Very Very Unique

Every volunteer's service is unique. And by this I mean very very unique. I live in a spread out community, with almost no phone signal, running water in the house for most people, and a lucky few houses with a solar panel or generator that is run for a few hours each day. I walk twenty minutes and then take public transportation another twenty minutes to get internet, do food shopping, and maybe one day, laundry when the laundry mat opens back up. This is also a volunteer's site.

At this point I've visited a bunch of volunteers and want to try and paint a more complete picture of Peace Corps using various unique experiences. However, even if I manage to successfully lay out all the characteristics that form the atmosphere of a volunteers' experiences here in Panama, I've only scratched the surface of the 77 other countries with volunteers and the 220 or so countries throughout the world. To keep this post from running on for pages and pages, I'm just going to talk about the living conditions of each volunteer.

For the first two months in country we lived with a host family that wasn't much of a shock besides learning how to use a latrine. My shock came when it was time to for each trainee to visit a volunteer in their site. I went to visit AJ who lived in the Darien which is the wild west of Panama. His site, which no longer meets security requirements of Peace Corps, is 1.5 to 2 hours walk from the nearest paved road, store, and phone signal. In the rainy season the path turns into mud and at times can be more than 2 feet deep. However, a volunteer had worked there before and did a hydro electric project so the community had enough electricity for charging computers, small TVs, and lights.

After visiting his community, I just about freaked out. Hiking in all your food every week, being unreachable almost all the time, and trekking through mud was just too much. I ended up in a community that fell on the other end of the spectrum for environmental health volunteers. My community is a bit better off. We've got water systems that work pretty well, houses of block and metal roofing (which is on the higher end of housing), the road is well maintained and public transportation has recently started on it. My neighbor has a gas generator and for $20 a month I get electricity from sun down to about 9 or 10pm.

A few months after moving into my community I went to visit SG. While she had an hour long hike, it was generally pretty pleasant. There were many houses of block, a nice school, and the store sold cold soda and beer.

For carnival I went to one of the larger celebrations in the country in my friend TM's community. I can't say it was a community, more like a small city. He has all the basic amenities in his house as well as a washing machine.

Recently, I went to help do a water seminar presentation in my friend HM's community. Her community is the worst off community I've visited so far. It had the typical situation of most communities I've visited being about an hour walk, most housing was rancho style with giant leaves layered on top of each other, but the water was terrible. Some times people wait almost two hours in a line to get water from the one area in the community. There are two lines, one goes to the larger somewhat dirtier source where people bathe and do laundry. The source right next to it is used to fill water buckets for drinking and cooking. If you didn't know, people use a lot of water, in the US it's roughly 50 gallons per person per day, in Panama it's 30 gallons. Most of that goes to the bathing and laundry but still that leaves several gallons a day for cooking and drinking which have to be carried up the hill back to the house.

I've seen houses from leaves to block and metal, roads from mud to paved, water from barely anything to fancy private systems, signal from nothing to being able to browse the Internet, electricity from nothing to fully wired communities, and everything in between. Factor in the people, committees, government interaction, climate, religion, communal structures, ethnic groups, etc. and it begins to become visible what very very unique means.