Brave New World

Free at last, free at last, gracias a dios I’m free at last!  I’ve finally made the move into my own house!  I could have moved out of my host family’s house 3 months after arriving in site (around June 18^th), but a mix of finding the place and dealing with the landlord (and the ease of not cooking or doing laundry) made me stay an extra 3 months.  It took a while to get out, but I’m now that I’m gone I’m ecstatic to be living on my own for the next 18 months!

Not to say that my host family was bad – they were actually pretty awesome – but after 6 months it got a bit irksome.  My room was outside of the house and I had some privacy, but that didn’t stop the kids (one 1^st grader, two 7^th graders, and two 9^th graders) from barging in and pestering me.  They’d constantly ask “Que es eso?” (“What’s this?””) whenever they saw something new; they expected me to bring them something after coming back from Penonome every time I went; and they ALWAYS asked to use my computer, iPod, or camera (“Prestame tu computadora?”  “Tu iPod?”  “Tu camera?”).  The 1^st grader Magaly took so many pictures of absolutely NOTHING that my memory card was full the next time I needed to use the camera.  Also I really had no say when I wanted to eat – I’d be chlling in my room and one of the kids would come and ask “Va a comer?” (“Are you going to eat?”), and I had no choice but to come and eat because it was already sitting on the table.  Waking up late on the weekends wasn’t an option because the kids would blast music in the common room or they would get their hair cut with electric clippers right outside my room.  When I was able to sleep late my family ALWAYS commented on it, just cause it’s not common for people to sleep past like 10 here.  Add to these inconveniences the tumultuous snoring of Alberto (an adult son of my host parents) the room next door and the frequent barking and howling of a dog (named Doggie) at random hours of the night right outside my room and you can see why the move was necessary.  Ugh!

But all that’s in the past!  Let me tell you a bit about my new pad.  It’s about a 5 minute walk past my host family’s house, making it a 20 minute walk (downhill) to school every day, and a 25 minute walk (uphill) back home (I’ll probably end up taking the chiva to school at 7 for 25₵ so I’m not all sweaty for class).  It’s nearly at the end of the chiva line, less than a minute walk away from the tienda and a small river.  The house itself is about twice the size as my room back at the host family’s house, with a large living room (and makeshift kitchen in one corner) right when you enter and two smaller rooms off to the right-hand side (my bedroom and a storage room/spare bedroom for guests).  The house was furnished very modestly with a desk, a bed, 2 stools, and 2 chairs:  all I’m borrowing from my host family is a stacking-rack of shelves and hangers for my clothes.  Electricity and running water are plentiful, with the landlord paying for water and me paying for electricity depending on how much I use per month.  I gave the landlord a down-payment and he built me a new shower, installed a faucet for laundry and dishes, and constructed a new latrine.  Yes, the only downgrade from my host family’s house is transitioning from a toilet to a latrine about 20 feet from the back of my house.  Considering I thought I’d have a latrine during my whole service, just getting one now isn’t too bad.  I’ve got a bucket for laundry, a small selection of various plates, cups, and utensils to eat with, and a double-burner top-stove.  Food will not be luxurious by any means:  for breakfast it’s a bowl of oatmeal and for lunch and dinner it’ll be a bowl of lentils, unless for one of those meals I want to substitute a tuna or peanut butter sandwich.  Of course I’m always welcome at my host family’s house whenever I want to visit, and I’ll probably have dinner with them once a week (a heaping bowl of white rice with some morsels of chicken or fried hot dog).  The spare room lets me have other Peace Corps volunteers over whenever I want, and it’ll be nice to have an extra room for my parents to stay in when they visit in March.

I took about a month to finalize everything with the landlord, Jose de la Cruz, and it was a bumpy road to get where I am now.  For one, my host family said it was a dangerous place to live because there are a lot of borachos (super drunk men) that like to party and get wasted during the weekend and various days of the week.  But I can handle my own here.  I’ve got a barbed wire fence with a padlocked gate – plus my boss who inspected the house told the landlord that he had to install 3 deadbolts on the back door and 3 on the front door, which he did.  It came with padlocks for the front door and my room, but I bought my own so the landlord can’t come in or let anyone else in without my permission.  I talked with the landlord concerning rent a while back and he initially wanted $100 a month, which is outrageous here in Panama.  He thought I was some wealthy gringo (white person) and wanted to take advantage of me.  I told him I was a volunteer and don’t receive much money per month, and after a bit of bartering I got him down to $50 a month with a $100 move-in fee for the construction of the new shower and latrine.  Then my host family told me something else that caused some worry, namely that Jose de la Cruz is not the actual landlord.  They told me the actual landlord lived in Panama City with his wife, but that the man died so now his wife is in charge of the house and property.  The only thing is no one that I talked to knows the landlady’s name or has her cell phone number.  I talked to Jose de la Cruz and he said he was the owner of the property, so I just went with his word and if that landlady comes sauntering into town during the next 18 months then I’ll figure things out from there.

