A week of "Capacitaciones" in Chiriqui

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I've spent the past week offering "capacitaciones" (professional development workshops) at UNACHI (the Universidad Autónoma de Chiriquí).  There, I spent most of my time inside, but the outside parts are pretty, too, with lovely garden areas.

A walkway from the entrance of the school
to the math & sciences area
has pretty garden areas alongside it.

The workshop in action.

I taught the class in a computer lab -- mostly, we used pencil and paper, not computers, though -- with a whiteboard instead of a chalkboard.  [Whiteboards, sigh.  Sometimes life is rough, you know?]

It was so, so much fun to be back with other mathematicians talking about math.  I've really missed this.  The group was fun to work with; they had excellent questions, and they did a bunch of work.  By the end, they were saying "you have a family here at UNACHI", and truly, I felt welcomed.


The department chair, me, and the guy who organized the workshop.
They're holding copies of my books (which I gave them), 
and I'm holding a certificate they gave me.

At the end of the workshop, there were obligatory speeches of thanks and presentations of a certificate, because that's just what you do here.  But also, we took pictures of all the instructors with their artwork, inside the nearby awesome Sierpinski triangle that Aisa and her students made of aluminum cans.  

Aisa is in the gray dress in the left of the largest open triangle;
I'm poking my head through a triangle on the right.

I did the workshops in the morning, and during the afternoon I hung out at my AirBnB and pretended to catch up on other work.  The city of David (pronounced like dah-VEED) is very flat, and because of earthquake risk the houses are almost all one-story (and seem very flat even for one-story houses). The neighborhood surrounding my AirBnB was a grid of streets; there are basically no street signs or house numbers, so it was really, really easy for us to get lost if we weren't using internet apps to navigate.  

A map of our neighborhood, very homogenous. 
That Route 1 on the corner is the "Carretera Americana", 
which runs all the way from Alaska to Panama City,
(when it's not blocked by protests: story for another time).


Here were some of our neighbors.  
We had an alarm rooster to greet us every morning!


When you ask people in Panama, "What is there to see or do in David?", it doesn't seem to matter where in Panama they're from.  Even in David, they pause and they say, "Well, you could go to Boquete.  Boquete is lovely!"  Then sometimes they'll add that the beaches nearby are great places to visit, too. 

I'll say a few nice things about David, though. UNACHI is, as I've said, one of the nicest and most welcoming universities I've visited while here in Panama, and for any academic thinking of coming to Panama, I think it makes this place worth spending time in. Also, the restaurants here were phenomenal.  (At one Italian restaurant we liked so much we went back just to try different food on the menu; while we were there we asked the servers about ideas for things to do in David, and they paused and said, "Well, you could go to Boquete . . . ").  

So one afternoon, we did just that.  We drove up the long (and well-maintained) road to this little town at the foot of the mountains.  Boquete is at a higher elevation than David, and the air here is cooler, very windy this past week; the climate makes it a great farming area.  

See the mountain (surrounded by clouds) in front of us?

We walked around a park I'd seen when I'd visited this area a few months back with Aisa, and I got to show them to my husband.

I love these yellow blossoms.

The park has artificial ponds with ducks, turtles, and koi,
plus passes alongside a raging and beautiful river.

We went to yet another restaurant.  I think I have eaten at restaurants more times this past week than in the previous five years.  Maybe I've been snatched by aliens and I'm really a body pod? 


Just a photo to say that if the aliens swapped
me and/or my husband out for another body,
they did a good job with the body doubles. 

Now that the week of capacitaciones is over, we've moved into an AirBnB in Boquete itself.  Updates to follow!  Those will be interesting: road closures, high winds, and protests look like they'll up-end plans, so there are improvisations ahead.

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