Spoiled Rotten

I always tell my community members that they are lucky to live in a place where plants grow year round and one can harvest food in any month of the year.  Due to the distinct rainy and dry seasons, there are specific times to plant and harvest specific food items.  Now that I have been through the food cycle almost twice, I will share my reflections.
 

January (start of dry season): Start of fresh beans, both tree and vine variety.  So tasty fried in oil and then cooked with rice!  They’re still hard to get.

February:  People give me a bag of unshelled beans as soon as I step foot out of my house.  I’ve tried currying, boiling, sautéing, and making chili out of these beans.  But beans for breakfast isn’t doing it for me anymore.

 

March: The last of the beans are drying up! Hurray! Kids are knocking green mangoes off the trees, which are quite delicious with salt.  Rice and bean planting.

April: Ripe mangoes. Yum. 

May (start of heavy rains):  A glorious time when avocadoes are available. I pay my neighborhood boys 15 cents to climb trees and get them for me.  There are rotten mangoes on the ground everywhere with worms in them.  Mangoes, go away!

June: Corn harvest means lots of corn juice and mashed up corn boiled in a leaf. Pifa (a palm nut) is given out in large quantities, not bad with the most exotic spice available: salt.

July: Pifa becomes my dog food because I can’t eat anymore of it.

August:  Pifa, please go away.  Some vine beans and corn are available. 

September: First rice harvest.  After 10 months of eating processed white rice, the whole grain stuff is so, so good.

October: There is enough harvested rice around that sometimes I can even buy it from my neighbors!

November: End of new rice, so sad.  ORANGES!

December: Oranges never get old but sometimes I eat so many that my lips get raw.

Throughout the year, some items are generally available such as yucca (and other starchy root vegetables), plantains, and bananas.  However, whatever is in season I eat in large quantity.  The only items listed above that I have ever bought are avocadoes and rice.  The rest are strictly gifted or given in exchange for something I have.  

Two different varieties of bananas, avocadoes, spinach-like leaves, yuca, an egg.

BEANS! And oranges and a log of yuca.

Sometimes I have so many beans or yucca or mangoes on my hand that I have to secretly re-gift them to other neighbors so that they don’t go to waste.  I guess it’s not so bad being spoiled rotten by my community members.

Paradise found: Coiba Island

Arriving at the ranger station

Coiba Island was a penitentiary until 2004.  Now it is a protected national park.  Due to its isolation it has some of the best ecological diversity in Central America.  I spent 2 nights on the island with 9 other volunteer friends, most from my training group.

We snorkeled.  I saw a shark among lots of fish and coral.

Best buds since the beginning of training: Monique, Jessica, and Kayla

We hiked.  Up a rocky road in bare feet to see a view, and then our boat driver showed us a direct paved pathway down.  The guard helped us harvest mangoes.  To a jungle filled with monkeys.  To see a sunset.

 

Not a bad prison view.

We toured the prison.  The park ranger on duty had worked in the functioning prison for 10 years so he was full of rich history.  Such as… the prisoner’s cementary.  If a prisoner died during his sentence, his body had to buried on the island until the sentence was completed.  Then the family could pay to collect the body and rebury it on home turf. Then the park ranger helped us harvest more fruit from the prison grounds.

Probably the best photo I have taken in Panama: a man holding a fish asking to be eaten by an crocodile, with a Speedo bystander.

We cooked in the park rangers’ kitchen.  Lentils and rice, of course.  The park rangers even gave us some fish to cook.

We visited the park ranger station's pet alligator.

We talked.  Mostly about how Jurassic Park should have been filmed here.

Then, we went home to our sites.  Paradise couldn’t last forever. 

Cat Lady

How many cats does a spinster woman have to own to become a cat lady? I have five.

My cat Meri had 4 kittens a week ago.  

The kittens were born in the Toy Story bag where I store my clean clothes.  Hm.

My treatment plan to become a regular pet owner again: I will take care of the kittens until they can eat real food, and then raffle them off to community members.  The winners will have to trade me a chicken for the kitten which I will raise and then donate to my going –away party in October.  

