Peace Corps Swear in

On march 14th I swore in as a official Peace Corps Volunteer. After 2 and half months it was a huge celebration. After a year deferment and almost another year of waiting I was finally an official Peace Corps Volunteer.  Here are some photos of me and my friends. All shots of me were taken by my great friend fellow PCV Felipe from North Carolina.

My great friends Felipe and Rebecca. Such an amazing team and volunteers. Rebecca wrote a beautiful speech on behalf of the CEC sector and spoke in front of many higher ups in government. She spoke in perfect Spanish! 

My "Aunt" and I.  Sarah is such wonderful friend. She is serving with indigenous communities in The Darien.

My family and I. We were part of the same clan during training. They held me down.

I was so happy! 

My friend Adrians. She is so full of light. She is serving in Veraguas.

Emily and Sally from Texas! Both amazing women.

My sis Stephanie from Miami. Wonderful woman in the Teaching English sector.

Sarah

One of my best friends. Tom from the DMV. He is a fool! So funny and a great volunteer. 

The Places That Scare Us

Fear handicaps. It takes hold of you and squeezes until you cannot breathe nor move. Fear kills.  Lately I have been very afraid and that fear almost killed my happiness and my effectiveness as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I am not afraid of meeting people nor am I afraid of Spanish. I speak the language recklessly. Spewing poorly conjugated verbs and made up Spanglish nouns. I do this without shame like a toddler learning to walk. I fall all over the place gleefully ready to learn. The fear of failure is my monster.  It haunts my dreams as well as my mornings.  A huge part of it is ego. I want to be the best Peace Corps Volunteer ever. I think my group is the best Peace Corps group ever!   That ego combined with a huge need to be helpful makes the prospect of disappointing my community too much to bear at times.  My father refers to this the trap of being awesome. There have been times when my want to leave my community in awe of my ability to be witty, giving, and creative has superseded my want to simply experience. It is at these times that my lack of wit, my rigidness creatively, and my inability to give or do anything hurts the most. My first 3 months here in my community are about me learning about the place and people that I live with.  I sit for hours in a school and watch. I cannot teach right now. I cannot start any projects.  I want to pasear (visit and talk)
 to 11 houses a day yet the heat, which at times reaches 100 degrees, prevents that. I can only experience. Sometimes I fail even at that. It can be tedious and hot and there is no place to show or do. That ego and that fear of failure trapped me for many days. I couldn’t get out of bed and racked my brain how everybody would see me as fraud. All the Peace Corps Volunteers that I admire would be disappointed, as would my community. It got so bad that the thing that I was afraid of most, failing my community, I began to do. I shrunk away from the people in my community and ran to things that would give me comfort from the Monster of failure. For me, it was the easy access to Internet. For others it is food, or love, or liquor, or shopping. Whatever it is that we use to deter us from the things we are afraid of only prolongs that pain. Instead of looking at that monster we run and run creating a cycle. I was afraid of failure.  So afraid that I began to fail which would make me feel worse and want to sooth the pain of it.    

            I believe in the power of meditation and self-actualization. A leader in meditation Pema Chordron speaks at length about the power of fear in our lives. She has a book “The Places that scare you: A guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times “, and reading it helped me allot.  I knew that the only way to conquer this monster was to first look at it. Looking at it was painful. No one wants to see himself or herself as egotistical or needy. No one wants to see that they have actually not been mindful. However it is the only way to get over it.  I looked at myself and decided I had to change the pattern that I was in or I would stay emotionally stuck and would not have an effective or happy Peace Corps Service. I gave myself very small goals in order to battle my fear.  Here are the goals I made for myself:

            Get out of Bed

            DO NOT use the computer in the morning

            Leave the House

            Go to School

            Visit 2 houses

Finding peace

These things may seem very easy but when you are handicapped by fear they can be impossible. Little by little I began to be able to look at that monster and fight. I was able to be more present in the moment and exhibited more control over myself. This allowed me to give more of myself. My experiences with people in my town were rich and substantial. I was happy and at peace. Of course I am not finished. I will have to teach myself these lessons over and over again. Like a toddler I will stumble and fall many times yet I will get back up gleefully ready to try again.  I urge you all to continue to explore the places that scare you and to fight against those monsters that haunt you. Your life will be richer for it. 

Good Gossip

Gossip or Bonchinche in Spanish can be an awful thing. It can destroy reputations and end friendships. However I am finding that it can also be very helpful. My community is small by U.S. standards. There are 1,000 people here. It is rural and is about 40 minuets away from the city. Gossip is a major form of entertainment here. If I leave to run an errand in the city, the whole town knows. They know what I cooked for my family and tell me about later. This is really strange for me as I am from a large city where no one knows or cares what you are doing.

