Pasear.

In the evenings, we leave home, school, work. We move from one place to another. We stop by the park, the store. And in the process, we say “buenas.” How are you? How’s it going?

Panamanians have a word for that.

More than just pasar, pasear brings a social connotation to it’s sister word. When we pasear, we get face time. Judging by my limited experience, it is a verb that one can only complete if one is out of the house and socializing. My first night here, my host mother took me on a walk to the house where I’ll be taking Spanish class during training. Though the walk only takes five to ten minutes in the morning, in the evening it can take 45 round trip. We stopped, said hello, introduced me, chatted, sometimes stopping to meet other recently arrived volunteers to the training community, and then repeated on the way home. So began my education.

The art of walking around and saying hi--have you perfected it?

From snow to sweat.

On Friday evening, only approximately two and a half days later than intended, the second half of the Panama training class number 67 arrived in Panama City.  Thanks to a wave of preemptive cancellations, the flights that our group was supposed to be on did not get to DC in time for us to get on them on the morning we were supposed to leave, thus throwing our organizers for a loop as they scrambled to get everyone at our DC staging out of the country.  The lesson?  Flexibility.  The downside? Our training class was temporarily split in half for the sake of travel.  The upside?  I got to see the constitution! 

But wait!  Do not consider me settled in.  Our training class has been in La Ciudad del Saber for the past couple of days, receiving tons of paperwork and preparing to move into our host family homes (tomorrow!), so life continues to be lived out of my backpack.  The honeymoon phase is most decidedly setting in.  What I mean to say is that so far, our lives have been carefully organized as we move from one phase to another, and I have had nothing to worry about except taking in the beauty of the new country I'm in.  We can see ships crawling through the canal from our compound.  It's cool, but still static.  We keep wondering when things will start to feel real.

My guess is tomorrow.

Until then, I'll leave you with a photo from a mirador (overlook) during today's visit to a volunteer's site in a town called Chica, which is about 1200 people big.  The volunteer has been there for six months now, and mentioned that things have only really started to settle and fall into place.  Her house is cool (I, being the lazy photographer that I am, snapped no shots of that) and the community is also, literally speaking, a bit cooler than the rest of Panama, as it is in the mountains.  At night, the temperature can get down to a chilly 65 degrees...

The blog is back!

Ladies and gentlemen,
I'm pleased to announce the resurrection of what was formerly referred to as "Chelsea's so-called 'blog' that she supposedly 'updates.'"  Welcome all to the page!  If you are here for the first time, you really haven't missed much.  Since the birth of this page in 2007, I have updated everyone a whopping nineteen times.  I have resolved to change my ways!  This post marks the beginning of a new era:

The Chelsea Joins the Peace Corps Era!
(big text and hype really necessary?  Yes, yes it is.  This is serious.)

A quick update on where I've been for the last year and a half:
I lived, worked, played, traveled, and sometimes slept in Colombia until December of 2009.  Bogota was my home-base and I dove head first into everything I could, from salsa dancing to playing ultimate with a team of women that played in nationals in Medellin.  I came home for Christmas with every intention of returning to Bogota to continue life there, but wanderlust reminded me that I just wasn't quite done moving.  What was originally planned to be a three week visit to Mexico (I had a friend there doing a Fulbright) on my way down to Colombia became a two month stay.  My good friend Meredith and I roamed the country and ended up spending a few weeks wwoofing in a small town near Guadalajara.  I left Mexico on March 10th, stayed a couple nights in Miami, and arrived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on March 12th to begin a month of voluntarily shoveling and wheelbarrowing rubble in Leoganne, the town that was the actual epicenter of the earthquake.  Describing Haiti in this blurb would be impossible.  For more info on the project I was on and the beautiful people who run it, check out All Hands Volunteers.

I left Haiti with the need to sit still for a while, re-think, re-group, and recover from what had been a pretty non-stop year.   The goal was to get a job while I plotted my next move.  I lasted three weeks before I was breaking the news to my parents that I was applying for the Peace Corps.  My mom's response was: "Duh."  They knew this was coming.  In October I accepted my invitation to serve as an English teaching volunteer in Panama, beginning in January of 2011.  In the meantime, I've been in the real world as a loan assistant with a small business lending organization, ACCION.  They are fabulous and were so supportive as I left them for the PC. 

Chances are most of you already know all or part of this story.  Chances are some of you know the better details or were with me for the juicier parts.  But I'm a fan of recaps, especially when there's this massive time warp between posts, and I wanted to give a sense of the journey I'm coming from so you all can come with me on the one I'm heading into.

I leave for our staging event in Washington, D.C. in roughly 36 hours and have been overcome by anxiety surrounding everything that I have left to do during my last day in Albuquerque.  As per my usual style, I have left too much until the last minute.  I will say that it was worth it for the playing, visiting, and overall hootenanny-ing that I got to do whilst procrastinating.  So long and may you get more sleep than I will in the coming nights!

Villa de Leyva 2009 photos!

I'd like to share my Snapfish photos with you. Once you have checked out my photos you can order prints and upload your own photos to share.
Click here to view photos

Alright friends and family--this one is a test.  Remember that post on Villa de Leyva, oh a little over a year ago (aka the last post I made on this blog)?  Well, here are the photos from that trip, found on a forgotten snapfish account.  Just figuring out whether this something I want to use...