Site Visit

We´re back at training after another adventure. We traveled to our site last week after meeting our community guides at a conference in Coclé. The town is beautiful, with views of the mountains and the Pacific, and our hosts are wonderful. We toured the town and met all the teachers and students at the primary school and the government health workers. Matt also hiked into the jungle to see one of the aqueducts. The weather was sunny and comfortable in the morning, misty at midday and very rainy all afternoon. We look forward to living and working here and staying in one of the concrete houses, where we can stay dry and watch it rain. The food isn´t too bad, with large quantities of rice and beans, boiled green bananas, yucca, and a little bit of chicken.

During our visit we were the talk of the town and crowds of children would either stare at us or come joke around. The Ngabe (picture the a with two dots over it and pronounce the word no-bay) are really sweet people. Many of them live in huts without any walls and most of the children suffer from malnutricion. But they love to smile. They are also proud of their heritage and language, and we went to a conference at a school in a nearby city with our community guides about Ngabe life, where we were told to spell it with the a and not an o. The talks there focused on health and development issues, including controversial mining and electric power projects. Matt felt right at home!

While speakers were getting up and talking about the Comarca, Lisa was lying down next to the bathroom. After several hours of agony a teacher at the school offered to bring her to the nearby hospital. Lisa said yes, grabbed Matt and off we went. But when we got there, Matt called the PC doctor, who told us to go to a different hospital the PC has a relationship with. So we got on a bus for a tense ride up the highway and they got Lisa right into a room at the hospital. Matt developed the same GI symptoms shortly thereafter. Eventually they gave us a room with two beds and we stayed for two nights for treatment of intestinal infections. We had lots of IVs and watched a lot of TV. Gracias a Dios, we felt a lot better Sunday and Monday morning we returned to the Comarca. We feel like real PC volunteers now!

This morning we met the host family we´ll stay with for a while, and they´re really nice and their house is cool. We´re also talking with a guy who has a concrete house we can rent after we leave our host family. Lisa unfortunately didn´t get a chance to really talk with the women who run the cooperative, but we had a great meeting with the water committee and several of the women artisans in town.

There´s definitely lots of work to do, including getting the water back on. The town hasn´t had water in over a month because of aqueduct problems, but for now everyone´s got water because it´s the rainy season. After Christmas, when it dries out, it won´t be so easy. But our thinking caps are on, and we´ve got the cellphone numbers for all our engineer buddies.
Training winds down this week and next and then we swear in as volunteers. Can´t wait! Best wishes to everyone.