Okay. I have been sitting at the internet café, staring at this blank window in which to write for a good five or so minutes contemplating an opening sentence that would make my high school English teachers proud, and it has just only struck me that, due to Panamá, my verbal skills have severely withered away. So I have to apologize for that write off the bat.

Life in site is great and nothing is new to report, but my mother feels like maybe I should update the reading masses (which probably include not many more people than who work at Foote Hospital) on the oddities of Panamanian life that have kept me laughing in disbelief every day, and which are keeping my morale abnormally high. I swear, I am going to return to the United States and you will all be introduced to a Melissa you never thought possible. This is mainly due to the fact that my mastery of Spanish is such that I cannot express sarcasm as of yet.

So let's talk about pigs, and how, as a girl from the suburbs of Michigan, and later on Chicago, I was under the impression that pigs were kept in pens which were basically mud pits and they didn't ever get bigger than a medium sized dog. Apparenly I've been mistaken for 22 years, as there are two giant pigs at my site who roam like they own the place, who would probably be taller than me if standing on their hind legs, who collapse in whatever mud they find whenever they want (and there is mud evvvvvvvvverywhere), and who often are ridden by children and chased by dogs. This threw me off guard to begin with, especially when the pigs eat the copious amounts of trash lying around, and every time I see one, I laugh hysterically, which is leading my community to believe that I am insane.

There's also the subject of rice, and how I am physically unable to eat a pound or two of it a day, unlike my Panamanian family. Literally, imagine a box of that Instant Rice stuff and how much a cup makes in a saucepan of boiling water, and then imagine that all dumped onto one plate, add some fried meat of some sort, because other cooking methods are just too time consuming, and now imagine eating all that food. None of you could do it, and I can't either, and now the greater portion of my community thinks the Gringa has an eating disorder, which is only exacerbated by the fact that I run, or do any type of exercise, as opposed to the Panamanian women´s totally. Sendentary. Lifestyle.

Speaking of running, funny story. The kids in my community think I run bien suavecito, but maybe a little too slow, and so they took it upon themselves to coach my effort and encourage my sprinting down the Panamerican Highway to race them, after two miles of what can be best described as jogging. At first I resisted because, let's be honest, I am no World Class Athlete, but then I thought, whatever, maybe it'd be good to work on speed. So I agreed, and literally three seconds after we took off as fast as we could run, my legs gave out for no apparently reason and I bit it, face first, in the middle of the road, in front of about five ten-year-old kids, the respect of whom I'm trying to earn because I'm futiley trying to teach them English. Now I have a hugeass gash on my right leg and a completely injured ego.

Other little things, including part of my Kuna community trying as they might to convert me to Evangelicalism, the fact that making "shhhh" sounds at chickens as you wave a broom at them from thirty meters will scare them into leaving whatever surface they were currently on, and that I will always inevitably have some form of intestinal parasite because my host mother makes possibly the best juice I have ever tasted, using water that comes out of the tap a milky white, are making my life in Panamá extremely interesting, but I can't complain. I'm here, I'm relatively healthy, I am not pregnant and I speak decent Spanish, so you can all quit worrying.

Oh, also, I got a dog. Her name is Evey, and she's pretty badass, except she bites everyone and it's impossible to deflea her. My next update will include pictures, as well as what might be a detailed description of how I ruined an aqueduct or something, with my lack of math and engineering skills. International Studies students do not an Environmental Health worker make.