Going Sola

Photo 1- Hanging out with Gordy (her accepted nickname means Fatty) and my host aunt Teresa, shucking corn.

Photo 2- Work crew with the finished house!

Photo 3- The finished product. There is a window above the line of the penka (palm leaves).







The house is complete! Last Sunday the chainsaw man finally arrived to cut up the 3 trees, and we hauled them on our shoulders to my house site. On Sunday and Monday nights I slept in my wall less house in order to guard the valuable boards from potential thiefs. On Tuesday, four men came over to nail up the walls and door. I moved all of my cargo up from my host family´s house as soon as the door was lockable. On Thursday, my boss showed up for his 4 month visit, and we were all proud to show him the (barely) completed house.

I am still eating with my host family because due to political protests (I will save that for another post), I could not leave my community for the past week or so. Today I came into the city to buy a stove, pots, and a gas tank. The fun part will be getting it all back to my house!

Living alone is a scandal in the Ngabe, and probably Panamanian as well, culture. Everyone lives with their parents usually until there are too many kids and they need to move out. Every time I tell some one I just moved into my house, the same questions arise: ¨Who else stays with you? What?! You´re all alone? Doesn´t that give you fear?¨. I assure them that I am currently looking for a pet cat to guard my house.

I realize thatI haven´t written much about my environmental health related work. Truthfully, it´s because during the first 3 months I wasn´t doing much besides observing in terms of health and water and sanitation. I did learn a lot this way. I learned that everyone in my community walks up and down steep ravines to collect drinking water from spring sources. I do too.

I learned that luckily, no one drinks out of the river or stream even during the dry season. I drank enough coffee during house visits that I often had to ask if there was a latrine, and I found out that about 50% of houses have functional latrines. I have observed that no one treats the water, and that diahrea is common among all ages.

The next steps will be education in the forms of workshops, seminars, house visits, and meetings. After that we will move into project phase hopefully by mobilizing the current water committee, and creating a latrine committee. The sticky part of the situation is that our local politician has announced that through a government grant, the majority of the aqueduct will be built this upcoming month. This will include the water collection tank, the storage tank, aquifier, and some tubing. The problem is, he and other politicians have promised this same project before to no avail, so no one knows if the construction crew will arrive or not. I am very worried about the arrival of this project because often times, such projects arrive with little engineering planning for tank or tube size and thus the water system does not work well. There´s not much I can do about it for now though, so I will wait and see and continue working with the water committee to make our own plans.