i was a slacker while we were in panama
and didn’t really tell you what went on down there, so here is a brief recap of
our seventeen days there:
we arrived very early on sunday morning,
and after checking in to our hostel and getting a little rest we decided to go
explore one of the “main attractions” of panama city: the mall. it’s huge and has just about everything you
could want, and as a bonus has a few stores with incredibly cheaply-priced
clothing. that same day our team decided
to head out to a ritzy area called the “causeway” for dinner, and we
ended up cramming the six of us in to one taxi for the 15-minute drive…oh fun
times with transportation.
monday, our first “full day” in
panama, was a “squad fun day” (which i guess had we still been doing
races would have been a race, but instead we traveled to a few places together
to get to know the country): the miraflores locks of the panama canal,
bennigan’s restaurant on the causeway, and neon-bowling and bumper cars at the
mall. we just got to hang out with our
whole squad in a non-competative fun sort of way.
the rest of our first week was spent
getting contacts in place, meeting with the contacts, getting set up with our
housing at the orphanage, moving three of us with seven people’s stuff to the
orphanage (jenn, kari, and renee went and helped team less with a youth camp,
but they had to leave the hostel before we could move our bags so we took their
stuff and some of another teams that had left stuff there all with us). we moved in to the orphange on a friday
afternoon, after the kids were out of school, and hung out all day friday and
most of saturday with them. no one at
the orphanage speaks english and we don’t speak that much spanish, but God
allowed us to have an amazing first weekend with them. on sunday we went to church with the kids and
it ended up being the same church that team seven:eleven was going to be
staying with later in the week, so God opened another amazing door for us by
providing translators for the church service and people to continue the world
race’s relationships with that church.
during our whole week at the orphanage we
spent all the afternoons hanging out with the kids, helping with homework and
chaos-control, we taught them card games and they taught us their favorites, we
made movies of them doing silly things like sledding down slides in cardboard
boxes and watched the videos with them. we celebrated renee’s birthday with the kids with fun-fetti cake and
frosting and cars-themed decorations and gifts.
one morning we went to a clinic that
prostitutes come to for weekly checkups (prostitution is legal in panama as
long as they get checked every week and can present their card that says they
have a clean bill of health) – we talked with the ladies there and shared the
gospel and the loved of Christ with them and passed out Bibles to those who
wanted (and we had a couple extra spanish bibles at the end of the day so renee
and i got to take them home with us). kari’s blog.
another morning we did programs at a
school to supplement their religion classes – we talked about friendship with
the kids and shared the story of david and jonathan and talked about how Jesus
is a good friend to all of us – the kids responded really well to our talk
about Jesus being a friend.
our host Cesar wanted to take us around
one morning and show off parts of his country to us, so we toured the old part
of the city and visted a few old buildings as well as the presidential palace
and the museum near the french embassy – it was a great cultural introduction
to panama and we loved seeing what was there.
we left our kids at the orphanage tuesday
night and headed to the bus station to catch an 11pm bus back up to costa rica,
where we spent one night, and then on to nicaragua…which is where we are
now. so that’s the whirlwind tour
through panama!
