In this interview, you’ll hear from Arabella Davis, a Peace Corps Environment volunteer in Panama. Arabella shares what daily life looks like, the work being done, and how service has shaped their personal and professional growth. You’ll learn about housing, cultural differences, project work, language learning, and what it’s like to live and work in a new country. This interview offers a real look into Peace Corps service and what future volunteers can expect.
Table of Contents
- Volunteer Experience and Motivation
- Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
- Surprises and Challenges
- Advice and Support
- Practical Tips and Language Learning
- Social Identity
- Final Thoughts
Volunteer Experience and Motivation
1. What do you do as a Peace Corps Environment volunteer in Panama?
As a Community Environmental Conservation Promoter in Panama, my role is to promote environmental stewardship and address community concerns. Leading up to my three-month mark on my site, I visited community members to learn more about the culture, community resources, and challenges. Then, I held a community analysis meeting to discuss the community’s key environmental concerns and identified the priority focuses through community voting. The three that received the most votes were conservation and accessibility of water, ecotourism/reforestation, and solid waste management. These are all open-ended, which has led to us working on a variety of projects.
Community Projects
My work is directly shaped by what the community is interested in or addresses issues identified by the community itself, such as a loss of native species or worsening water quality. Some specific projects I have been working on include:
- a year-long training program on sustainable agriculture with 38 producers in collaboration with government agencies
- designing and executing a $4,300 grant from the ground up on reducing river contamination from family pig farming through improved solid waste management.
- led a fruit tree nursery/reforestation project of over 400 trees
- helped revitalize our environmental NGO
- organized community-based trail maintenance
- a school garden
- allocated $1,200 towards community development projects in collaboration with an international program called Global Glimpse
- held different workshops on solid waste management.
Life outside of work
I have busier periods and slower periods depending on what I am working on, although I’m technically on-call 24/7, and it’s up to me to make my own schedule and plans. Although my primary role is working on environmental projects, a lot of what I do as a PCV is also visiting homes to connect with community members and hear and share ideas over juice or coffee. I’ve been able to learn about Panamanian culture and life, and also share my own culture with my community.
Finding a work-life balance that works for me has been essential, and I try to save time for myself in the mornings and weekends for personal hobbies or projects when I’m not needed elsewhere or doing a specific project.
2. Why did you decide to join the Peace Corps and serve in Panama?
I decided to join the Peace Corps and serve in Panama because it was the perfect mix of impact, adventure, and a healthy dose of unpredictability for personal and professional growth. I studied abroad in Singapore during my undergrad, and had the opportunity to solo travel around Asia and Latin America, which profoundly deepened my appreciation for foreign cultures and experiences.
When nearing the close of my undergrad, I began job searching, but despite my environmental qualifications and experiences, I found a highly competitive market to get a job I wouldn’t even love or feel like was making an impact.
For me, the Peace Corps was a bit of everything good. I was intrigued by the unstructured and project/integration-focused aspect of the Peace Corps since it would give me more opportunities to experience and navigate new situations, and I could strengthen my leadership and project management skills.
I have found it very empowering to see how far my impact can reach without the sometimes restrictive boxes that people are slid into under typical, rigid positions. Plus, serving in a Latin American country, I have been able to strengthen my Spanish, enabling me to connect to a whole new demographic and address important issues that affect Latino populations.
Living Arrangements and Cultural Integration
3. What is your housing like in Panama?
For the first three months at site (and two months during Pre-Service Training), I lived with a host family, and they would usually prepare traditional Panamanian meals for me, like rice and chicken, spaghetti, or soup. After this three-month period, I was able to move into my own house, which was pre-approved by the Peace Corps. Since a previous PCV had lived there, it came with some old furniture.
My house
My house is ~15x20ft with the faucet, shower, and latrine right outside through the back door. It is also connected to a little front porch. Inside, I have a full bed, a couple of racks for my things, a fan, a table, a stove, and a fridge, a little shorter than myself. My signal is very good. The water is clean and drinkable, but during the summer, it only runs for a few hours each day, so it needs to be collected in the morning before it stops. I haven’t gotten sick yet since I’ve been here.
My landlord and her daughter live right next door, and they are very easy-going and great neighbors and friends. They let me use their washing machine to do laundry and occasionally look after my dog when I’m away.
My house is a bit up the road from the center of town, so I have a little bit more privacy, but people can still see into my house, so I usually crack the door if I want extra privacy. It is normal to have the door open from around 10 am to the evening before dark. My community, with ~200 people, has a bus pass through once every hour. I usually need to walk ~5 minutes to get on the bus, but they’ll drop me off at my house.
Shopping, food, cooking
I use these buses to go to the supermarket about 45 minutes away once every couple of weeks to get groceries and toiletries, but there’s also a veggie vendor who passes in front of my house twice a week, where I can easily restock. There are vendors who sell bread/pastries, snacks, toiletry essentials, fish, and other stuff too. I love Panamanian food, but I prefer to prepare my own meals. Locals are very curious about what I cook and usually think my food choices and combos are a bit strange. Eggs, avocado, or hummus on toast are some of those.
