March Madness

Whats up everyone, I am here doing well in Panama and hope all is well with you all wherever you are in the world. I know I haven´t sent any emails in a while but I am trying to keep my blog somewhat current. This past month in March the Peace Corps held a conference that brought together all the volunteers in the country which was amazing. There were roughly 150 volunteers plus 20 staff that all met together in one place at the same time, which is the first time it happened in about two years. It was pretty cool seeing and meeting everyone that works in the country that I wouldn´t normally see otherwise. Peace Corps Panama has some amazing people working and living here who are doing some amazing things in the country. If I haven´t mentioned before there are 4 different programs that Peace Corps has in Panama. The four programs are the Community and Economic Development program (which is my program), Sustainable Agriculture program, Environmental Conservation program, and Environmental Health program. But I have a few pictures from the conference, the U.S. Ambassador to Panama also attended the event one day. I also have some pictures from a panamanian baseball game that a lot of us volunteers went to during the week. Also a few other pics from this dart throwing competition that we had.

As far as work goes I have been getting a lot busier over the last two months. My cooperative that I am working with is making a lot of improvements and has relied on me more to get work done. We are currently working on getting a $5000.00 loan and are alos expecting a $1500.00 donation for store improvements. And I am also working on putting some other funding proposals to get some money elsewhere for improvements on the infrastructure of the store. In addition, I am working on a reforestation project right now and have about two thousand trees planted and working to start an environmental club in my town with the local environmental government agency. Lastly, some other volunteers and myself and organizing an AIDS/HIV fair in the middle of May to educate an community about the dangers, risks, and prevention of HIV/AIDS. This is a few things that I am getting into lately but I don´t want to bore you all with the details. Lastly I will leave you with the pics of the All Volunteer Conference in mid March.