March 15, 2009

Our group of twenty arrived in Panama a couple of days ago, and we were all surprised to feel the heat of Central America. It’s ridiculously hot here! We stayed in Panama City the first night, and woke up bright and early the next morning to travel to our project site. The drive took about three and a half hours to the main city, Santiago. After we reached this point, we were told that we needed to change vehicles in order to get to the village of El Bale. We quickly moved from our nice air-conditioned tour bus, to three 4x4 trucks with metal caging in the back, and prepared for an epic off-roading adventure. There were really no roads established from then on. Everything was dirt, and there were hills and rocks all over the place. It was definitely the roughest drive we had to endure so far. Finally after about an hour of holding on for dear life, hitting my head against the metal cage a few times, and looking at the beautiful scenery, we arrived at the village of El Bale. We were immediately welcomed by the leader of the community, Padre Roberto, who was very excited to meet all of us. He showed us where we were sleeping (thankfully we each have a bed and there are four working toilets!), and then invited us to play baseball with some of the local children.

Baseball in El Bale is intense! The kids have tons of energy and can play for hours and hours, nonstop. We tried to keep up with them, but I’m pretty sure they were laughing at our horrible baseball skills. We played until the sun went down.

After baseball, we had our first meal in the country. I’m not going to lie; I was extremely scared about dinner. All of our travel consultations prior to leaving for Panama warned us that we shouldn’t eat anything raw, drink the water, or eat anything that touched the water, so I was a little weary to dive into the village’s food, but I was completely wrong. Dinner was amazing. We had rice, beans, a beef stew mix, mushroom and onion gravy, and salad. This first meal definitely eased a lot of my worries about being abroad for the first time.

After dinner, we met as a group and talked about some of our expectations and what we wanted to accomplish. Many of us still didn’t know what to expect, but we were all excited at the same time. We concluded the night with a three-hour star gazing session. The stars last night were incredible and it literally looked like we were in a planetarium. We all lay out on the cement court outside, and spent our first night in the country truly appreciating the beauty of Panama.

Today, we really started to work on our business project. In the morning we had our first meeting with the main organizer of the honeybee farm, Brother Alcedes. He started by introducing how the honeybee farm is set up and what they need help with. We immediately learned that the farm is made up about 12 different families. Each family lives in their own respective area of the community, but the distance between each family ranges from about 1 hour to 6 hours in terms of walking distance. None of the farmers have transportation, and each farmer has a different number of hives at their site. Some have about 2-3 hives, while others have up to 19 hives. This makes it difficult for the farmers to organize a supply list for ordering in bulk. Another issue that came up during this meeting is the fact that the farmers are not making money. They are selling their product to a middleman for $5, who then raises the price a couple more dollars to sell in the supermarket. We asked Brother Alcedes why they haven’t tried to cut out the middleman, and he said that the farmers don’t have a legal status that allows them to sell their product straight to supermarkets. This is a huge problem for the honey farm group right now. We’re still trying to gather more information about the honey farm, so hopefully we can get this all done tomorrow.