I Moved/Ebony/Luzita

1) I moved to my new house. Man, that was work. I still have a few things to buy to put in my house, but the hard part is done. I have free public Wifi on my porch, so I decided to write a quick update.

2) Ebony's coming in two days. I hope she enjoys my new home! :)

3) Since I'll be in the city this weekend with Ebony, I decided to leave my roommate (Luz, my new cat/rat killing machine) at my host family's house until after I get back. I kinda want her to live in my house now so I don't have to be by myself, but I don't want to have her move in and then ditch her for the first few days.

That's all! Quick update!

Def Poetry Slam and Embera People

1) Did you know that Def Poetry Slam was a thing in Panamanian high schools and middle schools? Panama has several national competitions during the year for school kids (English Spelling Bee, Spanish Spelling Bee, Storywriting Competition), and one of them is a poetry competition. When they say poetry in Panama, they really mean group spoken word. I did not know this until I showed up at the regional competition being hosted by my school this past week. Kids were THROWING DOWN. I mean like, I was not ready. It was awesome. I want to see more. There were groups of kids doing choreography to the poetry they recited. The poetry all had the theme of the discovery of the "Mar del Sur," which is a source of pride for Darienitas, in which this place (Darien) plays a huge role in the history of not only Panama, but all of the Americas. Maybe I'll tell you about it when I get a better grasp of history?

2) I went to the Embera comarca. The Embera are an indigenous group in Panama that have two comarcas (reservations) located within the Darien province. Peace Corps has several volunteers placed in communities in the comarcas, and I visited one this past weekend in order to give an English teaching seminar to some teachers who requested it. First of all, the teachers I met were amazing people who were really excited about the seminar and really dedicated to helping their kids (I mean, hey, they REQUESTED for Peace Corps to come give them a seminar during their Sunday, when they could have slept in or traveled or relaxed at home). The seminar went amazingly, and I plan on trying to set up some more in my region in the future.

Secondly, though, the community I visited was AWESOME. The people were super welcoming, I got to ride in a piragua (a tiny boat; the community is located on a river, so I had to take a boat to get there), and it was the most rural place I've ever been. The only places in the community with electricity were the cantinas (bars) that run off of a generator. We bathed in the river, where people also wash their clothes. (I won't go into all the uses for the river water; there's a reason there's an Environmental Health volunteer there), but I loved my visit and I hope to make more trips to the comarca. I bought a few of the woven pieces that the women make, and I bought some earring hooks for them from my town, because I think their artwork would make super cute earrings, and I told them that if they make earrings, I would buy them (and so would other people). I'm fully expecting to come into possession of some cute earrings soon.

I now have a paruma (a skirt that the Embera women wear) and it's purple and cute and it's probably made in Japan, but I plan on collecting more during my two years as a Darienita. I also plan on picking up some of the Embera language. Peace Corps and I are going to have beef soon, because they gave me no Embera book from which to begin learning, but I did get to pick up two or three words/phrases this weekend, and hopefully within a year or so I'll be able to at least have really simple conversations.

Welp, that's it for now. Ebony's coming this weekend! Also I'll be giving more charlas (talks) this week at a youth center AND moving into my house AND doing my 3-month write-up for my boss. Busy week!

Life is Happening/I Feel too Busy to Be Writing This Blog Post Right Now

I actually feel like I’m getting kind of busy now, like now is the time where I actually feel that I’m doing work. (Woo-hoo!) Several things are going on in these few weeks. I’ll touch on a few of them:

1)      School Entry Needs Assessment (SENA)- After the first 3 months in site, Teaching English Volunteers in my group receive a visit from our APCD (the head of the TE project, aka our boss). Each volunteer must organize a meeting with all the English teachers with whom s/he works. The APCD comes to the meeting, talks with the school principal, and then goes around seeing the school and meets anybody else in the community with whom the volunteer is currently working. Essentially, the point of the visit is to check the progress of the volunteer in his/her adjustment to the community/school and how work is progressing during the early stages of service.

Not that I was TOO concerned about this meeting, but I was a little anxious about it because 1) It can be notoriously difficult to get Panamanians to come to a meeting at a set time (I’m not picking on Panamanians, they’ll tell you this stuff themselves), and 2) In a way, I was kind of breaking new ground by having this meeting.

The TE project in Panama is a new one, and this is the first group of volunteers that have had to do the SENA presentation. For this reason, my group was a little unclear about what exactly was expected of us in this presentation. On top of that, in terms of getting around to all the sites geographically, the APCD had planned his tour from East to West. Why is that relevant? Well, pull up that map of Panama you had saved and find Darien. I’m the only one out here . . .it’s all the way to the East by the Colombian border. . . .meaning I get to be the guinea pig and blaze the trail as far as SENA presentations go.

