Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Jet

I have a Panamanian boyfriend.  He’s a stud, with curly brown hair and big brown eyes.  He calls me “mi amor” and tells me he loves me.  He’s also two years old.

Last week at Clayton (when I scribbled down an entry to post in the 30 seconds of internet), we were given locations and names and told that this is where we would go for our volunteer site visit.  I glanced at mine, but decided to pay more attention to the day of sketchy internet.  We also received a stack of money and told to figure out how to budget it.  If I had been thinking, I would have compared the costs laid out on the sheet with my volunteers name and location with the money in my envelope.  Instead, I ignored it and did the math later.

My site visit was to another CEC volunteer in Los Santos – on the tip of the goofy peninsula on Panama’s west coast.  Scrimping my cash – the money I was given was barely enough to cover the costs she wrote down, and prices have gone up since then – I made my way from Los Mortales all the way to Cambutal.  The trip took the better part of a day.

The Volunteer works in sea turtle conservation in her community and I was visiting during the off season.  Which means that instead of working with turtles, I helped her in the garden, went to the beach, paseared and finally had a chance to relax.  For some reason, sitting in classes all day is a lot harder on me than physical labor in a garden or hiking in hot sun.  First hand and for an extended period of time, I saw how she was accepted into this community, how she adapted to them and how they adapted to her.  She’s the fifth volunteer in this site and will likely be the last.  She told me success stories, war stories and gave me lots of advice.

One house we paseared to often was her former host family.  Jaclyn, a woman very involved in the sea turtle group, is about 45, with a two year old grandson named Jorge.  We went over to watch the news every day and ate dinner with her on Saturday night.  She welcomed me in with open arms and her grandson looked at me like I was an alien.  Slowly, he began warming up to me, until suddenly, he climbed on top of me as I was sitting on the couch, kissed my cheek and said, “Hola, mi Amor.”

It quickly became the joke to ask Jorge “Donde esta Ana?”  He would get very excited to point and run up to me.  “Hola, Ana” and “Ana, venga” (Hi, Ana and Ana, come here!) were two phrases I heard a lot of by the little two year old this weekend.  It was quickly decided that I was his girlfriend.  I hope I get a chance to go back some time soon.

A much needed respite from training, it will be hard to get back into the grind.  I can’t wait until I know where I’m going.