4. What moments or interactions stand out during your service?
Although I didn’t grow up religious, here I enjoy going to church to say hello to community members and participate. Since our community is so small, people know each other very well, and I like to see how they greet and speak to each other because it’s wholesome. Seeing the sense of
The community here has given me a lot of time to reevaluate or ponder things in American society, and this one.
Here, there is a 96-year-old community member who is still as smart as a whip and cracks jokes. The first time I spoke with him, I was amazed that his health was so good for his age. Getting to know him and other elders in the community has made me see aging in a different light. I think Panamanian society and culture make more space for aging than American society does, and having that kind of social support network for our elders is incredibly important for their health.
It made me think about how deeply social support networks run, the mental health crisis in the United States, and what we can learn from Panamanian culture about community, happiness, and health.
Surprises and Challenges
5. What has surprised you most about living or working in Panama?
Unregulated rising costs
I find it really interesting to see local problems in Panama that are also found in the United States, but scaled down. For example, even inside of my small community, I have been able to see how unregulated rising costs of agricultural production, often due to corruption, have diminished small family farms and, therefore, the local economy of small communities, and ultimately the culture that defines them as more people are forced to move or abandon traditional practices. Similar patterns exist in the United States as well, but they often went unnoticed by me because I never personally investigated them, and often, there are so many different variables that it was difficult to identify primary sources.
Impact on traditional knowledge
Another local problem I have seen is the weight of new technology/westernization’s impact on traditional knowledge. As families move to the cities for work, traditional knowledge is being forgotten and paved over. I’ve been told that from before, people who couldn’t read or write were 5x times smarter than we are today. I feel like I’m witnessing a deep loss in knowledge and culture over the years in slow motion. We have community elders who, once gone, will have no one to replace them or carry on the knowledge they possess. Like a great oak being felled. It makes me think of urban migration, how it’s become a necessary evil to many, and what else it’s erased.
Laid-back sense of community
On another note, I continue to be in love and pleasantly surprised with the laid-back sense of community and culture here. I’m going to miss being on the 15-person buses where everyone knows and warmly greets one another. My time here has given me the privilege of being a part of a small community- experiencing their everyday life, their charm, and their challenges- that otherwise, I would have never gotten the chance to know. Beyond the canal and economy, Panama has a lot of a unique culture and character that is being missed.
I am also seeing more beauty in American culture, such as our willingness to try new things. I am appreciating more and more Americans’ curiosity, openness to newness, positivity, and interest in extracurriculars (that we often enjoy trying new activities, clubs, and hobbies). We are go-getters and dreamers.
“You’re gonna suffer, but you’re gonna be happy about it.” Harry Potter
6. What challenges have you faced in your Environment work, and how did you respond?
A main challenge I have faced in my environmental work has been getting community participation to make certain projects possible. While people are aware and interested in local issues, it is difficult to get a large attendance at times due to cultural differences and local logistics. For example, some don’t attend because they don’t want the responsibility of being involved in a group or because of bad weather.
While this doesn’t affect training as much, it makes other projects like trail restoration more difficult for those who do come. It also makes projects happen much more slowly than expected. While PCVs are taught to be flexible, we have to find the right balance so that we can get things done in our short two-year framework.
These challenges can be mitigated by bringing snacks to activities you do and by encouraging them to attend through multiple follow-ups. I also hold one-on-one meetings with them at their homes to bring the training to them when attendance is low.
7. What secondary projects have you worked on during your service?
Aside from environmental projects, I also did computer and English classes with the local school. Additionally, through Global Glimpse, we carried out a series of community development projects. Some were directly environmentally related, like purchasing and painting trash cans and making eco-benches from repurposed trash. Others were more focused on community beautification for eco-tourism, like re-painting the local community house or murals. After the two delegations of Global Glimpse, we had paint left over, which was distributed to other community painting projects.
Advice and Support
8. What advice would you give to future Environment volunteers in Panama?
I think not setting concrete expectations helped prepare me for the realities of being a PCV. I came into the Peace Corps mentally prepared for the possibility of having a conservative/religious community, little privacy, limited access to running water, and the possibility of not having electricity or service in my house. Although none of those things happened in extremes with my community, some PCVs do have one or more of these as a characteristic. And if you are without electricity, for example, it may be frustrating and inconvenient, but it may bring something to the table too, and will shape your unique experience as a PCV and the relationship with your community.
Being a PCV, like a fellow volunteer quoted from Harry Potter, goes like this: “You’re gonna suffer, but you’re gonna be happy about it.” It’s incredibly rewarding, beautiful, unique, difficult to translate to friends and family exactly what you do, and terribly frustrating and lonely at times. You have to be friendly, persistent, optimistic, resilient, a go-getter, humble, open-minded, flexible, and resourceful. Every single person has different experiences depending on the particular site they are placed in and how they handle challenges and opportunities. It’s an incredible thing to do and will challenge and fulfill you in ways you didn’t expect.