No big, though, everything went well! My teachers showed up on time. (I LOVE them for that, a million times over.) The meeting went well (my APCD DOES love to talk, though, although that was to be expected), and my co-teachers said nice things about me. (Yay!) It kind of gave me new energy for my primary assignment (my school work). We visited some classrooms, visited two other schools in the area, went out to the port (my APCD knows very little of my province! He wanted to see Puerto Quimba), and we had lunch at the fanciest restaurant in Meteti, which may be the fanciest one in the Darien. (When the ambassador comes to Darien, he eats there.)

2)      Adult ESL classes-I started adult ESL classes for the community this week. I’m super excited about it, because it’s the only time I get to have my OWN class and do what I want to do with it, as opposed to facilitating with others (not that I don’t love my co-teachers, I just actually want to teach myself, sometimes). I put an announcement out on the radio about the classes, and a few people showed up and seemed really interested in the class, and I’ve already planned my first few lessons on basic grammar and sentence construction. I’m pumped! I even met one Embera (indigenous) lady from the comarca (reservation) who travels internationally for her job with the government at the culture center, who wants to learn English to communicate when she travels. There are some cool people in Meteti/Darien. The students seemed interested and engaged, they asked plenty of questions, which is great, because it means they’re not afraid of me or uncomfortable with the gringa who wants to teach them to speak Gringo. Check.

3)      Upcoming seminars/charlas-I’m giving a charla this weekend that could potentially become a huge secondary project for me, and as a project, it would go a long way toward helping my primary project’s cause. The other TE Darienita and I (TE PCV in Darien) are bringing a seminar to Darien that teaches basic English grammar to teachers in really rural areas that teach in multi-grade schools. Those schools are too small to have an English teacher, but the government says the students have to be taught English, so this seminar gives the teachers some tools to be able to do that—teach English. I’ll explain more about this after the seminar.

The other type of ‘charla’ (talk/seminar if you will) I will be giving soon is a set of charlas called Elige tu Vida (choose your life). This is a program that lasts a few hours, and is directed toward high school-aged students. The charlas address sexual health and goal-setting for the future. The purpose of the charla is to get young’ns to open their eyes and realize that they have options in life. That’s a tough thing to get kids to realize! We make the charlas fun, though, with games to keep them interested and to make it less formal. I’ll be traveling to a couple of youth centers in Darien to give these seminars. More on that, later!

4)      Ebony is coming next week!

5)      I’m moving into my house next week! I’m looking forward to getting settled in, and at the same time I’ll miss hearing my host brother singing along to bad pop music in the next room or having my host sister coming to my room to give me a book I left in the living room, just to have an excuse to knock on my door.

6)      My mango allergy has been confirmed. I ate two more mangos last week because my host mom gave me a mango after I told her ‘no, thanks,’ I didn’t want one. (You know how Panamanians/Southerners are, they gotta feed you.) I wasn’t sure if it was the mango that caused the reaction last time. It was. I know this now, after my second trial run with mango. MAN I suffered from eating that thing, but my face is back to normal, now.

7)      General goodness. Aside from the mango suffering and the fever I had a little while back, Darien has been giving me good vibes. I haven’t left the province in a couple months, so I’m thinking it’s going to be interesting traveling to the city to meet my sister. (They have movie theatres and hot water there, WHOA.) Life has been going well, though, this week especially has been a really good week!

Observations:

-When you sweat all day every day, you forget how many things your sweat gets into on a regular basis. Today I noticed that my BOOKBAG STRAPS are starting to smell funky. I gotta wash that.

-I’ve been spoiled in my PC life so far. I used a latrine for the first time in my life the other day, bathed outside for the first time ever, and I have yet to wash my clothes by hand.

-Tattling is a favorite pastime of Panamanian schoolchildren. I don’t think the phrase ‘snitches get stitches’ can be translated into Panamanian Spanish.

I'm not going to edit :(

As I was reading back over some of my old blog posts, I noticed something. They make me cringe. My writing can get pretty bad sometimes. Ambiguous pronouns, non-parallel sentence structure, and paragraphs that are just straight up difficult to understand.

I'm not going to edit.

I decided I have better things to do.

Much love to my blog readers!

Bienvenidas and Despedidas (Hellos and Goodbyes)

I would say that I’m continuing to settle in to Meteti life here. At the same time, around a week ago, I started getting a little cabin fever. Enter gringo* weekend.

I haven’t left site much at all during my first couple of months in site. I would attribute that less to my level of commitment as a volunteer and more to the fact that I refuse to sit in a freezing bus for 6 or 7 hours one-way just to get a taste of the city. (That’s not to say I’m not super-committed to my Peace Corps work.)

