My host family was quite wealthy, I lucked out on my house for sure. My "mom" was 29 and my "dad" was 33. There house was HUGE for Panamanian standards, was gated, had glass in the windows, a NICE indoor bathroom and shower and I even had a ceiling fan in my room. Plus my family had juice, and gave me fruit with breakfast, it was quite exciting haha.
The first day I was there I ended up making a pilgrimage with my family. We walked from Santiago to Atalaya at night to celebrate a saint. It took us about 2 hours to walk there. In Atalaya the line to go into the church was at least 2 hours long so my family opted not to wait, but on the street there were tons of vendors selling various things and tons of people walking around. It was really quite the event, and we didn't even go on the busiest night. We had to wait 45 mins to get a bus back to Santiago.
During tech week we created and hosted a youth camp for children in the community. We had about 15 kids show up, not bad for minimal advertising in a small community. It was a lot of fun to interact with the kids, they were adorable. We also co taught in the classroom with teachers. I lucked out and was paired with an AWESOME teacher. My trainee partner and I led an activity about the positives and negatives of different animals, 2 other trainees led an activity about ecosystems and then the 4 of us and the teacher did a story/play with the kids about a rat and a lion (see pictures below). It was a ton of fun, but semi intimidating to be infront of all those children, teaching in spanish.
We also did a little bit of work on a trash project that the volunteer was working on. She was having her youth group stuff all their trash into plastic bottles, compacting VERY well. Now they are using the bottles to build a their recycling center (see pics below).
We also got to take a boat tour and a hike through some mangroves. They were gorgeous! (see pics below).
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