So after 6 months of waiting I made it!  I moved in yesterday, and the start of a new month is a great time to start a new experience.  My first night wasn’t bad at all, got everything organized and experienced my first taste of freedom.  I only had to kill one cockroach!  At my host family the frequency was about one cockroach every other night, so we’ll have to see what it’s like at this new house.  There was also a big dragonfly looking thing that kept buzzing around the light, and periodically during the night I would hear rustling under my bed and above my head:  it seems a bat had first claim to the underside of my bed and likes to exercise at night, so I’ll just have to share until he tires of my tossing and turning.

Yes it’ll be a very simple living, but I finally have the privacy and solitude I want.  I can play music as loud and often as I want, waking up as late as I want on the weekends won’t be a problem, and I’ll be in charge of my own food and my own laundry:  in essence I’m now in charge of my own life.   I’ve never lived alone and I know t’ll be a lot of work, but this first solo venture in Panama will teach me a thing or two about responsibility – and it’ll be an experience I’ll never forget!

-Nate

Computer Woes

Well, I knew this day would come.  I´m no longer able to use my netbook here in Panama.  It broke on me about 2 weeks ago.  The frustrating this is how exactly it´s broken.

It was about a month ago when I started having problems.  The laptop was having trouble charging and would only do so when the power adapter was adjusted a certain way.  It got worse and worse until one day I had it wrapped around the netbook to charge and Magaly, a 1^st grader in my host family, tried to open the netbook and pulled the cord a bit too tight.  Ever since then I´ve had to pull the cord very tight across the netbook in order to make it charge.  Sometimes it would be charging and then suddenly lose connection without me knowing, resulting in the power draining to 0.  That sucked.  I thought (hoped) it might be a problem with the charger, so I had my parents send me another one.  Two weekends ago it came, and when I gave it a try I found out that it was the port in the computer instead of the power adapter.  After a few more days of tugging on the adapter to get a charge, it stopped working completely.  That´s the frustrating part:  I´ve got a perfectly functioning netbook, but the battery won´t charge.

I have most of the stuff backed up on my external hard drive, but there are still some things that I´d like to get off of it before I officially toss it aside.  As it happens, I´ve got a volunteer friend who´s got the same netbook as me, so next time I see her I´m gonna ask to use her netbook to charge my battery to 100%, giving me a good 8 hours to rescue any documents I didn´t have a chance to save (including 2 blog posts!).  I don´t know when I´ll be able to get that done though…we can´t leave our provinces for the first 3 months of service, meaning I may have to wait until at least the middle of June in order to see this volunteer.

Then comes the next step:  getting a new computer.  Sure I could try to get my netbook fixed as it´s just over a year and a half old, but it was already starting to run slow and I´d rather put money towards a new computer rather than put money into an old one that my have another problem not too far down the road.  So I can do one of two things.  The first would be to travel to Panama City and buy a new computer there.  I think they´re about the same price as laptops in the States so there´s no problem with that.  However, if I got insurance on it and brought it back home with me, it wouldn´t be valid in the States.  Also, Spanish keyboards are different than English keyboards.  Not by much, but enough to be a bit confusing.  I don´t know if it´d be a good or bad thing to have a Spanish keyboard, but it definitely would be a conversation starter when I got back home, haha.  Second, I can have my parents buy a netbook for me in the States and send it to me here in Panama.  If they did that, any insurance they buy would be valid when I got home and I´d have a fully English keyboard.  I´m a little hesitant about sending a new computer through the mail though, as you never know who´s hands it will pass through.  Of the two choices I´m leaning towards getting one shipped from the States to Panama.  Packages from the States have been taking between 7 and 10 business days, not too shabby, so if I wanted a computer pronto I could have one by the end of the month.  But I at least want to look at what Panama City has to offer, so I think next Friday I´ll ask for permission to leave my province and go check out their laptops, then I´ll make a final decision.

Shame this happened right when I was getting on the blog writing kick!  Internet was out at my school all last week so I couldn´t use the computers to get any posts up, but it seems to be working now so there´ll be more updates as long as there´s internet.  If you´ve got any input on a good laptop Stateside, preferably a netbook with a camera to Skype with, let me know!  Right now I´m looking at the Asus - Eee PC T101MT-EU47-BK, a netbook where the top swivels to turn into a tablet.  It looks pretty cool, but any input concerning the latest models from you guys would be awesome!

