Panamania

July 2013 During the first year of service I met Marumi, a JICA (the Japanese Equivalent of the Peace Corps) volunteer, during an event organized to create networking opportunities and collaborations amongst environmental volunteers throughout the country.   During the seminar Marumi got along very well with Ernesto (the leader of Piedras Gordas’ environmental co-op) and me.   Although we are both environmental volunteers our organizations have different goals and focuses.   I was assigned to live in and work on projects in a single community for two years, whereas Marumi lived in an ANAM (Panamanian Environmental Protection Agency) complex and travel throughout the country to train Panamanians in various environmental conservation techniques.   Marumi told Ernesto and me that she was interested in coming to Piedras Gordas to work with the environmental co-op and to see some of the techniques that Peace Corps Volunteers use to manage community environmental proj...

July 2013 For the past 10 months maestro Gabriel (the headmaster and one of the teachers at my school) had invited me to come to his house in Santiago (a provincial capital 3 hours from Piedras Gordas) for the weekend.   Each time he invited me I already had previous engagements for the weekend, or something else I preferred to do; so I kept turning him down.    To be perfectly honest I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of spending the weekend with him and his family.   Gabriel is a nice enough guy, but he comes off as a bit uptight and is not someone that I considered to be particularly fun.   He frequently goes on tirades against reggaeton music and popular Panamanian culture, and absolutely refuses to dance (which is unheard for Panamanians).    However, after months of pushing back the trip to Santiago I felt obliged to spend a weekend at his home with him and his family.   So when I finally had a free weekend, I told Gabriel and we organize...

June 2013 As Peace Corps Volunteers we are often presented with opportunities to help other NGOs working in Panamá with their projects.   One of the opportunities frequently presented to us is to work as translators for groups of traveling doctors (usually from the US), which travel to underserved communities to provide free basic health care. Last year I worked as a translator for a group of optomolegists that came to Panamá from throughout the United States through the Lion’s Club, to provide eye exams and free glasses for rural Panamanians.   This past June, Chelsea, a Peace Corps Volunteer from my group, invited a group of traveling doctors to come to her community to provide basic dental and health care.   I jumped at the opportunity to help when Chelsea asked me if I’d like to translate for the medical gira (tour).   Not only is it a very rewarding experience to be able to help people receive the health care that they need, but it was also an opportunity...

March 2012-March 2014    Waste management in Panamá has been the primary focus of my work during my Peace Corps service, however I have been lucky enough to dedicate my time to a number of other secondary projects such as teacher training, environmental classes, computer classes for children and adults, building capacity for ecotourism businesses, constructing eco-stoves, promoting organic agriculture, youth mentorship, and HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention. Working in the Schools One of my primary assignments as community environmental conservation volunteers is to help train the primary school teachers to incorporate dynamic teaching methods and environmental themes into their lessons.   To do this I developed an environmental curriculums for pre-kinder through sixth grade, held class planning sessions with the teachers, and encouraged them to co-teach my classes.   The environmental themes that we touched on ranged from protecting plants and animals, ...

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...