Feliz Navidad Prospero Año y Felicidad!

California red worm box and family

Corn and a beautiful summer day

Another after-the-photo photo

Geronimo, my neighbor. great singer

I wanna wish you all a Merry Christmas! I´m not feeling much like writing today... not much sleep the last couple of days. I´m about to head out for my first vacation in Panama, Kat, Issac and Melissa and I are going to Kuna Yala. First I´m headed to Panama City. It should be interesting. I havent been to the city for six months. we might go to the mall ( i wonder if they have a Panamanian Santa there) and watch a movie. I´m excited for a change. This computer is murderously slow.

I´ve been in site for six months (1/4th of my service.) It´s hard to believe that so much time has passed. It´s easy to feel like I haven´t accomplished anything. Many of my fellow volunteers have fish/rice tanks under their belt or some other project in the works. I give little informational charlas, visit farms, plant beans and more beans, soon to be harvesting beans and more beans.

I also read fairy tales to small kids and whoever else will listen. So instead of just pasearing on those numerous days I wake up with nothing to do, I pasear with Los Mejores Cuentos de Hadas, under my arm and read Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and the Lamp, and other stories. Jack and the Bean Stock is an all time favorite... Guess why.

-What kind of beans were those?
- Uh. Magic beans.
-Si, but what KIND?
-It´s just a story. They don´t exisist, you know, here.
- Ah. A story, ahora si. like the bible?
-Umm. Yes,like the bible (it has the same unrealistic qualities)

But the last couple of days kids come over to my house every hour of the day to hear the stories, except most of them dont really want to listen, they just want to look in my house and ask things like, ¨Bedi, whose matches are those?¨ or make statements like, ¨Bedi, your mattress is so THICK.¨and ¨BEdi, what a WARM blanket you have.¨ Ay Dios.

The other week I got home from David to pick up various packages from mom and Aunt Ruthy. My backpack was packed with gluten free goods, in fact, when I got back and started unpacking it was as if my backpack puked Whole Foods all over my floor. I had my back window open (the only one I open when I want privacy, like while bathing, or unpacking alot of really delicious food). I dont know how long she had been watching me, but at somepoint during my efforts to fit cookies, pasta, dry cereal, candy, chocolate in secret places safe from eyes and rats, I looked up to see the nine-year-old neigbor named Danillela peering through my window. ¨Do you have any sugar? my mom wants to know.¨ This family comes over frequently to ask for sugar. I keep saying no, but this time made me feel particularly guilty. I imagine that some people reading this think I am stingy. I am stingy. Sometimes when this young girl comes and asks for dry milk for her malnourished little brother I tell her no. Then I close the door and eat the dry milk with a spoon. Guilt makes you do strange things. It is not that I do not give things to people in my community. I often take small offerings with me when I pasear to offset the coffee or food that culturally they feel obligated to give me. I pay kids to water my garden when I leave town for a while and buy the handycrafts of people in my community. But to give into a request like a loan or food handouts would set a precident impossible to follow and thus be unfair to the others who would undoubtably follow. I want to impart the lesson that work= money. But I will not give handouts. I´ve made the mistake a couple times already. leads to undesireable results.

Speaking of handouts, the other day, I stopped by a little store in my community to buy some tomatos (is there an e in there?). The owner asked me where they make spam. we looked at the label. Denmark. Then he asked me if I would please wait, because he wanted to ask me something else. He went back into his house/store and I heard him rummaging for a while. he came back and said, ¨Bedi, I am so glad you are here, because I dont know what these are for.¨ On the counter he plopped a greasy 5lb bag of gummy bears. I laughed. He looked at me. ¨They´re candy. Ositos de goma!¨ I said.

He then asked me if he could make chicha (juice) with them. This is funny because panamanians make juice out of everything. Apparently missionaries come every year and give out food. 4,000 ngabes arrive. (4,000x5lbs is a lot of gummy bears.) Dario had been keeping them because he didnt know what they were for. We cut open the bag and he asked me to try them. my tounge worked around the bear, looking for the flavor of lime that I knew should be there... but... kerosine... bag... ah! lime,there it is. ¨yeah, they´re ok,¨ I told him. He poured them into a new bag and stirred the five pounds of little bears around with a spoon ¨Hay bastante comida,¨ (That´s quite a bit of food) he said. he´ll probably make them into juice.

still here

happy panamanian mothers´day to all of you who are mothers. maybe i will have more pictures later... my camera is being replaced (thank you mom). Thank you to all who have sent letters, packages, and emails. I realize it´s mostly a one way street because i hardly write or call... but I think of you all alot.

Whats been happening... the rains have stopped, for good. I can probably expect the water to go out soon, I´ll be carrying water up the mountain to my house. It might be fun though, communal bathing and clothes washing. I have been keeping busy, if not out there working then in there (meaning my head) working even harder. It has been incredibly intense, often leaving me with the desire to call this whole thing off. If life is so hard, why not spend every moment with the people that you love? But it´s giving me ample opportunity to work out some personal issues... exsorcising AND exercising personal demons.

I think I am going to start putting my efforts towards creating a presentation and documents about the use and disposal of agrochemicals. People here use herbicide bottles as coffee containers, and dont use equipment like masks and gloves. I went to fertilize beans several nights ago. I didn´t have gloves but I figured that one time for a couple of hours wouldnt be too bad. The chemicals acutally burned holes through several spots of my skin on my hands. DONT WORRY. I´m getting gloves today. But imagine, I was out there once for 4hrs. They have been doing it for days. You should see their blistered hands. Tomorrow I am meeting with the man who supplies my grains group with a mico loan in the form of herbicides and pesticides. I am going to try and see if I can convince him to throw in some masks and gloves for free. He should not be selling one without the other. I´ve been doing some research on the chemicals used in my site. Most say to avoid the fumigated area for 24 hrs. Yestereday I walked along a trail a good distance from a farm where a man was spraying fertilizer. The wind was blowing and it brought that summery smell across the valley to where I was walking. He wore no mask, no gloves, and shortsleves... I watched as his 6-year old daughter navigated her way barefoot through the sprayed plants to take him coffee.

I had a visit from an old childhood aquaintance the other day. It was unexpected. I had gone to visit José, my favorite coffee producer. He lives at the bottom of a pretty intense hill in a house that is really just a zinc roof. I was holding his young grandkid on my lap when the kid pulled something out of his pocket and placed it on my knee. Our eyes met, mine and the toy´s that is. It took a moment before I realized... ¨Mr. California Raisin? Is that you?¨ I asked in english. I picked him up and looked at the bottom of his once white shoe. Copyright 1987. Sure was. ¨wow,¨ I looked at the family. ¨Una pasita de California!¨ ¨No,¨ they hurried to correct me, ¨It´s a little frog.¨ I didn´t argue. The raisin and I looked at eachother knowingly. Here, raisins don´t have legs, arms and gaunty circa 1980 sunglasses. We both knew how far he´d come - from the greasy cardbord confines of a McDonalds Happy Meal to a moldy pocket in the Comarca Ngabe- Bugle. That´s all that mattered.

You must forgive me! These are the things of which I am inspired to write about these days. keeps things interesting. Not quite as intersting, perhaps as the rat that chewed its way through my mosquite net (not my fortress! No!) to shit on my pillow and sit on my head. That has made things intersting. My view on rat poison changed in an instant. Prepárate para morir!

Much love, smell some pine trees and eat a candy cane for me!