Last week all of the trainees in my group travelled to different parts of Panama to visit current EH volunteers. I traveled to the Comarca Ngobe Bugle (indigenous reservation) in western Panama to visit a 2nd year volunteer. I took a 5.5 hour bus ride west from Panama City, and got off in a smal town in Chiriqui and met my volunteer there. Then we took a 30 min pick-up ride into the reservation. At this point the road stopped, so we got off and hiked about an hour into the valley to find her community.
The Ngobes speak Ngobe as their first language and Spanish as their second language, but you can get by just fine with just Spanish and a few Ngobe greetings. In the picture, I am wearing a traditional Nobe dress with traditional Nobe rubber boots (hah). All of the women and the girls wear these colorful dresses with the sawtooth pattern all of the time! Behind me is a world map the volunteer painted on the side of her house for the education of the community. She said a lot of adults were suprised how much water there is in the world, how tiny Panama is.
Visiting the volunteer Meredith for 4 nights was great, because I got to see what life is like. I realized that it takes a lot longer to do everything out in rural areas - cook, bathe with one bucket, and do laundry by hand. Everyone in her community is really friendly, and the kids like to hang out on her front porch all of the time to look at the map and play games. I fell in love with a puppy Lucky that we were dog-sitting for the weekend, and she definitely wanted to go home with me too!
It is a good thing I enjoyed my visit to the Comarca Nobe Bugle, because half of the trainees in my group will be placed there, and most of the rest will be in other indigenous sites where Spanish is the second language. Starting next week, my training group will spend 10 days in a Darien (province nearest to Colombia) community doing technical projects such as building pit and composting latrines. The week after that, we will find out our community placement! 