Panama Update #10
July 23
My goal during my time in Panama is to write for one hour a day for the year. So far in two weeks I have reached that goal on every day but one or two. In case anybody is wondering, even if nothing very eventful happens, I plan to write.
The person who hired Nikki down here asked her to send me by his office today so we could meet. He is friendly and helpful. He is originally from Colombia and is well known in the Smithsonian here. Nikki has a lot of respect for him as a scientist. We chatted a bit about how I liked Panama and about what my plans were for my time here. He wants to start a lunch-time yoga class for the auxillary building where he and Nikki have their offices and asked me if I could do something like that. I told him if he could find 6 people who are interested we could set something up.
Nikki was working in her office today and not in the field so we met for lunch at the blank cafeteria. The vegetarian selection was pasta with steamed zucchini and a fresh salad.
My volunteer service started this afternoon. Nikki needed some books from the library so I was trained in how to find them and order them if they are not on site. The people who work in the library are very helpful. It saves her a lot of time since the library is in a separate area from her office building (about 1/2 mile away). They have a great on-site research library here for all the scientists. If a book can't be found here it can be ordered from the Smithsonian in Washington or one of 8000 libraries world-wide. I now have a library card which allows me access to all that. The librarian and I are becoming friends since he is the one who has organized the Yoga classes I am giving and they are held in the Smithsonian after hours. He has a natural curiosity and is very interested in learning as much as he can. We may order mats online and sell them to people at a cost or if it is better to buy them in Panama. I gave him the website of the Minneapolis yoga center where Nikki and I met(http://www.themeditationcenter.org/) and he enjoyed reading about all the summer programs offered there.
ANTS: The only insects I have noticed so far in our apartment are small ants, like the sweet ants in Minnesota. They don't have a good selection of ant poison in the stores, so we are just wiping them up for now. Basically all they have in the stores are sprays, and that is not good for inside. Maybe we can find something on Amazon for that. The outside ants are bigger and build huge ant hills, like the size of bowling balls or bigger. Maybe they need such big ant hills to withstand the daily rains. You see them all over on the sidewalks. The ants are very hard workers and there always seems to be a line of them carrying pieces of leaves or something like that.
