Home Sweet Home...almost.

One of the biggest projects I have been working on this month is fixing up my soon to been house. It can be a bit of a long process because you have to find a tree, cut it down and then haul it out from the jungle. Luckily the woman who is my landlady had a tree on her farm, so after that got cut into boards we spent two days hauling wood. I can honestly say, I never in my life thought I would be hauling 2 x 4 on my shoulder out of a jungle. But when it is for you own house, it is not hard to find the motivation.

Luckily, we are just fixing it up at you can see from the photos so once the wood was there, it wasn´t to hard. As you can see from the top two photos, we are fixing that corner, which is the kitchen and the front half of the house also got a new floor and window for my sink. The man in the red shorts is my host dad, Martin. It will still be a few weeks before I can move in because we used up all the wood and still need more for the shutters and some furniture. That means going through the whole process again. A bit of a set back, but that is the way it goes.

I have been in Panama for almost 6 months now and have loved living with both of my host families, but I am ready to have a place to call my own. I can´t wait to finally unpack my bags, put up photos and cook my own food. There will be lots of room for visitors, hint...hint!

Time Flies

Top photo: the view of my neighborhood, Middle: My host sister, Leyda, hanging laundry we just got back from washing, Bottom: My host families living room.

I can´t believe it is already one month into the New Year. I am getting more settled into the pace of life here and this last month has just gone by in the blink of an eye. The first few weeks of the year, I got sick with a bad cold, followed by a nice bacterial infection but I am back to feeling great and enjoying life.

The ¨job¨part of Peace Corp is starting to kick in and I have spent a lot of time working on a community analysis as well as talking with people about what changes they want to see. I just attended my first regional meeting which is where all the volunteers in my region, Bocas Del Toro, get together to talk about projects, issues, life, and get updates on what is happening at our headquarters. As volunteers we are responsible for reporting and quantifying all of our work in site and worldwide Peace Corp is implementing a new system for tracking so we were also given an introduction to that. It is important, but I guess even in the Peace Corp you can´t escape bureaucracy.

In one week I have a week long in-service training with all the other volunteers in my group, 62, which should be fun. We have language instruction and lots of different seminars on topics such as basic accounting, the current economic situation here in Panama, starting youth groups and group leaderships. I am really looking forward to it since I haven´t seen a lot of them since we left training so it will be nice to share stories and see how everyone has changed.

Thanks for all the great comments and emails! I love reading them. Hope eveyone is happy and healthy so far in the new year.