanks, cleaning rooms, cooking food), they’re first question is “WHEN ARE WE PLAYING VOLLEYBALL?! LET’S GO!! GET AMPED!!”

And boy do they play volleyball. They have so much energy! We had a lot of good laughs. Mostly at Pedro’s expense, since he was often mentally absent during games and therefore dropped the ball on quite a few plays.

I also, of course, had a fantastic time hanging out with my East Side homies. Their sillyness keeps me in stitches. Needless to say, none of us were ready to leave the island when we did. I don’t think anyone ever willingly leaves San Blas!

MID-SERVICE TRAINING (MST)

MST is a new facet of programming for Peace Corps Panama. The volunteers in my group all had to meet with their respective programs (Teaching English or Community Environmental Conservation) to discuss what is and isn’t working in our respective projects’ programming, the future of the program, and also look ahead to our close of service (which occurs in one short year—my, my how time flies). We closed discussing graduate school opportunities as well as opportunities to extend our Peace Corps Service.

The critical portion of our meeting was exhausting at times, but I’m glad we got through it. Man, it takes a lot of energy to make effective critiques! You have to articulate and qualify your points so that they are well understood, while maintaining a good level of diplomacy so that all parties feel that their points are being understood and considered as well—man it’s a struggle! All of us in the Teaching English project are public service oriented, though, and really want what’s best for the Panamanian people and institutions that we serve, so it was refreshing to have that platform by which we were able to have some input into the direction of the project in which we work.

On the last day of training, we looked ahead at our individual projects for the next year and even went as far ahead as to consider our lives after Peace Corps—we finish service in a year! (Unbelievable.) This was the first time I seriously considered the fact that I won’t be in the Peace Corps forever, and the first time I seriously considered the fact that I MAY not be ready to leave after two years. We talked about opportunities to extend into a third year as a Peace Corps Volunteer and, although I’ve recently been getting pumped for grad school, I started to think that grad school can wait, and having this opportunity to gain full-time experience in grassroots development and to build relationships with the Panamanian people and with the amazing Peace Corps Volunteers that I’ve grown close to—that’s not an experience I’m going to be able to have again. What am I going to do with my life?

Who knows, though? At this point, I’m still very on the fence about it, but I’ve got time to decide! My close-of-service conference is in December, so I won’t have to begin seriously considering extensions until September. My service ends in mid- to late-April next year. Beyond that, who knows? We’ll see where I end up next year this time. 

By the end of Mid-Service Training, I was a little sad to leave my original set of government-issued Peace Corps friends (collect them all!). I never see Group 72, so coming to training felt like a weird high school reunion—I don’t know them anymore! Even so, leaving them after training to come back to my province may kind of foreshadow what it will be like to leave them in a year. I’m going to miss those guys!

But never mind all this crazy talk—we still have another year in this country, and—like I’ve said before—we are going to make the most out of it!