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.

A Curbed Addiction

I can’t stop thinking about the TV show The Wire. It started innocently when one of my volunteer friends offered me to look at her collection of TV shows and movies on her computer. I can rarely stay awake through an entire movie alone so I chose to copy the 1^st season of HBO’s The Wire, figuring I could watch an episode now and again when I have battery life on my computer. The next week in site, I watched one episode on my computer every night until my computer ran out of battery (4 nights). The next time I went to town, I recharged my computer and continued with this pattern until I finished Season 1, and then copied the rest of the seasons onto my computer. I have made Self Rules that I can only watch one episode per night and that I can’t watch it when I should be being social. I have cheated (myself) a couple of times on both counts.

I watched a few scattered episodes of The Wire during college, but because the series has a complex plot I never became hooked because I hadn’t started at the beginning. The show covers the complex relations between drug trafficking and Baltimore city police. Two of my favorite characters have already died, and yes, I did shed a few tears in the privacy of my very dark home theater (my bed). It’s probably for the best that I did not watch the show during my Baltimore days, because I would probably have felt less safe.

Some volunteers without electricity have car batteries or solar panels in their homes so that they can always recharge their electronics. However, I am content with my situation because it keeps my current addiction under control.

Gravity Rocks

In the States I never thought much about where my water came from – pumped from a well at my house, or part of a huge city wide treated system in Baltimore or Worcester or Boston. In training last fall, we learned about the basics of gravity fed water flow. Many NGOs and good-hearted engineers around the world have had a habit of including fancy electric/gas/solar-powered pumps in water systems in developing countries, and the problem is that pumps are complicated and break easily.

Luckily, in the mountains and hills of Panama pumps can be easily avoided thanks to gravity. I have been working with a community-elected Water Committee to bring water to the majority of the houses in the community –nothing fancy, just a tap stand outside of each house.

I’m going to give a run-down of my experiences during the past month with the construction of a gravity fed water system (the only power source is gravity) for those of you who are interested.

1. Fix the road that is necessary to get materials in on a truck. Use several pick axes to chip away at a rock that is blocking a road.
2. Spring Water Catchment Box: Locate a spring source (where the water leaves the earth to start a stream) which is usually in the hills above the community. Carry the sand and rocks and cement up there in sacks on shoulder or head or horse. Build a box around the spring source out of cinder block, rebar, and concrete mixture. This box has an opening at the top so that if there is too much water to fit in the tube, it will exit.
3. Tube: The tube size is based on the flow rate of the spring source. The problem in Panama is that the flow rate fluctuates usually 5x between the dry season and the wet season. Community members pried large rocks and dug an 18’’ ditch to bury the 1 ½’’tubes.
4. Storage Tank: A tank is designed to be large enough to provide 30 Gallons per person per day in the community, plus allowing for population growth in the next 20 years. The tank needs to be located close to the community, but above all of the houses. The 4,000 Gallon tank is made of cinder block with a reinforced concrete floor and top. Ideally the spring catchment is built first so that water is readily available to make the cement mix, but in my case the Latinos paid a guy to haul water from the river in buckets.
5. Lay down the mother line tube down the major path through the community. Then make cuts in this big tube and put in a T, connecting it to a ½’’ tube that goes from the main path to near the house. At the house there will be a tap stand with a little cement pad.

I was more useful for theoretical knowledge such as water catchment and tank location, since my construction background is minimal. I wished I knew more about construction so I could have been more critical with quality control on the contractor’s rushed work. I did quite a bit of manual labor such as digging ditches and hauling sand and rocks on a bag hanging off my head.

This is the stage we are at now. Work remains – encouraging community members to organize and finish burying the main tube, and get the water group to start charging users 50 cents per month per family for use. We are also soliciting funds from the local government representative to use part ($,3000) of his annual “Community Fund” to buy enough tubing to reach the 9 houses that are left.

Thanks to gravity, my neighbors and I don't have to haul dirty laundry down to the river or drinking water up from the river anymore...at least, until the dry season.

The Water has Arrived

It has rained straight for the past three days. Today, the contractors finished up their work and the wáter arrived in 9 houses, including mine. Each house has its own spigot in the yard. There are 15 more houses in the community without water, but the government funded budget of $9200 ran out before tubing could reach all of the houses. As a combination of it being the rainiest month of the year, the small number of houses connected to the system, and my house’s location near the bottom of the system, I currently have bountiful amounts of wáter to my availability.

