Tag Archives: Because…Panama

Huecos de Muerte and the Fancy Part of Town

Two main things to cover today.  We discovered on our very first night here that the sidewalk had a giant death hole in it.  Turns out they are all over the city.  We now refer to them as “Huecos de Muerte,” or Death Holes because I’m pretty sure some of them could kill you.  Seriously, some of them are big enough for the clown from the movie It to hide in.  Eek!  There is no texting and walking around here, which makes navigating on Google Maps tricky.  I’ve started pulling over to the side, checking my map, and then proceeding along my route.  I’m not taking any chances.  I’ve taken a few photos of some, but there are two problems with taking pictures of them.  First, taking a picture down into a hole doesn’t give you any idea of how deep it is.  Secondly, the worst ones tend to come out at night.  But for what they’re worth, here they are…

Eric en un Hueco de Muerte

Eric en un Hueco de Muerte

Hueco de Muerte

Hueco de Muerte

Hueco de Muerte

Hueco de Muerte

 

Last night we turned left instead of right down Avenida Balboa (northeast, I suppose), and headed towards the fancy part of town called Punta Pacífica.  That’s where Trump Tower is, along with all of these exclusive condo buildings, including The Point, which Wikipedia calls the tallest all residential building in the western hemisphere.  I guess if you break it down like that, you can have a tallest [insert specifics here] building anywhere.  Anyway, we hiked around all of the huge condo buildings until we got to the bottom of it.  I trust wiki.  It’s tall.  And I say that we hiked because this city has a lot more hills than you would imagine!  I was definitely out of breath when we got to the middle of the hill that led to The Point.  Strange since it’s right on the water.

Looking towards Punta Pacifica near the beginning of our walk. The Point is the tall one all the way to the right.

Looking towards Punta Pacifica near the beginning of our walk. The Point is the tall one all the way to the right.


Punta Pacífica

Punta Pacífica

Towards Casco Viejo (the old city)

Towards Casco Viejo (the old city) with Punta Pacífica behind us.

Today was a business day.  Eric worked all day while I got some errands done.  I looked at an apartment and practiced my Spanish with the realtor, got copies of our passports and entrance stamps made and laminated, and checked out a Spanish language school.  It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when it’s all over the city, 90 degrees, no car, and all in Spanish, it makes for a long hot day.

Tomorrow we’ll get a tour of the Johns Hopkins affiliated hospital (kinda just because they offered), then head to the bank.  We have no idea whether they’ll allow us to open an account.  The States have made it a big pain for Panamanians to let Americans have accounts here, so a lot of banks just don’t want to mess with us.  Apparently it’s a lot of paperwork.  So we’ll go in armed with all kinds of IDs, 8 letters of recommendation from banks and other businesses, promises to give them our firstborn, slaughtered lambs, and the like, and we’ll see what happens.  If you think about it, please say a prayer.  We’d really like to be able to get some money down here.  It could make paying rent or buying a car or, well, a lot of things really difficult if we can’t open an account.  Oh, and if you have an extra prayer for my nerves, that’d be great.  If I’m already a pain because I get nervous and lose all my Spanish suddenly, that might not help us.  Hopefully the teller will speak slow, clear, non-Panamanian sounding Spanish.  Fingers crossed.

Thanks for keeping up with us!  We appreciate your support more than you know!  Love to all of you.

Tracking down the church & Texting us for Free!

First I want to share photos from our going-away party last week.  Eric’s brother, Ray, and his wife, Jennifer, were incredibly welcoming to all of our friends and family as they shared their home with everyone for a big send-off party on January 3.  Jennifer prepared an amazing spread that everyone enjoyed, there was a full bar, the last of the wine and beer from our wedding (7 months later!), and tons of friends and family who drove from all over to wish us well.  Our sweet friends Jake and Brittany even drove all the way from Pittsboro (over an hour?!) after another party to be with us.  It was all very special, and we felt very loved.  Here are some photos from that night.  I just regret that we didn’t get one of our hosts!

The Bruton Girls! It was a wonderful surprise when Lauren walked in. She spent a year in Mexico, so we enjoyed listening to her stories and wisdom. “It’s not wrong, it’s just different.”
Diana and Kevin
Sonal!
The “Panamanian” outfit that Jennifer and Ray came up with for Eric and me. I wore the grass skirt for a moment, but decided it looked better on Eric.
Brittany and Jake – the two who drove from Pittsboro to be with us!

