Site Announcement!

This week we received our site announcements - meaning that I finally know where I will be spending the next two years!!! I will be living with an indigenous community in Bocas del Toro Panama, working with Cacao. woot woot. My community is building a nursery of superior cacao trees to provide branches for grafting to all the cacao farms in the Bocas region of Panama. I am really excited about this project! I will also be helping them set up school and home gardens. I could not imagine a better site placement!

Now its photo time! Last week we had a week of technical training in the area in which we will be working (cacao in my case) 4 other guys from my program are also working in cacao so we spent the week together with 3 other current cacao volunteers in Bocas, who gave us our tech training. We spent half the week in a secluded Nobe community (we had to take a 2 hour boat ride to get there. This house to the left is where I lived for 4 days. It had one room and ooooooohhh about 8 family members living there. My "bedroom" was an area sectioned off with a sheet.

To the right is my host mother for the week most likely cooking either boiled green bananas or fried plantains which are quite literally the only things I had for breakfast and dinner for 4 days straight (and which may be a trend that continues for the next two years...) Some days the bananas were smothered in pureed sardines or the plaintains were topped with a fried fish, which was nice. Being close to the Caribbean can be a beautiful thing. This is my cute host sister to the right.





The kids in the community looooved having their photo taken, which is a happy coincidence with the fact that I loved taking their photos. You can see their sweet baseball field in the background of this one.



Also, while we were on the island, my host dad was building a dug out canoe and we went to go watch and "help" on afternoon. Imagine a slightly larger version of this boat, with a 15 horsepower motor on the back. That is was 8 of us spend 2 hours in to arrive to the community.

I guess it is also worth mentioning that during the week we learned all about pruning, grafting, processing and controlling diseases for cacao, which is both a beautiful and delicious fruit. Everyone can look forward to receiving delicious chocolate treats from me!