The start of Peace Corps Training...

Since leaving the States about four weeks ago I feel like I´ve witnessed a fair amount of Panamanian culture. But something tells me what I´ve seen won´t even compare to what´s ahead of me in the next two years.

Look in the bag!

I live in a small town (about 1,000 people) called Santa Clara, outside of Panama City. Santa Clara is the location of Peace Corps training, and where the 33 new Peace Corps volunteers are all living and studying until the end of October. Each of us lives with our own host family in this small, quiet community. I live with a retired military officer and a nurse, who have two children: 14 and 25. For Panama, they are a well educated and affluent family. However, there is still a drastic difference from the United States. We have running water to the house, most of the time, but no bathroom. There´s a pit toilet in the backyard, but you have to work your way through all the chickens to get to it. The house is small and made of concrete block, but we do have electricity. Arturo´s (my host father) very proud of the fact that he owns a car, as not many in the community do, and he spends much of his time helping those who can´t pay for transportation to/from the city (an hour away).

Out in the Campo (countryside).

As a Peace Corps volunteer, I am working in the Environmental Health sector. There are about 15 of us in this batch of volunteers. Our work revolves around aqueducts (providing clean water), latrines, and health education. As an engineer, I´ll be working more with aqueducts and latrines than with education. Aqueduct work can involve anything from trouble shooting existing water systems to installing new systems from the ground up. Most of the work with water is located in the indigenous areas of Panama, where small communities bath, wash, drink, and go to the restroom all in the same river. As a volunteer I will help look for springs and design/build a gravity flow system to get fresh water to the communities. In some instances volunteers have to go as far as 10 or 15 kilometers (about 6 to 9 miles) to get clean water. The pipe carrying the water needs to be buried 28 inches underground back to the community, often traversing thick rain forests and geographical obstacles.

Bocas del Toro.

As for the work with latrines, some of the indigenous people use pit latrines, others use the river. To help encourage sanitary living situations, Peace Corps promotes a compost latrine. To keep this simple, a compost latrine is a way of turning human waste into "dry earth" or material that is safe to spread on open ground and even crops (although that´s a little more difficult to convince people of with little, if any, education).

The walk to class.

So far training has been interesting, but I am eager to move on to my site where I will spend the next two years. Right now we spend half our days in language training and the other half in technical training. For technical training we learn about how to work with the resources available in this country to improve the water and restroom situation. We´ve built rain water collection systems off of tin roofs, learned how to poor concrete, worked with machetes and organic gardens, and gone out into the countryside to troubleshoot an existing water system. Also, Peace Corps brings in existing volunteers to talk with us about what to expect and how to adjust.

We have been able to do a fair amount of traveling so far, from the Darien (bordering Columbia) to Bocas del Toro (bordering Costa Rica). I´ll do my best to attach some photos to this article, but the computers here are very slow so be patient with me. For today, I´m out of time. I hope that this gives you an idea of what life is like down here in Panama. I´ll write again soon.

Rob