Sixteen was a rough year for me, as it is for most teenagers. I was just learning how big and strange and wonderful and terrible being a grown up is. After graduating high school, I had a lot of decisions before me, and I was still mired in the angst and confusion of pre-adulthood. I was also living with my family is a tiny southern Missouri town with no opportunities for anyone who wasn't born there. (I wasn't born there.) To say I was moody would be a gross understatement. Well, I had the good fortune to have a mentor who recognized my restlessness, and she recommended I take a trip. She told me about a youth mission organization called Global Expeditions that organized mission trips all over the world.
Lights sparkled, thunder boomed, and the angelic choir sang. Immediately, I poured research into the organization, picked out the trip I wanted, a two-weeker to Panama, and set about saving up and raising money to go. There's a whole long story about the struggle to make up the couple thousand dollars I would need, but I'll skip all that since you're probably more interested in the trip itself. After all, this is a travel blog!
Well, money raised, bags packed and a head full of dreams, I set out with a group of fifty like-minded teenagers. That was the first plane ride I was old enough to remember, and I'll never forget the way the ocean looked as we traveled over it, or the sensation of going up through the clouds. We had a small layover in Belize, and I was about to go out of my head with excitement. I was in another country! Just that small taste in a foreign airport was enough to get me addicted, and my trip hadn't even really started.
We got to Panama City late that night, stayed a few days at a sort of children's camp in its off season while the trip leaders coordinated. We would break into two groups, and each group would go to a different village. You see, we weren't there for the big city. We would be visiting to small villages in the Kona Jungle where several of the residents didn't even speak Spanish but Kona, a similar language but not the same. That was also when we discovered that the we had no interpreters being that someone had the impression we already had fluent Spanish speakers in the group. We had two fluent speakers, and four or five who had done well in their high school Spanish classes. I had a Spanish dictionary and the ability to pick up languages fairly quickly, so they counted me as an asset as well.
So, our first huge hiccup discovered and several laughs had, and a day of rocking out with ipods hooked up to the one large speaker in the camp, we broke into our groups, loaded up onto busses and were off.
That day was when I discovered that drivers in other countries are terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. There was many a swerve, traffic weaving and going faster that we thought a bus ought to be able to go. We did make it safely, however, and there were several people waiting for us as our bus pulled in. We were in Wagandi.
Everyone was a little confused initially, as the village was both exactly what we had imagined, and nothing like it. The village was small, with just over a hundred people living there, and the houses were roughly constructed wooden building with leaf thatched roofs. The Kona Jungle loomed nearby, and the trees were thick over the rolling hills. All of that fell perfectly in line with what we imagined, but an asphalt road, fairly will kept with painted lines (which all drivers ignored anyways) ran not fifty feet from the village edge. Cars and trucks (and some horseback riders) traveled up an down it.
After one of our Spanish speakers confirmed with the village chief, a short, friendly-but-skeptical man in a red Hawaiian shirt that we were still welcome in Wagandi. After the formalities were taken care of, we piled off the bus and began to introduce ourselves. It was a little awkward at first, what with the language barrier and cultural differences, but everyone noticed the looks I got as soon as I got off the bus. I was different from the others for the simple fact that I carried a soccer ball. All of the children immediately directed their attention to me, or rather my ball. That was when a few of us decided that the best way to break the ice was to start a game. I gathered a few people that I had gotten to know over the travel then I kicked the ball towards the group of kids. A huge game broke out, and we were immediately welcomed.
The men in the village cleared out the meeting hall and set up hammocks there for all of the women from out group. The men were settled in the church building. We also discovered that the village cook was an English speaker, and the pastor of that small church could speak and understand a little English. The conversation initially with several of the people were hilarious as everyone, whether we U.S. teenagers or the Wagandians, would often end up speaking our languages louder and trying to use accents. Someone started a motto of "If you speak with an accent, they'll understand."
The kids were the most welcoming initially. After we played a game with them, and a few of us were always ready for another, which was sometimes soccer, sometimes tag, and sometimes tickle-fights, they followed us around like a cloud. We never had a quiet moment, and I've never had such fun in my life. After a bit, when I was sitting in a corner of the church at midday, writing in a travel journal my mother had given to me, three of the little boys burst in and immediately wanted to know what I was doing. I showed them, and explained as well as I could in my broken Spanish. Of course, they couldn't let me have all the fun with the book, and using my lap as a table top, they began drawing pictures. The oldest began to point at them, and telling me, in Spanish what they were called. The game "Como se dice" (Spanish for How do you say?) was born. For hours each day, I would sit with them and we would trade words. They'd draw a picture, and point to it and say "Como se dice en ingles?" I'd tell them, and they'd practice for a bit, then I'd ask "Como se dice en Espanol?" It might sound boring, but it was hard not to catch their enthusiasm. I still have all of those drawings in that book, and I still laugh when I look at them.
Every morning, one of those little boys, who was named Roberto, would serenade us awake. It was possibly the funniest thing we had ever encountered. As soon as the sun rose, he would sit outside our door with his puppy and sing as loud as he possibly could. He didn't sing any song in particular, preferring to make up his own lyrics and give them the tune he thought best. More than one, it was about his puppy or wondering when we would get up. If anyone was upset about being woken up at dawn every day, they never said a thing. Not one of us really wanted him to stop. It was loud, horrible, and very off key and one of the fondest memories I have of that trip, and there are several.
I'll admit, I had planned for my Panama trip to be recounted in one blog post, but as I write, there is more and more that I remember that I don't want to leave out. I will post up a second one reliving the rest of my Panamanian journey next week.