Community Water Seminar and Meeting

I organized a community water seminar for the current and future beneficiaries of my local aqueduct.  Two other volunteer, Jake and Erica, came to help me give the talks. (Check out Erica's post and excellent photos about the event in my site.)

I planned the event for the morning of the day my Peace Corps Environmental Health (EH) boss was scheduled to visit the community and run a meeting about receiving another volunteer after me. The timing of the seminar/meeting was not ideal – Sunday morning is church time for many, and a national presidential candidate was also arriving in a nearby community by helicopter for a political rally.  And to kill 2 cows for the people to eat. 

The seminar was scheduled to start at 8 am in the water president’s thatched house.  At 9 am there were only 6 people present but we started anyways with a skit about using contaminated water.  The 2 other volunteers and I felt a bit foolish doing a skit in front of an audience of 6 in a house, but that didn’t stop us.  I was the grumpy mom, Erica was the dirty girl who peed and then put her hands in the water bucket, and Jake was the messy dad.

The morning continued with 3 talks: 1) Home Water Purification, 2) Water Conservation during the Rainy and Dry Season, 3) Creating an Annual Work Calendar for Water Group.  By the 2^nd talk there were 12 adults and 4 kids present – not bad considering somewhere nearby there was a helicopter landing with free meat galore.    The small group was more conducive to an interactive workshop environment with lots of good questions.

We all ate a seminar-funded lunch at a neighbor’s house and then reunited for the Peace Corps meeting.  The Panama EH project recommends 3 consecutive volunteers in a given community to ensure sustainability of infrastructure.  Since I am the 1^st volunteer in my community and the aqueduct is not finished, I had suspected that a volunteer would be replacing me in October.  However, this year the new EH group arrives in May for training and will move to the communities in July – 4 months before my group leaves.

Although in other Peace Corps countries it is common to have more than 1 volunteer in a community, in Panama it is the rare exception, and never in small communities like mine.  Based on my experience, I am definitely a proponent of the isolation -> integration model: in my 1^st three months I only saw my American friends every 2 weeks and was submerged in a world of Ngaberi and Spanish.  Therefore of course my co-volunteers and I feel as if our follow-ups should go through this same rite of passage, which will not exactly be possible if we are still living there for the new volunteer’s 1^st four months.

My boss did a good job explaining this multi-volunteer dynamic to my community.  No, we will not be living together; the new one will live with host families at the beginning just like I did.   No, the new volunteer and I will not be together all of the time; we will each be doing our own thing most of the time.

But what does 2 EH volunteers “doing their own thing” consist of in a community of 20 houses?  I’m not quite sure.  We’ll find out in July.

Manners, Please

My 4 year old neighbor Lily brought her classmate David over to my house to play.  This is David’s first time visiting my house.  Like usual, she asks me to see the books and I haul the box out onto the porch.

David grabs the pages roughly, crumpling them.  Lily tells me he doesn’t know how to turn the pages, and I instruct her to teach him, which she does.

My radio on the bench catches David’s eye, so he picks it up and starts fiddling with it.  Lily yells, “That’s Bechi’s! Don’t touch!”  He puts it down.

I cut up a ripe banana and bring it out to them.  They ask me for another and I say no.  David follows me into my house, asking me again for another banana: “Gringa, da me un otro maduro.” Lily glares at him from the porch and shouts, “Her name is Bechi! David, get out of her house!  We play on the porch.” He returns to the porch.

I never had to deal with David because Lily did all of the policing for me.  This visit was eye-opening to how genteel my neighborhood kids have become in my household.  They have adapted to my foreign house rules: no wrappers or peels on the ground, books return to the box, and don’t enter my house without permission.  After returning to my house after a week away, a kid has given me a dime that he found on my porch ground.  Not to say that they’re all perfect.

Most of the neighbors’ houses look like a tornado recently struck inside, with clothes and dishes everywhere, so it is impressive that these kids have adapted so well to my orderliness.  But perhaps this only adds to my house’s sense of safe haven – away from wood needing to be chopped, babies needing to be changed, and rice needing to be cooked.