Beginnings

This is going to be a pretty  bare-bones blog, without pictures or pretty background or probably any editing. Still I'm going to post from time to time because I want to have something out there to explain to interested parties what I'm doing (and to be in honest, in no small part so that I have an easy out when people ask for updates or a recap). Also, you're going to have to bear with the parentheses-- I've grown very fond of them lately.

Anyway, I'm here in Panama. After a few days of orientation in Panama City with the other eight gringos, I came to Santa Ana, a town of 3,000-some in the Los Santos region. My host family centers around a matriarch, Mercedes, who calls me hijo, and who I call mama. I live in her house with two of her five adult sons. The others all live near by, as do other assorted relatives. The house is the family's social hub-- I met so many relatives here in my first few days that it took a while to figure out who I was living with, and whose names I needed to remember (actually I'm definitely still working on that one).

The other main part of my situation is that I'm teaching English at the town school, which is K-6. There are two English teachers there, both of whom actually have pretty solid English, and I'm there to give an extra boost of fun, pronunciation. That said, they give me a lot of lattitude, so I've tried to edge in some bits of motivation and linguisticky understanding to go make all the bits of English they learn helpful/meaningful/less of a chore.

At school the kids have been reasonably well-behaved (although there are exceptions among the kindergartners and 6th grade boys). The classes are reasonably sized, in the teens and twenties. The teachers have been kind of inconsistent in that sometimes they just give me a topic and tell me to teach it right then and there, and other times having me as just a parrot, showing off my "perfect pronunciation."

A couple of adventures:

• Today I went to the pig farm that mi mama owns together with a son of hers. I watched them slaughter a pig. Not a thing I'd seen before. There are a lot of thoughts one can think about it, but the thought that really struck me was how much life comes out of the way things are arranged, and how critical all the bits of the arrangement are.
• I got dropped off at the beach, which is about 6km down the road. I took a dip, walked across the beach, and then walked back. It was really nice to have a long walk, the length of which I didn't have control over. I also noticed how much more quickly it went when I had an active goal-- scanning the treeline for ripe mangoes. 

A few differences I've noticed:

• Back to the mangoes, no one buys them here because the trees are everywhere. It seems like people are just tired of them. Lots of them fall and rot on the ground, and no one minds if you knock one of their tree to eat (although I'm still not sure if it was kosher for me to have snuck under a barbed wire fence to grab one)
• People aren't so easily definable by their profession it seems. My host mom is known as 'la profesora' because she teaches professional ethics at the university, but she also does a lot for the pig farm. Her son/partner does even more, but he's also works as a government auditor. Another son works at a bank a few days a week, and driving a circuit from the beach to the town to the city nearby on other days.
• The people who pack the bags at the supermarket checkout also take your bags out to your car and load them.