So back to our adventures in Panama.  Yesterday we had planned to go to the Iglesia Presbiteriana de Panama – the Presbyterian Church of Panama – at 11:30 am for worship service.  Let me set the scene first.  You might imagine that there are not many Presbyterian churches in Panama, but what you might not imagine is that there are actually only TWO in the whole country.  And this one happened to be diagonally across the street from our building.  Amazing.  They have a Facebook page, so I checked it out, trying to figure out how big of a church could fit inside this building with a shop advertising cement work, painters, etc.  Here are some of the photos I found.

iglesia iglesia 5 iglesia 4

So we left our place with the necessary two minutes to walk over to the church, but when we arrived…it was completely empty.  Why?  Because Panama.  (I don’t know if I’ve explained that response before, but whenever something doesn’t make sense and one of use asks why it is the way that it is, the answer is “Because Panama.”)

Turns out they had decided to meet at an apartment across town at 3 pm instead, and they offered to call me to give me directions.  I facebooked them back, explaining that I got really nervous speaking Spanish on the phone, and since there are no addresses in Panama and directions are confusing anyway, maybe it’s better that they just facebook me back with directions.  She quickly wrote back asking for my phone number.  Perfect.

My phone immediately rang.  I took a deep breath, and Eric started laughing at me.  This very nice woman said hello, then started giving me the most convoluted directions ever.  I asked her if she could please slow down a little, but she gave up on me and handed the phone to her husband, who I later found out was the pastor and the most difficult man to understand in all of Panama.  As you might imagine, that didn’t go well either, although he didn’t give me much of a chance either.  He ended up telling me he was going to call his English speaking friend and he would have that guy call me.

My phone rang again, and a nice guy with a South Carolina accent said “Hey, this is Michael Lee.  I’m a missionary with MTW, and Pablo said you need directions.”  Wonderful!  Lo and behold, he couldn’t give me directions either.  Why?  Because Panama.  After a couple of minutes, he decided that it was just easier to meet us at the metro station and walk with us to the apartment.  When some of the streets have two names, some of them have signs and some don’t, none of the buildings have addresses, and only some of them have clearly marked names on the buildings.

Anyway, we got to the apartment and found out that the whole “church” that would be at the service would be the missionary couple (Michael and his wife Tricia), the two Panamanians I spoke to on the phone (the pastor, Pablo, and his wife, Elisabeth), and Eric and me.  That’s it.  From what I could gather, it’s a weird transition time for the church.  It’s normally very small, as you could see from the photos, but there are also old missionaries going out and new ones coming in.  Michael and Tricia only got to Panama on Wednesday, the day before we arrived.  But the result was a nice experience for us.  We had the opportunity to worship with these folks in a VERY intimate setting, the challenge of hearing a fast-speaking Panamanian pastor’s sermon, and the luxury of translators to ease any awkwardness that might otherwise have arisen.  I still spoke mostly Spanish while I was there, even when the South Carolinians spoke English to Eric and/or me.

We ended up spending three hours with these two couples, mostly just chatting about the Lees’ past missionary experiences in Mexico and language school in Costa Rica, Pablo and Elisabeth’s experiences trying to grow the church, as well as general talk about Panamá and the Interior, as the part of the country outside “Panama City,” as we Gringos call it, is called.  It was intellectually taxing, but a good experience overall.  It was also good to add phone numbers to our contact lists.

That brings me to WhatsApp.  Does anyone use this?  This is a great way to text me for free while we’re here.  Download the App, then add me as a contact in your regular contacts list on your phone with the phone number +507-6759-6620.  I should pop up in WhatsApp.  You can text me through that for free, rather than us having to pay to text internationally.  Everyone down here uses it because texting is expensive here.  Eric thinks it’s stupid and just uses Google Messenger or whatever, which is fine too, if you want to be like that.

Eric’s number is +507-6759-6633.

The night ended with a little chicken schwarma at a place right outside the metro.  Lovely.  And relaxing.

IMG_4077

34 days and counting…

I shouldn’t even put a countdown in writing because I’ll jinx us.  In case you haven’t heard, the latest is that we’re still going.  Eric and I will go on January 8 as planned.  CB and Addie will follow in mid-February when we move into an apartment that will let us have dogs.  CB will continue to receive chemo while we’re there.  And he is a super happy dog after his first chemo treatment, btw.  We are on Day 4 and he hasn’t shown any bad symptoms.  Sadly, his pee also hasn’t turned bright blue, which was a possible side effect.  That would’ve been cool.

