Let me just start by saying I AM DONE! Done with school, done with the semester, and now officially in summer! 

I’ll back up though, it’s been a while. 

So, we got back from our agriculture field trip and finished up the class by writing a 10 page paper with partner on the agricultural topic of our choice. Flaam and I wrote a paper entitled “A Case for the Sustainable Management of Soil Fertility.” If you had told me a year ago that I would be taking a break from my college education of pretty much only multiple choice exams to write a 10 page paper on soil fertility I am not sure I would have believed you, which made this seem like a big accomplishment, and I was really happy with how it turned out. 

Once that was over we dove directly into about 2 weeks of finishing up our internship. Now our time was our own and Ginny and I got straight to work writing our 50 page paper, creating a CD, a coloring book, and a vocabulary pamphlet to give to our host organization, not to mention creating a power point and preparing for our 15 minute Spanish presentation of the whole thing. 

It was a lot of work but my days felt weirdly empty. Pretty much everyday of the 2 weeks Ginny and I met at 9 AM, went to one of a few locations, worked until lunch, took a break, met back up, worked until 4 and by then our brains were a bit exhausted. Since as I have mentioned, we live in Ciudad del Saber, an ex-US military base that is weirdly isolated, there wasn’t really much to do when we were free at the end of the day. One of the ways my roommates and I solved this was to make delicious dinners and then watch movies a night. Here is an idea of what we watched during this time : Tin Tin, Walk the Line, Ratatouille, Legally Blonde, Midnight in Paris, The Beaver, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, and a few others. This was hugely contrasted by a semester of having watched no movies or tv for the most part. 

Throughout this time we got everything done. I even now have awakward song and vocabulary recordings on my itunes that have been turned into a CD. We took one last day to go give our “products” to the organization in San Miguelito. They gave us a parting gift of a mug that says ” Yo <3 Panama”.

Our paper, entitled “El Papel y La Motivacion de Aprender Ingles en la Vida de la Gente del Valle San Isidro” or “The role and motivation for learning English in the lives of the people from El Valle San Isidro” is 50 pages and comprises the whole story of our internship.

I am pretty proud of it. 

Then on April 26th we had our Internship Symposium at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Each group gave a 15 minute presentation in Spanish, weirdly enough recordings of these will be available online at somepoint. And although Ginny and I were LAST to go, everything went smoothly, and with turning in our report afterwards we are officially done!!!!

If you are interested in our report, here is our abstract/executive summary:

Executive Summary

The Role and the Motivation for Learning English in the Lives of the people from El Valle San Isidro

Virginia Kenyon and Elizabeth Scott

Host Organization: La Organización de Madres Maestras

San Miguelito, Valle San Isidro final. - PO Box: 0850-00738 

La Organización de Madres Maestras is a non-governmental organization centered on creating and fostering a positive educational environment for preschool-aged children. Madres Maestras works to expand upon the traditional family structure by raising the children as a community. The organization was founded in San Miguelito, El Valle San Isidro, northeast of Panama City. Over the last 40 years, Madres Maestras has expanded and now has branches throughout Panama, Honduras, and Costa Rica.

An internship was conducted with Madres Maestras by two students from McGill University between January and April of 2012. The internship took place at four of the organization’s preschool classrooms in the area of El Valle San Isidro. The primary goals of the internship were to provide basic English lessons and to carry out an investigation of the role of English and the motivations for learning it in the lives of the women who attend the Madres Maestras program. 

Basic English lessons were provided to the mothers and children who attend each of the four preschools. The lessons were conducted using interactive songs, games, and dialogues. Themes of the material taught include basic daily phrases, the family, body parts, colors, and fruit. Lesson plans were adapted to fit the needs and demographics of each preschool. Due to the nature of offering lessons at multiple sites, each preschool was visited for two to three days.

The investigation was conducted using two sets of questionnaires that were distributed to the mothers during the lessons. The questionnaires assessed level of English, opinions on the lessons, desires and motivations for themselves and their children to learn English, and the perception of the role of English in Panama.

Results from the questionnaires showed that women of this area are enthusiastic about the prospect of learning English. Their desire to learn English is motivated by an interest in helping their children as well as aspirations for a higher standard of living. The women believe that English plays an important role in tourism, development, and communication within Panama. Thus by learning this language, they feel that their children will be exposed to more opportunities.

To help continue the goals of the lessons beyond the time frame of the internship, various products were created and given to the main office of the organization as well as the individual preschools that attended the lessons. These products include an auditory CD for pronunciation purposes as well as an accompanying pamphlet with vocabulary and song lyrics. A large coloring book with English spelling and pronunciation annotations was given to the organization to be photocopied and distributed at their discretion. Laminated materials from the lessons were also placed in the care of the organization. 

