09/04/2011 (posted 10/04/2011)
Today was our final morning in Volcan.
We have been here for just under a week (since we finished our outreach) and in that time have done very little indeed. All I've really done is go on Facebook and eat cereal and cakes. Nice as that has been, I am kind of ready to actually do something.
Jess, Andrew and I are spending a few days together in Panama City. I'm going because my flight to Cusco, Peru is on the 13th from Panama City Airport and we are only allowed to stay in Volcan until the 10th so I have no choice. Andrew and Jess are doing another outreach in Nicaragua that starts in around a week so they're going there to see some sights, plus Andrew's sister Emily is flying in to do the outreach and arrives on the 11th so it means we can all pick her up from the airport.
The standard plan is to take a bus to David and then a bus to Panama City, but we're sick of buses and plus they are ages in a tight, stuffy bus.
We therefore decided to rent a car. Albin's cousin owns a rental place so we got a discount and the idea of a roadtrip was a fun one. We made a CD of Hillsong Worship Music to rock out to on the way and off we went.
We also had Jonny and Jarett in the car as they fly out of Panama City tomorrow afternoon so we gave them a lift.
Andrew and myself were named as drivers so he did a two hour stint and then I took over. It's my first experience of driving abroad and obviously it's on the right hand side of the road and the drivers cockpit is on the left hand side of the car. It took me a little while to get used to this but eventually I was driving fairly comfortably.
Until a policeman flagged me down and told me to pull in.
I was a bit taken aback so pulled in maybe 100 yards away from where he flagged me. He got on his little motorbike and came along to talk to us. Although Jonny speaks good Spanish, we decided as a group to pretend we spoke very little as we figured this may play to our advantage.
He seemed to suggest that I was speeding - I was cruising at 120kph and have since found that the limit is 100, so I guess he had a point. He then asked to see my license which was tricky as it is in the UK - all I had was a photocopy. This was enough for the car rental place to allow me to drive the car but the policeman said that it wasn't sufficient.
He then motioned a truck towing the car away, and this made me kind of worried. He asked us what we were doing in the country and we mentioned that we were missionaries. After a few minutes of deliberation, he told us in broken English (we felt bad for not speaking the Spanish we had but it was a good tactic to play the baffled tourist card) that he would let us off simply because we were missionaries.
This was an awesome demonstration of God giving us a bit of help - purely because we share knowledge of God with the policeman, we were spared being towed away in a rental car. Thank God we weren't, literally.
One of the conditions for him letting us go was that I wasn't allowed to drive, so poor Andrew had to drive the rest of it. At least he had about 45 minutes of rest before he was back, and after around three more hours we finally arrived in Panama City. We firstly dropped Jonny and Jarett at a hostel in which they are staying tonight and then getting picked up from tomorrow.
We then tried to find the house of a friend of a friend of Jess, Ann, who we are staying with for the next four days. It's so lovely of her to put us all up. We knew that her house was near the Miraflores Locks so we tried to find them - the trouble was that it was getting darker and darker, and the only map we had was from a Hertz car rental place and wasn't the most detailed.
After around one hour of driving round in circles, we phoned Ann but couldn't quite communicate where we were as we had no idea. We then pulled into a petrol station and asked a policeman how to get to the locks - he told us that he'd show us the way! It took around 15 minutes but he drove there and we followed behind not quite believing our luck. We have had good experiences with Panamanian police today.
We finally arrived at Ann's house at 7:30pm, sweaty and exhausted. It's a lovely house and very well air-conditioned.
The trouble was that we had a table booked for 8pm at the Hard Rock Cafe with all of our team (except Lissette who left earlier in the week) for one final meal, so we forfeited the prospect of a shower to freshen up. We decided to get a taxi as we'd driven enough for one day and so we managed to get there on time, no matter how smelly we were or sticky we felt.
We had a lovely meal at the HRC - I had the Red, White and Blue burger which was ridiculously tasty and it was accompanied with a couple of very welcome beers. We then finished the evening off with some ice cream from Dunkin' Donuts and a walk across the seafront before we said bye to Christina and Bonnie, who are flying early tomorrow morning.
The first of the original seven are now gone, and two more are going tomorrow afternoon. It feels strange that after experiencing so much and having so many memories together, our team is now quickly breaking up.
I don't like goodbyes because although we'll probably all see each other at some point in the future, these goodbyes mark the end of this experience. We'll never have this time back again and the prospect of the end of everything we've done together, no matter how relatively short our time has been, is a sad one as we have enjoyed so many great times together and now won't for quite some time. We'll all go back to our normal lives and move on.
As I say, I don't like goodbyes.
JG
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