My Panama, My Adventure

It all started when Marina came to visit me. Sharing the country, the culture, and the Peace Corps experience with her gave me such a sense of pride in what is now My Panama. It has taken almost a year but I am finally “in like” with this country. Many of the things that irritated me in the beginning are now endearing and the rest are routine. Washing my clothes by hand is no longer a chore but a welcome upper-body workout. The weather is not hot. The weather simply is. And I am not just surviving my Peace Corps experience. I am experiencing it.

I have been in my new site for almost three months and I am really beginning to feel a sense of purpose. I provide training and consulting services to an NGO (non-governmental organization, e.g., nonprofit) that does some amazing work in helping families to overcome poverty while combating deforestation. With strategic planning in full swing and a leadership training series launched, I was a dozen different shades of excited before the unrest started to make the news.  The reasons for the clashes are complicated and frankly as a Peace Corps volunteer, none of my business. I am nonetheless affected by it.

The first alert was called for one particular region of the country, then another. Now, every volunteer in the Panama is on alert. For the most part, our orders are to be aware, to be still, and to be prepared. Hopefully, things will settled down sometime soon but if they do not, the place that I am finally “in like” with could quickly become the place where I used to live. The daily walks to the market to buy one tomato, the year-round summer wardrobe, the pink “rug” that I painted onto my dungeon – I mean kitchen – floor… it could all be a thing of the past, long before I am ready to say goodbe and there is nothing I can do about it.

In the middle of all of this uncertainty, I am sure of two things: 1) it is all worth it, and 2) for as long as there is breath in my body, my adventure will not end. Whether it is sooner or later, I will one day say farewell to My Panama. But whether in Latin America, the U.S., or some other part of the world, my adventure shall continue.