La Vida Panameña

Un poco de todo

2010-07-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

Art? Como no. I visited Kayla in her new community. It has lots of things for turists to do. Obviously.

Before applying the medicinal mud to our faces the guide told us, "There is no difference between the dark and the light mud. They are the same. The dark mud is for exfoliating, the light mud, for sensitive skin." What he didn't realize was that the mud was really war paint, if you are so inclined.

Finally I made my last trip up to Cerro Tula. Home for almost two years. Maybe one day I will be able to describe what it is like to leave. Anything I write now sounds lame, kitschy. So I'll leave it for another day. Here are my photos from my despedida numero dos, the sequil. The kids were both hyper and shy with all the preparations going on.

Cremating the kitty. Just kidding! I was sad that Chami remembered me. He started meowing and wasted no time jumping up into my lap. It had been over a month since I had seen him last, he looks healthy and the family seems to like having him around, a good sign that they won't give him to someone else or tie him to a tree in the middle of the forest if he takes a liking to chickens... He did have a gimp leg, but he'll get over it. Sweet little thing.

Kayla and Ben came by to Cerro Tula for the occasion.

The entrega de obsequios (gift giving) was very formal we held this position while everyone with cameras on their cell phones took pictures. My host mom had made me a skirt with a nagwa pattern and a charcra that says A W Bedi , I'm not sure what the AW is for.

The finale of the despedida was a traditional Panamanian music called Décima acompanied by guitar. Benjamin, left, began by saying, "I wrote this song especially for Bedi, for all the work that she has done here." The first words of the song are as follows: Aye! Dark skinned brunette of my life....
My wonderful host family: left to right. Maricela 24, me, Gilberto, Paula, , Ana 7, Milka (Nini) 9, Jessica 4, Lilly 5, Jesenia 7.

Bellow are pics from Isla Coiba, a giant island on the pacific coast. Former home to a high security prison. Current home of lots of beautiful beaches and wonderful snorkeling.

Saying Goodbye- Part one

2010-06-07T14:04:00.000-07:00

1-2-3 Say... nothing

Last weekend I hiked into site, for what I figured was the last time, with my backpack stuffed with 25 lbs of rice, 10 lbs of beans all the makings for a thank-you meal for my community plus 5lbs of hard candy and a piñata supposedly formed after Barney but really resembling a pink marshmellow. The past 4 months or so of splitting myself between my community and the volunteer coordinator job had left me with a desire for closure. I wanted to say goodbye and thank you to my community and leave behind the nagging need to spend time there.

I was mildly suprised that no one in my community had taken a larger role in planning my despedida, but chalked it up to my absence the last couple of months. So I planned the party sola, my host mom said she´d do all the cooking.

The morning of I opened my doors and sold all my belongings. A radio, old karosin lamps, socks, mirror, bed, pots pans spoons. Most went for mere coins, and I felt a little like I was playing store.

I helped my mom cook by cutting onions. She always gives me that job. We joked that the food would be good and salty due to the gringa´s tears.

To my suprise about 60 people showed up ( I hadn´t expected nearly as many). We played some games the kids broke the piñata and scrambled around for the candy covered in flour. I think the adults enjoyed it as much as the kids did. ¨Down low. It´s on the ground!¨they´d yell when the piñata was too high for them to reach. Then they´d slap their theighs and laugh as the kids wacked the ground with the stick.

I made a little speech thanking my communtiy, encouraging them to continue en la lucha to achieve their goals. I told some stories about stupid things I had done that garnered some laughs. then I envited others to speak, if they so desired.

Everyone spoke in Ngabere, and too bad, I didn´t understand much. But I had the context, right? Probably good things were being said, a lot about god and... gringas. My friend Rosa, the grandma above (harmless right), also stood to speak. I smiled and nodded as she spoke in Ngabere, pretending, as I always do, to understand. But this woman is hated by nearly everyone, and she is rather spiteful, but she and I have always gotten along. Basicly, she likes to talk shit in very public places. So it crossed my mind to be concerned. But, eh, what could be done at this point?

She gave me a charca for my cell phone, a slobbery kiss that was like she was licking my cheek and said in spanish, You are like my daughter! Then she sat down.

Later that night my host mother, knowing I hadn´t grasped a word, filled me in. She had taken advantage of the moment to insult all who were there, calling them her enemies and worse. Later her grown daughter and another woman got in a fist fight. I didn´t see it, fortunately. So I just laughed about it with my mom in the kitchen.

Later that night I sat in the darkening kitchen as my host mom cut off the green rinds of bananas and threw them in the pot over the fire. I tried to stamp all those smells permently on my nostrils. I ate one last wonderful meal with them in the dark. Three of my six host sisters lay stretched out on the table where I ate, passed out after the day´s activities. The youngest, Lilly lay in the fetal possition on her stomach with her little rump pushing into the air and her chubby face smooshed against the table. We ate by flashlight. Boiled green bananas with beans. And I tried to thank them for two years of making me their family. But Ngabe culture is not a culture of thanking. Earlier that day, as I had dished up 60 plates of food and handed them to my friends not one person said thank you. Not one! And I didn´t think anything of it. There is no Ngabe word for thank you. So perhaps, hopefully, it is just implied. Understood.

I went to bed thinking, ¨well, that was a good end. It will feel good to leave.¨

But wait! my host father is planning a secound good-bye party in July. So I get to do it all again. Which, aside from being funny, isn´t that bad after all.

A High Point

2010-05-28T13:37:00.000-07:00

Volcan Barú: The highest peak in Panama

The past two years have left me acustomed to beautiful mountain vistas. And really, I´ve climbed and desended more mountains during that time than I ever had before, or should I say than I ever had to before. Going to work, or to the school, or to a store that sells lentils or to check my email doesnt mean hiking when living in the global north. But having that said, I am a mountain snob. What really qualifies as a mountain? Is it really a mountain if you can climb it from foot to top in less than four hours? In less than a day? I guess if it´s the tallest thing around... ( cultural sensitive note: I have never told a Panamanian that their mountains would be mere foothills if asked to stand by the Rocky Mountains.)

Ha! I am so ignorant! I should not post the above paragraph. But I think it´s kinda funny. oops. I stand corrected. While I was writing I was looking up the hight of Panama´s highest point (Volcán Baru: 3,474 metres (11,398 ft)) and the altitude of the highest peak on the Wasatch front. I assumed our peaks towered over the Panamanian volcano. But Mount Nebo (which I don´t recall having heard of before), the Rockies´highest peak, hits only 11,928 ft! I can´t be very smug bout 600 ft. I should brush up on my geography. God, I say that like every day.

