Seven months in Panama
The Ides of March mark the seven-month point in my Panama adventures. I really feel like I'm in a different place than when I arrived -- Panama hasn't changed, of course, but I have certainly learned a lot and done a lot. I have only two months left before heading back to the U.S.; and two of my remaining "Panama" weeks will actually be in Chile. It seems like a very fitting point at which to offer up a couple of musings about what my life is like these days.
Speaking Spanish
When I first got here, it was really hard for me to understand anybody else, especially when there was more than one person in the room or when there was background noise. I was constantly – but constantly – making mistakes with basic gender with conjugation rules.
Nowadays, I have much less trouble understanding others, and also much less trouble asking people to occasionally repeat themselves. (In fact, I know several ways to say What? Come again? Can you repeat that? It's nice to add a little variety to my conversations, I figure.)
I've given two different week-long workshops entirely in Spanish. I've had long telephone conversations with complete strangers in Spanish. I have a whole repertoire of jokes in Spanish that I'll share with random people to make them laugh. Just the other day, I suddenly realized I've come so far that there are times it's easier for me to speak in Spanish than in English with people who are bilingual. Don't get me wrong; I still make mistakes with gender and conjugation rules, but it's usually the more subtle rules that trip me up these days.
Just yesterday, I was chatting over lunch, explaining that "hablo mucho más bueno que antes", and my host leaned over to suggest "mejor". ("I speak much more good now" . . . "better"). So, yeah.
Math
Math: the book
When I arrived in Panama, I had written zero chapters, and had tentatively hoped to write about one chapter a month. Seven months in, I have six chapters done! OK, it's not seven chapters done, but still I feel like I've made a lot of progress and understanding the overall shape of my book and structure of my book. I still have three chapters to go, and I know that even after those are done, I'll have to redo many of the pictures and to rewrite some of the chapters that now I've seen what happens in later chapters. But revising is always easier than drafting, so hey! So happy! I have six chapters written, and they are so much fun.
 |
| At a math & art workshop, participants showing their completed worksheets. |
Math: the outreach
When I first arrived in Panama, I had basically one mathematical contact. I soon developed a whole bunch of other one-way contacts with mathematicians, but for several months, those remained one way: just about everybody I reached out to ghosted me. But after about three months, I started getting nibbles in the other direction, nibbles that eventually turned into giant bites. As I mentioned above, in February I got to do two different week-long workshops in the interior, and meeting people there was good for the heart. I also got to see a bit of how Panamanian universities work, which was something that I was really hoping to get the chance to see.
One of the goals that I had listed in my application application was to build bridges that make it easier for future US mathematicians to come here, so I'm really glad that now I have a bunch of names that I can pass forward, allowing future collaborations to have much less friction. Did I mention that I'm the first mathematical Fulbright scholar in Panama? I'm hoping to pave the way for future U.S.-based mathematicians to come travel here.
In addition to those two week-long workshops, I've done a bunch of different one-hour workshops and talks. I have more lined up for the future: two weeks of my mini-grant in Chile, two days at a school in the inner city, and vague promises of invitations to two nearby universities (we'll see if those actually come through – ha!)
Paperwork and Bureaucracy
I completed the Panamanian side of my immigration paperwork 3 1/2 months after arriving in country. Bureaucracy before the departure, after my arrival, and then the process of finalizing the paperwork was… Well, very bureaucratic. But now, all that remains is to make sure that I give back my temporary ID before I return to the US.
Here are the links to those posts, just to keep things in one place.
- The Fulbright Orientation
- Here's the post about the pre-departure paperwork and all that it involved.
- What I packed
- Here's the post about my post-departure paperwork and my first immigration appointment in Panama.
- Paperwork done: I'm a documented Immigrant
Fulbright paperwork (as opposed to immigration paperwork) involves writing monthly updates to the embassy. As you might imagine, I love doing this, and I'm the poster child of monthly-update-writing.
I happen to be unaffected by all the funding pauses and funding cuts coming out of the White House. Some of this is situational -- the Fulbright program has been congressionally mandated since the 1960s, so it won't be cut -- but some of this is an accident of timing: I got almost all of my funding before the highly disruptive "pauses", and my last little mini-fulbright travel award will reimburse me for my plane tickets to Chile once I return, now that pause is over and the funding spigot is back on.
