Visita!

Last week, our second week in country, all 42 of us got to go on a vacation!  That is, we all went to visit different volunteers in their sites to get a feel for real life and a sense of what kinds of challenges and environments we´ll be encountering once we´re on our own.  I went to a small community called Bonyik, up in the Bocas del Toro province, which is mostly known as one of the THE Panamanian vacation destinations thanks to an archipelago of gorgeous islands.  We weren´t on those islands, but inland, closer to Costa Rica.  The community is actually part of the indigenous tribe Nasso, and has about 250 people in it.

Nikki, our host, lives in a house on stilts that she built with the help of her community during her first few months in site:

She has no running water or electricity, so instead we bathed and washed clothes in the river nearby, which I was going to include a photo of here...until the computer in the internet cafe stopped letting me upload!  The next post will hopefully include more photos.  Other highlights of daily activities included: serious hammock sitting, cutting down a Cacao plant from the tree out side her house and snacking on the fruit inside, making chocolate tip from locally refined bittersweet chocolate, learning how to make my own hammock (oh yes, yes I did), and going to bed shortly after the sun went down.

Nikki has been in her community for about a year and a half, and her primary project is working with community members from her community and surrounding ones to organize a transportation cooperative in order to bring transportation for the people, by the people up and down the road leading to all the communities there.  We attended several organizational meetings with them, and ended our trip at a fiesta the group threw to raise money.  I got to feast on some delicious arroz con pollo and sopa, dance, and play some volleyball before hopping on the bus back home.

It´s hard to say how close this community was to the communities my group will be working with, since the whole face of the English teaching project in Panama has changed.  The previous groups have been both teaching English and doing tourism advising, which runs the gamut in terms of project options.  Our job is much more specific to teaching.  I will most likely not be in a community so remote or small, but in a larger community with a MEDUCA (Ministry of Education) school in it.  In any case, the scenery in Bonyik was beautiful, and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a community in action--a nice break from the grind of training!