 

-Nate

Reawakening

I’ve been doing some thinking (a dangerous pastime I know).  It’s been over 3 months now in my Peace Corps stint in Panama.  To tell the truth I’m incredibly happy here and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.  I’ve changed a lot since coming here, but in some ways I’ve remained the same.  You all know me, and you know that during the past I’ve slacked on some things in my life (that could even be an understatement).  I haven’t treated this Peace Corps experience the same way – I’ve actually been doing some pretty great things in the small amount of time I’ve been here.  But in other areas I’m still the same old me…in more important areas as a matter of fact.

I left January 10^th knowing that I’d be gone for almost a whole year before I get to see any of you again, and I promised you all that I’d keep you updated, keep you close to my Peace Corps experience so you’d in a way be right here with me.  But as you can see, it’s been over a month since I’ve updated my blog.  Not much has happened in that span of time, but at the same time so much has happened.  You don’t know too much about what I’m doing, just that I’ve gone to Panama to teach English.  But how am I doing it?  How am I living my life right now?  You’re all pretty much clueless to my day-to-day life, and I want to share it with you.  I’ve slacked on some pretty important things in the past, and it’s been gnawing on me that I’ve been slacking on my Peace Corps blog as well.  In reality though, it’s not the blog I’m slacking on.  It’s you – the friends and family who’ve been so close to me throughout my entire life.  It was this realization that inspired a sort of reawakening for myself and this blog.  You deserve better than a once-a-month look into my new life, and you can be sure that you’ll get something better from now on.

What’s more, in not updating as often as I should, I know that I’m disappointing Future Nate.  Sure sometimes this can be an uneventful life that I’m living, and the little things that happen on a daily basis I remember weeks and months later, but what about in a year?  In 23 months?  In 10 years?  I don’t want to forget this experience, but day by day I know it’s slipping away.  I don’t want it to.  I want to look back on this blog one day and remember what I was feeling during my experience and what I went through to get to the end of my service.

So to all of you who I’ve left in the dark these past 3 months, and to Future Nate – I’m sorry.  But hey, I’ve got 23 more months here!  And I don’t plan to let those go by unshared.  I came across a blog of a fellow Peace Corps volunteer here in Panama a few weeks ago and she writes a pretty sick blog, updating a few times a week.  Little things that may seem uneventful at first glance, but in the grand scheme of things very important.  It’s inspired me to post this blog entry and to start posting more often.  All that being said, you’ll be seeing much more posts from here on out and I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy writing them.  Cheers!

Nate

The Next Step!

Hello Friends!

It's kind of late and I've got a big day ahead of me, but I wanted to write this one last post as a Peace Corps Trainee and give some of my thoughts about the past eight weeks and the next step in this grand adventure I'm undertaking.

Today I swear in to become an official Peace Corps Volunteer!  It's both exciting and intimidating at the same time.  At 12:30 pm the buses pick us up from Ciudad del Saber and take us to the Panama Canal Museum in Casco Viejo, the old historic part of Panama City.  There, at 2:00 pm, all 54 volunteers (myself included) will solidify our commitment to a full two years of service with the Peace Corps.

The past eight weeks have been a whirlwind of work, fun, friends, and new experiences.  Yesterday morning we left our training community of Santa Rita for good, saying our farewells to our host families and joining here in Ciudad del Saber on the outskirts of Panama City for the last bit of training we need before we swear in.  I had a fantastic time in Santa Rita, getting to know everything that is Panama and bonding with a variety of people with common interests:  to assist the people of Panama with various Teaching English/Environmental Conservation projects; to learn about Panamanian culture; and to share our American culture with the people of Panama.  The days were long and the information at times overwhelming, but it was all preparation for these next two years of service.

It's a very bittersweet period in my Peace Corps experience.  The people I've been seeing and hanging out with for the past 8 weeks will take the vow alongside me and commit to the official two years of service.  Thursday morning we'll leave for a beach near Fallarón and spend Thursday through Saturday having one last stretch of fun in the sun together before we leave for our respective sites throughout Panama, starting our assignments the following Monday.  During the first 3 months we're not allowed to travel outside of our provinces, and we're not to spend the night outside of our sites.  I'll be able to make day trips to hang out with Volunteers in my province of Coclé, but other than that I'm pretty much on my own, living with my new host family and becoming integrated into my community and my school.

