Panamania

November 2012-November 2013 Early on in my service, community members from Piedras Gordas and I identified waste management as the community’s largest environmental and health concern.   During a community meeting with my boss we decided that this would be focus of our primary community project.   I left that meeting feeling relieved that we had identified and agreed upon a tangible issue that we wanted to tackle.   However it was also a bit daunting to know that from then on the community would turn to me as the authority on waste management, and that I would be responsible for forming community members into a waste management group that would tackle vast and multifaceted issue. After that first meeting I spent the next few weeks planning out how to motivate community members to form a group and plan activities that would finally address the community’s waste management problems.   To generate interest for the upcoming waste management me...