Briefing & Debriefing
Our first three days and our last three days were spent all together in a big AMIGOS group, all 62 of us. When we landed in Panama we spent the night in a hostel that was 30 minutes away from the airport. The next day we traveled to Cocle where we did our briefing. We talked more about health and safety and our community action plan. We were also given our partners and routes. We spent 2 days in a wonderful meeting area. There was lots of room for us and AC in the rooms which was a huge luxury. On the third day we traveled to Chitere on three big busses and had an amazing breakfast of coco pebbles, bananas and sprite. There was a big party waiting for us at Chitere with lots of singing and dancing. No one from mycommunity was there to meet us, so we went with Calabazito’s Honorable Representante, a neighboring community. A Honorable Representante is like a city council rep. We went with him and and the girls from Calabazito and he dropped me and Rachel off in La Canoa before going to Calabazito with the other three AMIGOS volunteers.
Our midterm event was supposed to be in the middle of our trip but since there was going to be so many different organizations involved they had to push it back to the last weekend before we left. We went to Montouso which is a huge national park near the town of Las Mines. We stayed at a school that is a 15-minute ride from the park. The first day we split up into two groups:half planted trees and the other half, including my route, went on a hike whilst cleaning the trail. Then all together, the participants and local youth from our communities cut and painted tires to become flower pots. There was also a lot of presentations from different Panamanian organizations and entrepreneurs.