Anyway, some friends and I climbed el volcán a couple days ago. We began the hike around 10:00pm, thanking our lucky starts that it wasn´t raining. The moon was almost full and when we weren´t shadowed by trees we walked without flashlights. The trail up followed a steady incline and only once did we lose the trail (accidently turning into a stinky cabbage field with a creepy tin shack). In a little under 6.5 hours we reached the top, after stopping in an old shack to huddle out of the wind. It was the coldest I have been in Panama. We arrived at the summit, marred by about 20 telephone towers, some buildings and a generator, at 4:30am and wandered around for someplace to wait the next hour and a half. Kat and I found ourselves huddled in a doorway where the wind broke and called everyone over. I made a poorly timed joke that the more people that leaned against the door the better, if anyone creepy were inside they wouldn´t be able to come out. A moment later someone did push out against the door. We all screamed, and then screamed again as a very sleepy man appeared. He just looked at us and led all 9 of us into a room with several bunk beds and walls plastered with girly photos. He climbed back into his bed and fell asleep and we sat down to snooze on the floor. It was weird, but very nice of that poor, sleepy watchiman to let us in out of the cold.

The sun came up, we watched it. It was a clear morning and we could see to both coasts, the carribean and the pacific. It was beautiful, but still frigid, so we didnt linger long before heading down.

This is a picture of a sheep/kalalilly feild on the way down.

Count down

2010-05-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I packed up my bags and my host sister and I walked to the road. I will officially leave my house on the 5th of June, but I won´t be back to Cerro Tula until then, when we have my despedida, which promises to be an interesting afair.

Last lasting impressions:

Chami is staying with my host family. He recently knocked up the poor little kitty to the left. But they look happy enough.

A beautiful evening coming down my road.

Somewhere on the

Last supper: Intestines

My new home:

2010-04-25

2010-04-30T18:34:00.000-07:00

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!

The strangest thing that has happened to me in two years....

2010-03-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

I'm home. As in the United States of America. It's weird. Like this: my cat is unbelievably fat. It was 1am when I finally walked through my back door, after 2 years. I was at the table eating something when one of our cats waddled into the kitchen. I almost choked. Brett picked him up under the arms; I'm not sure who it was more uncomfortable for, the cat or my brother's lower back. He gently shook him so that his enormous white belly rippled. "Oh, Pip, you look great!" he said to the cat. Then he looked at me, "He's been on a diet." I nearly died. I couldn't even look at him. The fact that Pip can jump from the floor to the couch defies the very law of gravity. The people of my community would probably be unable to identify him as a cat. This picture is for my fellow PCVs, who will appreciate how grosera my fat cat is.

I've been emotional, teetering between uncontrollable giggles and tears. At one juncture I was in a bathroom having a laughing fit and I looked in the mirror and really thought, “Oh my God. I’ve cracked."

I have so many clothes! Why? It just makes dressing so complicated. And my brother wears really tight pants. (This is a test Brett; you say you read my blog!) The two things seem unrelated, but they are. I not only dress like it’s still 2007, I find new fashions repulsive. As I asked my brother, what would you do if you had to walk through water and you wanted to roll up your pants but couldn't due to the fact that that your jeans are so tight you can't pull them 3 inches above your ankles? Although, come to think of it, stream/river crossings aren't all that common in Salt Lake City.

Eggs and sugar are really white.

Fridge magnets? Mini wine baskets and cookie trays and cats you can dress like a colonial mistress, and finally a fork with 3 of its prongs bent forward labeled "diet fork". Question mark.

I am really awkward. But this isn't really new, only intensified.

The strange silence of the city. It’s so quite here inside my house. The only noise is the electrical hum of the heater or the computer monitor. The fridge. No scratching chickens, crowing roosters, screaming children, bees buzzing through my house that are so big my Panamanian mother calls them an “air bus”. It’s all very sterile.

I still jump when I hear something rustle. Before I left I shook 10 4in cockroaches out of my backpack only to discover later that I had missed the ant colony in the front pocket. This morning I shook out my slippers.

But it’s good to be here. Today I think I will go blow my mind at whole foods. I hope nothing remotely funny happens.

So much has happened in the last month

2010-03-14T14:39:00.000-07:00

Since I have last updated my blog I have built 9 latrines, hiked across the continental divide and ended up on a river that leads to the carribean, held meetings with communities who have requested volunteers, had our Close of Service conference cumulating in a discoteca inside a renovated school bus and vacationed with Rachel. whew. Its alot to sum up. so maybe pictures will do a better job. God, and internet, willing.

School is back in session. So every day around 1 a steady flood of kids pass by my pouch. Rachel showed them how to trace leaves with the flat side of a crayon. I handed them some scrap paper ( a latrine manual actually). I figured they would use the blank side to draw. But instead they colored the tiny illustrations of the construction and, yes, the correct use of a latrine.

My latrine project has been a challange from the begining. But to my suprise the closer we get to completing it the more seamless the work becomes. (it may have been dangerous to put that in print.) All 9 families now have the latrine floors, and they have all been moved over the 3 meter hole. Not one broke! The men involved, none of whom had ever worked cement before are now expertos and are really proud of what they have accomplished. The women, like Maritza above, are particularly grateful.

Many people wrote my Ngabe name (Bedi) on their latrine, perhaps bringing to fruition my joke that in the future, long after I have gone home, people will think of me....when they are pooping.

After moving the last of the latrines over its prospective hole I sat with a weathered old man named Fransisco and his toothless wife who had just given me a ripe banana and a cup of sweet coffee. " You know," he said. "Once they came and took a list of names of people who needed latrines." He's talking about some other agency. "They never came back. The second time they took names again. They didn't come back either. It was the same the third time. and the forth time. And the fifth time. (I though he was going to keep counting.) Then the sixth time you came. And now we are finally seeing it happen." So no regrets there.

Melissa scaling a steep cement staircase on a riverside cliff on our hike across the continental divide.

At the top of the mountains the river is hardly a spring, but throughout the 2 days it grew to a raging river, changing color and temperment with every curve.

Chochino Kati!

One of the little villages along the way that we spent the night in.

We crossed any number of sketchy bridges made of everything from logs tied with vines to old metal pipes.

Another river crossing: zip line style! We saw one women put her baby in a bag, tie the bag to the seat and send the baby over the river solo!

Finally after a total of 26 hours of hiking, all of us feeling a little feverish and ill in the stomach, climbed on a dugout canoe with a motor and headed down the Cricamola river towards to ocean. What a trip.

