In Panama!

I've only been in Panama for 48 hours but it feels like every minute has been jam-packed. We are staying at la Ciudad de Saber (City of Knowledge), an old American army base that is now used by various agencies and organizations for offices and temporary sleeping barracks. It is right across the street from the canal. We can see big ships gliding by.

Yesterday we spent all day in training sessions. We really hit the ground running and I'm very impressed with how well organized the Peace Corps is as an organization. Aside from all the acronyms they use. Seriously, listening to two Peace Corps people talk might be worse than listening to two doctors talk. And the fact that every male Peace Corps staff member has a beard... is that a requirement or something?

We had language interviews in the afternoon which were slightly daunting but I thought I did okay on mine - I had very low expectations for myself. The point of the interviews was just to place us in the right Spanish class. I'm not in the lowest or even the second lowest class, so I guess that's good. I've always been a visual learner and felt the need to see a word in a book or on a blackboard before I learned it but I really like the small, conversational Spanish classes here where we are forced to speak as much as possible. When I hear a word I don't know, I'll write it down phonetically and ask what it means or look it up later. It feels like a great way to learn so far; I guess we'll see how successful I am. I am finding that I understand everything that I hear, I'm just having trouble speaking and expressing myself. I think this is a normal level to be at, but I just happen to be in a group of a lot of fluent speakers. I'm also at the point where not only is my Spanish not enough, but my English is actually getting worse, so I can't express myself clearly in either language. It's really frustrating. Today I actually said "Yes of that I need also." In English.

Today we went to visit a current Peace Corps volunteer at her site about an hour and a half away. (I was really excited when I saw on the schedule that we didn't leave until 10am, but then realized that we had two hours of Spanish class first.) I was really excited to get out of the classroom and actually see Panama. It is GORGEOUS. Stupid gringos, we all got a little sunburnt, but we had a great day walking around her town and seeing all of the projects that this current volunteer (she came last year) is doing. And her house had water and electricity, which probably got our hopes up a little too high.

We move in with our host families tomorrow! We stay with a family for the next ten weeks of training in a community not too far from Panama City. After ten weeks of training, we'll be sworn in as volunteers (right now we're aspirantes, trainees) and we will move to our sites for the next two years. Right now it's time to concentrate on working really hard on our Spanish and our teaching skills! I've never slept so well at night. This is all pretty exhausting. But it's a nice exhaustion because it's from learning, learning, learning all day long.