Our site announcement

On Wednesday they announced where we´ll be spending the next two years. We´re going to the indigenous reservation 1 hour from where we visited a couple of weeks ago. I´m going to be working with one of the largest artisan cooperatives in Panama. The group has around 50 members and all but a few of them are women. They even have a store where they sell their goods, which include dresses and bags. It sounds wonderful. I´m going to help them with basic accounting and marketing. Many of them can´t read or write so it will be a challenge.

Matt is going to be teaching health education, nutrition, and perhaps English, as well as digging some latrines and working on the aqueduct, which has some problems. There has only been one other volunteer in this site and that was 8 years ago, so we are essentially starting from scratch. Matt and I are now learning the indigeous language. It´s an historically oral language and ah, is proving to be a bit difficult to learn, but I´m sure it will be fine.

We will have running water during the rainy season (8 months out of the year). During the dry season we´ll have running water 2 hrs. a day. Whether or not we´ll have electricity will depend on where we live in the town. There are 1,500 people in the town, which is quite sizable, but one has to keep in mind that these people are spread throughout the mountains and not really very close to one another. We will have a half hour chiva (4 wheel truck) ride to our site from the main road. It is about a 1 1/2 hour hike if you can´t catch the chiva. I haven´t seen the road yet, but I´m positive it´s a dirt road.

There´s another volunteer who lives a 1/2 hour walk from us. Another volunteer Steve, who in our group, will live 1 hour from us, which is excellent because he is an engineer and Matt may need his expertise from time to time. There is only one other volunteer from my group going to this reservation and he will be a couple of hours from us. He´s a native speaker and a computer genius so I´m psyched to have him somewhat close to us. He´s also a New Yorker. He´s from Long Island.

Another thing that Matt is very excited about is that we are going to be in coffee country! And our site has coffee opportunities. So, all sounds good at this point. Right now I´m at the mall in Panama City on my way to a city in the middle of the country for my week long technical training. I get to stay in a hotel. Matt is ah, headed back to the reservation to build latrines all week. He will be staying with a host family. Pobrecito!

After this week, Matt and I will travel back to Brian and Amanda´s house in the reservation (see previous post) for our cultural week. We will stay with a host family for the week.

I´ll try to post a few messages this week. I´m sorry there are no photos of Matt!! He´s the photographer and I´m the blogger. I´m not quite sure how this all came to be. It should be the other way around! I have the camera with me this week, but next week I´ll be sure to take pictures of him. He´s loving life!

Peace out.