Day 6: January 8, 2014

 

This is going to be a long post, so prepare yourselves. My final day in Panama was also my favorite. I woke up to a gorgeous sunrise through the fog.

While I was sitting on the fence taking pictures (which is considerably more difficult than it looks since the fence is semi-unstable), the Panamanian bus driver from another university nearly scared me off the fence when he offered to take my picture since I thought I was alone.

A front view photo of the entrance to the church compound we stayed in.

The main event for the day was a big cultural performance to celebrate the end of our week. Below, one of the women was making a flower crown to put on her head. The little boy next to her I later spent much of the day with.

  

Ms. Shirley, our trip advisor, was the first to receive a flower crown, which looked absolutely beautiful. It was after this that one of the woman looked at me, and placed Ms. Shirley's flower crown on my head. She told me it looked beautiful, and before I knew it she had grabbed my hand and taken me away from the group to pick flowers so that I could have my own. While we collected flowers, I told her about my family and life in the U.S (my spanish had improved considerably by the end of the week). By the time we returned to the group, we were fast friends.






Here I am with Patricia, her son, and my completed flower crown.

 After everyone had eaten a delicious lunch of chicken and rice that the women of the village had prepared for us, Isaac, a leader in the community, kicked off the cultural event.














Among the performances were traditional dances performed by the women. During the last dance they performed, the invited all of us to get up and dance with them. By this time, the kids had stolen my phone away and were taking pictures for me.

These three little girls had been sneaking looks at me and giggling all throughout the performance, so I kept making funny faces at them. One finally came over to talk to me and told me I was pretty- talk about a way to win a girl's heart over. 

When the cultural performances were over, the women brought out their crafts (beaded jewelry, wood carvings, woven baskets, etc) for sale. Although I bought a good number of things for my friends back home, I didn't get quite as much shopping time as I wanted because the kids were busy fighting for camera time or hugs (or photo- bombing as per the picture on the bottom left).
























On the part of us Americans, our contribution to the celebration was a huge Barney pinata for the kids. When the pinata finally broke, it was mass chaos in the happiest, craziest, best sense of the word.

        While the pinata craziness was subsiding, my friend Rebecca pulled me aside and said Patricia wanted us to walk her back to her house. When we got to her home, we got to meet her entire family, including her husband and her many sons. Out of nowhere, Patricia presented Rebecca and I both with gifts of parumas, which honestly made me want to cry a little bit. The piriati women sell each paruma for a good amount by their standard, and considering I hadn't met the woman before that day, it's hard for me to grasp just how bit and beautiful of a heart Patricia has. We exchanged contact info, and I promised to stay in touch. I miss her already.

Then of course came the hardest part of the trip- saying goodbye to all the amazing people I met:

Gonzo-also a translator, and definitely the person
that gave me the most grief all week 

 Dani and Joel, 2 of our translators 

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Posing with Eloida, the woman who's home I visited

My friends Amy, Rebecca, and I with our Parumas

Keving OG (Original Gangster), our trip coordinator

And of course, it was equally hard to say bye to all the kids. When they said "see you tomorrow", how are you supposed to explain that you're not coming back? If there's one thing I didn't want the Piriati people thinking, it's that we walked in their lives for one week and walked out again just as easily.  

Maybe it's fitting that the sunset on our last night there was the most spectacular. Because we were leaving for the airport at 3 am, I didn't bother going to bed that night. Sometimes there are just a lot more important things than sleep.