Santa Marta

I will write a shorten version of our trip and sorry for the spelling errors. I do not have time to go back and check through. Anyways Santa Marta is the this poor town up in the mountains where we had our home stays from Monday to Friday afternoon. I got lucky and stayed with Cameron and Joy. Cameron and I do not understand any Spanish so to have Joy there to speak and translate was awesome. Also to get to know Joy better was great since we haven´t had time to get to know each other. I found out she was the roommate of my friend since 6th grade. Who knew? We all stayed with the ¨doctor¨. He works a the clinic and he is actually a kind of nurse or EMT. He is able to give shots of vaccicines and birth control, deliver babies, do checkups and take out stitches. We watched him the clinic for two hours. Some problems we had was that he never asked the patients whether is was okay for us to watch and told them that we didn´t know anything because we didn´t know spanish. HE also made fun of Joy often for not being able to roll her r´s. We were not very fond of him.

The mother of the house was very friendly. We helped her cook and clean up the dishes afterwards and I feel like she really appriciated the help because unlike other women in the village, there were no other women living there to help her except vivienne who was nine. But the food was good and I have no complaints except that we were over fed. They gave us huge helpings of food that could feed three of us for one plate and it kind of made me sick to eat so much but I didn´t want to seem rude by not eating the food.

The family seemed to be better off than others. There were four bedrooms with actually beds and then a separate building for the kitchen and dining room. They had a shower that didn´t work outside, so we had to hull a bucket and wash from that. There was also a pit topilet of course in the shape of toilet which I prefer. They had a lot of animals. One of their dogs they claimed was sick but it was basically starving to death. THe dog is skin and bones and it is quite sad. A lot of the animals sit and beg while we eat and its a bit awkward.

On one of the days there was a a soccer game of the gringos against the Panamanian children. I believe the children won all three games. We would have lost by a greater margin if it wasn´t for Chad. I was surprise to see him get so into the game and actually see him run was quite a sight. We were told that he would only run if you shouted snake but apparently, give him a soccer ball and he will run for that as well.

We also had a dance which was awkward. The guys would just grab you by the hand and lead you out and we didn´t understand the steps. It was confusing and I didn´t enhjoy myself much.

The worst was the hike to see the crashed plane of one of their presidents. It took 4.5 hours to get up the mountain and I think the Panamanians can do it in 2 hours or maybe more. It was a ahard climb on the muscles but it was satisfying to reach the top. My camera batteries were dead before the hike so I didn´t get any pictures but it was very pretty to be so high up especially when the mist cleared partly and you could see the hills below. The trip took a total of nine hours and I will admit I wasn´t the happiest person ever but when all is said and done, I am glad to have completed the hike.

Another hike we took was to see two waterfalls and a hotspring which the locals believe has healing powers if you dip your hads into it. Clearly it doesn´t work since I have a head cold and tons of bug bites. When we were traveling to the second waterfall, we were taken to a path that required us to cross the same river/stream multiple times. At one point I slipped and fell, getting soak. I was most cranky at my camera getting wet but thankfully it works perfectly fine now that it has dried to which I am very happy about. I was happy to lñeave Santa MArta. I didn´t come away with any more Spanish than I went in with. I had hoped for a kid who liked to teach me words but it didn´t happen. But the expoerience was interesting to see how another group of people live.