My Adventures in Central America: Boquete

Friday June 8

Playing duck, duck, goose (or "pato, pato, ganso" in Spanish )

Today we left early in the morning to get to an orphanage just outside of David where we would be conducting educational activities with the children. We were divided into groups which would focus on nutrition, hygiene (tooth brushing and hand washing primarily), and exercise, and we would be joined by several of the Unachi students who would be doing vaccinations and medication donations. I was fortunate enough to be in the exercise group :). We would be working with kids between the ages of 2 and 12, and planned on doing different activities with the different age groups. The sun stayed hidden behind clouds and we had the most fun with the "difficult to handle" group of young boys who, of course, wanted to play soccer. They were quite good and more sportsmanlike than I would have anticipated. Unfortunately, many of these kids are taken from their homes due to abuse, neglect, or worse, so we were not allowed to take any photos of or with them (but I snapped a couple before we were told not to :).

After lunch, we took a big group picture and headed to Boquete where we would be staying for the weekend. We settled into our hostel, Refugio del Rio, and could not get over how luxurious it all felt in comparison to our accommodations at "the compound." Our host, Lucini, was the kindest, most helpful hostel owner I have come across. He let us choose the foods we wished to have for breakfast, gave us a ton of recommendations for things to do and places to eat around the area, and even made us reservations for Saturday night (with a two-for-one deal thrown in)! We tried looking up a place to go for dinner, but ultimately decided to just explore the town and decide based upon what looked good at the time. Interestingly enough, we all ended up at the same place in the end - a great Peruvian restaurant specializing in seafood :).