Gender and Development Youth Conference a Great Success

2010-02-21T14:34:00.000-08:00

Nearly nine months after the GAD comitee started planning, this year's youth conference has come to a successful close. Without alot of hard work from Panama's GAD, our volunteer facilitators, Panamanian counterparts and DONORS FROM BACK HOME this seminar couldn't have happened and 42 kids wouldn't have had this amazing experience! Muchas Gracias!

Several Ngabe girls attended the camp

Much of the seminar is done in groups of 10. The kids talk about self-image and self-esteem and and how they effect their values and decisions. Finally they look at their future, short and long term, focusing on early pregancy (are they really ready?) STIs, and HIV/AIDS.

The participants had egg babies to preview the responsibility of having kids.

Team buiding activities like towers made from nothing but straws and tape help the kids get to know eachother. It's a pretty big deal for most of them to come all the way to Panama City, for many it means 2 full days of travel. Generally they arrive anxious and shy and sad. But as the camp goes on they make friends from other provinces, cultures and races. It's wonderfull to see an indiginous girl from a poor rural community become friends with a latina from a more developed community.

> Team olympics: three legged races

By the end of the camp the kids have made good friends and when we drop them off to go home to their communities they wave happly at us and wave goodbye to their friends.

2010-02-16T19:55:00.000-08:00

Step Two:

2010-02-10T17:49:00.000-08:00

Transporting Materials and Building a test latrine!

The latrine benificiaries carried zinc roofing, rebar and 100lb bags of cement two hours to their homes

The handles allow the cement floor to be moved to a new location, and a tree planted over the old hole.

A beautiful skyline

Step one

2010-02-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

Step One: Holes
The following are some of the holes dug by the community of Bajo Membrillo. Nine holes have been completed in the community, the remaining 6 latrines will go to the community in which I live.

Rogelio and Cecilia

Elena and Emiliano

Elena's father

A wonderful trip... and back to work

2010-01-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

All photos courtacy of my friend Ashley!

Two weeks ago my bud Ashley came and visisted. We went to Bocas to the lovely island of Isla Bastimentos which teemed with ex-pats and European surfers. The Afrotilian locals speak Guari-Guari, an English dirivative left over from the banana plantation boom. It's crazy to hear English but to be unable to understand it. The beach was beautiul, despite the fact that to get there we had to hike through the boggy rainforest.

We spent some time in my community and somewhat unsuccessfully fired the earth oven for the first time. I fought with the fire for hours and it never got as hot as it should have, but none the less, the salty bread (paula kept insisting that I add more salt... I cant taste it so I have to take her word for it) and the eggless cake (translation: gooey fudge?) were gone the next morning.

We also went to Boquete, a mountain coffee town that has the climate of the rocky mountians in fall. It was great to have some time off, but more than anything it was so nice to see a friend from home. Thanks so very much for coming Ash!

I returned home to my community after she left. I'd had a bad cough for the entire trip and was pretty drugged up on cough medicine. I layed in my hammock and stared at my zinc roof and listened to the summer zakaydas that screech in unison like thousands of dentist drills and tried to find the energy to go pasear with my community. I finally peeled myself from my hammock and walked through the still heat to my friends Emilia and Felipe's home. They're little toddler stuck out her hand for me to shake as I approached. She looked up at me with a sticky smile as her dad came out of the house with a stricken look on his face. His wife was having a miscarrage (although he didn't know that was happening.) It was an intense couple of hours as I tried in vain to contact the nearest health center to call for am ambulance that could take Emilia from the community entrance (a steep 30 min walk) to recieve treatment. Talking on the phone in Spanish can still be at times nearly impossible for me and the impacient nurses on the phone spoke quickly. When at last I understood that someone would look for a way to get an ambulance up the mountain two men carried Emilia in a hammock strung between a pole that they layed across their shoulders. I ran ahead to wait for the ambulance. They arrived with Emilia about a half an hour later. I know she must have been in alot of pain because she was nearly in tears and Ngabe women almost never cry. I gave her water even though I worried she was going into shock (the doctors said I should) and we tried to make her as comfortable as possible. Several hours passed as we anxiously watched the road for the trail of dust that ment the ambulance was on its way. It didnt come. I called again and they told me they didnt have one with four-wheel drive. I ran out in front of every car that went down. Most wouldn't even stop for me. Even a Ministry of Health car drove down and to my plea he said, " shucks. You see, I am not on ambulence duty right now? What can I do? I'll tell you what. I'll call the ambulance driver. He's a good friend of mine. I'll call him and tell him to hurry." I let him go. I didn't know what else to do. No one else was running out to every car desprately trying to make them stop. It was like when my little host sister ate rat poison and I was the only one reacting. It's crazy how the passiveness of others is infectious. Finally, fortunately, a private car with two gringos drove up and stepped out to take some photos. They didn't hesitate to load her into the back seat and take her to the hospital. I watched them drive away. They were in the comarca for a church seminar, they said. And of course they would cut their scenic drive short, I mean it's urgent, right? I said yes, that she had been loosing substancial amounts of blood for over 24 hours. The exchange was interesting. It was so different from the interactions I had just had with the health worker and the people on the phone who were supposidly looking for an ambulance. So I watched them drive away and felt so greatful that in America, when we can do something for someone we do it. None of this "gees. I'm not on duty, you know?" bull shit.

Emilia is fine. She spent a couple of days in the hospital and is now back in her home.

I spent alot of the last week spending time with her kids, who were home alone. I finally have been learning how to make chacra, the net bag that ngabe women make. I take it from house to house and sit with the women. They eventually take the string from my hands and do a couple of rows, their small caloused hands make perfect little even loops. They don't know but that's my plan. I like the idea that all the women that I care about in my community have helped me to make it.

I should begin building the 15 latrines soon. I had a great meeting with the benificiaries, despite the fact that one women said all the land belonged to her father and that no one had a right to build latrines. I told them to work it out. Let me know, I said. I don't think that anything will come of it. On the 4th I will go and take pictures of each hole. It's exciting to get started.

We are busy planning of the GAD youth conference. I will post pictures of each project so all of you donnors and everyone else can see the process!

Thank you so much for your support!

Feliz Navidad, un Prospero Año y Muchas Gracias!!

2009-12-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

A modern Christmas... Lights, Generator, and a holiday flick: Preditors Attack!

Inivitees sit quitely and eat their holiday meal. But it's a subdued affair.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannakah, and Happy New Year to everyone!

