¡Bienvenidos a Panamá!

Well I arrived safely in Panama! I left on Friday morning at 5:40 am and spent most of the day in Atlanta on a 9 hour layover, which was actually more fun than expected. The only bad part came when, after having waited patiently for 9 hours, thunderstorms began right when my flight was supposed to take off and we were delayed for another two hours. But I arrived in Panama unscathed and found my other staff members right away. We spent the first night in Panama City (which is huge and very cosmopolitan) before heading via bus to our city of Penonomé, which is in the Panamanian province of Coclé.

I realized that most of your probably don't know exactly what I am doing here in Panama so I will try to give a brief summary. I am here as a supervisor with Amigos de las Américas. Amigos is an non-profit from the US that focuses on youth leadership and multicultural understanding within the Americas. This summer, Amigos has 14 programs in 8 countries in Latin America. Each program is composed of about 9 staff members and 55 youth volunteers. The volunteers are broken into groups of two or three and placed in small, rural communities where they live for 6 to 8 weeks. In their communities, the youth from the US work with local youth groups and teach classes and do community improvement projects. As a supervisor, I will responsible for about 8 of those volunteers. Each week I will travel around and spend one night in each of my communities and generally just make sure that everything is going well. On the weekends I will live in the staff house (here in Penonomé).

Penonomé is a cute city of about 30 thousand people. We live on a quiet residential street, although there is also a shopping center and many parks. Our staff house is pretty big (a huuge living room, kitchen, dining area, four bedrooms, and three bathrooms!) so we have nicknamed it "el palacio". All of my fellow staff members are really great and interesting and we have been getting along well so far (although considering we have only been here for one night I guess that it is too early to tell...). So far we have spent most of our time here in the house training and planning for the next few weeks. Right now I am pretty nervous because tomorrow I will embark on "survey". That means that I will spend one night each in my four designated communities and I will have to figure out all of the logistics for the volunteers when they come. Considering that I have never been to these communities before, haven't met anyone who lives there, and am going by myself, it is quite a daunting task! But I am mostly excited. I should probably go pack my bag considering we are leaving at 7am!

Here are some photos of our house and the neighborhood: