New House

We haven’t written a blog entry in a while.  We have been very busy here with moving to our new house, which happened on June 22.  Steve also had a presentation to make to the community about which projects he would be doing in the next two years, and that took a lot of preparation.  It turns out they are most interested in reforestation, the handling of garbage/recycling (there is no trash collection here), and environmental education for the youth of the community.   Steve is also going to work on a web site to promote tourism in the area.  This will include helping create and maintain trails to the most scenic spots in the area, and also taking pictures of those spots for the web site.  Sounds like fun!

We love our new house!

We have been busy getting settled in the new house.  The stores in our town only sell basic food and cleaning items, so we had to make several trips into Chitré to get all that we needed.  On Monday night we hosted five people sleeping over in our house, which was quite a feat considering we only have the bottom floor of the house.  We originally thought we were going to have the whole house, but the owner of the house wants to keep that separate.  Right now the top floor is not finished, so no one can live there anyway.  We had five people here because there is a team of paramedics from Montana touring our province teaching first aid.  Heather and Steve both translated for them on Tuesday afternoon at our school.   A couple of people slept on the front porch, which eased the crowded conditions.

Paramedics Sierra, Dan and Parker and organizer Amanda behind our house

Here are some more pictures of our new house. 

Heather having breakfast

A hammock with a view!

We just found out that we have cell signal on the back balcony!

Here is the view from the top of the hill behind our house.  At night you can see the lights of cities which are 30-35 miles away to the north.  We have hiked down into the valley to a small village at the bottom, which we will describe another day.

Our new neighbors include two sisters ages 10 and 12 who have helped us out with lots of things.  They brought us house plants for our front porch when they saw we had none.  They gave us lemongrass to plant when they found out we liked to make lemongrass tea.  They helped us clear a path to the top of the hill with machetes, and finally they helped Steve make shelves from the fridge box.

Noelis (age 12) and Myelis (10) 

Noelis swings a machete while Myelis moves brush

Reusing the fridge box for storage

All of the female employees of the school organized a Father’s Day celebration for all of the male employees of the school.  They raised money by selling raffle tickets for a food basket.  Father’s Day is the same day in Panama as it is in the US, but Mother’s Day is celebrated on December 8^th here, to coincide with the Catholic Day of Immaculate Conception. 

The females drew lots to provide a gift for each male.

The women serve up the food

Mangoes still have not come in season yet in our town, which is at an elevation of 2000 feet.  There are many nearby places at lower elevations which have lots of mangoes right now.  Steve had a meeting with an environmental agency on Monday and came home with a ton of mangoes.

Can we eat all of these?