Get Set...

River blindness! Typhoid! Dengue! Botflies! Oh my!

Oh crap.

Going to Panama means going to a tropical country with lots of crazy exotic parasites and stuff.
This morning I woke up an hour early so I could swallow the last of my four typhoid oral vaccine pills. I have yet to get the hang of swallowing pills; dude, I buy chewable multivitamins. They taste terrible like sweet powdery sour apples (I guess "berry" was the flavor they were going for), but better than the taste you get when you try to chew pills most people just swallow; damn, vitamin C is sour!

Anyway, my dad took me to the county health department a week or two ago and the nice but geographically-challenged RN gave me a shot in each arm; the left got yellow fever and the right got Hep A, which apparently I had missed out on last time I got shots. I was up-to-date on tetanus and stuff, so... yay.

Of course, malaria is big in the rural areas of Panama, and though my host family lives in Panama City (or Gamboa... which is near Panama City... but then again, everything in Panama is near Panama City) but there is currently no vaccine for malaria. If I head off to rural Panama for, say, a camping trip, I have to (gasp) take "anti-malarial" pills a few days in advance and every few days for several weeks. Great.

Anyway, I also got info on my host family! Two parents and an 18-year-old daughter. I wrote them a letter (I didn't get their email address) and I hope it gets there safely... if not, well, they won't know how bad my Spanish is until I get there in... 24 days!

On your marks...

In two months, I will be in Panama. Sometime this month, I get to find out who my host family will be, where I will live, what school I will go to. SWEET!!!

Anyway, this blog will be all about my six months spent in Panama as an exchange student from Oregon, USA. If you're reading this, you probably know me and I told you to come to this site, because I thought it would be easier (and more fun, and less painful) to create a blog than to send out mass emails. I may post pictures, ponder life, tell of my experiences, and hope that you guys will leave comments! ^_^

Right now, I have no idea what my life will be like in two months. Winter formal is this weekend, Christmas is like two or three weeks away, annnd... for now, I'm still focused on my life in Oregon. But soon.... so soon...