Terremoto!

We experienced the first earthquake of our lives on Tuesday.  Actually, it was a few tremors, not a real earthquake, but by New Jersey standards, it was quite something!  It was really weird to feel the ground move - the first time it happened I didn't even realize what was going on until it was over.  The epicenter was 20 miles away and the quake measured 4.6 on the Richter scale.  Here in our town there were 5 different tremors, each lasting only one or two seconds.  They started at 5 pm and ended at 2 am.  Each one was enough to shake the house, but not enough to knock anything off the shelves.  I'm sure in California they don't even notice things like this, but here in Chepo the whole town is still talking about it.  On Saturday we had another tremor, a bit longer but not nearly as strong.

Earth Day in our town was celebrated on Thursday by the entire school.  Each class made banners which they carried in a parade through the town.  You can see a two-minute video of the parade here.  It starts with the pre-kindergarten and goes through the sixth grade in white shirts followed by grades 7-9 in blue shirts.

Seventh graders and their banner

 Here are the boys' and girls' dormitories at our school.  50 boys and 50 girls sleep over Monday through Thursday nights.  There is one big room for each group.  It's the weekend, so the rooms are empty.

Girls' dorm

Boys' dorm

Our big news is that we have found a house to live in for the duration of our two-year stay here.  We move in on June 15th, after spending the required three months with our host family, whom we have grown to love over the past month.  The house is brand new!  Due to unfortunate circumstances the person who built it needs to move to a different province, so it hit the rental market, which is pretty limited here.  We feel very lucky to be able to live in this house, which as you can imagine is very fancy by Peace Corps standards.  We have indoor plumbing - two bathrooms with showers, balconies front and back, and a nice front porch.  There is plenty of room for visitors!

The house is a 15 minute walk from our present location.  We will have a new group of neighbors.  On Saturday we met a lot of them, including this group of adorable kids that Heather teaches.  We are really looking forward to getting to know them better.  They are a lot of fun.

Kids here don't need expensive toys to keep them occupied.  Here they are sliding down the steep pine-needled slope behind our new house sitting on palm leaves and holding on to the stems.

New Priest in Town

The big event on Sunday was the mass given by the newly ordained Catholic priest from our town.  It is the first time in the history of the town that anyone born here has become a priest.  He was ordained last Saturday in the regional capital Chitré, and he came here to give his first mass. 

After the mass, food was given out to all who came, a group of over 200 people.  The preparation of the food began days ago.  A pig was killed and roasted, palm leaves were boiled for tamales, and a huge vat of corn was boiled and ground up by hand.  The food was delicious!

Roast pork, anyone?

The final product is below.  Everyone who was at the mass got one of these on the way out - tamale, rice, pork and a sweet dessert.  It's too bad we couldn't recycle the containers!

Weekend guest

This weekend we had a visit from Savannah, a Peace Corps volunteer from a nearby town.  We hiked all over the area, including the Alto del Higo, the highest point in our province. 

Savannah, Heather and Steve

We also hit the swimming hole, where we saw the locals showing off by jumping from the heights.

Ernesto jumps while Savannah watches from below

While we were having fun hiking and swimming, our host father Aristides was busy baptizing people in the local river.  He baptized nine people on Saturday.

We ran out of bananas in the house, so our neighbor Joel and his friend went to our host family's farm and wheeled two big bunches up a really steep hill to our house.  You can see how much he sweated doing it!

That's a lot of bananas!

Here are a few pictures of the scenery here. 

this is the view on the walk home

view from our window of the rainbow

Below is the view from where we have to go to get a signal on our phones. It's a 3 minute walk from the house. We can make calls and check emails here, but the data is really slow for things like Facebook.  We have satellite internet in the school which is a bit faster, but sometimes when it rains a lot the service goes out.

That's it for this week!