I stole the theme of this from my days with @FitGirlsGuide, when I thought I was chubby in college and bought an e-book to learn how to workout and meal plan, and bought into the lies of an online fitness community. Our hashtag was always #ProgressNotPerfection, which is nice in theory, but I’m a little too competitive for that. Also it wasn’t vegan enough for me so peaced on outta there.
Anyway.
The last week of life didn’t leave me too much time to be unbearably homesick. While I’m definitely not over that hump, I started making progress with creating healthy distractions: primarily, the distraction of making work for myself.
This week I spent over 10 hours in my school observing the Pre-Kinder and Kindergarten class, and I learned just how much joy could exist in one room. The 16 students, aged 4 and 5 years old, brought out insane positive energy in me. My first day of observation I sat quietly, took notes, and asked lots of serious questions to my Maestra; I avoided interacting with the kids at all in an effort to be a fly on the wall. By my last day of observation with them, I was hopping along with them in their physical education class and helping them paint flowers with cotton swabs. I now have 16 new friends who all know my name and teach me new things in Spanish! They also reminded the Maestra many times that I don’t eat meat, that I’m from Michigan, and that my name has two “H”s. They’re smart little kiddos and they pay more attention to me than most of the adults I’ve met. Next week I’ll be observing the 1/2/5 grade class, and I can only hope they’re as welcoming and excited to meet me as my younger pals.
After spending time in my school, I learned about some of the projects they are specifically interested in, including: recycling (programa de reciclaje), organic gardening (huertos orgánicos), trash cleanups (limpiezas), and environmental education/lessons (educación ambiental). I’m also interested in putting my coaching background to good use by becoming involved in their physical education classes. Given all of this information, I spent lots of time this week brainstorming and planning things, probably prematurely, to present to my Directora. I worked on a detailed school garden plan for over five hours sketching out the school, all of the available space to grow food, color-coding beds, making a plant list, incorporating outdoor learning spaces, making sure to include a learning garden outside of the production beds, and of course drawing in a bean tee-pee, my favorite addition to any children’s garden. I also brainstormed resources for starting a recycling program, environmental ed. topics for each grade (really wish I brought a Spanish copy of “The Lorax” with me…) and themes for a physical education curriculum. I’m definitely getting ahead of myself, but if it keeps nasty thoughts at bay, I’m going to keep at it.
I also tutored a kid in English this week. He goes to school in Boquete but lives in my community, and he’s a very mature 10 years old. We didn’t get much tutoring done, but he told me he wanted to learn about American music instead, which in a weird way is still English education, so I obliged. We ended up spending two hours listening to The Strokes, The Shins, Arctic Monkeys, and Hot Mulligan, as well as a little bit of Lincoln Park (per his request; he knew them from a movie soundtrack). I refuse to let him think American music is just Katy Perry and J-Biebs; this is my chance to leave a lasting impact on this kid’s life and I am going to make the most of it. We have tutoring every week now, and you bet our soundtrack is going to consist of more obscure punk bands and new-age folk every week, combined with me bringing a selection of Walt Whitman poems and Kurt Vonnegut short stories for him to practice reading (my library is limited here, and not much of it is kid-friendly). His mother might fire me as he becomes filled with more angst and rebellion from my selections, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I think we’ll also start writing each other letters, because it would be fun to exchange letters with him every week; mine written in Spanish and his in English, so we can both get some practice in.
I worked on expanding my saved-seed collection for starting my own garden and for the school garden. I had two kinds of tomato seed, cucumber, and melon seed drying. Unfortunately, my host mom didn’t realize what it was and pitched it all out to wash the dishes they were in. I guess that means I’ll just have more work to do this week, and also more vegetables to buy so I can pilfer them for seeds.
I had my first meeting with the Ministero de Medioambiente, or MiAmbiente (or MiAm), which is the government agency here that works with the environment. MiAmbiente has regional offices in all of the provinces, so I went to my meeting at the office in David on Thursday. While I didn’t have much to contribute to the meeting, I was educated quite a bit on what kind of support is available to our communities and what’s expected of me at these monthly meetings. Additionally, I got to meet all of the other CEC volunteers in my province at this meeting, which was wonderful. I was invited to participate in some of their projects as well, while I’m getting my bearings and learning the ropes of community organizing in Chiriquí.
I felt productive by adding social events to my calendar this month as well, such as birthday parties, a trip to Boquete, basketball with the muchachos, and a schedule for pasear-ing in certain parts of my community (pasear-ing is just going to people’s houses and chatting for a while). I also have a Panamanian friend working on getting me a guided hike of Volcán Barú very soon!
Living in the mountains is lovely because there are massive white pines to greet me while I climb in elevation. It feels like seeing old friends, after so much time with tropical trees.
I was somewhat lucky to have a misunderstanding this week turn into a crazy opportunity, wherein my host mom for some reason thought I needed to do a census of my entire community, and sent me off to do a census with some other jóvenes. I got to visit literally every single house in my community, and got some face-time with every single family. It took over five hours, and my legs are insanely sore from walking up and down the slopes of our mountainside, but it was time well spent. I made sure to tell everyone that I would be returning another day to chat, so they know to expect me back. Unfortunately, I now know that actual size of my community, and it is much larger than I thought; I will need many many weeks to cover this much ground. My community is actually split up into 4-ish different geographic sectors, and it’s a decent hike in between each one. Luckily, I have over two more months of integration time to accomplish my goal: the plan is to revisit every house at least once. If I can do it all in one day, I can totally do it again in the next two months. By the time I’m done with this, my Spanish should be #flawless and my glutes and calves should be rock solid. I should also have a pretty decent community map drawn, which is another goal of mine.
In between everything I’m sticking on my calendar, I’m leaving time to make and study vocab lists in Spanish, read up on reforestation/native trees of Panamá, and do yoga (once I did yoga and studied simultaneously, but would not recommend: I don’t remember any of the vocab I studied while in downward-dog or side-angle). It’s been a little insane that I have almost 60-90 minutes to practice yoga every day, but my body has loved it; I held a headstand for over 2 minutes this week!
Basically, things started shaping up when I started filling up my calendar, making priorities out of possibilities, and taking advantage of really random invitations to do things. It’s ended in some really fun times (like the birthday party I went to on Saturday night, wherein I drank three beers and socialized like a pro) and some really awkward shit (accidentally ending up in Catholic prayer circle at a woman’s house with a rosary in hand, waiting for it to burst into flame while everyone said the rosary prayers in Spanish for almost two hours – did ya’ll know there’s a prayer for every bead on a rosary?!).
I’m learning that too much down time here is a bad thing, but so is too much scheduled time. I’m working to find a balance of social time and time alone, because they’re both really important right now. It’s a hard balance to strike, especially for someone like me who typically thrives independently and values alone time so much. However, my job is to do community environmental conservation, not independent environmental conservation! Amidst the sea of insanely diverse emotions I’m feeling about this experience, I can still make progress on becoming a part of this community and figuring out my role here. Therefore, I will continue trying to put myself out there – emphasis on trying.
#ProgressNotPerfection,
Hanamá
P.S. It is COLD here ya’ll! I spend every day in my fleece after 2 pm! Also I have fleas in my house/bed. Send sunshine and flea spray, please.
This is where I live!