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.