First and foremost... I want the thank all of those of you who have donated to my latrine project and the youth conference! The latrine fund is full, so as soon as the Peace Corps Washington office does the paper work I'll be off to buy cement and rebar. When we actually get going I will put up pictures of the 15 families we're helping and the whole dirty process of making cleaner latrines. Thank you thank you thank you!

Ay a la vida. Panama is like a convection oven today. At least in this internet cafe they have a fan blowing the scalding air around. Outside the heat slams you to the ground. It is impossible to towel off in the shower before you start sweating again. A year and a half seems to be the total time it takes for a previously wrinkleless gringa to turn wrinkly. I am, unfortunately, not joking. And days like to day you can feel skin damage in the air.

I spent Christmas in my community. Unseasonal rain has been falling, spreading ash-like funguses all over everyone's planted beans. Usually this time of year the red soil has turned to a fine dust and deep cracks break the trails desert-style. I welcomed the rain since I was sick with a cold and most of Christmas Eve I spent curled in my bed falling in and out of fever dreams as the rain pounded on the roof. I drempt that my ears were full for rice. On Christmas day I made a pumpklin pie in my pressure cooker, beaded little flower braclets with my little sisters and helped chop 25 onions for the big party my host parents threw that evening. I cried.

Cutting onions is an international joke.

Later that night I sat in the kitchen with my host family and their family that had come from afar for the party. They visiting family members were loath to talk to me (actually they were just nervous and shy), particularly the attractive nephew of my host mother. He just mumbled uninteligable responces to my questions until I gave up. I was akward myself. I tired to tell the story of Christmas but couldn't really remember. And I keep bumping into the baby that hung from the ceiling in the netted bag (it's a ngabe cradle). Just spacially I am not used to having to navigate babies. I ran into the sleeping babe several times, each time it woke and started crying. Not a silent night. Finally, feeling like a threat, I removed myself from the kitchen and went to sit with the invitees who had gathered under the solar drier. But it wasn't really the festive event I had imagined. Most people just sat huddled amongst their families and ate quitely. Finally my host dad came and handed out the popcorn I had made for the movie. (He powered up the gas generator for the occasion). What movie? The grinch? Those little claymation rodolf/santa ones? no. Just "When Preditors Attack" a garrish film with slasher re-re-re music as cheetas, lions and tigers ripped apart their prey. The filmers really hit their stride right about when National Geographic photographers would have hit the "stop" button. Most of the film showed the big cats up to their ears in intestine. Nice sound effects, too. Do not get me wrong! I am glad I was there! And I think it ment alot to my host family that I stayed with them for the holidays.

I am headed back up tomorrow to spend New Years with my Panamanian family. I've been really busy finding new communities for future volunteers and visiting our more recent additions to the PCV comarca family.

Thanks again for helping with the projects, I am very excited to get started!

Neither here nor there, but definately still in Panama

2009-12-16T14:03:00.000-08:00

In October I had the oppertunity to apply for a job here in Peace Corps called Regional Leader. A Regional Leader (RL) offers fellow volunteers support in the form of rutine annual and safety and security visits, works closely with governemntal agencies and travels around the province looking for and meeting with communities interested in hosting a Peace Corps volunteers. When I thought about possibly taking the job I wrote out dorky lists of pros and cons. The lists were always short and mostly looked like the following...
PROS
It will give me a sence of productivity (something I have missed to the point my teeth ache here in Panama)
CONS
My community will no longer be my one and only commitment

I knew I would be traveling more and that I would be spending less time in my mountain top village. The idea was comforting in some ways, I used to feel so isolated and lonely at times I counted the hours as they ticked slowly by. But I also knew that I would be giving something up, really my only chance to live as one of my community members. In the end, at the time I had to make the decision I was lonely and frustrated and needed a change. I applied for the job and I got it (I share it with another volunteer, also named Andrea). I still live in my community (most RLs move to their provincial capital).

Two months later I am better able to understand what I´ve signed up for. It´s not to say that I´m not happy. I really like the busyness, I like the hiking, the new communities, and providing support to new volunteers who are struggling with things I struggled with. But I haven´t been in my community for more than 3 solid days in a row this month, and I´m tired.

Today I went to my host brother´s graduation. They asked me to be his godmother (Here godmother´s walk their godson down the isle of graduation). I had to rearrange my visits to see several volunteers to make it but it was worth it. I walked him down the isle, and I felt like I was participating in some mass wedding with really cheesy music. Think ¨Toys¨. I had no idea what to do so I watched the pairs of students and madrinas that walked down the isle ahead of us. It was evident I was to hold his hand. He was so nervous, pobrecito , I had to reach around his back to grab his sweaty hand, which he held really rigid. I will say just this... You think American graduations are drawn out and flowery (insert questionmark, stupid spanish keyboards.) But imagine seeing the first member of your family graduate from highschool. It must be pretty cool.

My 6th to last month is nearly over and it is evident how fast they are going to flip by, especially if I keep up this pace. The grass is always greener on the other side and it is what it is, but I´m feeling twinges of regret that I´m not just a regular volunteer that can focus 100% on my community. On the other hand (which would that be, like, number 6, maybe) I tried that take for a year and a half.

Kate and Jannel came to build an oven in my community for my host sister Maricela, who loves to experiment in the cocina. We sang christmas songs as we hiked up our skirts and mixed the sand and red clay with our toes. All my favorite women from the community showed up, which was great since I hadn´t even announced it as something they should come to. They came on their own to get muddy and learn how to bake bread using only mud. I have some great photos but this damn internet is so slow.

Headed out to do a volunteer visit tomorrow and some site development. Then back up to the mountain for Christmas and New Years. Happy Holidays. I am thinking of all of you! (Snow... I include you in that statement!)

We need your help!

2009-12-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays!
I am going to shamelessly ask for your money. Tis the season! (but if for you, Tis is NOT the season, no worries. Money matters back home sound scary!)

Here in Peace Corps Panama I am co-vice-president for the Gender and Development Comitee. Every year the Comitee hosts a youth conference/camp for 50 some odd youths from all over the country. During the conference we cover a number of topics ranging form self-esteem, making life choices, values, morals and goals as well as safe-sex and HIV/AIDS. Panama's HIV numbers rank in second amoungst Latin American countries, and 20% of pregnancies are adolescent, so these topics are of great importance. The camp is a lot of fun for the kids (ages 13-18) and kids who have gone to past camps talk to the volunteers in their community about how much they learn. The Lions Club of Panama has donated the housing for the camp, but we've writen a grant to cover mainly transportation, food and supplies. The cost of the camp is large (due to the 50 participants). If you'd be interested in donating and helping the camp happen it's easy!
Go to : http://peacecorps.gov and click on the "Donate Now" side bar. Search by "Panama" or "Gender and Youth Conference" or "Newman A" or "525-132".

