Saturday, June 28, 2008

Swearing In!!!

So we are officially Peace Corps Volunteers, which means that come tomorrow (*sunday) we will be moving to our new home for the next two years. This is pretty intimidating, but we are very excited. I am unable to write too much as of right now, but I wanted to put some pictures up of our swearing in ceremony which was held at the US Ambassador's Residence in Panama City.


Group 61!


Brandon and I with the World Peace Corps President

Waiting for the ceremony to begin.

The minnesotan of the group and I

At dinner afterwards.

We love and miss you all!

Monday, June 16, 2008

Piquancy for Fodder

Here are a few piquant anecdotes as yours to savor:

At the commencement of our most recent site visit on Thursday, which we are now returning from, the last leg of our travel (the crossing of a river thirty meters in breadth and two in depth at the midpoint of the five kilometer span between our community and its most adjacent neighbor) came to be defined in our redressing of an otherwise botched effort of a bovine transiting straight truck to traverse the same waters in the opposing direction.
It was none less than providence for this less than fortunate fellow whose weighty passengers had spelled his fate that we (Your authors as well as our community’s mayor and his lieutenant in his mid-sized pick-up) as well as a well inebriated horseman happened upon his circumstances. In short strident form the horseman took to loading the hoofed passengers and returning them to whence they had come while seamlessly maintaining aimless inaudible small talk as we, concurrently hitched the unoccupied vehicle to our, allowing now for a successful river crossing. At this, the ordeal was over and all parties resumed their original business. It is our expectation that this none to far from the fold of experiences that we will be audience to in forthcoming chapter of our sojourn.

More briefly enjoy that:

We have yet to dispose of toilet paper in the toilet, needing instead to dispose of our spent, soiled tissue in a trash bin, due to poor water pressure, and that this is emptied only we full of siblings. Expect as well that when said trash bin is emptied, its subsequent home is either a small scale landfill adjacent to one’s home or to be burned. Curiously, the practice of soiled tissue escaping the soiling cavity is transcendent and has carried over to outdoor latrines!?

Hot showers are nearing the realm of mythology as we have only indulged ourselves with such luxury on only two occasions since our arrival here.

It has been discovered by Brandon that the eyes of a fried fish taste deliciously like cooked spinach.

Due to absence and infrequency, we have acknowledged that we have an acute Pavlovian response to the sight of foods containing colors, especially primary colors, as our diet has been otherwise defined by starches in perpetuity whose family of color have failed to breach yellows, browns and whites.

Smiling and nodding is an entirely acceptable manner carry on small talk, native or not.

Your lower lip can serve as an excellent satchel three to five recently expired uncooked hermit crab tails that you intend to use as fish bait.

Without fail . . . expect more to come . . .

Saturday, June 7, 2008

Update

So we have a lot of information coming when we will be in our site (only 3 weeks away folks!) as we have a lot of things we would like to share, but too little time to write anything up, which will change soon! Anyhow, we wanted to give you all an update as to what is going on in our lives as of right now. We will be leaving next week to visit our communities for the first time, and meet our ¨counterparts¨ who we are supposed to be working with for the next two years. During this time (approximately one week) we will try and set up our living situation for the 3 months we will be living with a host family in site, as well as doing a general community analysis and figuring out what types of work we will be doing in the first three months. Everyone is pretty excited about starting to form a picture of the next 2 years in their brains and we are not excluded! We only have 3 weeks left of training before our official Swear-In as Peace Corps Volunteers, and we are very excited.
Last week we jumped back into the swing of training after two weeks out in the ´campo´or field learning hands on techniques to many of the projects we might be possibly working on. This past week was pretty difficult as we had to prepare and pull-off an eco-fair for 250 some kids at the local elementary school (only with the time we had this week) as well as do a community proposal for a possible solution to the sometimes good, sometimes bad water situation in our host town. All of this was finished up on Friday with a group of us going to the next closest town (where some of our other trainees are staying) to see a local typico band play. We all showed up around 9pm, and Brandon and I could only stay until 12am (before one of the best typico bands in the country even came on stage...), as we were already so exhuausted from the week. Today we are back in Chorrera for more classes, and tomorrow we have a free day, then Monday (Our one year wedding anniversary!!) we have classes like normal again. It´s been quite an intense past couple of weeks.
So that´s our update for now, we will try and write more soon! Love and hugs from Panama!
-Ashley and Brandon

Some Love

So we have been asked quite a few times if there is anything that we would like to have sent. Obviously our first answer is ¨Yes!¨who doesn´t love recieving mail?? Then we sat down and started to think about it... there are a few things (few is a relative term..) that we would love to have sent to our doorstep. This is not a list of things that we are expecting to get, or a request- simply an aid for those who keep asking!

- Licorice. Any kind of red yummy licorice will do.
- Granola bars. Also any kind of super-healthy yummyness will do.
- Magazines. Any kind of fashion, Interior Design, Health, Construction, Music, News or other type of magazine will do (and we would love to have your would-be recycled ones too!)
- Powdered Gatorade. Electrolytes are good!
- Books. Anything that you think we might like! (We would however like a book called ¨The Barefoot Architect¨, any book on flora and fauna for medicinal purposes, a medical book, and any classic book you could think of. Plus David Sedaris books!
- Ashley would like a ¨spa kit¨as it is ¨really difficult to feel girly down here!!!¨
- Red Hot Chili Peppers Album ¨Stadium Arcadium¨- Ashley forgot her copy, and it is scratched up as she listens to it incessantly.
- Seeds. Any type of fruit or vegetable seed you can think of (I am not sure if you can get these, but we would be really interested in artichoke, asparagus, strawberry, spinach, eggplant, etc... you get the idea)
- A really good pair of tweezers!
- Fruity flavored candy! (skittles, chewy sweet tarts, starbursts, etc..)
- Pistachios!!!
-Cook books! (Probably vegan or vegetarian, as meat, cheese and milk are hard to come by here)
- Anything else that you can possibly think that we would enjoy!!!