We´re official volunteers

Matt and I swore in as volunteers on Thursday. Our group got all dressed up and headed to Panama City for the ceremony. The US Ambassador to Panama, the minister of health, the Peace Corps director, and the head of the cooperative organization that I´ll be working with, along with several current volunteers, were all in attendance. We had to stand up and introduce ourselves in Spanish. It was fun and a reception followed. After the reception we took a tour of the canal museum.

A bit later our group went out to eat at an Italian restuarant in the city. It was good. I had a salad, spinach ravioli and some red wine from Argentina. Matt had a salad and some garlic bread and some beer (he´s on a diet...just kidding).
After dinner we went out dancing! Unfortunately the cheap dress up shoes I bought here in Panama fell apart half way into the night, so I danced barefoot (always questionable).

We stayed out v. late for Matt and I but we didn´t mind the lack of sleep because the next day (Friday) we all piled into a diablo rojo and headed to a beach a couple of hours outside of the city. We all bought food at the grocery store before arriving and ate breakfast and lunch in our rooms and dinner at the restuarant.

Despite the fact that it rained a lot, we still went swimming and played ultimate frisbee on the beach. We´re going to miss our group. It might sound strange because we´ve only known our new friends for 10 weeks, but I think we´re all really close at this point. We´re been through a lot together. This morning Matt and I got up and headed straight for the bus. We said bye to a few people, but I think it´s best to just go and not say goodbye.

The good news is that we´ll see them all in a few weeks at Thanksgiving. We´re headed back to where I went for my sector conference for turkey! I´m really excited.

I´ll post pictures from this weekend sometime soon. We didn´t use our camera, but everyone else did and they´ll post the pictures soon enough. On that note, I should mention that our laptop is locked away in the city. Unfortunately the hard drive, which is less than a year old, is dead. It might have been the humidity. The good news is that it´s still under warranty and Dell is shipping us a new one in a month. We´re going to have to figure out a better way to store it down here! Ah!

Hasta pronto and Happy Halloween! Oh, I forgot to mention Matt and I dressed up as arroz con pollo for Halloween! Chicken with rice...he was arroz and I was pollo. So cute and thanks to Melissa and Emily for making our costumes!