A Day in the Life

At 5:50 am, my neighbor wakes me up to deliver me breakfast. “Bechiiiiii, Bechiiii, are you still sleeping?” (but in Spanish). My gas tank ran out 3 days ago and until I get it replaced, I am relying on my host family’s kitchen. Rice and potatoes and chicken – a treat at any hour. My cat Meri thinks so too and won’t stop whining. I eat a little bit and then place a big pot upside down over the bowl to protect the food from my pets.

I go back to bed and wake up to BANG – Meri knocked the pot off the table onto the floor. My neighbor’s dog rushes inside to get a taste of the delicious food (Where is my dog at?!). I blindly scramble out of bed in the dark, shoo away the animals, and collect a few unscathed potato and chicken pieces off the dirt floor (I know, gross) to suffice for the rest of my breakfast. It’s 6:15 am. Time to start another day.

My Community's Latrine Project

Dear blog readers,

Happy Thanksgiving to all! I spent it in a lodge in the mountains near Costa Rica, like last year. I had a lot to be thankful for to be spending Thanksgiving in the company of all of my Peace Corps friends, eating delicious food.

Below is a letter I composed to ask for financial support with my community's latrine project.

Carolyn

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Dear family, friends and colleagues,

Since August 2010, I have been living in Panama, working as an Environmental Heath Peace Corps volunteer, and will be here until October 2012. I live in a small indigenous (Ngabe) village called Lajero in the mountains of Western Panama, and work predominately with the newly formed water and sanitation committees.

I am contacting you on behalf of Lajero’s sanitation committee to ask for support of a pit latrine project benefitting 32 families and 203 men, women and children. Currently many families are without pit latrines and use the river or woods to defecate, which contributes to waste-borne illnesses.

Each family involved in the pit latrine project is contributing sand, gravel, wall materials, and labor, which amounts to 52% of the total project cost. I am looking for support for the remaining $2,543 or 48% of project cost to cover the materials that are not locally available (cement, rebar, corrugated roofing, and tools). A donation of $80 pays for a pit latrine for one family. Plus for every dollar donated by contributors like you, the NGO community service organization Synergy is contributing a matching $1 to reach the goal.

My sanitation committee’s goal is to secure funding by January 1, 2012 so that we can start construction on February 1 at the peak of the dry season. Community members have already started digging pits in preparation for the project. It has taken a year of community analysis and meetings to reach this point, and community members are excited to move forward!

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to contact me via email at carolyn.purington@gmail.com. I will also be back in the United States January 2 through 10 if you wish to talk via telephone (508 886 6539). Contributions can be made on the Peace Corps Partnership website at https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=525-171 .

Although the web site is the quickest way to make a donation, you may also make a check payable to Peace Corps Partnership Program. Please write the project number, 525-171, on the check and send it to:

Paul D. Coverdell, Peace Corps Headquarters

Peace Corps Partnership Program, OPSI

1111 20th Street NW

Washington DC 20-526

I appreciate all of your support. Thanks so much!

All the best,

Carolyn

Photos: 1. Working with community members on an aqueduct project; 2. Giving a waste-borne disease talk in the local school; 3. A family in the community

Doing the Zumba

Happy Halloween! This dress is what old ladies wear in the non-indigenous parts of Panama. I actually do wear it around my community, but it served well as a Halloween costume too.

To celebrate the completion of one year in our sites as volunteers, most of my training group met up for two nights at an all-inclusive resort on the Pacific coast over Halloween weekend. My volunteer friends and I had been anticipating the vacation for months, but when I arrived for my first time to an all-inclusive resort I found myself a bit overwhelmed- swimming pools and buffets galore, with Panamanian staff running around everywhere cleaning stuff that didn’t appear to be dirty. Jessica and Kayla (my trusty Comarca cohorts) and I arrived to our plush 2 bed, 1 futon room and the first thing I thought (or maybe said) was, This room could easily fit 7.

I enjoyed myself thoroughly but I nevertheless wavered between guilt and gluttony. As I sipped a mixed drink in the pool I wondered what my host mom was doing back in the community. Probably working. I decided to partially come to peace with myself by doing to the buffet what any of my community members would have done – eating as much food as possible, and never leaving a spec of uneaten food on my plate. I did just that, every meal.

In the morning after breakfast, some of my friends and I were watching a game of shuffleboard. I heard music on the beach – I looked – and I saw a Zumba (Latin music exercise) class in the sand. I ran over and joined in, the only non-Panamanian, judging by appearance. The dance moves were fun but due to my level of coordination the Panamanians had to give me some tips.

Later on, one of the other volunteers whom I don’t know too well said, “I can’t believe you just walked over there and joined in the middle of the Zumba class!” I thought about it and realized, before my time in Panama, I wouldn’t have joined that class alone. But by joining the class I was just doing what I do every day in my community as a volunteer, jumping into potentially awkward situations that I know nothing about, and seeing where it takes me.

One of these things is not like the others.

Read On...

Whew. The last of a month's worth of posts that I have been saving up to post. Happy belated Halloween!

The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) is an excellent, concise read about an old man fishing off of the coast of Cuba and battling sharks to protect the gigantic fish he caught. If you haven’t already, just read it!

The Girl Who Played With Fire (Stieg Larsson) is the second book in the Dragon Tattoo series. The book was a long, fast read but once I was done I felt a little empty inside because I had read for many pages about nothing much. However, I will read the 3^rd book in the trilogy as soon as I get my hands on it.

Gifted Hands (Ben Carson) was a quick autobiography about the pedriatic neurosurgeon Ben Carson who now works at Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was inspiring to read about all that he went through in his childhood. It was also a good reminder how important research is as I have felt very far away from the world of academia in the past year.

Persuasion (Jane Austen) is probably my favorite Austen book that I have read so far. I enjoyed all of the twists and deception in the plot.

Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri) is a collection of short stories about Bengalis struggling to adjust to life in the United States. I appreciated how the author mentioned specific suburbs of Boston and towns and in New England, as it made me better able to picture the story taking place.

A Long Way Gone, Memories of a Boy Soldier (Ishmael Beah) documents the childhood of a boy caught up in the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, fighting with the Sierra Leone army against rebels who had killed his family. The book was very graphic, but now I understand how ugly rebel warfare really is. I wish the book had included more historical context to the war though.

Asuntos Varios

Taking a quick break from the nagua dress: Swear-in ceremony for the new Environmental Health group on October 20 in Panama City at the US ambassador's house.
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Panama is approximately the size of South Carolina. I never expected that as a Peace Corps volunteer I would be so grounded, but actually I have done much less distance traveling in my 15 months in Panama than I ever had in my previous existence. I have no regrets about it either – instead I have visited dozens of indigenous communities in the Comarca Ngabe Bugle, mostly on foot.

However, I am itching to get myself on an airplane and go some place where I am really on vacation. I will be traveling to Medellin, Colombia in late December for a week with some of my volunteer friends. One of my volunteer friends has family there so we will be celebrating Christmas with the family in the countryside and New Years in the city. Next, in early January I will fly from Colombia to Boston and visit the home front for 11 days. I am excited to see family and friends while back in Massachusetts although I am a bit concerned about surviving the cold weather!

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I was advised by a loyal blog reader that some of my posts are not visible, or are misposted, in Internet Explorer. However there doesn't seem to be any problems in the (superior) Firefox or Chrome browsers.