Direct link:
https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=525-132

Thank you so much! Happy Holidays!

Andi Newman
p.s. I appologize to those of you who are also on my parents email lists. It may mean that I have shamelessly asked for your money more than once. And that's annoying...

Happy Turkey Day!

2009-11-27T14:47:00.001-08:00

Rain and Nutmeg... Even in Panama it's time for Thanksgiving

2009-11-09T13:08:00.000-08:00

Painting the Pollera dancers for the parade

The misty slopes as seen from my community's "main street"

Kayla and I met up at the beach for a quick in-transit reunion.

Deluge every day at 12 until sunset, sometimes late into the night. There is something so special about the rainstorms here. They are unlike anything I could have imagined after spending my formative years in dry Utah and Colorado; even the never ending rain of the Northwest doesn't compare. First the fog creeps down from the road and clouds everything but the red trail from view. The wind starts to rustle and flap through the big plasticy leaves (a very diferent sound from the low howel of wind through the pines). Then the rain comes and you can here it climb up the side of the mountain for about 45 secounds before it really hits. It gives my little sisters time to bring in the clothes that are thrown up on the zinc roofs and over barb wired fences. I lay in my hammock and wonder at the might of nature. It has successfully silenced the clamour of my closest neighbors. NOT an easy feat. The kids are home by themselves these days while all the adults rush to plant 800lbs of kidney beans in their steep feilds before the rains stop. They entertain themselves by banging metal things with other metal things, and screaming "MAAAAAAma VEEEEEENga. MAAAAAAAAma VEEENga." over and over and over. But with the rain drumming on the tin roof, the loudest white noise you'll ever hear, I can hear none of it. I snuggle with my cat and read books. When the summer comes he will be covered with fleas, and our naps together might have to end.

It gets chilly at night and I sleep with sweatpants, sheets, a fleece blanket and a sleeping bag. It's the humidity that makes your bones quake; I don't think the temperature ever drops bellow 68 degrees. But the mist and the rain makes me think of fall back home, cinnamon and nutmeg and pumpkin pie with too many cloves. Sometimes the radio from someone's house belts out a christmas jingle advertisment and I slide into snowy daydreams. But that real nip in the air isn't here. That cold that gets into your toes and lays on top of your skin. It's strange, I could swear I should be that cold, but it isn't. It is almost like seeing food but not smelling it because you have a cold, as if a certain sense is missing.

All us volunteers are headed to chilly Chiriqui for Thanksgiving it is going to be great! Kudos for Ashley and Brandon Gries for all their hard work to make it happen. Nobody wants that job, and they volunteered! (weird)

I'm nearly ready to jump into what promises to be a crazy 3 or 4 months: Site Development for future volunteers, a latrine project, and a kids camp for 50 youths from all over the country.

Ay Ay Ay.

Mission Vetiver accomplished. (Not really "accomplished" but "poco a poco" ). I finally was able to make the trip with some of the bean planters to get seeds of a special grass for soil conservation terrace construction. It was a long process. Believe it or not, a year! But we planted them using a Level-A and hopefully in the years to come they will see the terraces forming naturally and notice the difference in soil quality when it hasn't all washed down the mountain to paint the river red. I hope to implement it in a number of farms in different communities as well.

Yesterday I had a great night with my bud Lisa in good 'ol David. We saw the Micheal Jackson movie. Wow. And I got popcorn. Enough said. It was wonderfull. We ate dinner at "the casino". Nachos. Served to us by waitresses in VERY tight, short shorts. The place has a pirate motiff. And stalagtites that decorate the stage. It was funny. I looked at Lisa and reflected that never would the Andi from the global north every choose to eat at such a tacky place. But we were both giddy with the prospect of dinner at the casino. Ca-ching!

An update

2009-10-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

Rebecca whipped eggs for about a half hour trying to acheive the "soft peaks" with the wireless elbow grease of our grandmothers. We made a gluten-free chocolate polenta cake with cacao from Kate's community.

Elmo "the frog"

Rainy afternoon in the hammock with Chami. What a snuggler.

It has been so long since I've updated this 'ol blog. But it's funny, the longer I'm here the less the experiences I have impress upon me the need to record them. They become less out of the ordinary. I don't carry my camera with me as often and my journal, instead of filling with the happenings of the day, is a place of introspection and answerless questions.

Time is such a funny thing. There are days I stew in my community and wish it were all over. Days that I say to myself that if I didn't have a latrine project that I've promised to a nearby community I would call it quits. Then the next day, I think how sad and strange it will be when this is all over. An example:

Two days ago I woke up. It was raining, as it always does in October. It had rained all night and the fog that wrapped itself around the hill promised it would rain all day. I had two English classes at the school that morning so I ate breakfast, fed the cat and walked down to the school, planning my lesson as I went. The teachers had planned exams for that day and had neglected to tell me, so I walked away from the school without giving class. (Not a big deal, but a total of one hour walking in the rain). I went to visit a family on the other side of the communtiy. 2 months ago the 14year-old son was harvesting pifa (a squash nut that grows on a spiny palm) when 3 of the spines fell into his eye. He went to Panama city for surgery and the doctor made him an appointment for several months later. The kid approched John (the previous volunteer in my community who was visiting at the time) and asked for the money. "The doctor told me if there was a gringo living in my community I should ask him for the money." Unlikely. We helped him to write a letter to the Comarca senetor, asking for his support. To make a long story short they didn't get the money, although the money was waiting for them. They blame me. Really it is just a story of poor communication that plagues cross-cultural conversation. Then I spent the rest of the day at a funeral. I've been to funnerals before, but this is the only one I have sat through from the begining to the end. I won't go into the detailes. It was very sad. And funnerals, as my friend Kayla and I talked about, have an interesting way of illuminating how far you really are from being a true member of your community. I looked around and realized how many names I didn't know, how I couldn't remember where people lived within my community. I didn't even know the face or name of the boy we were burying, even though I consider his family to be one of my favorites, and I pasear with them quite a bit. His mother has 12 children, so it is not suprising that I can't picture his face. I felt like an intruder, but I knew once I went that I couldn't leave until it was over. When it was all over and they were serving food they served me first in a bowl with a spoon (everyone else ate with their fingers from a banana leaf). Even that display of respect has a power to seperate and make one feel seperated. I honestly don't know if they were glad I was there or felt that I was an intrusion. It is most likely the former, based on my experience, but sometimes it is hard to tell.

