¡Hola a todos!
We just finished our visit to Bajo Grande in the Province of Veraguas. This will be our home starting the beginning of September.
Bajo Grande is a little community in the south of Veraguas, not too far from the Pacific ocean. It has probably less than 100 people. Getting there can be a bit challenging since the “chiva” or 4x4 cab goes to our site every other day, and no more than twice a day. To get all the way in you have to cross the river three times (Rio Negro). Rio Negro is a clear, beautiful river that does not go higher than knee level.When the raining season hits, and the river is to high there is another way in that is a little longer. We are really lucky because it is just stunning there. It is placed inside some tall steep hills covered in dense green. You can spot cattle and horses roaming the hills. The weather is a bit cooler of what we had experienced in Panama so far (still hot, but tolerable).
People are quite nice is our new site. Everyone seems to work together, and share the little they have. From the very beginning they made us feel very welcomed, and showed their kindness right away.
Our host family was super nice. They have a big family, and still made room for us. Señora Doriana and Señor Santana made us feel like we were already family. They were curious about the life in the US, and what our family and friends were like. Also because I am from Colombia it helped build trust since there are many Colombians in neighboring communities.
There is no power but some houses have generators to turn on sporadically to do laundry or charge electronic devices. It will definitely be a challenge to live without electricity, but we will especially miss having a refrigerator. We will get to leave our site every couple of weeks to run arrands, and will make sure to rest ourselves then.
In our community mostly everyone is evangelical. We were a little worried about this at first, thinking it might be a little overbearing, but it turns out people are pretty accepting. We went to the religious celebration “el culto” (weird name, I know!) twice and it was filled with chanting, music playing and overall positive messages. Its pretty amusing because one guy hooks up and electric guitar to an amp and plays while others shake maracas, play tambourine and sing. There is no priest because sit is such a small community with difficult access, so someone from the community basically rambles on for a while until there is more music and singing. Definitely and interesting experience.
We had a busy week as we helped build a kitchen for the church with cement and block.
We went on a hike with Señor Santana and his son to get Penka, which is giant palm that people use the fronts to cover their houses. The walk was crazy beautiful in every direction, there was a horse and some cattle around. After they got the fronds from the tall palm we helped carrying them up hill and back to the house. Each of us carried 3 of the giant fronds and they were super heavy. After making it back home covered in sweat we helped building the hut for a little chicken coop.
We also had a meeting with community members to introduce ourselves and explain the reason we were there, since we are the first Peace Corps volunteers. They seemed very receptive and want to get to work in different projects. We set up some activities for the first three months like school and community gardens, organic compost making and working with the coffee trees which have overgrown too much and have become a problem to harvest.
We may be able to get horses!!!! which is a common way of transportation in the town, we talked to some people and got some ideas of where to get them. They seemed really affordable and it is an opportunity we can not miss. Another idea we have to explore is to get a couple of goats, I mean, why not?
We will be living with another family when we get back in September and will live with them for 3 months, then we’ll be able to live on our own. There are some houses that we could potentially rent. We can’t really wait to be on our own space and be a bit more relaxed.
We have talked about how inspired we feel to do so many things that we wanted to work on but did not have a chance since we were busy with jobs back in Portland. Now our job will be to focus on helping out the community of Bajo Grande, learn from them as well and create something together to thrive. We can’t wait to get back there and start being PC volunteers for real
