The End of Panama, The Beginning of ... Nicaragua

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.