Day 19 - PCV Site Visit

On Thursday, August 27 another aspirante (trainee) and I got onto the 6 AM bus from Santa Clara headed for David. Nine hours (and 438 km) later… we got to David, the second largest city in Panama. Not much there though and we found our hotel, got some dinner and called it a night. Sodas with dinner and in bed by 8:30…pretty cool. Best part of the experience was being able to use a toilet that flushed, shower with hot water and sleep in a room with AC.

The next morning we caught the 5 AM bus from David to Changuinola, a small town in Bocas del Toro, to meet up with the volunteers whose sites we were going to visit. Due to late minute changes in plans, my site got changed and I ended up staying with a SAS (Sustainable Agriculture) volunteer instead of a CED volunteer. We crossed the mountains that make the spine of the country during the five hour drive from one side of the country to another. Once we got into the hills we could see the Pacific. As we ascended and lost sight of the ocean, 23 minutes later we were in view of the Caribbean. After arriving in Changuinola and meeting up with the volunteers we headed to their sites.

The volunteer I was staying with was from Ohio and has been in site for about a year. The community is made up of about 500 indigenous “Naso Teribe” people and is in the foothills of the mountains. We took a bus from Changuinola to the Costa Rican border and got onto a chiva (pickup truck with a canvas covered cage covering the bed where more people sit) about 30 minutes down a dirt road. Parts of it were missing from a massive flood in November which washed a lot more than the roads away. Many of the communities are still recovering from losing their homes, farms and families. Once we got off the chiva we began the hike to her house. The moment we began it started raining. We walked for 45 minutes through mud (marsh mucking in a jungle up a mountain), crossed a couple of rivers and finally made it to her house.

The house is on stilts with a thatched roof, one room, a deck and a shower underneath. It is surrounded by orange, mango and coconut trees and has a great garden with squash, melons, tomatoes, and other veggies. We ate a lot of these for dinner. Because of its location so high in the hills, the source of the water is clean and the pressure is strong enough to pump it to the shower and kitchen.

We took dried cacao granos (beans) and grinded them up into a paste and let it dry. This was pure and unsweetened chocolate and it was incredible. We used it to make cake and hot chocolate (because of the altitude and clouds it gets chilly – mid 60’s at night and in the morning).

The volunteer works with a lot of cacao farmers with maintenance, possessing and disease control of their crops. She also is introducing composting techniques, helping to organize their coops and other agricultural related issues. She also is a link between many outside agencies and the community, including healthcare, education, coops and sanitation. Many of these organizations wont come out to remote sites like these so the PCV acts as a facilitator for acquiring funding, information and support between the communities and these organizations. Another important role that volunteers provide is free entertainment. There is never any shortage of laughs or curiosity.

This weekend was a great chance to get to experience how PCV’s live. Panama has a diverse country, geographically, culturally and agriculturally, and volunteers do a diverse range of activities. One CED volunteer may be helping cacao farmers in Bocas while someone in the Darien may be helping a school get computers. Other aspirantes went to island locations and some were in the mountains. There are many different PC programs operating in Panama now, including Tourism/Education, Environmental Health, SAS and CED. A lot of the activities overlap and often volunteers will invite each other to share information with their communities. The SAS volunteer I stayed with was doing a lot of things that CED focuses on. It comes down to what the community wants what they find important.

These visits were also a chance for us to see what types of environments we could see ourselves in (Indigenous/Latino, mountains/coast, rural/less rural, etc). I still don’t have a strong opinion when it comes to site preference. I will probably leave it up to the program director to choose for me because they have a better idea of which sites go best with the different types of volunteers.