Buenas from the Promised Land! My apologies that I haven’t written in a while, but I am excited to share that things are progressing quite successfully! About a month ago I moved into a new host family to try to get away from the terror that is the two year old that lived in my old host house. Unfortunately this two year old was simply replaced by an equally obnoxious and quite rotund 6 year old. After about three weeks of living there, that host family then bought a restaurant and decided that I would be a perfect nanny for the chubby cheesecube, while they both worked from 5am to 8pm at the restaurant. Since planning ahead is not exactly a strength down here, rather than buying things for the restaurant they decided it would be best to simply take everything in their kitchen (including the stove) to the restaurant to use there. So a few weeks ago I found myself acting as the nanny of a 6 year old with an empty kitchen… needless to say we ate a lot of cold white bread and cheese sandwiches that week. Ironically, that same week I was supposed to move into my own house and be free of small Panamanian terrors; however, the day I was supposed to get the keys to my house, the owner decided that instead of renting the house, he wanted to sell it, so I therefore could not move there.  As one can imagine I was quite stressed because I knew I couldn’t stay in that host house, and I had nowhere to move to. All of this eventually led to me accepting an offer to live in a gorgeous home of a rich man who actually lives in Panama city but comes to the campo on the weekends. And that is where I currently am as I write this blog. The house is massive and beautiful and is about the last place I would have ever thought I would be living. Surprisingly my community was very supportive of this move and genuinely seem to just be happy that I have somewhere to live. I still plan on looking for a smaller house of my own, but for the time being I feel a lot more balanced and mellow when I come here. An added bonus is that there is a woman and her adult son who also live here so Im not alone, but still have my personal space.

Luckily in between all this housing mayhem I’ve stayed extremely busy with projects and adventures. We’ve recently started the clearing and planting fase of the reforestation project and the other day I went to help build a latrine and a campsite for the workers that will stay up on the mountain for a couple of months to plant. I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks when I can actually help start carrying the plants up and planting them. I also recently went on an environmental conference to a northern province and a teacher’s conference to an island off of panama city. Both were extremely interesting and not surprisingly very little work was actually done on these. However, both conferences gave me the opportunity to put my feet in both the Caribbean and pacific ocean. I also headed to the Darien (province that borders Colombia) for a regional meeting. In between all of this I prepared and held an entire community meeting. Although it wasn’t quite as successful as I had hoped, lots of people came and projects were discussed.  Also now that the meeting is over I have officially finished the observation period and can now start stepping in and helping to guide projects. Im hoping in the next few weeks we can get a good start on the massive school garden and clean up the park a bit.

Although this past month has been a stressful one, Im feeling very excited and energized for the upcoming few months.  I hope everyone is having an extremely enjoyable start to summer and please keep me updated on all of your lives. I promise another post will be coming soon.

Lots of love and sunshine,

Bridget