Hicks/Dunn Panamanian Adventure

On July 14^th my parents touched down in Panama Tocumen International Airport! They landed at 9, so I just decided to meet them at the hotel. They got there around 11 and it was great to see them! It had been 6 months and 3 days – the longest I had ever gone without seeing my parents (or being home, for that matter).

In the hotel!

The first couple of days we spent in Panama city. After spending a relaxing morning in the hotel, first on the sightseeing docket was Casco Viejo – the old city that was founded after the original colony was destroyed by pirates. We walked around, had a nice lunch, and saw the Canal Museum (the same place where I had my swearing in ceremony). That night we had a delicious dinner at Beirut – a Lebanese restaurant.

Views of the city from Casco Viejo

Mom posing next to colonial ruins 

More views of the city - you can spot my favorite twisty-building on the left.

The next day we headed up to see the Canal, which was really cool. To think that it was built over 100 years ago is pretty incredible. They are currently expanding it, to be finished in 2014. We watched 2 huge ships go through with only a couple of feet to spare on either side – pretty impressive!

 Locks waiting for a ship to enter - the one on the right/far side is full and just had a ship go through it, the one on the left/close side is empty and about to let the ship in. 

Locks opening!

Pretty amazing that these huge ships pass through the locks 

with just a couple of feet of space on either side.

Huge container ship that just passed through... 

Wonder where it came from and is going?

 

After that we saw the Summit Zoo and Botanical Garden  - it wasn’t all that impressive, but we saw a few cool animals and plants:

 

Necklace-plant (so-called by Mom)

 

Turtles sunning next to a pond

 

huge palm trees!

 

Oh hi - just hanging around...

 

On the way back into the city, we stopped at the Peace Corps office to let my parents meet a few of the staff, had lunch at Pan y Canela – where PCVs go all the time when we’re at the office, we drove up Cerro Ancón (the highest point in the city), then we had a drink on the Amador Causeway before heading back to the hotel and dinner at an absolutely delicious Italian restaurant. 

View from Cerro Ancón

On Tuesday we rented a car and headed out of town. After a detour that made us drive through La Chorrera, we stopped in Santa Rita to meet my first host family. Unfortunately only my host mom, Reyna, was there. I really enjoyed seeing her though – I had a great time living there for the first couple of months.

From there we finished driving to El Valle de Antón. El Valle is in a crater of a volcano that has been dormant for millions of years (I think I’m remembering that right). Now it is one of the best places to go birding in Panama, which is already one of the most bio-diverse places on earth. We stayed in a small hotel that caters to birders. We were there with a group from the Audobon (sp? I hadn’t heard of this before…) society and one other family. Good thing that other family was there because they were in just about the same position we were with regard to bird knowledge. It was great to get to know them – their daughter is working as a music teacher in Panama City and her parents came to visit, just like mine.

Us and the family we met on the hotel's bridge

Views from the hotel

 

The one full day we were in El Valle, we went on a hike with a birding guide. We saw a few cool birds, but the coolest ones were the hardest to see, and I don’t have quite the patience required – but we also saw some cool other animals and insects including an iguana and a big spider catching a fly.

Mom and Dad on the hike in front of a gorgeous waterfall

Awesome spider wrapping it's catch of a fly.

Banana flower!

Beautiful, colorful birds

This lovely lady was nesting in a planter on our porch.

Can you see the little birds tucked underneath her?

After showering after the hike, we drove around town, had lunch at a cute restaurant, then dessert at a nice restaurant/hotel. 

On Thursday we finally headed down to Pesé and Chitré. After checking into the hotel and a lunch at Ebenezer’s (a PCV hotspot in Chitré) then finally to Pesé. After a quick stop at my house to drop off some stuff that my parents brought and take inventory of what we needed to buy. We quickly met my landlady and family, my host family, and my counterpart – César. Then we drove back to Chitré, bought a table, futon , and shelving for my kitchen. After a scarfed dinner, we drove back out to Pesé and put my house together for a couple of hours, then finally back to Chitré to crash and go to sleep.

The next day we did another run out to Pesé to have breakfast at my host family’s house (Bruni definitely put a lot of effort into it, which I was very appreciative for), stopped by the primary school (my parents were a big hit), finalized things in my house, and then headed back to Panama City.

 

Me with my landlady (almost 75 years old), her daughter and her grand-daughter

 

My host mom and her grandson sporting their gifts from NC!

 

It was a quick 6 days, but it was great to have my parents here, to see and hang out with them, and to show them my life and friends here in Pesé.

