I have officially crossed the six month mark as a Program Director in Bocas del Toro. It is hard to tell if I feel like I have been here for a year already or just a couple of weeks. Bocas is the type of place that can make you feel at home really quickly but then the next day you realize how much you have left to learn here.
Maddie’s arrival day in Panama.
For example, a friend from the University of Richmond is visiting me at the moment and we went to see a different beach, Bocas del Drago, that I had never been to before. We passed by communities I didn’t even know existed. Embedded deep in the jungle were small schools, a massive (and controversial) housing relocation center, and homes that you could barely see through the thick, Caribbean foliage. But then, this morning, I walked through town and said “Hola” to about 20 familiar faces. Bocas has made me realize that it is possible to know and not know at the same time and even in the same place.
Nothing has had a bigger impact on me than the children involved with Lacrosse the Nations and Bocas Surf Crew (a local partner nonprofit of ours here in Bocas that uses surf as their tool for youth development). When I signed on to work as a Program Director for LtN, my biggest worry was that I was going to have a hard time working with the kids. I thought that I wouldn’t be able to connect with them or they wouldn’t understand me. And I was so wrong. Lacrosse the Nations showed me that I always want to work with kids, and this is just the beginning of that. These children quite literally opened my eyes to opportunity, possibility, and what you can make of yourself if you just put fear aside. They also taught me that you actually can live life as freely as you want to. And it started from the way their parents are. Not like these parents know something that parents in the U.S. don’t, it's more so that these parents worked really hard here to create a business and their kids were often left to do whatever they wanted to with friends and created their own personalities and their own lives. Any kid participating in LtN’s programs is involved because they want to be, not because their parents signed them up. That is the best part of Lacrosse the Nations, it really puts a lot of the responsibility in the kids hands.
Maddie (left) coaching up our kids in Bocas del Toro, Panama.
We as adults can often be made to think that if kids don’t have someone holding their hand and telling them what to do, that they will make the wrong decision or get into trouble. But what is life if you never make the wrong decision? You cannot create experience in that way. I have learned and became a of the part of the message that kids are capable and competent - not only to make their own decisions, but to emerge as critically engaged leaders in their communities. In these past 6 months, LtN has taught me many unexpected lessons. More than anything, I am grateful that in my decision to come here to help others, I unknowingly joined a community that wanted to help me too.