I´ve been out in Bocas Del Toro for the past week with the ten other "aspirantes" who will be moving out to that area of Panama for their service. Team Bocas!
We stayed with local families in a little Ngäbe village on Isla San Cristobal for a week of language and cultural training. Really a very beautiful place and beautiful people. I loved it and found it to be very much the kind of place where a Peace Corps volunteer could feel welcomed and needed. Especially environmental health volunteers like my group specializing in potable water and sanitation. In the community of several hundred people there is one composting latrine. Aside from that there are some "servicios" perched over the bay or little creeks running through the community. There is a gravity fed aquaduct that brings water from the hills above, but many of the homes aren´t connected, so we bathed and got water from a pair of community "quebradas" where a pipe from a stream above the village emptied out into a little creek (see picture above). We treated the water with chlorine or iodine before drinking it in case you were concerned.
Also in pic´s above are a shot of a woman crushing some seeds to make a dye for the fiber they use to make woven bags, a small money-making artisanry endeavor. Another shot of local kids and a couple of my PC colleagues out on a hike.
We´re all heading on to another Ngäbe town up in the hills of central Panama this week for "Tech Week" to work on latrine and aquaduct projects. I think that the rest of training is going to fly by. ´We´re back in our home base at the end of next week, but then out to our own sites for a five day visit before swear-in on October 22. I´ll hope to be able to post another update sometime soon.
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