Happy Thanksgiving

Happy turkey day to everyone stateside. I´m in a beautiful hotel in the mountains near Panama City, where 60 some odd volunteers gathered to cook, eat and party together. The cooks did an awesome job, and the meal was complete, including cranberry sauce and pie. Now most of the volunteers have hit the road to their sites, but a couple of us are staying for one more night.

A huge storm cell has been beating down on Panama for a little over a week. All the volunteers from the Bocas del Toro region had to be evacuated and are now involved in releif efforts based in Chiriqui. Thousands of people have lost homes and the impact a disaster like this has on sustanance farmers is hard for me yet to imagine. Poor communities who eat what they grow have nothing, and those who sell thier goods have lost their products. Roads and bridges have washed away and entire communities are underwater. I should be able to arrive to my site tomorrow afternoon, but it depends how my road is. The country director talked to us this morning and said this is the biggest safety and security threat he has seen in his 10 years of service. The biggest concern I have for my community is that the beans they have spent the last month planting will be damaged, or that the excessive amounts of water will cause landslides... but the real problems have hit over the mountains in Bocas del Toro. My friend Kate left her community to attend a training the day before the storm hit her site. 24 hours later 16 spots on the road had washed out, leaving it inpassable, leaving all other Bocas volunteers stranded. She called a community member who told her nearly all the Cacao they had harvested was spoiling because of the humidity and that many banana trees were uprooted. The coming year is going to be really rough. Panama is not on the hurricane route and hasnt been hit by one in over 10 years, but this storm nearly turned into one 4 days ago. 12¨of rain are expected to fall withing the next week, and then the storm cell should move on.

On a lighter note- I´ve been out of site for a week and a half in our in service training. I didn´t recieve the information that I wanted but it was great to see everyone for the first time in 5 months. I think I have some ideas of how to continue working... the Panamanian summer is on its way, and I´m hoping that my community has more time to work on some of the techniques in which they have expressed interest, but have always been ¨too busy¨.

It is so hard to go back after leaving for a while. For the first time in 5 months I´ve shelved some of the anxiety and worries that I´ve woken up with every morning. I went and saw a movie, I took hot showers, if it was raining I didn´t go outside... this morning we went to an artisan market and bought souveniers like tourists. It all felt so good and I hardly thought about the life I will return to tomorrow. It feels a little like it did the first time. But something is changing a little bit. Ok, this is going to sound really cheesy, and I blame it on my buddist book I´ve been reading. I still feel anxious,and it is still uncomfortable but it is becoming so familiar that it almost feels like an old friend, or at least an aquaintance.

I miss everyone! And I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving. I probably won´t write again until Christmas.

The day history changed...

The 3rd of Noviembre Panamanians celebrate their seperation from Colombia


The muchachas of the school performing the traditional Panamanian dance of the Polleras

It was photo shoot day.
My neighbor posing with her brother. She gave him a plastic bag to calm him down for the photo.



I just left my hotel room, not able to stand the FOX news pundits screaming at eachother. It`s amazing, all that emotion, but so much make-up that it might as well be Ken making the argument and not Bill O`Reilly. I wont get started.

I`ll keep it simple. Go Obama!

I should never wait to think of what I am going to write until I get infront of the computer. Inevitably I draw a blank.

I love having my own house, and for the first time in four months I`ve been telling myself it`s ok to spend a day reading in bed. And I did. And it was almost nice. I am my own worst enemy in site, ok, secound worst enemy. I put number one as the sneaky bastard bugs who have been somehow biting me all over my stomach and back. When do they find the time?

I`ve been staying fairly busy, made easy by busyness of the community. Everyone is working from dawn till dusk trying to get seeds in the ground before winter ends one day the wind blows and people look up into the sky and say, -Ya. It won`t rain again.- and it won`t for three months. Should be interesting on the hill with no water.

Confession: I don`t know what I am possibly going to do in my community as an Ag volunteer. I feel inept and confused and a little bit like a fraud. I know this takes time, but I feel the questions swirling under the surface of my everday experience. I feel the expectations of the community and the grains group. And I feel the very real fear of failure to the people who have already given me so much.

But I`m trying to shut up all those thoughts for the time being. I`ve only been here for 4 months. I have spent some good quality time with people in my site. My host mother continues to open up more and more with me, and I love it when we are sitting in silence and she initiates conversation.

The women here have such amazing stories. They tell them without emotion. Perhaps they live them without emotion. Or perhaps I haven`t been here long enough to understand the way that they express it. I went to plant corn one day with a neighbor woman and her son, to whom I teach english. -¿How do you sing, Bedi? -They asked me. Seriously? -Well,- I said, -I sing like this...- and I sang. I sang a biblical song from the JCC (Raise and shine and sing glory glory glory) and the only other song to which I know substancial lyrics... Internal Flame by the Bangles. Then they asked me -¿But Bedi, how do you cry?- -I cry alot.- I told them. And I demonstrated a little bit. Then the mother told me she didn`t know how. I felt kind of silly after confessing to my being such a boob. So I back tracked. - Well, you know, I was just kidding. I don`t cry that much...- If ngabes called bluff they would have called it. Many have seen me cry... and anything I do around here is newsworthy.

I harvested cacao on the 1st. So while you were all eating chocolate, I picking it out of trees in the junge. I went with a 60 year-old woman named Josepa and her daughter Virginia. I like visiting cacao fiancas beacuase they always look the way I imagine all of the Comarca looked before the grand majority was slashed and burned. The cacao trees are always nestled in the cleavage of the hillls near the trickling cascades adn clear springs that meander through the woods. The last of the oold-growth trees with giant roots, covered with ferns and orcids, provide the cacao with the needed shade. Josepa climbed into the massive trees, sometimes nearly 30ft above the steeply sloped ground. The stringy, dark woman with her silver hair hanging loose around her face, stood in her pink nagwa balancing in a branch while using a hooked stick to pull the pods out of the tree. She used no hands to balance. She just stood there, shaking the hell out of the tree sending the cacao pods wizzing down around our heads.

Cacao pods look like nerph balls. They grow out of the most unexpected parts of the tree. And they come in all colors: mint green, bright yellow and orange and magenta. You cut through their shell with a machete and inside are the almond shaped cacao beans, surrounded with white goo that tastes like sour gummy worms.

I still fend off daily attempts to break my resolution not to give out hand outs. The other day I headed out to my English class. It was starting to rain. I sitll hadn`t popped open my umbrella when I met two young girls on the trail walking to their house.
-Lend me your umbrella,- one demanded.
-No,- I said. -It`s going rain.-
-No it isnt.-
-Yes it is.-
-No it isnt.-
-No. I`m not lending you my umbrella.-
-Well, how many do you have?-
-One! This one!- I said, shaking it at her.
-Give it to me.

I`ve talked about this with other volunteers and some suggest that you turn the situation on them, demanding of them what they demand of you. So I decide to try it, but I have one of those unfortunate language moments where everything comes out wrong and instead of telling her to give me her umbrella, which is idiotic in itself because she obvioulsy doesn`t have one, I say:
-No! You have to fix one to me!-
To her credit, she didn`t even pause to try and decifer what I had just said. Instead she just called me a bruja, a witch. Even though halloween was approaching I didn`t think this accusation was cute, and I didn`t stop to explain to her how to treat people when you want something of them. I just walked away.

But I will say just this... Things are getting better. And if I can learn to turn off the western type A brain of mine they will continue to improve I am sure. Thank you all for your support. I love everybody at home so much!