I started to write a blog post today (by which I
mean I typed up a page worth of stuff), but I decided it sounded too negative,
so I let it sit for a few hours to decide if that’s what I really wanted to
post. A few hours later, here I am writing up something completely different.
First thing’s first EBONY’S COMING! She booked her
plane ticket. For those of you reading who may not know who Ebony is, she’s my
pharmaceutical sister who has a month of vacation from her pharmacy rotations
in August, so she’s coming to beat up my block ova hurr in the Darien, woop,
woop! August 2nd. Panama and fellow Peace Corps Volunteers better
get ready, she’s in the building/pais!
So yea, that’s exciting. I’ve been telling my host
families that my sister’s going to visit, so they’ll be excited to meet her.
Other than that, I have decided to place a new focus
on pasearing. Seriously. I have been doing a subpar job. In the situation in
which I find myself now, pasearing is not easy (I don’t have a whole lot of ‘in’s
to give me justification to walk up to people’s houses), but I’m going to start
using any excuse I can get. Today I paseared at a house I had been to once
before (one of the teachers at my school lives there). I tried to visit one of
the English teachers, but she was out of town. Tomorrow I’m going to buy some
avocado or something and bring it by the house next to the one I’ll be renting
when I move out of my host family. The family that lives there has hosted Peace
Corps Volunteers before, so I’m going to try to use that as an excuse to sit on
their porch and talk to them. Being outside and talking to people make me
happy, and I haven’t done enough of that in the past two weeks.
I spent awhile at the teacher’s house pasearing
today. I also talked to a friend I made a few weeks ago, a Japanese girl that’s
in the Japanese version of Peace Corps. She’ll be leaving in a few months (she’s
almost completed her two years), but it’s still nice to make a friend. I need
to make some Panamanian ones, now!
Other than that, nothing new has happened. I enjoyed
my energy-crisis induced vacation days, but I’m just looking forward to
actually working. I’m already new here and trying to figure out my work schedule,
so it didn’t exactly help that I came in toward the end of a trimester, and
then on top of that classes get cancelled for three days and subsequently the
exam schedule had been changed when I arrived at school today. I’m just trying
to roll with it all and constantly find the most productive thing that I could
be doing. That didn’t happen this morning when I went to school. I kind of just
sat around, reviewed my booklets of instructional activities and wondered what
I could possibly be doing right now that could be of any use to anybody, and
hung out in the teachers’ lounge with the other teachers. Now that I more or
less have my head wrapped around what’s supposed to be happening at school for
the next few weeks, though, I feel a little bit more prepared to go in tomorrow
with a game plan to start making baby steps toward moving some ground on my
primary project.
In Panamanian news, the Cambio Democratico party had
presidential primary elections yesterday. Afterward, people with CD flags drove
down my street in giant trucks, honking.
Critics are saying that the newly elected candidate
for the CD party, Jose Domingo Arias, may just prove to be a puppet of the sitting
president, Ricardo Martinelli, who founded the party a few years ago and is
still very much the leader of the party. If that is the view most people hold,
it may not prove favorable for garnering votes for Jose Domingo, since the vibe
that I get from a lot of Panamanians is that Martinelli’s not a popular guy. (I’ve
only been in this country for three months, so I’m not going to form an
opinion. I’ll let the Panamanians tell it.) From the looks of the news, post-election
celebration madness just looked like a giant fire-code violation. Too many
people crammed in small spaces with a noticeable lack of presence of security.
Lots of cameras and microphones trying to catch audio of politicians yelling
buzzwords and phrases about the election.
In other news, the province of Chiriqui won the
Panamanian world series for baseball. They partied all night in David (the
provincial capital) last night. I kind of wanted Bocas del Toro to win, only
because I saw their fans on television, and they are OFF THE CHAIN. Picture
Sean Paul’s “Like Glue” video. Now take those people out of the Jamaican club
and put them in the stands in Changuinola with a Bocas jersey on. Those are the
Bocas fans. They hold it down for their team. Only from the about 15 minutes of
actual baseball that I watched, it looks like their first and second string
pitchers need Jesus. (Do they say ‘strings’ in baseball?) They threw so many
balls that Chiriqui scored a few runs. . .just from walks. It was uncomfortable
to watch.
Finally, if the price of meat keeps going up the way
they report on the news, I will not think twice about going vegetarian. I’m
already generally too lazy to take time out and actually cook meat to include
as a part of my diet, but then it’s $3.50/lb, too? Yea, I’ll leave that alone.
Because of the energy crisis and the fact that it takes a lot of power to run a
meat packing plant, the meat industry people on the news say that the price for
them to process and package meat has gone up so that this increase in price is
passed on to the consumer. Bummer. I do like pork. By the time I move on my own
it’ll be well into rainy season, so hopefully those prices will come back down?
I’m not sure how elastic those prices will be, though. I saw the sickly looking
livestock in the Azuero on the news, so. . .not sure if the supply is down like
for real for real or if the prices will come back down as soon as the rain
comes and cuts the variable cost of processing the meat. We’ll see.
#energycrisis
Can you tell I wrote this right after watching TV?
It was still on my mind. I don’t know, I thought maybe some of you might be
interested to know what’s going on in Panama. J
As always, thanks for reading the blog!