Because I haven’t really been out much during the past month, I felt that I was starting to get a little loopy. Good thing July 4^th happens to be Independence Day in my native country (USA! USA!). I told my co-workers and host family that I’d be out of school that day to celebrate with the gringos and got all my ducks in a row to be able to take the day off.

Worth it! It was especially great to see some of my G72ers (volunteers from my training group). I’ve missed those guys! Between July 4^th and my trip to La Palma, I felt refreshed and ready to work when I came back to Meteti.

Side note: I have also figured out how to get my hands on a map of Darien. I have been promised a giant map by the cartographer himself who has an office in Meteti. Those can be hard to come by. It took me awhile to figure out how to get one, and now I’m so excited! I like maps. I’m going to go so many cool places (when I’m on break from school, of course).

Furthermore, I met the previous volunteer that had lived in my site for two years. She’s on vacation from her teaching job in the States and came back to Meteti to visit this past week, since she missed the province so much. Hers is the house I’ll be renting when I move out of my host family’s house at the end of the month. I had heard a lot about Liz from people around town, who really loved her. I was excited to meet her because she’s kind of a Peace Corps cheat sheet, if you will.

Liz is really cool! I hate that I only met her four days ago and I already had to say goodbye. She was super helpful in helping me figure out my housing situation and just giving me tips on how to do this Peace Corps-Meteti thing in general. I mean, she WAS in my shoes a couple of years ago. We could have been bffs in an alternate universe in which both of us were in Peace Corps at the same time.

In addition to saying hello and goodbye to Liz in such a short time, I also had to say goodbye to my Regional Leader (RL), Molly, who finished up her service and headed back to the States this past weekend. Regional Leaders in Peace Corps Panama are volunteers who extend for a third year of service in order to be Coordinators for Peace Corps, kind of being Peace Corps’ arms and legs outside of the city, serving as a coordinator for a particular province of Panama. I happen to live in the same town as my Regional Leader, so I got to know her a little bit while she was here. She’s another person that I think I could be good friends with, so I hate that I had to say goodbye! She’s an awesome RL.

As far as the ‘hellos,’ I got to meet a few of the new Peace Corps Panama trainees that arrived in the country less than a month ago. They will be moving to their sites next month. This group will include about 10-11 new volunteers in my province  (since they are Sustainable Agriculture and Environmental Health volunteers, who tend to serve in more rural areas like Darien). Since not very many people from my training group live near me (I’m the farthest East), I’m really interested to see who in this new training group gets placed near me. These are the people I’ll be spending the next two years with, essentially.

In other news:

My mom in the States mailed me a huge package, so now I’ll be introducing Darien to American delicacies like Skittles and Cheez-Its.

I went on the radio again. This time, listeners were treated to a few bars of Katy Perry’s “Part of Me,” courtesy of yours truly. I wish I was kidding. I wish I could tell you it won’t happen again. I knew my knowledge of pop music lyrics would come in handy one day. I mean, I don’t know if I possess any skills more marketable than this, my knowledge of Katy Perry lyrics. I’m not proud of it.

*The word gringo is a little bit difficult to accurately translate into English, but for purposes of this blog post, gringos are Americans (fellow Peace Corps Volunteers).

Work

So this post is about work.

Have I talked about what my primary assignment is? Here’s a review: I’m an English language education facilitator for the K-9 grades at a public school in the Darien province of Panama. Outside of primary projects, Peace Corps Volunteers also are expected to take on secondary projects in their community based on the needs/wants of the community.

With respect to work these past two weeks, I feel like I have been being pulled in different directions. Every day I have needed to be in at least two different places at once. Ahhh. Needless to say I slept well this weekend once I got a little time off.

That being said, let’s all remember that I’m in development work. What does that mean, class? That’s right. It’s going to be a minute before I see any actual results from the time I put in. I’m only finishing month two of being in site, which means a lot of what I do is still getting to know the community and building relationships. The good news is, I do feel like I’ve been setting myself up for some productivity down the road. This past week I visited some local agencies and have begun forming projects with them (I’ll be more specific and explain projects in my blog as things come to fruition).

With respect to my primary assignment, I feel so behind! I’m still observing teachers and doing feedback forms. I have eight co-teachers, so it’s going to be at least another month before I finish up observations. I’m anxious to begin co-teaching and co-planning with them, but I need to get through observations with all of my teachers first! I feel good about working in my school, though. My teachers are all good people, and I get along with all of them really well (even the one that I never see, because all us English teachers know that finding him is like finding Sasquatch, seriously). Any other Teaching English Volunteer knows that having co-teachers like mine is a huge help. As busy as I may get, it’s good to know that getting along with my co-workers is one less thing to worry about.