Finally! What you have all been waiting for!

Actually no, it is just what I had been waiting for, waited 3 months for, but finally, finally, I climbed Volcán Barú! 

Yes that’s right, it’s a volcano. It’s also the highest point in Panama, and the only place in the world where you can see both the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean at the same time! 

Volcán Barú is in the province of Chiriqui, just 35 km from the Costa Rican border. I have been wanting to climb this volcano since I heard about it at our internship cocktail the first week in January. The end of our agriculture field trip was the perfect time to do it since we were already in Chiriqui. 

So the day after the trip ended, Flaam, Ateeya, Caroline, Mya, and I bused from David back to Boquete to embark upon the climb. 

You can climb the volcano from either the Boquete side or the Volcan side. We chose Boquete becuase it is short, easier, and less dangerous. And by easier I still mean really hard, but just less scaling rocks, getting lost in the forest, having the path washed away by rain, etc (all things we had heard happened on the Volcan side). 

We heard a lot of kind of sketchy stories about the Boquete side too, about people getting lost, dying, getting robbed, weird things like that. So we decided to go with a guide, who turned out to be this really awesome, 70 year old Panamanian man named Feliciano. 

He told us that it would be best to go up in the middle of the night to get to the top at sunrise when it was most likely to be clear. 

So, on Friday, April 6th, we met Feliciano at 1AM and he drove us along with some others in the back of a pickup truck up the incredibly rocky road by the light of the full moon. 

We then spent the next 5 hours climbing pretty much straight up the 3,474 m (11,398 foot) volcano. It was STEEP, and it was DARK, and it was EXHAUSTING!

I was pretty delirious for the last hour or so, especially when we got to what I had thought was the top and then I actually had to legitimately scale rocks, with no path, and already shaking limbs. Plus it got really cold to, down to freeezing.

But then, THEN, there was this…

Amazingly, we all made it! 

please note my sock glove, one doesn’t really think to bring gloves to the tropics

We felt like we were going a little bit insane…

…well at least I did. 

And we celebrated with sparkling cider, courtesy of another group of students from our group who climbed too, because you can’t buy champagne during religious holidays (a fact we have forgotten many times) and it was Semana Santa.

Feliciano surprised us with coffee, which was very welcome at 6:30 AM when we had been up all night, and also, because it warmed our hands. 

 Unfortunately due to clouds we could only see the Pacific Ocean, but it was still incredible. And before we began the still rather arduous trip down (seriously it was really steep, and we could fully appreciate that in the daylight, had we seen how steep it was on the way up I’m not sure we would have made it ) we took pictures, and generally reveled in being on top of Panama. 

Photo Credit: Ateeya Vawda, Flaam Hardy, Caroline Morrow

On the last day of our Agriculture field trip we visited Finca Hartman outside of David. 

Finca Hartman is a shade-grown coffee farm.

We walked through the farm, saw how coffee was grown, and then saw how it was processed. 

Then we sat on the patio, with a ceiling covered in burlap sacks.

And we drank a lot of coffee, and ate tons of freshly made holjaldres. 

I don’t think I’ve mentioned holjaldres yet, but they are pretty much just fried dough. In my opinion they are similar to Elephant Ears but without the cinnamon sugar. They can range from being mediocre, oily, and rather tasteless to being light, airy, and delicious. The holjaldres at Finca Hartman were the best that I have had here, and there were warm, heaping bowls of them! 

Photo Credit: Ateeya Vawda and Google Images “Holjaldres”

The following day we went to the farms of the Amigos del Parque Internacional de la Amistad (so friends of the international park of friendship…). 

I know so much about making organic fertilizer now, wow. 

Those are piles of rice husks. For the fertilizer you add fermented chicken poop, horse manure, carbon from burnt corn husks, soil from the mountains, molasses, and microorganisms.  

The farms were situated in the hillside, it was chilly, and foggy, and absolutely beautiful. 

As we left it started to get stormy.

And then it really started to POUR! 

We grabbed our rain jackets and headed to Cerro Punta Greenhouses. By the time we got there it was raining so hard on the tin roof that we couldn’t hear the speaker over the rain. The greenhouses are mostly for the production of flowers.

Since it was still raining pretty hard by the time we left and we still had to drive to our hostel we just stuck our bags in the bus with us instead of on top. 

There wasn’t a lot of room… but we made it work. 

Photo Credit: Caroline Morrow and Saskia Nowicki

The next day we went on two more visits.

