Today has been most hectic and looong for us and there are a million thoughts swimming in my head.
Enoch came home for lunch and told us we had to get on the next boat to Changuinola to renew our Visas. So off we went to spend the afternoon in the Immigration office, but the journey there was amazing. We rode a water taxi across the bay and up the river. A jungly wild river with cows and turtles and exotic birds all around. The trees and vines stretching towards you, making the shoreline impossible to distinguish. I felt like I was in the middle of a movie- like The African Queen or Mosquito Coast. The kids were on the lookout for monkeys and loved it even though the monkeys were "hiding".
The lovely Immigration office is not blessed with much equipment or computer technology so getting the papers filed was a slow process. I sang every Primary song I could remember and played I Spy until we had spied everything in the room at least three times. But we couldn't feel very bad for ourselves because there were two older women there that were much worse off. They were vacationing on Isla Carenero and had everything stolen from their hotel room, passports and all. They were trying to get some family members to wire them some money so they could eat and find a place to sleep and make their way to Panama City to get new passports. Our crazy boisterous children actually cheered them up quite a bit. Zion was the biggest flirt ever and the girls kept going over and proudly showing off their itty bitty Panama-resident-card photos. Rivka gave one of the women a big hug and the lady almost started tearing up and said that she felt a lot better. What will I do when my little children grow big? They are so precious!
We finally broke out of there at dinner time and headed to our favorite spot in Changuinola- Buen Sabor. It is a bakery with other things like sandwiches and burgers on the menu, but we go there for the real NY-style cheesecake and a playplace (yes, that's right, they have a slide!!!) both of which do not exist elsewhere in all of Panama that we've seen. The girls were in HEAVEN! It didn't even matter that they were starving and would have to wait a half hour for their food (as if it takes a half hour to make a sandwich- it is a well known fact that in Panama you have to wait forever to get your order). They climbed up the slide, then slid down, then climbed up, and on and on. It never gets old to them. I'm thinking they are a little playground deprived.
So home again home again we came on another boat, this one by a different route and right through a little rainstorm. We huddled under a little tarp and Zion was the only one who stayed mostly dry. I thought it was exhilarating. A bit creepy though since I am afraid of dark water and it was well past 8 o'clock.
On the walk from the boat docking to our little apartment we ran into one of the local doctors who had seen Hosanna during the brain crisis, and since Changuinola actually resembles civilization and has a Walgreens-type photo place we were finally able to develop the pictures we took just after Hosanna got out of the hospital (I forgot to pack our digital camera in my rush to meet Hosanna at the hospital). So I have a lot of melancholy thoughts plaguing me tonight. I will try and scan those pictures so you all can see my tough little baby. She's a survivor all right.
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