2010-04-25

On Friday I looked up at the sky and swore. What I wouldn’t do for some (insert explicit here) rain. It had been puro verano, pure summer. Everybody was parched, making several trips daily to the stream to fill up gallons and take back to the house. Lines form of women waiting to wash their clothes and children. After 2 years in Panama I’m still not very patient when it comes to waiting for water. But that evening I was sitting in a neighbor’s house when all of the sudden the light changed. Everything turned yellowish-pink and the sky between the white clouds looked electric blue. I commented on the color and this is what my neighbor said:
“Ahh. Yes. It’s a sign. A sign of a change. It will rain. Or it will not rain. It could do either thing. But it is a sign of one of the two. “
He was right. Uncanny. On Saturday the skies opened up and they have been since, everyday from 1pm to the early morning, in true rainy-season style.
I spent 10 days in my community recently. I haven’t spent so much time there in months, due to other things that have been going on. And it will probably be the last time I will spend so much time on my steep ridge. It was a perfect cross section of everything I’ve experienced as a Peace Corps volunteer. Here are some random thoughts. Not all have much value.
• You know how sometimes you hear your voice on a friends answering machine and think, “oh god. Tell me that’s not what I sound like.” Children have a similar quality when throwing your voice back at you. When walking through my community and yelling out hello’s and how-are-you’s to people almost all the children answer me in what I believe is an imitation of my apparently, very high-pitched, pre-pubescent-male voice. Strange. Could the sound waves generated by my vocal cords truly bend so much in their path from my mouth to my ear that I don’t even realize I sound just like a sassy nincompoop?
• One would think (and one would be mistaken) that when someone was giving important information to a gringa, who obvious to everyone does not understand much Ngabere, like, “don’t walk down there, there is a man bathing and he is naked and it would probably be very embarrassing for the both of you were you to interrupt him and thus see his private parts, so why don’t you not walk down that creek path?, that they would repeat it in your common language: Spanish. Fortunately for the sake of this-will-be-funny-when-I-tell-it-to-my-friends stories nobody values this type of translation. Much to the chagrin of the bathing men in my community.
• Little kids can be super cute when they are forcing their mouths around the strange foreign words “head, shoulders, knees and toes”. I think it’s because most of them are missing their two front teeth, but they can’t hide it because their lips are stretched into grins.
• My kitty deftly slit a whole in the roof of my mosquito net, on which he was sleeping, and landed on my bed, which he has always coveted. He and his fleas accommodated themselves on my cushy sleeping bag and fleece and enjoyed the day. I came home to hear Chami mewing in that way cats do when they are distressed. I couldn’t find him for a while. He’s proud of his new skylight. I’m not so sure.
• It must be time for me to move out. All the giant spiders, scorpions, cockroaches, crickets, ants, biting ants, and yes, stick bugs, are moving in.
• It must be time for me to move out. Everybody and their dog’s surrogate father want my belongings. It is going to be difficult to mitigate my footprint in my community.

I´ve finished my 19 latines, the picture is from the last one. I still need to make 6 more seat molds, then I´m really done. If your reading this chances are I'm missing you!