            One day I was walking around the community and looking at housing options. I live with a family for my first 3 months and after that I get my own place.  The 2 options provided by the Peace Corps were not suitable for me.  One was $100 a month which is crazy expensive here. It also was across the street from the biggest bar in town, which is both annoying and dangerous (although I would have a gate surrounding my house). The other was beautiful but far away from the majority of people.  While walking I ran into my dream house.  It was in the middle of town, close to family here, and beautiful.  It had a lovely porch with aqua blue columns. There were 3 large floor to ceiling doors that doubled as windows.  It was love at first sight.  I said to my compeneros “ Wow. I love that house!  Its my Casa de suenos (dream house)”.  They looked at me like I was crazy.  “Why would you want to live in a old house like that? “  “I heard there were ghost that lived there!”  I stood undeterred I loved the house.  There was a problem however, the landlord was the widowed wife of the last inhabitant and lived 4 hours away. I didn’t have a way to contact her.  2 days after I said I loved the house the whole town knew. They called it “Temps casa de suenos” and laughed at the fact that I liked old houses. 1 week after I said I loved the house the grand daughter of the landlord came to me. She had talked to her grandmother about me. 3 weeks after, I walked past my dream house to see men working furiously in the back yard hacking up overgrown weeds. The grandma was in the yard waiting for me.  She invited me inside the house. It was spacious and cool. I loved it even more!  She showed the other houses she had. These houses were modern with indoor bathrooms (rare for my community). I still loved the old house. She said that I could live there for $20 a month and use the stove and furniture from the other houses. I got my dream house!  I owe all this to some good gossip.  

Photos of the day: Nature at it's finest

I live in a very beautiful country. Panama has amazing bio diversity. Here are shots of the land. All original photographs shot by me.

The Panties

My cheeks were burning and it was not because of the hot sun beating down on me. It was washday and now it was time to hang up my semi hand washed clothes. There were a group of men in front of me, family but still men. My host dad, grandpa, brothers, and cousins were sitting lazily about the patio enjoying watermelon and talking. I froze.  It was time to hang up my underwear. In a few moments my panties would be flapping in front of their faces. The dainty ones, the sexy ones, the grandma draws, the holey forever stained ones would be drawn up in the air like flags for all the world to see. I grimaced as I tried to develop a strategy to hide them. Dresses in the front draws on the line behind. Only it didn’t matter, a whole group of people would have a good view wherever they stood. Also no one else shared my embarrassment. If you walk around my community on any given day there are lots of panties hanging. People don’t try to find a discreet place to dry them either. You find them on the spears guarding the welcome gate of a home. You find them strung up above your head when you sit on a porch. They are inescapable. In the U.S. nobody sees my underwear except for whoever glimpses while I'm washing clothes or if I specifically WANT them to see them. Which is very rare grandma J I had to grin and bear it. People here do not have the luxury of having fancy dryers inside of their home. I am lucky that part of my wash is taken care of by a small washing machine. I have to rinse and scrub the clothes after and then hang them up. The rest of my community does it without shame. This says more about U.S. culture then it does about them and it inspires me. One day…not now but one day I will not feel embarrassed to see my panties blowing in the wind.   

Fellow PCV Alex from Ohio shot the photograph

Letters from my students

I hope you have a good time where you are going to help people that live in the jungle.

I hope you have a good time in Panama. I hope you can bring me back a coconut from the jungle.

Before I was a Peace Corps Volunteer I was a Teacher. I worked in a inner city school in one of the most violent and poor neighborhoods in a city that is plagued by violence and poverty. My children saw far more and experienced far more then any child should. Although their lives were hard, they had bright lights and energetic spirits. I recently came across the letters they wrote me as I was leaving for Peace Corps Service and would love to share some of the letters with you.

Note: I do not have long, flowy, red hair. I have a dark Afro lol

I will miss you and I love(d) when you would read to us. 

I am going to miss you. But when you go can you send a picture of you and those sweet nice people.    :)

Photos of the Day: Sisters & Family

This shot was taken a few days before it was time to say goodbye to my host family. These are all the "Children" or second and third generation of the family. It is a very raw shot and captures the beauty of my family in Los Mortales.

This was a shot that I took during a volunteer site visit. These young girls had seen allot even in their young age. I could tell by their eyes.