Doing the Zumba

Happy Halloween! This dress is what old ladies wear in the non-indigenous parts of Panama. I actually do wear it around my community, but it served well as a Halloween costume too.

To celebrate the completion of one year in our sites as volunteers, most of my training group met up for two nights at an all-inclusive resort on the Pacific coast over Halloween weekend. My volunteer friends and I had been anticipating the vacation for months, but when I arrived for my first time to an all-inclusive resort I found myself a bit overwhelmed- swimming pools and buffets galore, with Panamanian staff running around everywhere cleaning stuff that didn’t appear to be dirty. Jessica and Kayla (my trusty Comarca cohorts) and I arrived to our plush 2 bed, 1 futon room and the first thing I thought (or maybe said) was, This room could easily fit 7.

I enjoyed myself thoroughly but I nevertheless wavered between guilt and gluttony. As I sipped a mixed drink in the pool I wondered what my host mom was doing back in the community. Probably working. I decided to partially come to peace with myself by doing to the buffet what any of my community members would have done – eating as much food as possible, and never leaving a spec of uneaten food on my plate. I did just that, every meal.

In the morning after breakfast, some of my friends and I were watching a game of shuffleboard. I heard music on the beach – I looked – and I saw a Zumba (Latin music exercise) class in the sand. I ran over and joined in, the only non-Panamanian, judging by appearance. The dance moves were fun but due to my level of coordination the Panamanians had to give me some tips.

Later on, one of the other volunteers whom I don’t know too well said, “I can’t believe you just walked over there and joined in the middle of the Zumba class!” I thought about it and realized, before my time in Panama, I wouldn’t have joined that class alone. But by joining the class I was just doing what I do every day in my community as a volunteer, jumping into potentially awkward situations that I know nothing about, and seeing where it takes me.

One of these things is not like the others.

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.