Wow, we’ve been back in the states for 11 days
already. Busy, busy, busy. Visiting family, shopping,
appointments. Time seems to disappear.
I know you’re probably wondering if we made it to
our goal—100 new birds species seen in Panama in June. Well, we certainly
did. We spent 2 days birding in the old Canal Zone with Jacobo Ortega, an
amazing bird guide. We birded in the village of Gamboa and the nearby
Pipeline Road in Soberania National Park. These two spots are only 5
kilometers apart. The first day with Jacobo we spotted 26 lifers, which
put us only 14 shy of 100 for the month. Since we were going to
practically the same place the second day, only 5 kilometers away, I really
wasn’t expecting to see that many new birds again. But I was very
wrong. The second day with Jacobo we saw another 34 new species. I
was blown away. What fun it was. Our total for the month was 120
life birds. For the entire 10 week stay we saw 208 life birds and 280
species in total. Wow.
And the Spanish lessons were great, too. We
learned a lot. Things were really coming together better in the last
2 weeks of study. But, clearly, we still have a lot more study ahead
of us. We are still beginners who find conversation very
difficult—possible only with someone who is willing to speak to us slowly and
clearly, and who has a good imagination to help them understand what we try to
say with our very bad accents. But it has been fun.
So Panama is over for us, and now things are
becoming more clear for our future. In the last two months doors have
opened wide for us to go to Nicaragua as volunteers with the Christian Reformed
World Relief Committee (CRWRC). We are excited to say we have a scheduled
date of arrival—on August 8 we leave Detroit and arrive in Managua. There
we’ll stay in Managua for at least the first 3 months while we continue to
study Spanish, begin to learn about the peoples and cultures, and search for a
home for the remainder of our time in Nicaragua. What we will be doing
there in the long term is still undecided. I think we’ll be discovering
what we are supposed to be doing as we go along. Perhaps that’s the way
it should be. God leads—we follow.
