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.

I Know I have been in Panama for awhile when...

• My hair looks like that. [Actually it's a bird's nest that a woman was wearing as a wig at Balsaria this year.]
  
• I own a variety of utensils but I still only use the spoon.
• I eat everything out of a bowl even though I own plates.
• I went to my first live music tipico (traditional Panamanian music) dance last month and I already knew all of the songs from the radio.
• Dry leaves are trash and must be burned compulsively.
• I brag about my pets’ hunting prowess.
• I cook pasta but I’m still not full. So then I cook some rice.
• I find myself acquiring new clothing with sparkles and bedazzle glued on to it.
• My sleeping habits depend on the lunar cycle.
• Crowing roosters don’t wake me up.
• I buy dog food in 1 or 2 pound bags. The cat eats it too.
• Small children don't call me gringa because I'm just Bechi to them. Sometimes it breaks my heart to think about how I've been their neighbor for their whole conscious lives, but that they won't remember me in a few years.
  

Latrine Inauguration

The latrine group and I planned an Inauguration Party to celebrate the success of the project. As a rule, the celebration must include food with meat, and coffee. Usually such events are funded by individual donations and outside or local government support.

My most active latrine leader and I calculated that we needed 50 pounds of rice and 22 pounds of chicken to feed 100 people. I figured that there were enough leftover funds to buy the rice ($25) and the leader promised to write a letter of solicitude to the local government representative (AKA our neighbor called Honorable Representante) for the chicken (valued at 22 * $1.50 = $33).

At about that time I disappeared for a week to go find my friend and family in Panama City, and by the time I had concluded my Break Time the guy who had promised to write the letter had left to go work in Panama City without ever writing it.

I stepped back. Clearly March 17 was not a feasible date so I pushed the date back to March 31. I tracked down another letter-writing competent beneficiary and asked him to write the letter, which he did within a day.

Before I knew it, a week was left before the Inauguration and it was crunch time. I cornered the other main latrine leader and asked him to advise half of the beneficiaries of the party date and time. He also agreed to go down to the store on the Interamerican highway to buy the rice for a good price and bring it to my house.

Then I dropped the bomb on my host family. “Is it okay if you guys host the Inauguration?” Translation: “Is it okay if you host 100 people on your property, some of with whom you don’t get along, and cook for them and clean up after them?”. They said yes.

I spent the next couple days advising the other half of the beneficiaries and simultaneously checking up on their progress of building a house around the latrine platform. I also asked the Representante almost daily if he was going to be able to provide the chicken and in what quantity.

The day before the Inauguration I went out to look for Representante in his usual hot spots and found out he was outside of the area for pay day. The reason chicken was such a point of worry was because it needed to be bought at the store on the Interamerican highway, a 1 hour 40 minute walk down or a quick car ride with unreliable transport. Also it needed to be bought the day of for a 10 am start time due to lack of refrigeration. At 7 pm, I finally got a hold of him through a new technology in this area called the Cell Phone and he promised to go down to the store early in the morning to get the chicken.

My cat was ready to sacrifice herself for the party if the chicken didn't show up.

The Saturday of the party, we started cooking at 6:30 am. By we, I mostly mean my host mom. The dad who agreed to host the event never even showed up after work on Friday (normal) so she did what she’s best at and stepped up. The raw chicken arrived at 10 am along with only a scanty amount of event attendees, and all of them were people I had personally invited. A few others trickled in, but I assume that the latrine leader never advised the other half of the people about the event.

We started the program at 11:30 anyways and I gave a heartfelt speech about the importance of washing the latrines and covering the seat to keep flies away. I also talked about how everyone present now knew how easy it is to build a latrine slab, and it is their responsibility to organize another community project and solicit funds.

We ate and I then returned the $5 deposit that every family was required to put down before receiving materials. I had explained the purpose of a deposit several times before but most people were still very pleasantly surprised to be getting paid at a party with free food (those silly gringas…).

There were 25 pounds of leftover cooked rice so every family took home a huge doggie bag. There had been just enough chicken though because the Representante only had bought 2/3 of what we had solicited.

Only the ancient grandmother remained at my house, resting on the hammock . I breathed a sigh of relief to be officially finished with the latrine project. If my latrine leader had actually done his job and advised the rest of the beneficiaries about the party, there would not have been enough chicken to go around and people would have been unhappy.

It’s funny how things work out.

Epilogue: To top the day off, I headed down to the creek to bathe soon after the event had finished. In my deep thoughts I forgot to whistle a warning to announce my arrival to the bathing spot. I walked in on an elderly neighbor bathing naked. Oops. Well, that makes us even because last year he did the same to me.

Afterword: My role in this latrine project and as a development worker/volunteer in general is to “build capacity”. In retrospect, this usually means “being on other people’s backs and getting a lot of exercise walking around”. Sure, it would have been a lot more painless for me to have coughed up the $33 to buy the stupid chicken. But instead I bothered 2 guys to write the letter, and then bugged the Representante to the point of embarrassment so that he came through with his promise to buy the chicken. Evidently I was not relentless enough with the latrine leader who was supposed to advise the other half of the invitees, but it’s all good.

Watch Out, California

I’ve been hearing about the widening of the Panama Canal (ongoing, finish date 2014) and its benefits ever since I have been here in Panama. A wider and deeper canal means that larger freight ships will be able to pass through, creating more traffic and thus more jobs and revenue. The canal locks today only fit ships that carry 5000 containers, while now newer ships can hold up to 12,000 containers and have to seek alternate routes.

Currently, large ships from Asia that won’t fit through the Canal dock in California (Los Angeles or Long Beach) and then the containers are transferred to trains which run to the East Coast. Now these ports are threatened. The California “Beat the Canal” effort is attempting to prepare for the 2014 deadline by expediting the transfer from boat to train, to make the route more attractive for time-sensitive shipments than the longer canal route.

While Californians are rushing to mitigate the “threat posed by the canal,” Panamanians are preparing to celebrate the success of their ownership of the new and improved canal in 2014.

“The Fickle Asian Container,” The Economist. 28 January 2012.

The Thing about Bananas

Walking anywhere in my community, there are banana and plantain plants everywhere. One would think that I eat bananas all of the time – well, sort of.

Unripe green bananas can be peeled and boiled similar to a potato. They can also be fried into banana chips. People usually eat bananas green instead of waiting for them to ripen, because a green banana serves as a starchy belly-filling food while a ripe one only serves as a sweet.

Thus, in other homes I am served boiled bananas with salt or in a soup. Pretty good, but not something I would necessarily cook for myself. Occasionally a community member gives me a bunch of green bananas to take home and cook. So what do I do with it? I stow it away under my table for a few weeks until I have some beautiful, ripe yellow bananas. What then follows are 3 intense banana-eating days before the bananas will spoil.

The first time ever here in Panama that I have had bread and ripe bananas at the same time! (I always have peanut butter and honey on hand).