Other things in life right now:

In the future, if I ever need to introduce myself to a middle school class, I should just start out with “Hi, my name is Aja. My hair is real.” There’s an eighth grade class at my school that has known me for two months now, and I think that until today some of them thought I wore a wig or something. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop having people ask if my hair is real or stop having random children touch it and giggle when I’m riding a chiva.

I’m LOVING J. Cole’s new album right now. It’s clearly Grammy material, I’m not kidding. Go listen to “Let Nas Down.” But actually, tho, listen to the whole album.

Also listening to a lot of Allen Stone. If you don’t know who he is, please go listen to his live recording of “Figure It Out.” When you fall in love with that, you can listen to his entire second album.

Today the bananas came in at the produce stand. I been waitin on those bad boys. The lady at the produce stand knew I was coming for my guineos (bananas) and had my plastic bag ready when I came in the door. Her produce stand is right next to the house that I’m renting when I move out of my host family’s house, so I forsee a beautiful friendship forming in our future.

Random things:

I find myself speaking to the pets in Spanish.

I count things in Spanish.

When I talk to myself (i.e. when I’m looking for something I lost or when I’m planning my schedule) it’s in Spanish.

My English and my Spanish are both getting worse. I’m beginning to speak English like a Panamanian. I’m also beginning to speak Spanish like a Panamanian. Neither one of those is good for professional situations. 

I’ll be destined to work in the campo after this.

I will be getting some quality gringo time in on July 4^th. Some of the volunteers in my province are meeting in another volunteer’s site to roast a pig. . .because that’s the kind of the that you do when you’re a Peace Corps Panama Volunteer who lives East of the Canal. . .or, you know, if you're in North Carolina. It’s a thing.

Too Much Food (Jazon Mraz, anyone? No? Ok, then.)

About the amount of food I ate yesterday. . .

It was ridiculous. Somewhere my grandmother is looking down upon me, giddy with joy because I ate five meals in the same day. Yea, I said that. Five meals in the same day.  Let that sink in, let the wave of shock and/or disgust/approval wash over you, and then also consider the ice cream, Jell-O and three pieces of cake I had after that fifth meal.

It wasn’t my fault, allow me to explain:

Panama happened.

First, I woke up like any other lazy Sunday. I had been my definition of productive (kind of) during the other six days that week, so I thought Sunday might be the day to sleep in, catch up on some laundry, maybe pasear a little bit. I contemplated going to mass with my host mom, but laziness won over. Instead, I stayed home and washed the mountain of dishes in the sink and cleaned my room while blasting some clean-up music. I had a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, which is normal, but then after I cleaned up the kitchen, I thought to myself “Hey, I’m already here, it’s about noon, maybe I’ll fry a couple of eggs and a hot dog, because why not.” My host mom came home and decided that this would go well with fried plantains (because plantains go with everything and are a superior alternative to eating eggs and hot dogs alone or with bread), so I finally fried my OWN plantains for once. (They were delicious.) After eating all of that, I was fuller that I wanted to be, but that’s cool, because I just wouldn’t have to eat again until dinner, right?

Anyway.

A girl that lives down the street from me called to invite me to her house for Father’s Day, so of course I went. I didn’t have anything else important to do that day. I didn’t take into account that that her family would feed me my second lunch in the middle of the afternoon. And it was Father’s Day. This was not just any lunch. There was beef, pork, regular rice, rice with coco, and potato salad. If you’ve never been to Panama, let me just tell you there’s not really a way to opt out or say ‘no thank you’ when someone invites you over their house and offers you food. I ate it.

THEN I came home, and within a couple of hours, it was dinner time. I had a birthday party to go to that night, so I ate a little dinner just so I wouldn’t be hungry at the birthday party. On Panamanian time, you never really know when those things are gonna start/end, and I don’t wanna sit around hungry or be rude and leave because I need to go eat.

Eating dinner at home was another HUGE miscalculation on my part. If she had drawn upon her useful Panamanian stereotypes, our protagonist would have realized that at EVERY family celebration in Panama, arroz con pollo (rice with chicken) and potato salad WILL be served, no joke. When you’re the guest, they always serve you first. A HUGE portion. So what did I do? I shoveled it down. All of the potato salad, and then about half of the rice was all I could manage. I took my leftovers ‘para llevar (to go).’ And then they served me cake. There were THREE CAKES. I was anticipating being served a single slice of ONE of the cakes. Instead I was served a good sized slice of each of the three cakes, PLUS chocolate ice cream and raspberry Jell-O. Even as I write this the next day, mid-morning, I feel really full. My host sister and I came home with our stomachs about to burst and went to bed immediately.

For anybody in the States who may have been worried that I’m not eating enough: Just don’t.