I promised about 100 kids that I would write them a post card from Panama. I wasn't expecting 100 of my students to put their addresses down. More like 10. I've offered before to write post cards whenever I took some trip overseas during the summer, and usually about 5 kids took me up on it. Since I was leaving for two years I expected a few more. But not 100.
So I bought 10 post cards and wrote the first batch to my 8th graders who graduated last year. These are kids who I had taught for 4 years, and who moved on from Butte Creek the same time I did. I felt a closer bond with than I had any other class, it felt right that they should receive the first of my 100 post card salvo from Panama.
Then I came to discover that Panama has no national post office. There are no mail boxes, no mail men, nothing. Private businesses fill that void a bit, like Fed Ex for example, but they mostly cater towards businesses. After asking around in my neighborhood, a number of kindly strangers who could put up with my bad Spanish directed me to a store called "Mail Boxes." Perfect.
Arriving at Mail Boxes yesterday, I pulled out a post card and asked how much it would cost to send one to the west coast. I was hoping for under a dollar, would have been OK with $1.50, and really hoped it wasn't more than $2.00 a post card.
The lady looked at it, smiled, and grabbed some laminated chart and a calculator and began pounding away furiously. For over a minute she was calculating, chk chk chk on the calculator, before pertly popping her head up and proclaiming "$46.47." I of course asked her to repeat it, and after confirming a second time, I did some calculating myself, and decided I sadly will not be mailing 100 post cards at the cost of $4,647 dollars.
Panama is like that. It seems so similar to home at times with its skyscrapers and glittering malls and ubiquitous American chain stores, but try to mail a post card and bam! Panama-ed.