The next day I ran around from home to home organizing work days and I had possitive interactions with everyone I met. And thing fell into place as if because, as they say here, God Wants. And my gloomy mood lifted even though it continues to rain, and rain and rain. I have a nutrition charla with 50 women in my community coming up, lots of soil conservation barriers. Things are good!

Games in Kate's community. Me in Kate's dress. Slimming no?

Hace Rato

2009-09-28T07:51:00.000-07:00

Culture Week in my community photos:

We made Bocashi (fast compost) with the Beans group

Meritza taught us how to make the chacra strings from long, stiff leaves.

The plant is called pita in Spanish and kuga in Ngabere. Once harvested the leaf is held against a smooth log and a piece of wood with a sharp edge scrapes off the green layer, exposing the white threds that are then twisted into twine.

It's been a while. The hills smell like warm whole grain rice and the rains move in with the fog a little earlier every day. Must be fall. Fall here isn't that much different from any other season, but my mind and body still know that leaves should be falling and I crave candy corn and cider. It is time to plant beans again. I doubt I will be out in the fields as much this year as I was last year helping them to plant (my host family plans to plant 1000lbs of beans.) I am going to be traveling more within the Comarca, visiting other volunteers. Another volunteer (named Andie, dont be confused) and I are sharing the Regional Leader possition as of November, so that may change the amount of time I have to spend in my communtiy. I think that I am ready for a change, I'm ready for more movement.

I just visted Kate in Bocas. It was great to finally see where my good friend works, and to meet all the people that I've heard so much about. Her patience and resilience as always, made a big impression on me and I left her community feeling so lucky for all this, and all my amazing friends I have here. Peace Corps is never what you expect, but all those things I heard before I came about the amazing friends I would make were true.

In Kate's site we did a PML (a seminar on individual and group organization and self-esteem) and had a birthday party. Both were great successes! Kate lent me her pocka-dot dress and she rocked an amazing pink dress suit, both styles are frequently sported in her community. She looked so professional, and slightly like a flight attendent. "white lights lead to red light..."

Her community really enjoyed pining the tail on the pig and breaking a huge Elmo pinata "what is it?!" everyone wanted to know. "Look," one guy said, "It's a parrot!"

It was a wonderful experience. I would like to write more but I find it harder and harder to sum up life here. I have more commitments everytime I find myself with internet and electricity. I also notice that Panamanian and Ngabe culture make fewer impressions on me. The stories I used to write in my journal about things I had seen no longer register as story worthy. My journal is more of a venting tool that I use to work out things in my mind than a place to write about day to day life. I am trying to rush back to today after too many days away. Ironically, I have very little planned up there. Probably a testiment to the little time I have spent there during the past months. But my kitty is probably waiting for me, and putting off going back up won't make it any easier.

2009-09-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

More pics

2009-09-07T14:45:00.000-07:00

The fam leaves tomorrow. We had a good time. The highlight was definately the canal. Just kidding, although Dan did think it was facinating. Brett liked the snack bar and I liked the part of the museum that made blowing-up noises over, and over and over again. But once we ticked that off the list we spent most of our time in the campo. We hung with Kayla and made sugar juice, went up to my site and paseared through a good deal of the community, helping me get ready to host culture week. We spent a while at the beaches listening to machata and tipico music from the busito playlist, drinking fruit smooties and watching interesting mesh outfits walk by on their owners. Boquete was great, we saw, smelled and consumed lots of coffee. And we are back in the city, getting ready to go back to our lives, Mom and Dan back to work, Brett back to RISDI and me back to the campo for culture week. These transitions are always strange.

Photos from the trip

2009-09-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

fotos

2009-08-21T16:32:00.000-07:00

I may eat just lentils and rice alone. But cooking is much better when done juntos.

Isaac and Melissa gave a great chicken project charla in my site.

Yes. All from my garden! Note the one green bean.

Lice is no lie

2009-08-20T13:04:00.000-07:00

Photos pending. In the constant battle with viruses either the computer or my memory stick decides to default. I have this great photo I want to upload, but for some reason when I plug the mem stick into the computer all that appears is someones Spanish homework. I have no idea.

Mom, Dan and Brett come in for a visit in a couple of days. I am very excited. I need a break, and this will be the longest that I have had, nearly 3 weeks, due to meetings on either side of my family´s visit.

Things have slowed down significantly since I last wrote. Good thing the lice kept me busy. I am not, unfortunatly, joking. It was war and I won, but now my scalp itches from the shampoo and my hair is falling out. The hair that didn´f fall out I have been pulling out in a return to early service anxiety and a general ¨What am I doing here?¨question playing over and over in the cabeza.

But I am so excited to have the folks here and people are really excited to meet them. All the women really want to meet Mom. And I´ve had a couple great evening up with my favorite neighbors Bei and Eda Umo in their community. Birthday celebrations.

And I am thinking about applying for a position that will fill up some of my ¨empty time¨. Then I can enjoy being in my community for the social aspect, just hanging out, working when there is work but not worrying so much when there isn´t.

STOP! Don´t put that crab´s pincer on your nipple!

2009-07-17T07:18:00.000-07:00

A traditional weaving of a Panamanian hat made with natural fibers.

Manly men! Learning about fish farming

In my defense, my blog is not as outdated as the Newsweeks I read in my hamack. Yesterday I was reading one, finding the news relevent and interesting when I flipped to the front cover and discovered that it was dated December 8, 2008.

The last month has held a lot: My one -year mark. (if Peace Corps were a hill, better said, a mountain, I would be hiking down. We all know hiking downhill hurts your knees.) I went on a great vacation with some buddies (I was the 7th wheel, in fact, for three couples. Fortunately there were no flats.) We snorkeled, cooked and ate great food including fire-side banana foster and Panamanian cacao fondu with mangos. We laughed, raced crabs, caught up and wound down. It went too fast.