Tourism
Some of my colleagues back home gifted me a Panama tourism book last May, and I used that together with advice from friends and other travelers to create a giant bucket list of things to do here. And Dang It if we haven't done just about all of the things on that list! I am glad that I will not be leaving Panama with a lot of "if only I had done X" regrets.
So far, I've been to
- Casa Museo in Ciudad del Saber
- Tour de Chocolate
- Bailes Folkloricos
- Parque Omar (walking, seeing trees) (twice)
- Cerro Ancon (hiking)
- Exploratorio museum
- Whale watching
- BioMuseo (twice)
- Bat Night at the STRI in Gamboa (twice)
- Casco Viejo
- Three different Art Galleries
- Museo del Canal
- Sloth Day
- Panama Day parade
- Museo de la Mola
- Parque Metropolitano (hiking)
- Book launch event
- Birdwatching
- Pop-up "Chamanes" archeological exhibit
- Smithsonian Nature Center
- Pedal cars on the Amador Causeway
- Boquete (walk through a park, strawberry restaurant, the base of Volcan Barú)
- Red Double-decker tour bus
- Purubiakirú (indigenous peoples village) tour
- Canal transit by boat, through the locks
- Panama transit by train
- visit the Mira Flores Locks (there's an educational center and imax movie)
- visit Gamboa Rainforest/Lake
- Panama Nature Center
In fact, the only major thing on the list haven't checked off all the way (hiking the Volcan Barú) is something that my husband and I got a good start on -- good enough, in fact, that I can picture the mountain and its steep gravel in my head. A Panamanian friend of mine who also wants to hike it might try it with me in April (it's on her bucket list, too), but if we don't manage to make that work out, I'll be OK.
Getting Around
One of my favorite songs from that show.
Exercise
Ugh. Running continues to be so hard here. Panama is a place that is constantly so hot, so humid, and so hilly . . . and running buddies are so few and far between . . . that I hardly ever run here. A Fulbrighter who lives about a half-hour away proposed jointly training for a 9-mile run in early April, but both of us have downgraded out expectations. We might, instead, do an "as far as we can make it run".
Sometimes I run. Sometimes I do Fitness Blender. Sometimes I just sit around doing nothing and I still sweat up a storm.
Food, Flora, and Fauna
When I first got here, I found a bit of food in the forest/shortcut I walked through; nowadays, I don't have the same access to found food. But there are banana trees in the backyard of my AirBnB, and it's hard to imagine eating more locally than that. There's an open-air vegetable market about two or three blocks from my AirBnB, and two large supermarkets within a kilometer (very walkable). I'm taking advantage of local bananas, pineapples, and mangos (the last are only semi-local; they're out of season here in Panama so they're imported from neighboring Columbia). Occasionally with other people (my husband or friends), we'll also eat at restaurants, but mostly I'm an eat-at-home kind of a person, and that's remained true even when my home is in Panama.
In fact, my AirBnB host regularly offers "Bird & Breakfast" experiences, and for the last two weeks, I've been the one cooking breakfasts for these! For about 10 days in a row now, I've made "huevos fantasticos" and pancakes (pineapple pancakes or banana pancakes) for the guests who come join us. So much happiness making breakfast! When I come back from Chile, the regular chef will be back from her vacation so I'll retire from my temporary chef "job".
And speaking of birds, I'm on an almost first-name basis with many species that visit the area regularly: parakeets, yellow-backed orioles, ruddy ground doves, the mighty chachalacas, red-legged honey creepers, barred ant shrike, azulejo, talingo/grackle, clay thrush, whistling duck, toucan, lapwing, gallinazo (black vulture).
And I also enjoy seeing Panama animals on a daily basis: gato solos (coati mundi), ñeques (agouti), turtles, cayman crocodiles, the occasional iguana and titi monkey.
 |
| A tiny (inch-and-a-half long) lizard with a red tail, gray body, and gold head. |
****
And that's a pretty good overview of my seven months here in Panama. It's strange realizing that it will very soon be coming to a close!
Comments
Post a Comment