Y’all have heard about our wonderful vet, Bethany, without whom we would’ve been sunk through this whole thing.  And we also now have a great team at a specialty hospital and an incredible oncologist who is even willing to keep in touch with us and/or our vets down in Panama.  God is good.  God is faithful.  Even in things like dogs.  He knows where our hearts are, and sometimes they are firmly implanted in 81 pound bouncy silly animals who want nothing more than to be with you.  Okay, enough about that.  There’s no crying in blogging.  At least not tonight.

So…a year.  It’s hard to imagine when my house is still as it’s always been…at least in the past year or so.  Nothing is packed.  We have a ton to do.  We don’t have renters lined up.  We don’t even have a kitchen in one of the apartments.  We’re still trying to figure out which international health insurance plan is best for us.  We’re collecting reference letters from banks and “business references,” whatever that means, as one of the many steps in the process of opening a personal bank account in Panama.

In the middle of this, I have roughly 12 more days to write three responses to motions for summary judgment and close down the rest of my post-conviction cases before my end date at work.  That’s the funny part.  Some part of me actually believes I’ll get to leave work on December 17th as planned and start to get everything prepared to leave everything I know and pack for a YEAR.  NOPE!  (If you watch Archer, you can hear how I said that in my head.  If you don’t watch Archer, your life would be better if you did.)

For those of you who are tempted to give up on my blog, I assure you that it will be much more describing what happens when you just pick up and move to a new country and much more of what Panama is like, and a lot less of me just being whiny when we get there.  Or at least if I’m whiny it’ll have a cultural flair…right?  My goal here is to be honest, to share what this experience really is like.  I feel so fortunate to be in the situation that we are in.  So few people are able to just pick up and leave, and even those who can often don’t.  So I want to share the good and the bad, the beautiful weather and the terrible rainy season, the modern city and the ridiculous tendency for everything to take 3x longer than you think it should.

I’m praying for strength right now because this is super scary.  It’s surreal right at this minute, and I think that’s God’s blessing because he knows if I really understood what we’re doing, I would completely freak out.  I think it’s also a blessing that I have more to do at work than I’ve ever had in a two week period.  I HAVE to be focused. I HAVE to work at night and on the weekends.  My brain has to be focused on prisoners constantly, so there’s no time for fear.  Yet.

Speaking of prisoners, the internship with the United Nations, in what I am starting to guess is Panamanian style, fell through.  At least for now.  My contact there had previously said that it was no problem for me to work only 30 hours a week.  My plan was to get to know the city, work on my Spanish in different settings, and have time to be with friends and family that visit.  Long story short, I am likely going to be doing some contract work for my firm here in the US, and the UN doesn’t allow interns to have another job.  When I told them I hadn’t signed a contract yet and would be willing to give up the work here in the States, she was still unwilling to commit to letting me come.  She had some worries about the nature of the class action suit I have been litigating.  She left it open for further conversation when I get to Panama, and I am hopeful that we can work something out.

Very upsetting, considering, first of all, the name-dropping potential of the, ahem, UNITED NATIONS gig, and secondly, the learning opportunities – both in language and in the prison world.  Praying that I can work something out with her once we are face to face.  I have talked to my boss up here, and luckily she completely understands and is willing to be flexible.

Alright, so if you’re up for praying for us, here are some specifics:  1) Wisdom,  2) Diligence in work over the next several weeks, as well as to get done all that we need to do before we move.  3) Decreased anxiety.  Mine is through the roof.  For Eric: Continued strength to take care of me in the wonderful way that he does.

And in the meantime, here are some pictures because pictures are fun.  Thanksgiving, the Carolina/State game (I don’t want to talk about it, but don’t we look happy in the pics?), and my happy dogs.

My dad, brother-in law, Drew, and my niece, Laine at the Old Well.
Bro-in-law Drew, sister Jennifer, and 4 year old niece at Old Well.
All the cousins! Eric and me, Drew and Jennifer, Cousin David and his new wife Averil from Houston, and Cousin Ashley and husband Ian from Atlanta/Decatur. So cool to have everyone together!
Laine modeling her new hat!
Eric didn’t make it to Hogwarts. I told him he had to go to Platform 9 and 3/4 or whatever.
Before the UNC/State game, obviously, b/c we’re happy. With good friends Dan and Sarah.
Game selfie!
I was forcing selfies on everyone.
He only likes them when they’re bloody. Creepy dog.
My friday night with the doggies. It got a little crazy.