At Aboquete Laboratories we learned another way to make organic fertilizer and about more bio-control options. It was an especially good visit because the guide spoke Spanish very clearly which I always appreciate.

Afterwards we went to the farm of an ex-pat American family who has created an aquaponics greenhouse.

Aquaponics is a system where you grow plants on a rock medium, you have a tank of tilapia which feed off the algea on the side of the tank, you run the water from the tilapia tank which has the tilapia fecal matter in it through the rock bed, the plants use the nutrients from the fecal matter and the minerals from the rocks to grow, the water gets filtered by the rocks and then returned to the tank. 

Totally closed system of growing food. 

The family was slightly crazy but the system was cool. 

Afterwards we drove through some beautiful mountains to the town of Volcan. 

Our bus that is heavy with us and our belongings couldn’t make it up the steep hills….

…so we had to get out and walk up them.

The next day we went to some more farms.

We learned how vermicompost is made

And about how you can make both organic fertilizer and methane biofuel from pig manure.

And about milking.

Mostly though, there was just a lot of cows.

We spent the night at a hostel in Boquete by a beautiful river.

Boquete was cold, and that was wonderful.

Photo Credit: Caroline Morrow, Ateeya Vawda, and Saskia Nowicki

The next day we drove to Las Lajas on the Pacific coast.

We visited a small, recently started organic farming and production project started by a German family.

Here we saw:

The awesome house they built

The crazy, cool things they grow

Do you know where cashews come from?

This crazy cashew apple thing on the left! The cashew is the thing on top.

Then they have to burn them to get the toxins out

Afterwards we drove to our hostel on the beach for the night.

We got to the beach just in time for the beautiful sunset!

Photo Credit: Caroline Morrow and Ateeya Vawda and Saskia Nowicki

On Friday, March 30th, we left our home in Ciudad del Saber for our last field trip in Panama. This agriculture course is only 2 weeks long, and a week of it was this trip.

Our first stop was at the Grupo Calesa farm in Coclé, for an example of a conventional agriculture system.

Here we saw:

Huge sugar cane fields

Fields look the same everywhere. I practically could have been in Eastern Washington.

It was hot, I didn’t want to be in pictures

Then…

…the best part…

….the SUGAR PROCESSING FACTORY!

First, the harvested sugar cane gets brought to the factory

Then it gets ground and put in this huge warehouse

This is a pile of $5 million worth of sugar! I ate some :)

I was really excited about it.

Then it goes into the factory, full of weird sickeningly sweet smells, steam, bubbling vats of molasses and incredibly loud machines.

Factories are so cool. If we were in the US or Canada there is no way they would have let us wander around this factory, which made it even better.

Then it gets packaged.

Then put in huge bags for shipping

I LOVE factories!

Ignore the tucked in socks, we have to do it…

We spent the night at a hotel in Santiago, Veraguas.

A half hour walk at dusk along the highway, full of a lot of honks and catcalls, led us to a not good pizza dinner in a really cold restaurant.

My roommates huddled together for warmth

Photo Credit: Caroline Morrow, Ateeya Vawda, Hope Bigda-Peyton, and Saskia Nowicki

Welcome to the class with the most boring lectures in the world but the most awesome field trips.

I’m in class right now, it is the last lecture of my year and in two hours or so I will take the last quiz of this school year as well.

The 10 questions on the quiz will supposedly in some way reflect the 250 powerpoint slides we have seen in the last 24 hours, however, the sporadic-ness, the tangents, the lack of this being the professors field, and the blasting air conditioning in the classroom that has turned my feet blue all contribute to my not being prepared for it.

However, I will take this time to tell you some about the wonderful week long field trip across the western half of Panama that we took last week!

There are too many pictures to share so each place will come in a different post.

Enjoy!

On April 22nd and 23rd Ginny and I gave our last English lessons at the main office for Madres Maestras in San Miguelito.

We gave 2 English lessons each day and people from a bunch of different pueblos showed up for them.

It was both a relief to finish as well as sad. We finally felt like we had got teaching the lessons down and then it was over.

Things we learned: We were teaching the mothers much more than the children, writing out phonetic pronunciation is key and something they really want to know, they want to learn whole sentences not just words, singing the Spanish cuerpo (body) song aka. making a fool of ourselves in front of the class, really makes them open up, and lastly, even though we felt like we weren’t doing anything helpful, the mothers really appreciated what we were doing.

Last day of class:

Us with our supervisors outside of the Madres Masestras office

from left to right: Ginny, Xiomara, Chanita, Flora Eugenia, and Me

Now what we have left to finish up our internship course… write a 30-50 page paper!