What I know about my 'job' so far

November 30, 2011

I am heading to Panama for 27 months on January 11, 2012. Panama is the southern most country in Central America, sitting between Costa Rica and Columbia. I don't want to get too much into the history of the Panama because I think it will be boring for some and not enough info for others. 

Peace Corps Volunteers (PVC) have been serving Panama for 30 years with more than 2,000 volunteers spending their 2 years of service in Panama. I will be heading down with a group of 52 new volunteers. Right now there are around 200 PVC in Panama working in 5 areas: sustainable agriculture, environmental conservation (me), economic development, environmental health and teaching English. 

I have been invited to serve as a Community Environmental Conservation (CEC) Agent. A host country requests volunteers for specific projects in different areas of the country, so there can be a lot of variety in the jobs. But as a CEC volunteer, I will be working with Panamanians, specifically children, youth or local agencies, to help promote practices that lessen the negative impact humans can have on the environment. According to the National Environmental Authority of Panama (ANAM), Panama "has experienced an unprecedented deterioration of its natural resources during the last 20 years as a direct result of environmental degradation. Loss of forest cover has led to significant soil  erosion, threatened many species with extinction and decreased agricultural productivity."

For more information about the Peace Corps or the Peace Corps in Panama peacecorpswiki.org is a pretty cool website to check out.

People frequently ask me where in Panama I will be living and what I will be doing. Well, my answer is...I'm not sure. This is what I know so far (mostly from reading other blogs and following what people on facebook have been saying, so some of this stuff may change). I will meet up with all the other volunteers leaving for Panama in January in Miami. We all will get together for an orientation and to get all our paperwork together. We will fly out together the next day. We get to Panama and move in with host families and start our 10 week training in a town somewhere near Panama City. The training will cover learning language, technical skills, health and safety tips, how to travel around, and even how to use a machete. Then the volunteers separate and move into our sites and begin our 2 years of service. 

And lastly, I know that am scheduled to come home on March 21, 2014--my 27th birthday.

This is the first time I have 'blogged' so I hope that it is easy enough to follow. Please let me know if it is hard to read or screens don't show like they should. I hope that I will still be able to keep in touch via facebook and email, but I am hoping this will help me share my stories with more people quickly.

Stick around. Now that we have covered the basics, I think the blogs will get a lot more interesting.