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...