The other major perk was that I got to enjoy air conditioning, really comfy beds, and hot water for the whole time we were together. Also, since they left on an early flight the day before my training was supposed to start, so they were kind enough to rent me the hotel room for the night as well. A couple of friends and I enjoyed the pool, a massage, and room service. It was a little piece of heaven and DEFINITELY a vacation from Peace Corps life!

I was sad when they left, but it wasn’t like saying goodbye last time since I know I’m probably coming home for Christmas! We had a good trip and I hope that they will be able to come back next year.

Last Weeks in the Primaria and Explaining MEDUCA

Continuing off of my English Week post – I spent the next couple of weeks tying up loose ends and cleaning up the school after the English Week celebrations. I also was trying to set some goals to accomplish before my time at the primary school came to an end. My main goal was to help the teachers implement phonics. In order to explain why I thought this was important, let me explain a little bit about the English teaching and educational system here in Panama.

The Ministry of Education (MEDUCA) hires people to be English teachers who have studied English in college – this means that most of the time the English teachers have not actually studied teaching and that speaking English (at least on paper) is one of the only requirements. This results in having some great teachers that are completely dedicated to their students and will go above and beyond to be the best teacher they can be. But also, on the flip side, there are also a good number of teachers who don’t know much about teaching techniques and aren’t very motivated to improve. They care about their students, of course, but they just view their job as an 8-3 (or, as it may be here, 7-1) job and they aren’t willing to do much outside of that. Of course, these are generalizations and there are teachers all over the spectrum, but that gives you an idea of the source of some of the issues in the schools here.

In order to help their teachers improve their methodology, MEDUCA provides a week-long summer seminar (during their summer – January) and other workshop opportunities throughout the year. By attending these seminars and workshops, the teachers earn MEDUCA points. With these points they can apply for better jobs within MEDUCA. I don’t quite understand this system for one main reason – while the couple of seminars that I have attended have been useful information and well presented, the teachers don’t always implement what they learn, implying that they aren’t actually changing or improving their methodologies, so the points don’t actually correspond to whether or not they are good teachers (for example, one of the best teachers that I work with is only a second year teacher, and one of the worst has years of teaching experience, is a permanent teacher, and can’t speak English very well).

The result of this system is that students are graduating high school after having English for 12 years and are not able to speak or understand the language. This is why MEDUCA invited Peace Corps volunteers to work alongside their teachers so that we could bring some fresh ideas into the system.

So… one long explanation later – I decided that one of the things that I might be able to successfully implement with my four primary school teachers was teaching phonics. They weren’t teaching phonics, and a lot of the way that they are used to teaching pronunciation is to write letters that, when said with a Spanish pronunciation, will sound like the English word. While this can be helpful at times, over using it will teach the students only the Spanish-pronunciation word, not the actual English word.

I wanted to show my teachers that if they start teaching the pronunciation of English letters and words from a  young age, the students will have a much better accent and be able to sound out words instead of always looking to the teacher when they encounter a word that they don’t recognize as a sight-word (word that they’ve just memorized). Granted, phonics won’t be as effective for ESL or EFL students as they are with native speakers because the ESL/EFL students won’t have encountered as many words in conversation, but it can still be an extremely useful tool for pronunciation and word recognition.

In the couple of weeks I had left at the primary school after English Week, I tried to plan with each of them to implement some phonics lessons. I even gave them suggestions as to what letters/sounds to teach with each of their lessons for the trimester and went to each one of their classes and gave a sample lesson with phonics. This had mixed results because I ended up trying to do it all in the last week I was there. Of the days that I actually taught, one of the teachers had something else planned that day, so I didn’t actually get to show him the lesson, another teacher had a prior commitment, so I ended up teaching half of his classes without him there, and half of the other students were too young to really start teaching phonics (I decided to start doing this is 2^nd grade). So, it didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped, but hopefully with continued encouragement from me, they might end up working it into some of their lesson plans.

After that last week, I was kind of sad to have to leave the lower school because I felt like I was finally truly getting into the rhythm of things there and figuring out how I could be of the most help. But, then it was time to switch to the high school. But first – my parents came and I had two weeks of training. Descriptions of those to come in the next couple of posts!

I'll leave you with a few pictures from English Week:

A group of 6th grade students performing The 3 Little Pigs (plus 2 of the teachers assisting)

 The lovely English teachers with me after pulling off English Week!

 

The students (one from each grade) that participated in the Monday Meeting.

 

 

The 9th grade boy who I found wearing a Vanderbilt Commons shirt!! SMALL world!

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!