Birthday Post!

Hello friends!

I had to make sure I wrote another blog post pretty quickly, because my birthday just passed two days ago! (I turned 23.) It was an AMAZING birthday, thanks to my friends and family in Panama.

First, for the morning, the trainees had an assignment that involved taking public transport to Panama City and finding various landmarks and answering questions, just to get us a little bit of familiarity with traveling around the city. We formed groups of six and, although my group did get a little bit lost a couple of times, I would call the trip a success.  We finished the assignment, headed back to the mall to eat lunch and walk around/chill out a little bit, and then we bussed it back to the training community. (note: Those buses are 

NOT made to accommodate legs.)

After I got back home, I knew something was up because my mom kept grinning at me with this weird look on her face. (Clearly she’s not adept at secretive activities, haha.) I took a mid-afternoon shower since I had spent the morning sweating, more or less, and then headed across the street to hang out with one of my fellow trainees and some Panamanian neighbors. Eventually, I headed back to the house eat dinner/hang out with some neighborhood kids and then the suspicious activity hopped into overdrive when my mom was like “Aja, come on!” and I’m like “Where?” and she’s like “Up there!” So I followed everybody to my abuelos’s porch. THEY GOT ME A CAKE! IT HAD MY NAME ON IT! I never get my own birthdays, so I was really psyched. There were also balloons. I felt so special.

Until now, I haven’t mentioned that my uncle/fellow trainee Paul is TERRIBLE at lying. (He had told me earlier that day that he didn’t know it was my birthday. Clearly that was a lie.) I thought this might be a chill eat-some-cake event until he was like “Yup, just a family gathering.” Then I’m like OH MY GOSH THE GRINGOS ARE COMING. Almost all of my Group 72ers came to hang out on my abuelos’s porch and wish me a happy birthday! It was awesome. There was food and beverages and children trying to show off and be cute for the guests and it was a PERFECT way to wrap up week 1 of training and it was an AWESOME birthday.

Everybody kept saying how awesome my Panamanian family is, and I’m just like yup. That’s my grandpa that just whipped out that accordion and played happy birthday. (Also we have an actual toilet that flushes, so people think that’s pretty awesome.)

After the party was over, I found out about the orchestration of the whole party, how a bunch of people in my training group had known about the party and had thrown in a couple dollars to buy things for it. Shout out to Group 72 for being awesome, to my Panamanian family for being the baddest Kennedy-family stand-in this country has to offer, and to Paul for being the coolest tio ever! You guys are cool.

--Aja