Back in Site!

After two weeks of socializing-overload, it feels good to be back in site where life is tranquilo.

In-Service Training (IST) proved to be more useful AND more stressful than I anticipated. I will say, a couple positive things about IST were:

1)      I got to see some faces from G72 that I hadn’t seen in awhile. I love you guys!

2)      The town where we had training was in the mountains and therefore 20-30 degrees cooler that the town where I live, therefore I wasn’t sweaty every second of every day and could therefore take one shower a day instead of two or three. I also had hot showers, a giant bed, and freedom from the worry that everything I own will grow mold.

That being said, I was super happy to get back to good old Darien. My first few days back, I went to go help out one of my fellow volunteers in the comarca with some youth intiatives she’s doing in her site in the indigenous comarca (reservation). I had a great time in her community (the stillness was a nice contrast to the relative bustle of IST and it was good to hang out with a couple of my East Side volunteers).

Immediately following that, I came back to my site, where our Regional Meeting was being held. Regional Meeting is a mandatory meeting that all PCVs have every 4 months. My region is the most spread out one, including everybody East of the Canal, which is about 30-something people, including the 9 newbies that we just got a few weeks ago. More bustle! So many gringos. I was happy to meet the new volunteers, aka G73. They seem like chill people, so it will be fun to get to know them.

We also killed another animal. . .cuz that’s what we do. This time it was a goat. It was delicious, especially the liver.

Now that everyone has left my site after Regional Meeting, it seems like my site again, so it’s good to be home! I was surprised that a lot of people in my town actually remembered where I was when I was missing for two whole weeks, so kudos to my gente.

Now that I’m fresh from coming out of IST, where I got to use some children (and teachers) as guinea pigs for teaching techniques, I’m anxious to see how much work I can get done before the holidays hit in November. That’ll be a challenge given the pace of life here, and I might come out of October stapling pancakes to the wall, but I’ll give it a shot! Wish me luck, and I’ll keep you all updated!