Soon I was back in site and Vaca Sagrada!! my garden was growing, winter squash, lettuce, radishes, green beans and cucumbers. I hardley dare to believe it. This is boring to you right? or maybe you can count the times I´ve expressed boyant hopes for my gardens and therefore can reasonably deduce the outcome... Interestingly enough though, one year later and I find myself doing the same things that I did a year ago. Ex: School garden (thanks to a great seed drive that a school we are coorosponding with state side did), organic pesticides, compost, heavy pasearing. I rarely fill my days to capacity. By the time it rains I am usually snug in my house with my nose in a book and my cat on my lap. But I stress about that free time less than I did last time round. I feel more accomplished with the little things that get done every day. Shooting the mierda witht the kids at school for an hour or two while we plant in their garden beats 7 hours stressing over what else I should be doing. Also marginly successfull: the school garden. Thank you Cathy!
The other night I awoke to my host family´s 7 dogs attacking something that sounded vaguely like a gasoline powered electrical plant, RIGHT outside my house. (Later my host dad would define the sound as roncar, the same word used for snore). Ok, so this thing snored loud. In a matter of seconds my host family had ran up to the rucous. I waited a while before I got out of bed to go investigate, not exactly sure I was up for whatever cultural experience awaited outside. It sounded like one of the dogs was getting eaten alive. My flashlight beem did little to illuminate the snorer. It looked like a grey, bulbous balloon wiggling back forth emiting a skunklike stench snoring like a semi truck motor. ¨Come see it,¨my host sister says.

An armidillo. The kind you dont eat, they explain to me. I retired to bed to listen out the last of the show. Dog teeth on shell. SNORE! whack! whack! and then finally, shink (that´s what machetes say.)

The next morning it was quartered and boiled and given to the ravenous dogs for breakfast. One ugly, stinky little beast.
Speaking of animals... I´ve become well aquainted with Ngabe animal lore. I´ve given up, more or less on my self-esteem classes witht the sixth graders, surcumbed to the blank stares, silent answers and the dawning realisation that it was all for my benifit anyway. I´ve settled for just having fun with the kids. I asked each student to go home and talk to their grandparents about stories, and to bring their favorites into class. They will rewrite and illustrate each story which will then be sent state side to our friends who sent us the seeds. This story exchange idea is my most recent brain child. Seemingly a great idea... What could possibly unsurp this? Not leaf cutter ants, and not shitty soil.

Until the kids brought in the stories and read them with these, oh so telling smirks. They are not being devious, but for all that they are reading they could be trying. I must be clear, their stories are some of the funniest I have ever heard, much funnier than any fox trying for some grapes, anyway. But they would not receive a warm reception in US classrooms. Every one is violent and sometimes brutal. The Grimm brothers would approve; to avoid predjudice we must reflect on the grusome beginnigs of our own cherished fairytales.

There are too many to share so here´s my favorite. Remember, this is academic.

Why the Vulture is Bald
Once upon a time a horse, tired from a day´s work layed down for a nap. Up above, a vulture circled in the sky, looking for lunch. Upon spotting the horse the vulture made the incorrect assumption that it was dead and began his decent. The vulture landed on the horse and promptly (information inserted for city folk: vultures eat the softest parts of the body first, being the eyes and the, well, the behind) inserted his head and neck into horse´s behind with the intent to dine. The horse who of course was not at all dead, woke up, was frightened and began to run, all the while squeezing his cheeks with frear. The vulture flapped and flapped his wings, but with each flap the horse ran faster. Finally the poor creature could run no more and fell to the ground exausted. Out popped the vulture´s head completely bald and smoking. And the vulture with his newly gleened knowledge says: ¨Lo juro, por Dios, que el ojo primero en vez del trasero.¨
Translation: ¨In the future when I go to dine, I´ll taste the butt only after the eye.¨

I´ll make copies of a complete book of Ngabe fables available soon!

The authors

The completed bean storage facility

Ojo de Gallo, a fungus that affects coffee

Murphey´s Law

2009-06-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

Bhoj slack-lining outside his mudd house... pre-fallKalli walking across a rickety bridge on the way to the charla that wasn´t...

Chiriqui provence grasslands

Mis amigas reading Beauty and the Beast.

Chacra y Nagwa Some chi watching us at the new volunteers´culture week

My photo-happy neighbors and their great background, strange hanging bottle and all.

Passing through town today... not supposed to be here but the plans two volunteers and I had to do an HIV/AIDS charla in a far away Comarca town fell through. The director of the school forgot to mention that the students would be taking their exams and would not be free until 4pm, a tall order for those who have to walk 2hrs to arrive home every night. We then turned to the nunery where we were to stay that night but they told us that every bed was full. So we hopped in a car and drove down the mountain. It was a beautiful day, a day that reminded me of camping in southern Utah (yes, that dry and that deforested). And we had a great lunch and 12 hrs after my alarm went off this morning I find myself again ready to go back up to site.

The HIV/AIDS charla that I had planned in my community with two different volunteers (see photos) also fell through due to hard rains and harrowing thunderheads. But in this case we were able to give the charla to the sixth graders. That went really well.

My buddies Kayla and Kate

I head to the city in the middle of the month for my yearly meds. This year has gone fast. Some days I only hope that the next goes just as fast (which I am sure it will), and other days I wish it would slow down. I have wrinkly hands. Seriously the skin is thick and dry and the skin on the tip of each finger is peeling off, giving the sensation that no matter what I touch there is something balling up in it (ex: my hair) when it is actually just loose skin. Gross. I will get it checked out in the city.

I´m really tired and am having a hard time finding ways to recharge. I probably need a couple of days of sleeping and reading in site and I´ll be back on track.

To motivate myself to pasear from house to house more I decided I would start asking community members their fabels and stories. I´d like to write them in Spanish and Ngabere and have the sixth graders illustrate them. So for the first time in a long while I went and made a full day of house to house visits. Jose told me he had a plethra of stories ( he didn´t use the word plethra). One went like this:

A woman is carrying her new born child up the road to the Health Center in the middle of the night. She´s tired and can no longer hold off sleep so she lays down on the side of the road and doozes off. Along comes a giant. He´s hungry and she, a new mother, could provide him with a snack. He tip toes up, and starts to drink her breast milk (wait, wait, this is a ngabe story). The women, thinking her child is hungry pulls the giants head towards her to acomodate her.... oh lord! That´s not her baby! In fear (and I imagine with much distaste) she pushes the giant away who runs to hide in the woods and see if she will dare sleep again. She does and the previous scene repeats itself except that this time she doesn´t fall asleep again. (end story)

I asked Jose how long ago this happened. He answers, ¨Hace varios días. (Translation: several days ago.) ¨Like on Saturday?¨I ask. ¨Could be,¨he says. ¨Or like 40 years ago?¨ ¨Yes,¨he says. ¨Around then.¨ Perhaps I won´t have the kids illustrate this story.

My cat won´t eat plain white rice. It´s embarassing. When he stays with my family they have to give it fish or chicken. He´s much fatter than other kitties due to Whiskas. It´s all very troublesome. But he is so nice to cudddle with. Note to my special friend who saw me flipp out on a camping trip many years ago because there was a tick on my tiger shirt: I picked 200 tiny ticks off of my cat a couple days ago.

