Hot Nagua

When my family came to visit me here, my grandmother Mom-Mom sent along a few yards of fabric, along with an In Style magazine with circled dress styles as suggestions. The rumor is that my Uncle John actually made the final fabric decision.

As soon as I saw the fabric, I knew that I was going to be bringing Ngabe fashion to a whole new level. I showed the fabric to a few of my women neighbors in order to ask for suggestions of the trim colors, and their eyes all POPPED.

The problem was, several women wanted to sew the dress for me so I procrastinated in deciding my seamstress. The two obligatory questions when anyone wears a new nagua are 1) Who made it? and 2) How much did you pay?

I finally sent the fabric off to Cristina from my 2nd host family – the family still hasn’t completely forgiven me for deciding to build my house with the other family, so I decided it would be a good peace act. About a week later when I picked up the dress, I wasn’t in love with the cut or the pattern, but I was happy to pay Cristina for it and bring it home.

I have had 3 showcases of the dress so far. It causes a ruckus wherever it goes.

ONE. I bring the dress to David with me to get it ironed. I really should have ironed it back in site, but that requires finding a whole bunch of firewood and a piece of corrugated zinc (in order to heat up the iron on top of a fire) and an old beat up iron … or more likely, a lot of pity from my host mom who would iron it for me. I paid a whopping $2.50 to get it ironed when the whole sewing job cost only $10!

Anyways, Peace Corps volunteers always stay at the same cozy hotel in David, so all of the friendly worker ladies know us there. Two of these Latina ladies separately complimented me on what a pretty dress it was – and it means something to hear a compliment on a nagua from a Latina!

TWO. Community debut. I wear it to the Sunday soccer games, men’s league. My water committee group is selling food or drink every Sunday in order to create some funds for our projects. We get a decent amount of business. The next weekend, I could not participate in the sale, and business was really slow. At today’s meeting it was decided, “We need Bechi to sell!”. I blame it on the dress. But this creates a problem, because the point of me being here is NOT to make my community think they need me in order to successfully do things.

THREE. I assisted facilitating a 3 day leadership seminar in an agriculture volunteer’s site in the Comarca. One of the sessions we did was called “Bucket Filling” – it teaches about empathy and giving compliments. At the end of the session we all, facilitators and participants, decorated little envelopes and then wrote each other positive notes and deposited them in the envelopes. About 80% of my notes included something like “I like your dress”.

Last week we had a Peace Corps Comarca regional meeting, and as a closing exercise each volunteer presented a haiku of his or her experiences in site. Dientes (teeth) is the term used for the geometric patterns on the naguas. I wrote this on the fly – don’t judge!

New nagua today
I’m ready for the runway
Sharp dientes, bite me