The Host Family

As I mentioned last week, I have moved out of my host family’s house and into my own place. After five months and living with four different families, I am finally a free man. The whole experience reminds me of The Seinfeld episode, wait, I can't think of a situation that is similar from the show. The closest I can think of is George moving back in with his parents, but that doesn't really apply for me. It looks like I am going to have to come up with some original thoughts for this post, so if it falls flat, well, you will know who to blame. And it’s not Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.

Over the past five months, I have divided my time amongst four families. After having a home with the same family for the first 26 years of my life, rotating families like this kind of left me feeling like the plate of stuffing that gets passed around the dinner table at Thanksgiving. I started out with a full plate of eagerness, but by the time the dish gets passed around the table a few times that eagerness is gone and eventually my plate was empty. Pretty soon I started to look forward to the desert, which thankfully came in the form of my own house.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the experience. I did, quite a bit. Each family brought a different wrinkle to the table, but in the end, they all helped me reach my overall goal of becoming acclimated with Panamanian culture.

My journey started out with a family that I lived with in the site of our training in Santa Clara. I lived with a family of four that consisted of the mom, dad, a 13 year old and a 4 year granddaughter. The mom of the house was the one who really took me under her wing to show me the ropes of the Spanish language, which helped me tremendously over the first two months. Also, it should be noted that the mom called her granddaughter “Hurricane” because she could be quite the handful. From there, I bounced around two different families for a week each. Both families were nice and kept me well fed (you can’t ask for much more than that!). The one thing that will stick with me about these two families was the day I left town, the young boy wouldn’t come out to say goodbye because he was in his room crying over my departure.

Finally, I made it to my site, where I lived with my counterpart and his family for three months. My counterpart, Sergio, is the main person of contact I have in the community. In my case, he is the president of the cooperative. His family consisted of his wife, a boy that is two and half and a baby girl that is now ten months old. I am not sure, but the two kids could give any brother and sister combo a run for their money in a cutest contest.

And they are great people too. The wife helped me more with my Spanish and my counterpart has a good sense of humor. One day when I told him that I was starting to get pretty dark, he said “that in two years I would be as dark as Barack Obama”. Well, he said that in Spanish.

Now I am on my own. And it is definitely different. No more babies crying, no more rice two times a day, and no more Spanish soap operas nightly. I don’t miss the first two, but I do find myself occasionally longing for soap opera fix (I liked the Spanish practice, ok). Soon, I will get to start to tackle some of the things I want to get to over the remaining 21 months. I’ll tackle those subjects in upcoming entries.

First, I am going to enjoy some peace and quiet.