Merry Christmas!

Well I ended up being Santa Clause for the Christmas Eve party in my community. I went into Changuinola and bought 3 yards of red cloth and cotton, as well as various other parts of the costume one of the several tailors in town made the whole costume for me.
Christmas Eve ended up being quiet the day. I went into the city to buy all the sand for our aqueduct. I rode back to my town in the sand truck with a cracked windshield and a holes in the floor. I was skeptical that it would be able to climb the hills to my town. The truck ended up stalling on the steepest hill, and we rolled backwards with out no motor. That was probably the scariest moment I´ve had in Panama, as I knew if the driver cut the wheel too hard either way we would either crash into the rock side of the mountain or roll down the side. When we got to the bottom he went to raise the hydraulic lift to dump some sand out so we could climb the hill and practically dumped all if it out. We spent about 45 minutes shoveling it back into the bed in the blazing sun.
I arrived showered and immediately needed to get ready for Santa. I was helped by several members of my family, they assembled my beard and ran around and tied up the last parts of the costume. The plan was for me to sneak behind the stage then pop out with the bag of presents, but as I was sneaking up all the kids saw me. I started shouting HO HO HO and all the kids came running out of the awning area. The rest of the time a gave out the presents to all the kids and sweat profusely.
There was an annual Christmas volleyball game of the older guys vs the younger guys. This is the winning team, with their $40 winnings from the game.


This is Santa and Momerto who made the costume, for never making anything more that pants and uniform shirts he did a great job, I´m only lacking my glasses in this picture. Momerto is probably one of my better adult friends, he is always hanging out at my host family´s house and is in the foto of the winning team in yellow shirt.

There apparently was a Ngobe Tri-Delt at the Christmas party! Crazy!

This is the first stages of the Santa beard, with Juanita.

Santa actually at the party. Many kids were terrified of me, I think because they had never seen Santa in person, but for the most part the were all mystified. Either they didn´t know it was me or they all just couldn´t believe I dressed up like that.

More hot Volleyball action. These guys are really good, I can´t even compete with them.