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.

Ya cumplí 23

(written on 1-26-11)

As far as I can tell, Ngabes do not celebrate birthdays so I did not have high expectations, but I ended up having a great birthday week.

I went to the nearest beach on the Pacific side to celebrate New Years with my Peace Corps friends a few days after 2011 had actually started. In transit I had bought a cake mix and frosting on a whim at the huge, exciting supermarket in David that actually sells such things. My dreams of cake became a reality when I asked the German cabin owners if I could borrow their oven, and they offered to bake the cake for me. The cake was then dubbed ¨German chocolate cake¨. My friends made a matchstick candle. Much later in the night, my friend Jessica demanded that the 10 or so in our group go around and say something they like about me. I was extremely bashful at the time, and now it seems super cheesy, but it was so sweet!

Back in the Comarca (reservation), the day before my birthday my host brother Domingo invited me to visit Boquete with him, which is a highland town in western Panama famous for its coffee farms, cooler climate, and high population of retired North Americans. His offer had nothing to do with my birthday, but of course I accepted. If I had a car, Boquete would be 2 hours away but with public transport it took 5 hours each way so it turned out to be quite the long day trip. In Boquete we visited the coffee farm where Domingo´s brother-in-law works, the farm where he used to work, and some beautiful flower gardens. Although there are plenty of coffee tours available to tourists for $25, it was great walking through the farms with Domingo, talking to the people, and seeing the somewhat squalid living conditions. Although Boquete is far outside the Comarca, seasonal coffee labor (harvesting) is almost soley provided by Ngabes.

Interesting fact about birthdays in my area- it is a common conversational question to ask, ¨When is your birthday?¨. In Spanish, this literally translates to, ¨When are you going to complete?¨ If the birthday is yet to come in the calendar year, the custom is to provide the date, for example January 7. However, if the date has already passed in the calendar year (as mine has), then all I have to say is ¨Ya cumplí 23¨ or ¨I already completed 23,¨ and no further questions are asked about what the specific date is. This system definitely took some getting used to when I arrived in November, because most people had already completed their birthdays! (After rereading this paragraph I think I am making this sound more confusing than it actually is. Oh Well.)


Other life update: My house is still wall less, which is the norm in my area, but I can´t live there alone until it has walls for safety reasons. Who would have guessed that 2 different types of agency permissions have to be obtained before cutting down trees. It has been a huge headache.

Writing a Report is Painful after 3 months in the Woods

I´m here in town on the computer because I need to buy tarp to seal the top of my thatched roof, and I also have a written report due in early February. Here is some of my report for your enjoyment-

Community Integration
Community integration has been a slow process. I do finally understand that the 3 months of Projecto Amistad were necessary to get the integration process started. Patience is definitely important for integration. Patience to answer the same questions to community members over and over again, patience to sit through conversations in a language I do not understand well (Ngabe), and patience to wait for people to feel comfortable around me. However, the patience definitely pays off when I understand a bit of a conversation in Ngabe or an old lady chastizes me for not pasearing with her in over a week.

For me, I have also learned that I need to be assertive with my integration process because many times people will not invite me to do things with them in fear that I do not want to. I need to tell people I want to go to the monte with them and work, or hike to a neighboring community with them, or pointedly ask people to expain to me what they were saying in Ngabe. More often than not, it seems that they are just waiting for me to ask!

I think the part of training that prepared me the best for my community integration was my conversations with current volunteers in the Comarca NB, and my volunteer visit to the Comarca. These experiences and stories gave me a decent idea of what to expect in my site, and left me with fewer surprises.

Challenges
-Dealing with community family tensions. My community is made up of 3 large families, and none of them like each other. Often times I feel like the go-between in the community since none of the families communicate. Slowly learning the history of the tensions has helped me respect and have more patience with the situation.
-Setting fair expectations for the community. I try to talk as much as possible about why I am here for two years and what I hope we can accomplish together, yet at the end of the conversation the aqueduct comes up again.

Lessons Learned
The value of literature - A few times I have left English newspapers and La Vaina by the fogon to be burned, and later have discovered my host mom marvelling over the photos, or my host dad practicing saying English words. Now I know to offer people the reading material before burning it!

Be straight forward and up front about things that matter - I was unsure about whom to walk with about the house building project, and now I realize this process would have been much less stressful if I had openly talked about it with both of my host families from the start.

Party Non Stop

I didn´t know what to expect with Panamanian holidays in the Comarca, since in many ways living in the Comarca is culturally like living in a different country than Panama. Now I know that November and December are not times to expect high productivity!

Nov 2 : Dia de Difunto (Day of the Dead - Memorial Day) - No School. No sign of mourning though.

Nov 3: Independence Day from Gran Colombia - The elementary school had a ceremony with the national anthem, poetry recitations, and speeches from the teachers. A small parade with the school band and baton twirlers.

Nov 4: Flag Day - No school. No sign of flag waving.

Nov 22: Anniversary of the Foundation of the District of Lajero (district where I live)- This holiday caught me by surprise because it is not a national holiday. My distirct invited several other surrounding schools to join our parade and competition. School marching bands and their families hiked for up to 2 hours to come to the event. In the afternoon there was judging, poetry recitations, and singing competitions. After I went home, the dance started and I could still hre the music at 8 am the next morning. More than 24 hours after the party had started, I saw people stumbling home completely covered in mud.

