Lost Stories: Funding Miracles

Written August 27th, 2013

When Peace Corps told me I had less than a week to come up with $300 in order to qualify for the global funds assistance for my project, I was a little nervous because the stakes were high. I needed that funding in order to build ANYTIME in the near future. However, I also felt confident that it would come through because 1. My friends and family are awesome and 2. That is, after all, how everything else goes. Somehow it all works out eventually here in Panama despite…well, everything. With some luck, divine intervention, and cashing in a lot of good karma I knew the last couple hundred dollars would come through. But I never expected what actually happened.

The day after I posted my funding challenge on Facebook, my newsfeed was flooded with reposts by my friends, family, and by people I haven’t seen or talked to in years. In the month of August, this blog had over 400 page visits. And the part that took my breath away: on Monday, August 12^th, just 4 days later, the amount of funding I still needed had dropped from $2,292 to $1,585.

We raised over $700.

In the weeks leading up to this, I had been very frustrated and just plain worn down. I had had some successes, like the map project, but felt like I was working all the time with very little to show (tangibly or intangibly) for it. A big thunderstorm had blown the top off of my roof and the wood rotted out on my staircase so that the lowest unrotted stair was waist high. My house was constantly wet and leaky, I looked awkward and monkey-like trying to climb into my house, and I even fell down my stairs once. The hole in my roof soaked my clothes and cockroaches started living in them. I tried 5 different times to organize work days to fix my house, to no avail. The morning we were supposed to work, the guys cancelled on me. Five. Different. Times.

I talked to my Noko about having a slot in the next community meeting to talk about the visiting engineering students who were coming to design a bridge for our port. He told me I could go first, and then at the meeting, didn’t let me talk until 2.5 hours in, when there were literally only 4 people left. I scheduled the women’s group meeting for Tuesday and visited every house in the community to let the women know about it. Half an hour before my meeting, the school project showed up and said they would pay people $1 per sack of sand to haul it from the river to school. The women told me we would meet when they finished. They finished at 7:30, half an hour after sunset. Night time meetings just don’t happen when you live without electricity. All in all, I felt sick of being a PCV and was so over Panama.

The morning of August 11^th, I had hiked out of a very muddy site. 90 minutes of trekking through sometimes knee deep mud, hauling my backpack. Up and down some baby mountains of the Cocle region. Baby mountains, but mountains nonetheless. It was a bright and sunny morning at 8 degrees above the equator and I was a hot, sweaty, muddy mess when I met up with the other PCVs. One of them had a smart phone and let me use it to check the project. The page took forever to load and since I don’t know how to use smart phones I clicked out of it like twice somehow. Some yelling was involved and the owner of the phone helped me so that I didn’t throw it. I saw our total.

It was so…anticlimactic. I wanted to jump up and down and dance and share my excitement, but the PCVs I was with were from the other side and did not understand the struggles and challenges it took to get funding. We were standing in a public place and the most expressive thing I could to was text my Darien PCVs and tell them about it with 6 exclamation points. Such is life in Panama, I suppose.

I would later get to celebrate the success of it with one of my first vacations in this country at a beach resort, and enjoy a break from the jungle for 2 days. Which was fabulous.