I'm Home!!

It's official.  As of September 13th, I am a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer!  It's definitely great to be home and see everyone.  I love America! :)

I had a super busy last month in Panama.  I talked to a friend on one of my last nights in my community and she asked if I was sad.  I told her that I honestly didn't have time to be sad!  I had a yard sale to clean out my house and a really nice birthday party with my host family.  It was easier to leave knowing that I'll be going back in January.

I have a few half finished blogs that I still plan on putting up, so, get excited!  ;)

Phase 2: Tanks and Tubes!

Five days of working in the sun and eating hot soup for lunch finished up the project in Guayabo!  It was a lot of fun!  Digging trenches for the tubes and then just gluing everything together like a giant Lego set.  The biggest snag was a missing 40 cent threaded adapter.  It's inconvenient to live in a place where you can't just drive to a hardware store.  It required assigning the task to two different people and hoping that at least one of them came back when they planned to and purchased the correct piece.

Overall I felt really good about how everything went.  The community members were absolutely fantastic - showing up ready to work and making me coffee every morning.  What more can a girl ask for?!  Sergio and his follow up volunteer Collin were indispensable to my data collection for my research!  It was a very successful and gratifying week.  Take a look at some pictures!

The black 850 gallon tank will serve 8 houses and the church.  They are working on the stand for the blue 200 gallon tank for the school.  It has to be raised up because we're installing the tanks at the school.

Precision wood work

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?  Or asked the grinning bobcat why he grinned?  Can you sing with all the voices of the mountains?  Can you paint with all the colors of the winds?

You can't tell from this photo, but those tanks have the best view in town!

One of the distribution lines coming from the tanks.

Not such a bad place to work!