My House!

Finally, here’s the update about my new house! It’s really more like an apartment, but it’s been wonderful having my own place and being able to cook and everything. Here are some photos:

My front porch:

 

My living room (I’m hoping to get a table muy pronto):

My bedroom:

Hallway:

 

My kitchen:

My bathroom:

The three things that have been the besr about living alone have been being able to eat what I want, when I want, being able to unpack my things (I’ve been living out of my bags for 6 months now… it gets old fast), and getting to decorate! I finally put up photos last weekend, which made me so happy, and made it feel like my place. 

Since my last post I have finished up working in the primary school, which included two days of celebration for the kind and queen of pre-school and kindergarten (it was incredible how big of a deal this was.... I was blown away) as well as a field day for the Día del Niño (Day of the Child). 

Here are some photos of the celebrations recently:

Me dressed up as a typical person from Los Santos (province)

 Me with the Reyna of Pre-school

 the Reyna and Rey on their float (back of a pick-up)

 me with a couple of my 3rd grade students (I think) on the Día del Niño

Then on  Saturday my parents got to town! It's been a great vacation so far and we have a few more days to go. I'll update with some great photos over the course of the next couple of weeks.

English Week

So just about every waking moment for the past two weeks has been devoted to preparing for the MEDUCA-dictated English Week. I’m pretty lucky because the teachers at my school got really into it.

Every Monday there is the weekly school meeting called the Civic Act/National Hymn where they say the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, the Pledge to the Flag and the Student’s Promise. They did all of this in English for English Week! Each one was led by a student – one student from each of the grades participated. The pre-school and kindergarten students hoisted the flag, the first grade student said the Oath to the National Flag, the second grade student said the Student’s Promise, the third grade student (my former host nephew – Roderik) said Hail Mary, the fourth grade student said the Lord’s Prayer, the fifth grade student read the program, and the sixth grade student read a short speech about the importance of English.

Afterwards, we gave all of the students certificates (that I made and printed, that was a formatting ordeal with the tienda that prints things that took an hour…) and I baked the Funfetti cupcakes that Mom sent me for my birthday and gave one to each of the students as well as the English teachers and a couple of others.

Then on Wednesday we had contests for each of the grades. The teachers had competitions in each of their classrooms to  choose one per class who would compete against the others in their grade. For these students, I also printed certificates and Eliseo, Rafael and I went to Santiago to get small gifts for each student. The contests were everything from reading a story, to picture identification, to reciting a poem, to a spelling bee.

Then Friday came the main event -  Talent Show! It was definitely stressful to prepare for, but the kids loved it. I have a whole new respect for those teachers and camp counselors who try to organize kids’ performances. Each grade ended up doing a different performance from songs like 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, to plays like The Three Little Pigs, to modeling and dancing. I put together a slide show that had the words to all of the plays or songs as well as translations into Spanish so the other teachers could understand more.

The last act – the 6^th graders – did a dance to the song “Follow the Leader” that I helped them put together. All of the other students loved it – I think it was the favorite act of the show!

I was happy to help out and put all of this together, but since I have a computer, speak English natively, and am a girl, a lot of the things fell to me like the powerpoint, the certificates, putting the gifts together, teaching the dance, making the houses for the Three Little Pigs, etc. So it was a very stressful couple of weeks.

One of the things that has started bothering me especially because I’ve been stressed is because of the primary school kids, when they want to say hi to me (which is every time they see me, no matter how many times in a day) they just say my name “Savannah! Savannah! Savannah!”. Normally it makes me smile, but the past couple of weeks since I’ve been kind of stressed, it sounds to me like it’s someone wanting my attention or wanting something from me. So when I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off this morning trying to get everything together at the last minute, having the kids calling my name every 5 seconds was more than I could handle.

My primary goal over the next week: teach the students to say “Hello, Savannah” instead of just calling out my name in order to greet me.

I’m also going to try to implement phonics with my primary school teachers over the course of the next 2 weeks that I’m with them. I’m worrying already about changing over to the colegio in August, but I guess it has to happen. I just wish there were two volunteers here so that I wouldn’t feel stretched so thin. But I’m lucky that I enjoy working with so many of my teachers and that I’ve had a warm welcome here. There are definitely worse feelings for a PCV!

But for the exciting news – my parents are coming to visit! They’ll be here for a week, and then I go to In-Service Training, which will be great to see the rest of the PCVs in my group. So July will be a good, if busy, month with all of the traveling I’ll be doing.

I'll upload photos soon of the kid in the Vandy shirt, English Week performances, and my house! I'm at the mall right now and I need to go buy some groceries and head back to site - I spent the night at my friend Miranda's last night for her birthday - there were 9 of us together, which was a lot of fun. Now back to work! And my PC TE boss, Joel, is coming to visit on Tuesday, so it'll be an official week. Busy busy busy as usual. 