I was sitting in my hammock watching the rain. I Heard the Chhhhh noise of air rushing through the tubes, and then Spfltttt, the dirty wáter started rushing out of my faucet! Although I have become very desanimada (discouraged) with this project, it was a special moment to to see water arriving to the houses. The first thing I did once the wáter cleared up was to fill up every bucket and gallon jug I have to my name. It will take me awhile to get used to having water nearby. I still feel the urge to fill my one gallon jug every time it starts to get empty, just in case the wáter stops.

I still leave some of my buckets under the eave of my house to collect rain water to wash dishes and bathe. Before this aqueduct, during the rainy season I would use filtered rain water to drink, and unfiltered rain water to cook, bathe, and wash dishes. During the dry season I would walk 4 minutes down a steep hill to fill up jugs of water, and 6 minutes down to the river to bathe and wash clothes. Most families in my area have a similar water situation except that they don't collect rain water due to lack of buckets and jugs. Nowhere in mountainous Panama is a drinking water source hours away, but nevertheless hauling water is a continuous chore that usually is the women and children's responsibility.

The amazing results I have witnessed so far:

• Teaching a little girl how to turn on and off the faucet
• Washing my feet all of time on the concrete platform
• Watching people wash their hands
• Thinking about the 88 year old grandmother who doesn’t have to hike down a slippery hill to bathe and fill wáter jugs anymore
• Showering there in the night time and hoping nobody will walk by

In the Trenches

I met Jose for the first time in January when he returned home to my community after working in Costa Rica coffee harvesting, and he immediately brought a new surge of energy into my community work. He noticed that my house construction project was lagging and started organizing new work days. He made me a hammock out of my leftover string and built benches out of my leftover wood. The next month he was elected as VP of our newly formed Water Committee. Jose came to almost every Sunday soccer game fundraiser, and always donated something from his store to sell. Jose was the one most readily available for surveying days or community meetings, and he actually showed up on time. He was one of the two men I brought to the Leadership Seminar back in July.

Now in Week 2 of aqueduct work, tensions have slowly risen among the community members, which is understandable as they are working every day without pay. That is, except for Jose. For the first few days of construction I was away from my community, and the Latino construction workers noticed how hard-working Jose was and asked him to be their “helper”. This means that Jose was helping haul water from the river to make the cement mix for the water tank, while the rest of the community members were building a trench to bury the tubes in the woods. When I returned back to my community, some of my neighbors let me know that Jose was paid $10 per day for two days for being the helper. Keep in mind that in these parts, a normal 8 am to 4 pm manual labor day wage is $6per day.

This situation made me uncomfortable, as the unwritten law for community projects is that beneficiaries donate all labor. The rest of the community was clearly disgruntled that one of them had been singled out to be paid an exorbitant day wage. Through rumors I heard that the Latino boss found out that Jose was a project beneficiary and therefore would no longer be paid for his work.

A week later, I observed Jose once again working as the helper to the Latino construction workers, and then being invited to eat lunch with them. I built up my nerves and point blank asked Jose if he was being paid for his work today, and he gave me a wishy-washy no answer. I was relieved and returned to my lunch. However, later I questioned the friendly Latino boss whether he was paying Jose. He said yes, and was surprised when I explained that the rest of the community was unhappy about the situation. He claimed he did not know anything about the project beneficiary no-pay rule. The Latino boss did not want to cause any community unrest and said we should all talk.

I thought highly enough of Jose to expect that once the Latino boss and I confronted him with the situation, he would quickly agree to leave the current day’s pay behind him in order to stay on good terms with the community. I was wrong. He claimed that he was not doing anything wrong because he is a harder worker than any of the other community members (more or less true). Later that day he called a meeting to announce he was withdrawing as VP of the Water Committee, pulling his family out of the aqueduct project, and demanding a refund for all of the donations his store has made in the past year to the Water Committee.

I was pretty upset when I returned back to my house before the afternoon rains. I considered calling one of my Peace Corps volunteer friends to vent about it, but instead walked over to my neighbor’s house and told my host mom and 2 host sisters* everything that had happened. They were alarmed, and did a good job comforting me and telling me that Jose has a temper like that, and I did nothing wrong by speaking up. Although ultimately my host mom did say, “I wish I had been there to tell you that you shouldn’t have said anything, we should have waited to say something until after the project was all over”.

Speaking up in the way I did rarely happens here which, I assume, is partially why corruption is rampant all over Panama. Although most of the community is behind me, my words caused more trouble than they were worth. I was speaking up to represent the dignity of the President of the Water Group as well as all of the other community members laboring in the trenches every day without pay. At the same time, who am I to say that a bunch of bad mouthing is worse than $30 earned in an immoral way?

*My host family is a matriarchy consisting of a mom (age 52), her two daughters (31 and 23) and their families, and her daughter-in-law (29) and her family. Four strong spunky women with husbands who make an appearance only every once in a while.