Arrival

The familiar road that I travelled fifteen days ago snaked before me as a queesy feeling of finality struck an unfamiliar nerve. I was almost there, almost to my pueblo. I have been busily waiting for this moment for nearly a year. Finally, I will be living with the people I hope to call my family, my gente.
I pulled into Cope around five on a regular Sunday evening. The fog was billowing over the sharp mountains like a nervous volcano ready to release its million year old lunch. People were strolling about the streets, saying hello's and exchanging the day's telenovela-ish gossip. The last leg of my journey lay just around the corner and up the bend, some 45 minutes from where I was standing.
I walked to the bus stop to ask about the next chiva to my pueblo. The old chinese man who owns the store next door said a chiva for me was coming very shortly. A chiva for me? I didn't quite understand what that meant, so I chalked it up to my loose grasp of Spanish. While waiting for my chiva I bought a coke. Probably the last coke I would have for some time as my pueblo doesn't have electricity and therefore nothing can be cold. So I set my bags down, and took the time to enjoy the luxuriously quenching opal liquid whose magical bubbles tickled my throat.
Inbetween the extisy of a sip, I heard a rucus emenating from some unkown place around the bend. Before I was able to investigate the matter myself, a chiva pulled up and told me to hop in for a whirl around town. I gladly oblidged, threw my stuff in the back and gulped down the rest of my home town coke. We zoomed past a store, a resturaunt and the police station. The comotion grew louder with every turn of the wheels. The chiva slowed to a crawl as we turned the final corner.
And there it was, a 15 year old girls birthday party. A huge coming of age affair here in Panama. In this single story house there must have been over 60 people. And who was standing outside the party but about 12 guys I knew from my pueblo who were returning from their Sunday baseball game. They were celebrating two wins against difficult teams in the first round of the provincial tournament. I yelled out a traditional hello. !AUWEY! As we rolled by, one guy handed me a brew, another guy shook my hand, another was yelling Auwey, and another was telling me to get into the chiva waiting to take me to our pueblo. I handed off my bags, opened the beer, and climbed into the chiva.
So, 'my chiva' was waiting for me after all. The baseball team was there so we could all ride through the pale, fog obscured dusk to my new home. The queeey feeling of finality now seems to be the queesy feeling of beginning.