It won't be easy, I can tell you that much right now.  Leaving all of my US friends was incredibly hard as it was, and now leaving all of my new Peace Corps Panama friends will be another great challenge.  Spending two months with these new friends of mine helped me adjust to Panamanian culture and its way of life, but now I'll be on my own.  I have no doubts about my commitment to these next three months, or the next two years in general.  I've thoroughly enjoyed myself thus far, love my new site I'll be serving in (post about that coming soon), and am very excited to start teaching in my school.  I'm a pretty flexible person, able to adapt to any situation and make the best of it while constantly maintaining a positive attitude, and that will be incredibly important in the months and years to come.

Despite all of that, tomorrow will be a scary/exciting/intimidating/emotional day, and after all is said and done I know I will be at peace with myself, sure of my decision to join the Peace Corps and fully undertake the adventure of a lifetime.  Thanks to everyone for all of the support, old US friends and new Peace Corps Panama friends alike.  It means so much to me, and I couldn't have come this far without all of you sticking by my side.  By next post's time I'll (FINALLY) be an official Peace Corps Volunteer and will being the long and winding road to a fulfilling and memorable adventure.  Wish me luck!

Much Love and Many Thanks,
Nate

First Teaching Experience!

Salutations Amigos!

I thought it was about time for another post or two.  Sorry they haven’t been more frequent…I know you’re probably thinking I’ve dropped off the face of the Earth, but I’m still very much here!  The past week and a half has actually been super busy and exciting, so busy and exciting that I’m kind of doing a two-parter post.  I’ll post this guy and wait a few days for hungry eyes to devour, then in a few days I’ll post the second.  This first one is about my first teaching experience with Peace Corps!

Last Monday Tuesday and Wednesday (Feb. 27-29) the other volunteers and I had our technical week, where we got our first chance to teach in a real classroom setting.  It was in La Chorrera, a fairly large town about 30 minutes away from my site in Santa Rita.  Because school started at 7 and we had to catch a chiva at 6, I had to get up at 5:30 those 3 days.  Since I’m EST now, that means I got up at 4:30 for all of you CST people.  Yeah, it sucked but it is what it is!

The days we went to teach were the first 3 days of the new Panamanian school year.  The 8^th-12^th grade students had just had their summer vacation.  The Earth Science part of my brain went haywire…I assumed that it was considered winter for Panama because it is still in the northern hemisphere, but that’s not how it works.  Panamanians basically have two seasons, summer and winter, but more often than not they’re called the dry season and the rainy season.  So as it were, the students’ summer vacation or “dry season” vacation had just come to a close, and they were ready to start their first trimester.

Like most things in Peace Corps, none of the volunteers knew what to expect.  We were told to write up lesson plans, but we didn’t have a clear starting point or any direction whatsoever because 1) it was the start of a new school year and 2) we had only spent a few hours talking with our teacher-counterparts the previous week.  In my case, my teacher was sick the day the volunteers met the teachers so I was completely clueless.  On top of that, when I arrived at his class on Monday morning he said he wasn’t ready for me and that Tuesday would be better.  The nerve!   I sat in on another class instead and saw a different teacher in action, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.  Tuesday and Wednesday were much better though!  I introduced myself to the class in Spanish and helped my teacher teach introduction questions (What is your full name?, How old are you?, Where are you from?, What is your address?, etc.)  For a couple of the classes my teacher had other stuff to do so he left me to teach the class by myself.  It was intimidating at first but turned out to be a really great experience.  One student asked “Are you coming back on Thursday and Friday?” and I answered no, then they asked “How about Monday?” and I answered no, then they simply asked “Why?”  That felt really good, to know that the students liked having me there and wanted me to permanently stay and teach along with their regular teacher.

During those three days I couldn’t help thinking “I’ve become the thing I hate!”  During the morning recreo (break) I would sit in the cafeteria with other “faculty members” (volunteers), drinking coffee and asking how their classes went.  I would shuffle through my papers, uttering phrases like “I’m free next period” and “I’ve got a double period teaching 11^th graders.”  During class, when I would ask for a volunteer and Student A would point at Student B, I would walk over and stand in front of Student B before handing the dry-erase marking off to Student A instead (yep, I was that kind of teacher :P).  It was crazy to experience all of that.  If back in high school I could see myself now, I would think it was some sort of sick joke.  But believe it or not, I actually really enjoyed it and it got me really excited to see what the school and students in my permanent community will be like.  And with that bit of foreshadowing, I’ll stick a fork in this post and call it done!

Miss you all,

Nate