Torchlight Parade

 The school recently celebrated 39 years of its existence by having a torchlight parade, as they do every year.  Each of the students, from first grade up to ninth, made a torch to carry in the parade.  They each took a thick stalk of bamboo, split the end, and then inserted an old bottle.  On the day of the parade, they filled the bottle with kerosene and stuffed a rag in as a wick.  Heather and I were a little skeptical of letting first graders run around with bottles of burning kerosene, but everything went very smoothly.  There was a lot of relighting the torches from each other as the wind blew them out, but everyone seemed to know the correct way to carry their torch safely.  

Yarisel (1st grade)  leads the parade

Give me a light!

 There was a group of drummers accompanying the parade.  They were very energetic!

We finally moved into our new house on Friday.  We have been busy settling in and getting things for the house, and haven't taken any pictures yet.  We'll post more next week.

Dengue??

We are finally back to feeling normal after our fever.   Both of us had the fever for nine days, which seemed like an eternity when we were going through it.  The Peace Corps doctor said she was almost positive that we had dengue fever, but we didn’t do the test for dengue, which is expensive and time-consuming.  Dengue or not, it really laid us low.  Even after the fever was over, it took a good three weeks for us to get our strength back.  We have only hiked for an hour so far, but it won’t be long before we are doing our usual three or four hours.  We have to walk everywhere in our town, and nothing is flat, so we get lots of exercise just going to school or the store. 

Our blogs have been pretty sporadic these past few weeks.  We will try to get back to one every week or two.  Some weeks not much happens.  This week, though, we had a nice Father’s Day celebration at school.  The tradition is for all of the female employees to make a lunch for the male employees and to give them gifts.  In Panama, Father’s Day is the same as it is in the US.  Mother’s Day, however, is December 8^th, which also happens to be the day of the Immaculate Conception.  On that day, all the men will get together and make a lunch for the women of the school.  

Gifts for the men, plus a carnation for each of us

Serving up the lunch!

This coming week we will be moving into our new house.  Our stove, fridge and mattress are being delivered this Wednesday.  We will really miss our host parents Aristides and Odilia, who have been wonderful to us during these first three months in our site, but we are also excited to have a place of our own.  More on that next time!