I would also say spending quality time with community members, networking with local leaders and organizations, and not being shy about reaching out and following up (a few times) makes a huge difference in your service. More than once, following up on a buried message I sent out a week or two before has opened doors. It’s pretty common for plans to get delayed or messages to get left on read, so sometimes you have to be extra diligent to keep the ball rolling. Also, you may be surprised how many businesses and organizations are excited to collaborate and willing to lend a hand if you reach out and explain your role and the community’s goal.
9. How did Peace Corps training prepare you for service?
PST (Pre-Service Training) is that period where everyone is thinking, “What am I doing here?” Just keep swimming, it gets better. I appreciated the other training, such as during IST (In-Service Training) and MST (Mid-Service Training), where we learned more practical skills and connected with local organizations. It was also helpful going into these later training sessions since you know your community, its resources, and projects of interest for the community.
Practical Tips and Language Learning
10. What would you tell future volunteers to pack—or leave behind?
Pretty please, do not overpack. It’s hard to predict what the local style or climate will be and thus which particular clothes to bring, so I recommend buying most clothes once you get to site. Bring the basics, but don’t overdo it. There are plenty of places to buy clothing nearby. Also, hand-washing or low-quality washing machines are harsh on clothes, so don’t bring things you really like/are expensive. Light cotton shirts and shorts are best for the weather.
Some of my favorite things I brought are art supplies, a power bank, a headlamp, a multi-tool, my stuffed animal, a sticker pack, a traveling backpack for trips/training, and good face sunscreen.
11. How has language learning been for you in Panama?
In high school, I took Spanish 1-4, which gave me a decent base in vocabulary and grammar. After graduating from university, I was able to travel and volunteer abroad in Spanish-speaking countries for around 5 months, which strengthened my Spanish before serving, and once I got to the site, my Spanish has been getting better and better by the day. In the beginning, you may feel a bit silly, and people will sometimes equate competency with fluency, but you gotta keep asking questions and practice as much as you can so you can improve quickly. I came in at an intermediate to medium Spanish level and am now advanced medium.
When I first arrived, I thought my level of Spanish was decent, but I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to understand my community with their thick “campo” accents and slang. On top of that, people usually have one or two nicknames in addition to their actual names, which makes it difficult to follow conversations. People also primarily communicate through voice notes here, which made it challenging for me to communicate well in the beginning
Social Identity
12. How has your personal identity shaped your service experience?
I’m a 24-year-old woman and have lighter features, which make me stand out a bit and receive more looks as an obvious foreigner in the regional capital, Chitre. While people sometimes stare at me a bit more, I don’t find it overwhelming or overly intense as I have experienced in other countries. I generally feel safer in Panama than in many areas in the United States. It is not uncommon for people to take videos or draw more attention towards me during dances or at events, too, but I’ve mostly gotten used to it.
I’m a 24-year-old woman and have lighter features, which make me stand out a bit and receive more looks as an obvious foreigner in the regional capital, Chitre. While people sometimes stare at me a bit more, I don’t find it overwhelming or overly intense as I have experienced in other countries. I generally feel safer in Panama than in many areas in the United States. It is not uncommon for people to take videos or draw more attention towards me during dances or at events, too, but I’ve mostly gotten used to it.
13. Did your identity lead to specific challenges or situations?
Not often, but occasionally, especially during festivals that bring out more tourists, people will try to overcharge me by “gringo taxing” me. If something like a bus/taxi or an item sounds overly expensive, I’ve spoken up and got the local rate.
Also, I grew up with two older brothers so I’m used to having to repeat myself to get a word in so it doesn’t bother me much, but I’ve noticed it’s harder for me to hold the men’s attention in conversations than it is for older or male counterparts. Once I started doing the grant project which was a higher impact project, men started to listen and respect me more because they saw my competency in executing a project that normally men would be doing since it was agricultural and construction focused.
14. What advice do you have for volunteers who share your identity?
I think no matter your identity, you’ve got to make consistent efforts to connect and be kind to your community. As a guest in this culture, I’m the one who should be adaptable and have patience, though I can use cultural differences as opportunities to share, learn, and teach.
As a woman, I was unsure how the men would behave toward me, and a few open comments in the beginning made me feel uncomfortable at first, but I learned that it’s just the culture, and it wasn’t seen as offensive. I also watched how others in the community interacted with those people and realized they weren’t seen as a threat or creepy, and the culture was just open about the things they said. Also, over time, you’ll learn phrases with just the right amount of humor and bite to quickly shut down unwanted comments if needed. I use the Panamanian finger wag a lot. I might not agree with everything people say all the time, but I’ve learned how to pick my battles here in the context of the culture and social norms.
While this is my experience within my site, volunteers with bigger sites or a different social dynamic might face more challenges..
Final Thoughts
15. What final advice would you share with future volunteers?
If you’re interested, I would try it! After a few months, you can always decide it’s not for you, but it’s worth a shot. It’s an amazing experience with countless opportunities, and two years go by a whole lot faster than you think.
Are you thinking about joining the Peace Corps? If you’re curious about service and ready for something new, apply today. Like Arabella, you can live abroad, work with communities, and grow in ways you didn’t expect. Apply to the Peace Corps and take the next step.
The content of this post does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or Panama Government.