Nov 28: Independence Day from Spain - No school. No celebration, as my community was clearly still recovering from the 22nd.

Dec 8: Mother´s Day - On Dec 6 the school invited the mothers (and me) for gifts (plates or cups), games, and food. On Dec 7th the local politician invited the mothers (and me) for the same thing. On Dec 8th I went with my host mom to a church (not hers) for the same thing, plus a sermon. On Sunday Dec 11th, I hiked an hour and a half to visit a sister church for... the same thing! Three of the functions had the same recorder/guitar trio and by the end I could have called myself a groupie.
On Mother´s Day, my host uncle killed a cow and sold the meat for $1.50/lb (same price as chicken! a good deal). All in all, I definitely got Mother´s Day´d out, especially since I´m not a mother.

Dec 25th: Christmas Day - No cow was killed, so it was not as big of a deal as Mother´s Day or New Years. Families do not seem to exchange gifts for Christmas. The elementary school celebrated the week before with a meal for all students, and dolls and cars for the first graders. I went to my host family´s church activity on the 25th. The 40 kids or so played games to compete for the 5 available prizes, but some of the games were too difficult so the adults competed for the kid´s prizes. There was enough food for everyone in attendance (a recurring holiday theme).

December 31st : New Years - A very polarizing holiday in my community. Most church-attending people headed to a 4 day evangelical church conference a few hours away, or stayed at home. In my community center there was a big party with firecrackers, fermented corn liquor, scarecrow burning, and general debauchery. I spent New Years even in the city and then headed to the church conference for 1 night to meet up with my host family.

All in all, the holidays were a great way to get to know my community. Next year I will be more prepared to pick and choose which events to attend!

Endless Summer

This may be the only year in my life when I have two full summers. I left the USA in August after enjoying a full New England summer. Now I am in the middle of Panamanian summer which lasts December through March. The weather in the foothills where I am located is quite similar to a New England summer, except a bit drier. The downside of my endless summer is that supposing I return to the United States in October 2012, I will also have a full year without summer.

Some of you may be thinking, but in Panama isn't it always warm and summer? It is always warm outside, but between April and November it rains enough to be called "winter".

The big news is that a carretera (highway) was built through my community. It is actually a dirt road, but it was a big deal when the machines and trucks arrived to cut through the walking path. I do not like the road because it is ugly and will soon turn to mud, but at the same time I understand why everyone was so excited about it. In time the road will have passenger cars so that people can leave without having to hike. The small stores will be able to deliver food without using horses.

With community members, we started building my house on January 4. It will be about 11 feet x 12 feet in dimension with a thatched palm roof. Currently the roof is about 2/3 complete because the moon is too bright to harvest more palm leaf. It turns out that when the moon is large and bright, all of the bugs are more active and will destroy the freshly cut palm leaves.

I can't wait until the house is finished and I can move in! I expect this will take another 3 weeks to get everything set.

What have I been up to?

When I was younger, Myles and Eric used to call me the Bookmobile because I read so much. During college I definitely fell off the reading bandwagon due to other constant distractions. Since November when I moved to my community, pleasure reading has again become on of my top hobbies.

• Monique and the Mango Rains, Kris Holloway - Memoirs of Peace Corps volunteer in Mali in the 90s working in a health clinic. It was interesting to compare my experiences to those of the author.
  
• 1984, George Orwell - I have been meaning to read this for a long time.
  
• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy - What beautiful imagery. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.
  
• Using Participatory Analysis for Community Action - A handbook describing some of the methods I use to work with the community.
  
• Where There is No Doctor- A Village Healthcare Handbook, David Werner - An illustrated guide to all medical problems that may be encountered in a rural area, stomach pains to snake bites. I have already used the book to identify several medical issues with myself!
  
• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver - A story of a missionary's family in the Congo, it was wonderful book to read while settling in to a very rustic setting. One of my favorite parts was when the young daughter complained about why people sweep a dirt floor. I sweep the dirt floor in and around my host family's house every morning.
  
• Three Junes, Julia Glass- The writing style reminded me of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, in that I loved it and could not put it down. I also love sad books.
  
• Three Weeks with My Brother, Nicolas and Micah Sparks - The story is good but I do not like Sparks' writing style.
  
• Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut -The book was written in 1976 and its amazing that almost all the criticisms of the United States have not changed. I enjoy Vonnegut in small quantities, and luckily he writes short books.

Other new hobby: chakaras which are knit shoulder bags hand-made to hold anything from a cell phone to a baby. I learned how to make them by hand and by knitting from women in my community.

Attention Baltimoreans

This may be old news to some of you. From a November 19 article in the Telegram & Gazette (hometown newspaper):

"2 accused of stealing cockroach, reptiles


BALTIMORE- Baltimore police say 2 brothers, ages 11 and 14, have been charged as juveniles with stealing about a dozen reptiles- an iguana, geckos, chameleons and turtles - and a hissing cockroach from the city-run Carrie Murray Nature Center.

Police said Thursday the boys will face charges including theft and breaking and entering. They've been released to their parents' custody.

All the critters were recovered and returned to the center Tuesday."

All of these stolen critters are common in Panama!