Hello Everyone! Wow. What an amazing week we´ve just had. Culture Week. Every trainee went to the region to which they are going and stayed with families in a community of a current volunteer. We went and visited a married couple in the Comarca. The volunteers who hosted us did a great job of planning the week full of great cultural activities. We visited several farms, several artisans, learned how to make pit latrines and were able to talk to alot of current volunteers in the area. I stayed with a great family. Compared with most Ngabe families mine was small with only two children. We read stories, played hangman, tick tac toe, 2o questions and I taught them how to french braid eachothers hair. The family cooked breakfast and dinner for us, helped us to speak a bit of Ngabere and took us with them to their evangelical church. This morning before we said goodbye to our families my host mother gave me a pink nagwa (traditional dress) to where for the photos (about 50) that we took together. My host sister was also kind enough to put my hair in poney tails so that I look like a ¨muñeca¨ (doll). They are right. I do look like a doll. I hesitated putting up the photo but just so you get the idea...
I´ve been writing a bit in my journal, i thought i would include some parts of my entries. I think they might be kinda cheezy, but I never know until i wait a month or so and re read them.
-----
Terrential downpour as we get off the bus on which we had been riding for the last 6 hours. By the time we can sling our packs on to our backs we´re half soaked, completely empapadas by the time we reach the rancho where the chiva (truck) has been waiting for an hour for the rain to stop.
Two other volunteers are also waiting along with 20 or so Ngabe people; women wearing traditional nagwas of all colors and men carrying heavy bags of rice, cement and manure.
The rain continues to fall on the tin roof of the rancho making it hard to carry on much of a conversation. The cement floor is slowly becoming a lake that closes around us and our mountain of backpacks.
Finally, the chiva driver shrugs, pulls the blue tarp over the top of the truck and starts helping people to step up on the back of the truck.
I watch as women with babies and old mothers, men with their heavy sacks and a small girls with a puppy and a kitten in an old rice sack clim aboard. The driver shoes us inside and throws our backpacks precariously on top.
We wedge ourselves between theighs and backs to find a spot. Kat sits sandwiched next to me as we feel the truck rev up and pull out from under the rancho.
I stupidly try to say ¨how are you?¨in ngabere to the young girl who sits across from me. Everyone laughs. We settle on staring at eachother. Behind her the green countryside blurs by through a section of ripped tarp.
Suddenly we stop. A large engine is growing nearer and nearer. I´m sure it´s going to plow into us. It doesn´t. We start up again, bumping along that panamanian road. Kat turns to me and says. ¨This is Yoga.¨
---------
My little host sister led us to the church comprised of pews, posts and a roof that sits behind their houses. Dusk was arriving and as darkness fell so did the fog. We sat for a while waiting for other family and community members to arrive. The church was for the entire community, a 25 year old women with 3 children had explained to me¨, ¨but many do not choose the path to salvation.¨
The moon didn´t shine through the blanket of fog and it was pitch wehn a man carrying a bible and 2 flashlights walked to the front of the church. He clicked both flashlights on and set them on either side of the bible so that they shone out towards those sitting in the pews.
My host sister walked up to the table and stood over the book. She propped both elbows on the table, one hand holding her chin, the other a third flashlight that shone down onto the pages of the old testiment.
I have sat in churches of many secs, some hundreds of years old, others with sound systems and visual displays worth millions of dollars, but never have I seen anything as eerie, impressionable or as spiritual as that young girl leaning over the bible with nothing but her face, skinny arms and pink nagwa centered between two cone-shaped beams of light, cutting through the dark and the fog.
As she finished reading, she set the third light down on the bible and everything seemed to dissapear into the darkness except the three beams of light.
