What Carolyn Probably Doesn’t Notice Anymore

Don't worry, I haven't reverted to writing in the 3rd person. Eric wrote a guest blog post for me reflecting on his visit to my community!

In late May, I visited Carolyn in Panama for 10 days – the longest consecutive time we had spent together since our early teens.  While she didn’t beg me to stay, I think we had a great time.  Something we both remarked when she visited me in January in New York City is that our lives couldn’t be more different: I live on the 19^th floor of a doorman building in Manhattan, often work 16+ hours/day, rarely sleep more than 5-6 hours/night, and rarely cook.  My neighborhood is known as one of the post-college hotspots in Manhattan; of the 1,500 or so people who live in my building, there are about 15 school-aged kids and the same number of people over 40, and 1,200 people who act like school-aged kids (no comment on my own inclusion).  With this difference in lifestyle, I can comment on aspects of Carolyn’s lifestyle that she just does not notice anymore.

·         Kids are everywhere: Carolyn has commented before on the number of children in each family at her site, but it worthwhile to consider what that means.  At 5 or so children per mother, and often multiple mothers per house, there are children everywhere.  At dinner at her host family’s house, I counted 12 kids under the age or 13, and saw similar numbers at other houses.    Carolyn commonly has 5-10 kids outside her house, playing with each other and getting in her way.  

Lots of animals too.

·         Lots of meat is a rarity: While Carolyn eats meat less often then I do, the amount of meat she eats is significantly less.  Beef is a real rarity, and the freely ranging chickens and pigs get far too much exercise in their foraging to produce the breasts and cutlets favored by Americans. I get the feeling that meat for Carolyn (at least at her site) is more like a dessert.

After hiking through a cloud forest.

Washing clothes in the stream works well: Carolyn hasn’t detailed it in the blog yet, but her clothes washing process goes something like this: go down to the stream, wet the clothes individually,  rub soap in, brush them off with a stiff-bristled brush, whack them against the rocks, wash them again, and leave them to dry.  After this process, I found my clothes just as clean as I do at home, and the entire laundry process took about the same amount of time. What my laundry process does not include are the treacherous rocks by her stream, made slippery by the combination of soap and mango rinds.

Visiting another volunteer Charles' site on the Caribbean side.

Last day before heading our separate ways!

All in all, a great trip, and I recommend anyone to see Panama – Carolyn can give you all the right tips.

Water Seminar

Cheap: All said and done, $1.30 per person per day for breakfast and lunch.  Participants contributed firewood for cooking. [Funded by SPA grant]

Eco-friendly: Bring your own plate, spoon, and cup.

Local: Located in the school.  Everyone walks up to an hour from their houses to arrive.

Bored or absorbed?

Adults here love seminars.  And pretty certificates.  I grant the popularity of seminars partially to the fact that most adults weren’t able to receive as much schooling as they would have liked.  So 1 ½ year into my time here in the community, I decided to host my first formal seminar.  The advantage of waiting is that I have helped out facilitating at 4 other water seminars and countless other seminars mostly within the Comarca, so I noticed what works and what doesn’t work.  For example, it is acceptable to start late on the first day but after that it should really start almost on time.

Seven different community water groups were invited to attend.  The seminar consisted of two sessions of two days, with a two week break between the sessions.  Inviting 7 water groups consisted of walking around to the surrounding communities and talking with the water presidents, and then reminding them a few times and requiring written commitment of attendance.  

General session topics included: Making a Community Map, Contaminants in your aqueduct, Water and your Health, a Successful Water Committee, Managing the Treasurer’s Account.  Technical topics included: How to measure water flow, Cleaning the Tank.  Hands-on sessions included: An aqueduct model made of buckets and hoses; thermoforming PVC pipe using hot oil to make connector pieces.  

All ages were welcome.

Hosting a seminar was intense.  For each day of the seminar I recruited 2 volunteer cooks, some of who showed up.  Most days the volunteer cooks had to ask participants to help out as water haulers from the spring source a 5 minute walk away, because the aqueduct was not working properly – how fitting to host an aqueduct management seminar!  My community’s water committee president really made me proud because he stepped up to cook when one of the recruited cooks didn’t show up, and also made announcements every day telling people to show up on time and bring firewood.  

A much needed break. Check out how these men can sport a bag.

Hosting a seminar didn’t stop once the seminar finished for the day at 3 pm because I was also hosting other volunteers in my house to help facilitate the sessions.  Actually, one of the best parts of the seminar was hosting 2 groups of 4-5 volunteers, some of whom would rarely have another chance to visit a community in the Comarca because they live in another region.  We ate novel items brought from outside such as celery and peppers, and drank wine from a box.  It was exquisite.

The aqueduct model using a bucket and tubes.

Certificates

So what did you do during your 2 years in Panama?  I helped host a cheap, eco-friendly, local water committee seminar!  Here in rural Panama the maintenance of the system lies in the hands of volunteer community members, so training them in how to take care of and improve the system is just as important as the actual tubes and tanks themselves.

En La Lucha (In the Fight)

The current president Ricardo Martinelli is currently not very popular in my region of Panama because of his plan to exploit environmentally destructive, foreign-run mines in the Comarca Indian reservation.  However, in the President’s defense, he has put a lot of money into the pockets of the country’s poor through welfare programs. 

Every citizen over 70 years old receives $100 monthly, which generally filters down to improved housing and diet for the children and grandchildren as well.  Students receive $30 at the beginning of the school year and $60 for every trimester completed with passing grades.  Finally, all mothers are supposed to receive $50 of food stamps monthly with proof of health center attendance and home garden projects.  For unknown reasons this program halted for 9 months and the women were only paid for 4 of those months in April of this year.

Each small community has a “volunteer” promoter in charge of keeping track of the mothers and their compliance with program requirements.  In reality the promoters are paid by receiving special preference for limited government project such as free houses.

Last week my local ladies had a health meeting with their promoter to get their cards stamped for the next food stamp pay day.  Of course the promoter advised them the same morning that he would be holding the meeting in the afternoon. If it were a year ago I would have attended the meeting as well, but these days I have little interest in Horrible Meetings.  I figure that I have the rest of life to attend them. 

I saw the women walking home from the meeting after 4 hours.  I asked my 24 year old neighbor friend Julia how was the meeting.  “It was fine, but he asked us each to haul 2 loads of gravel to his house before we can get our cards stamped.  So I won’t be able to make your seminar on Saturday.”

I clarified with her to make sure I was understanding correctly.  Yes, the promoter was asking his 25 women to walk an hour to his house and then to haul gravel on their backs for 25 minutes from the road to his house to advance his government sponsored cinder block house.  I would estimate that 1/3 of these women are in some stage of pregnancy or are breast feeding.

I asked Julia if anyone at the meeting spoke out against this unjustified labor.  She said no, they just wanted to get their cards signed.

For me, that’s the worst part.  They knew that they were being taken advantage of, and were too desperate to fight it.

Wait, it gets worse.  My neighbor Sara is 6 months pregnant and lives alone with her 5 kids because her husband is working near Costa Rica.  She felt like she could not risk not receiving her food stamps so she pulled her two oldest boys (9 and 11 years) out of school to carry the gravel for her.  One of her sons has already stayed back a year in school twice, and the other boy has stayed back once.

The required labor never happened due to logistical issues with the gravel truck delivery.  Nevertheless the situation goes to show that corruption is not all about rich politicians with their yachts and private jets – that it all trickles down to a community promoter abusing what little power he has.

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.