Love and miss you all - I hope everyone has a very happy 4th of July!

Sav

The Month of June

6/26/12 

Hello friends –

I’m sorry that it’s been a while since I updated. I guess between getting settled here and how busy things have been, I haven’t gotten around to it. But here’s what’s been happening the last few weeks:

I finished out the first trimester at the primary school, working with the 4 teachers there. Then we had a week-long break between trimesters. The first weekend I just chilled here in Pesé, but then on Monday I ventured to the province of Coclé to go to the beach – Santa Clara. It was really great – I ended up seeing 13 other volunteers from my group as well as a handful of older volunteers. We camped on the beach under these little ranchitos, which was a fun experience – chilling on the beach all day and night was great. Though, I have to say, sand is not nearly as comfortable to sleep on as I imagined it to be. But we had a great, relaxed time. We also found 2 AMAZING restaurants right off of the InterAmericana near the beach. One was a nice Spanish restaurant that I hope to take my parents to and the other was basically an American sports bar owned by this couple who is stuck in the 70’s (the probably 60-year-old husband had a mullet that was down to his waist…) – but they served the most delicious burgers… It felt like we were back in the States for a bit. Overall I relaxed, got some sun, some Frisbee time, and a lot of time with good PCV friends! Most people left on Thursday, but I was talked into staying until Friday when I finally made the trek back to Pesé.

On Saturday I woke up kind of in a funk – I think it was because I felt like I had just left all of my friends who are here in Panama and I don’t feel quite that close to people in my site. But later that day I ended up meeting up with Steve and Heather in Chitre and shopping for kitchen appliances, then I spent the nigh at Miranda’s house in Parita with 5 other volunteers (and an Australian friend of a PCV – the first person from Australia I have ever met!) as a housewarming party. It was a lot of fun to see them too – one of which I hadn’t seen since training and I missed her a ton!

Sunday was a blur because I was pretty tired, but then when I got to school on Monday I realized how silly I was being on Saturday – I was actually really happy to be back at school. I’m feeling really connected to one of the English teachers in particular, and a few of the other teachers and staff are really nice and always make me laugh. One of these is the science teacher, Celson. He is always cracking jokes and making me laugh. Put him with the woman who cooks and takes care of the cafeteria, Kathia, and you can’t stop laughing, or singing typical Panamanian music. Then there’s Señora Maribel who sits in the library, makes copies for the students, and opens the school in the morning – she’s as sweet as can be and is good company when I’m working in the library or waiting for the English teachers. Lastly, there’s Maria, one of the cleaning staff, who I have gotten to know through working with her to learn a song for the English Week Talent Show. So long story short, I’ve been feeling more and more connected at school, which has been great.

So that brings us back from the trimester break. Since then, I haven’t really gone to any classes. The first week back I was helping the teachers make their trimester plans. This was a bit of a process, but ended up being decently good work, especially with one of the teachers. Since then, I’ve also been working on a plan for each of the teachers to implement teaching phonics with each of their units. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to work with them to implement it yet because of English Week work, but hopefully that will happen soon.

As referred to above, this week is English Week, which means that last week was SUPER hectic and stressful trying to get everything prepared and a lot of it fell to me. I’ll give a detailed post about the preparations and events this coming weekend once it is all over and I can give a recap.

In addition to working and traveling, I’ve also been involved with/attended several community events such as a Bingo afternoon – I helped cook (aka fry) fish, ojaldra (the panamanian version of a salty funnel cake), and plantains – a basketball-court-soccer tournament, some normal soccer games, and a church choir competition at the school one night (4 choirs were competing to go to the regional competition – they ended up leaving it to chance, though I think the winners actually were the ones who deserved to go).

Lastly, I moved into my new house!!! I was super excited. I will also have a post devoted to this very soon, because that comes with some stories as well, and I think this post is long enough for now!

More to come soon. I promise not to leave you hanging so long this time!

Besos de Panamá,

Savannah

P.S. If I didn’t already know that this world is tiny, it was proved a million times over for me today. I was sitting in the park using the internet for a few minutes (sorry I didn’t get to post my blog) and this family starts unloading some things out of a truck in front of their house right in front of me. At first I just glance up, but I immediately do a double-take. The 9^th grade son who is helping move things out of the truck is wearing a yellow t-shirt that has a V on it… wait… it says Hank Ingram… oh my gosh he’s wearing a Hank Ingram Vanderbilt Commons shirt. It was absolutely crazy. That I happened to see him today, this afternoon, and that the shirt made its way from a printer in Nashville, to a freshman student, donated somewhere, then to Panama, then to my small town in Herrera. What are the odds of all of that happening so that I would see it? Absolutely crazy. (I'll add a photo soon!) Needless to say, it definitely made me nostalgic for Vandy!