Rainy season is back! No more carrying water!

Minchi chi Ngabe for little cat

My two visitors

Coffee in bloom

One of my favorite Chi-Chis

Jose´s daughter, Dominga

Building a worm box with Jose. (3 days later it had been knocked over by a horse and lay in shambles on the ground.)

Steph´s Coffee Roasters Seminar

My sweet little kitty, Chami. I am so glad I have him.

I even made up my mind to get caught up on my blog and upload my pictures last time I came into town. As Panamanians like to say however, ¨Dios no quiere¨ essentially translated: God doesn´t feel like it. That day it seemed to me, that he didn´t feel like it, although I feel a tad ego centric imagining that God has any opinion regarding whether or not I upload photos. But here, sometimes, it definately feels as though the forces work against me. Perphaps someone is throwing me the ¨mal de ojo¨ (evil eye) as so many people in my community tell me. If this is the case, he or she is one smart bruja. Who ever it is knows that nothing drives me mad like not being able to get things done on the few opportunities I have to do them. Never mind hexing me with a urinary track infection or even tuberculosis (recently these have been blamed on witchcraft). Hit me with the good old hurry-up-and-wait-but- get-nothing-done-even-though-you-have-tried-so-hard days.

Anyway, last week I came out to pick up two new PC trainees who were coming to visit my site and the computer wiped my camera memory chip clean. I was so pissed I decided not to write anything. But last week was great despite all the run of the mill mix ups and cancelations that plagued the trainees´visit. We walked for hours to a latrine meeting that didn´t happen. I had planned to make compost with a farmer and when we arrived he definately wanted to change the date. The conversation went like this
Me: Hi Romero, how are you?
Romero: Well, Bedti, you see, I am of good health, but... You know that compost we were going to make?
Me: (You have got to be kidding me!) Yes??
Romero: Well you see, I haven´t yet collected the materials.

I had passed by this house three times to make sure we would have something to compost that day. So I asked him what he needed and how far away it was. In two hours he had collected the materials and we had successfully made the smallest pile of bocashi yet to be seen in the comarca. The girls were good sports about the pase of our days. One even said kind of excited like, ¨They told us in training that they´d say ¨si dios quiere¨! ¨ (If god wants- the biggest Panamanian cop-out ever invented) I was glad I could oblige.

The next day we went to build the worm box with Jose and take a tour around his coffee farm. We spent alot of time just hanging out with my host family, people we met on the road and pasearing with other families in the community. It was a great experience to have visitors who reminded me of myself a year ago. I was able to look at all that I have survived and acheived during the past year and see how much I have changed. For the first time I really saw my language aquisition and the relationships I have formed with members of my community from an objective point of view. I felt really proud of all I had done.

Of course, the sunny feeling has somewhat worn off now that things are back to normal, I have a cold again and too much free time. Yesterday I did nothing but sleep. I have been so tired. Jose´s worm box had the life span of three days, someone else´s had dried up and the worms had died even though they live 5feet from the river and the plans I had today to build soil conservation barriers were cancled after I hiked up to the community for one hour. The compost we made when my family was here is not composting because there is still no water and when I pulled the tarp off it yesterday because it looked like rain the chickens had strune it about in 5 minutes.

Thank goodness for Scarlette O´Hara. I am reading Gone with the Wind again and I find myslef employing her Ï´ll think about it tomorrow¨mentalitly.

I´ve been thinking about, if I were, and I´m not going to because it would be silly, write a memiours what the title would be. ( I can´t even spell the word, do forgive me)

Betdi, Why are You so Sweaty?

Two Years in a Hamack

All the Things That Didn´t Work

8 Ways to pass an 8 Hour Meeting

Rich Girl, Poor Town

And the fleas bit her all over her body...

There are more, but some are too crass to appear on the web.

I´m headed out to a Gender and Development meeting tomorrow, and with two awesome girlfriends I will be giving and HIV and AIDS seminar to all the adults in my communtiy. Good ol´ condom on a banana demonstration etc.

I´ve been working in the schools quite a bit and it makes me happy. I feel far more competent and happy in the class room than in the feild (oops). We´ve been talking about self esteem, respect and all that fuzzy feeling stuff, but slowly I am seeing the kids come out of their shells. Yesterday I taught them a wash your hands song and passed out soap, explaining the importance of staying healthy what with the pig flu and all. Then I made the 6th graders go too all the classes and teach the song to the younger kids. Some of them liked it and others quite obviously did not. They stood, strong and silent in the back of the room being difficult. (Yes they were dudes.) But the quite girls sang loudly and didn´t shy from making the hand gestures that went with the song. I am going shopping at a dollar store to buy little prizes and the kids can purchase things from my ¨store¨with their participation points that I hand out daily. It´s fun. As for now, I am going to go find something with ice in it. Ice and dairy.... yum.