As I wrap up my first week in Panama, I have one thought that dominates all others, "I think I am meant to get rabies…"
Explanation:
Day 2 in El Valle, Aeriel and I head to the beach, pleasant docile Santa Clara beach; it is a wonderfully relaxing third day in our new country. Yet on the way home while waiting for a bus, a scrappy brown dog picks me as his target and within minutes his dumb foaming fangs are wrapped around my ankle. Don’t freak out readers, he didn’t actually bite me, a lovely local was kind enough to punch him with an umbrella before he could break skin, but still, a bit unsettling to say the very least.
Day 4, Aeriel and I learn that we share our lovely humble abode with at least three bats. While we calmly watch the Titanic in Spanish (the television event which has been the talk of the town for days), a pair of black flying night riders swoop down over our heads and across the TV screen. Throughout the course of the week we learn that they sleep perched above our beds, and we lovingly name them Barney and Barthalemule, and think infrequently about their existence.
But tonight, day 7, is my final conviction that I am meant to get rabies. While turning off the outside light, a bat, literally flies directly into my hand with all its might before falling to the floor, flapping about a bit and flying off into the night. I mean really, of all the places it could have launched itself, it picked my hand, in the 4 seconds that that hand was outside flipping a light switch. I now, of course sit hypochondriacing, debating whether or not over the course of the week in living with psychotic bats and rabid dogs, I have in fact become destined to die while foaming at the mouth.
El Valle has been filled with all sorts of convictions. First the conviction that in order to get our Spanish back in action we needed to stay in one place for a month and live with a host family, second the conviction that working with an orchid conservation group in rural Panama would be an insightful look into local life that would complement our homestay experience. Neither of which has thus far panned out.
Aprovaca for instance (the conservation group), failed to inform us that they were in fact inundated with volunteers and had just about zero projects for us. This is mostly due to the fact that the entire NGO is run by an oligarchy of 3 Panamanian women who literally hate foreigners and refuse to let us help with anything hands on, aka anything interesting having to do with conservation. Instead Aer and I sit on our laptops, “researching” grant opportunities and writing content for the website, but actually resting comfortably on facebook, gchat, and heavy connections to the world we both worked so hard to leave.
And while our host family, a delightful quartet of two young sisters, a mother, and slightly senile grandfather are undeniably an insightful and entertaining glimpse into the culture of El Valle, they do not make up for the eight hours of internet/computer work that we are forced to fill our days with. A sad sad truth indeed because despite the six hours of daily rain, we do in fact love this tiny little volcano crater town and will be sad to leave it tomorrow.
This new conviction, the decision to leave, will take us back to Panama City for Halloween and hopefully onward to a friend’s Peace Corps village in Northern Panama on our way to Costa Rica. But the overall lesson thus far from El Valle, is that life should in fact be written in pencil, bats can also be roommates, and rabid dogs shouldn’t be feared in El Valle, because there’s ALWAYS a local with an umbrella close by.
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