In-Service Training

The day after my parents left, I went straight into two weeks of Peace Corps Training. My friends and I left Panama City, but I actually had to go back to Chitré to go with my friend from Pesé to her doctor's appointment. For those of you who keep up with my blog, you'll remember Ana - my friend who I offered to go with to a psychiastrist appointment, well, of course it happened to be the first day of training. But it was ok - my other PCV friend let me crash at her house closer to Chitré, and I was able to with Ana. I was glad I could be there for her - she was brave and did very well. Though it took an absurdly long time - for an appointment that lasted about 45 minutes, we spent about 7 hours at the social security office (like a hospital almost with lots of different doctors). So that was a little frustrating, but I finally got to the terminal to head back to training around 1.

I was sorry I missed the first night with everyone together, but it was nice walking into training and having a lot of people who I hadn’t seen come up and hug me. It was awesome to be together with my entire group again after 4 months of being apart. Coming down here with them, we bonded really quickly in this totally new environment, so they are my support network here in Panama and I loved hanging out with them for two straight weeks! Training consisted of sessions from 8-5 with lunch in there somewhere. Then nights we would chill, party sometimes, and occasionally went down to the beach (about a 40 minute walk).

On our free weekend, most of us went into Panama City, enjoyed hanging out at the mall, seeing the new Batman movie (SOO good! Go see it if you haven’t already!!), then going out to a club. I skipped out a little bit early on Sunday so that I could spend a couple of hours on the beach at Santa Clara before heading back to the training center.

Over the course of the two weeks we got a lot of good information – the most helpful came from other volunteers who came and presented. But it also was a little bit overwhelming – we didn’t have a whole lot of time to process all of the information. The information presented by the other volunteers from previous groups was inspiring and made me want to follow in their steps, but most of it also requires a significant amount of time with each teacher, which just isn’t feasible for me with 11 teachers to work with. So coming back to site with those kinds of ambitions and expectations was overwhelming. Add that to leaving all of my PCV friends after 2 weeks together following on the heels of my parents’ visit and coming back to a (somewhat) new job – working at the colegio – and the first few days in site were a bit rough. I was sad to leave my family and friends, and I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to do anything productive in my schools I just kind of holed up in my house for a couple of days, but on Monday I had to go to school. Of course, this is the thing that made me feel better.

Once I was in school for a couple of days, I started getting used to the new routine at the colegio and realizing that while I might not be able to make the big changes like I learned about at training, I was doing some good and people were enjoying and benefiting from my presence in the schools.