Missing you all and hope that everyone is surviving the economic problems back home.

2009-05-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Patacones and Pets

2009-04-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

Patacones and Brett

Beautiful Las Lajas

WOW! Cool!

Shit!

Almost more than a month has passed since my dad and bro left Panama. Their trip flew by and before I knew it I was back up in site and it was if it hadn´t happened. I think we all had a really good time. I was suprised how quickly I slipped back into Normal again. My flawless directional ability got us lost in the city several times and as if it had a magnetic pull the dangerous ghetto Chorillo pulled us in to its narrow dingy streets. Dad was so calm. So was I (shut up Brett.) I pretended to be excited about the canal. To be fair, the boats are really big, and it´s a lot of water. But... I just can´t get myself to really care! Ever night we battled it out for scrabble champion. They were no match form my trilangual talents (quad if you count the words I make up.) I won. (shut up brett.) We ate great food and as my flaquito brother often pointed out, ¨Are you kidding? We just ate!¨ Exactly. I still dream about it. I made a point to drink Papaya milk shakes at every opportunity.

We visited lush mountain sides and flat beaches and the steep slopes of my community. Host father and real father exchanged heart warming words and we laughed and joked a lot. My community was so appreciative of their visit, even though it was breif. We made some compost like a big happy international family. The compost pile was a mixture of success (everyone came) and dissapointment (no one brought as much material as they had commited). And there is no water. so the compost is still sitting there, not composting. Small, unasuming, not enough. But that´s taking me somewhere esle....

Brett and Dad were christened Ngabe names Brett: Chachi Dad: Chidá. They still talk about them in my site. Sometimes we´re just chilling and they say their names out of the blue. ¨Chidá¨ they say and nod their heads, thinking. ¨Chidá... and your brother´s name, how was it again? Ah yes, Chachi. Chidá y Chachi. Huh.¨

Dad, Hermano mio, thank you for your patience when i had a map in my hands... next time i wont scoff at the GPS idea. Thanks for hiking through heat and haze to see where I live and for being so suppotive!

I wasn´t up in site for a week when stomach problems sent me back down and it´s been a rough month of not a whole lot to do. I´ve been helping carry sand and rock for the community bean storage structure (a little bit) . Each trip takes over an hour (30min steep uphill to the road, then back with the load of 50-60lbs. ) The group members have been carrying materials for a month now and they rest in my host families kitchen. When I am not helping they yell good naturedly up to my house, ¨Betdi, you sleeping?¨ ¨Making lunch already?¨ It makes me a bit nervous about my activity habits. I try and find a balance between being a part of the community and helping and not driving myself into the ground doing heavy lifting everyday. I´ve also been doing some soil conservation on slopes so sloped that it probably wont work. But I´m learning. I´m learning to be more honest and to say. No! Lets not do it here where the land has already slid and the slope is 1! (as in 45 degree angle). Mejor en otro parte, por favor!

Nine months after arriving to my community I became a mother. Of a sweet little kitten who becomes a little less sweet as he becomes more comfortable in my home. I hope I still have an inflatable matteress when I get home. I really like having someone welcome me home. Somebody to talk to (sort of). He makes me chill out a little bit, I like to make tea and pet him in the morning instead of stressing about what I am doing that day.

Last week we had out All Volunteer Conference. It was possitive. But I was negitive. I couldn´t seem to engage and felt threatened by all of the sharing of successes. It was silly on my part but I was really glad when it was over. Kudos to the group 62 with their abundance of musical and dance talent!

Tomorrow I head to a nearby community to talk about safe sex, aids and hiv. I think I am going to be deversifying form agriculture a bit. I need something to keep me a little more busy, something with more tangible results. I´ve been so frusturated! So I am in the process of asking for a latrine project in a community that is so far away from the road that they can´t get any support from anyone. And I am going to try and get more involved with gender roles, women and kids. And maybe agricultre will be like my platacones, important, just as filling as anything else on the plate, but not the main focus...

I tried to upload more photos but the comp is too slow. until next time!

9 months y siguiendo....

2009-03-19T13:45:00.000-07:00

Méligo, Bai, y Betdi. Please avoid obvious references to skittles and pots of gold.

Mom, this one is for you.

A long beautiful day of hiking.

You cané see the wind in this picture, but it´s there!

My neighbors, Ben and Lisa

Host family´s beans, but not all of them.

José impressed his latino counterparts with his knowledge of coffee prunning. It was a great exchange between Ngabes and Latinos (and gringos, for that matter.)

Lines of beans have been pulled up and left to dry in the feild before being degrained.

The roommate. One of them.

The Process: Porear (v) hit bean pods with sticks.

The Problem: Juice served from an old chemical bottle.

These girls were sitting in their house when I handed them a photo I had printed for them. The light hit the photo just right so that the picture turned translucent.

In town; on Vacation...

Today I showered with running water, ate cheese and drank cold water. Really cold water! Oh, it was so good. I enjoy that these are the things that I enjoy. I imagine I will always have more appreciation for things like refrigeration, a hot shower on a cold day and lunch with friends now that I have gone without for so long. But these things probably loose their luster and become normal again at some point. But now they are so exciting!

Tomorrow Brett and Dad come to visit. My first visitors from home. I am really excited to see them.

It has been a busy month. The summer keeps getting hotter, and dryer, but I´m getting used to it. Every other day I fill my big chacra up with my dirty clothes, 10L water jug and shampoo and go to the stream (mejor dicho ¨trickle¨). I still prefer the summer to the winter on account of the beautiful afternoons and rainless evenings.

I´ve visited some other volunteers in their sites, done some hiking, talked alot about soil conservation and coffee tree prunning. This month I spent more time with friends than I have before. Even though it was work related and alot of fun, the time out of site leaves me feeling disconnected from my community. So after Dad and Brett´s trip I am going to do what I can to stick it out for a couple of weeks and get my head back in site.

Ben, Lisa, Steph and I went to the capital of the Comarca to attend the election of the new comarca president. It was a beautiful hike with rainbows at every turn. The wind nearly knocks you off your feet it blows so hard, and it was colder than I ever expected Panama to be. We spent the night in a church and were awoken by a less than pleased padre who told us we had no right to stay there. we left, but I have never been chastized by a man of God before. As one could imagine, I felt rather guilty.

Favorite moment this month? Sitting in Ben and Lisa´s home on plastic chairs drinking wine and laughing about life here and life at home. Following a long and successful day taking about Lombriculture (worms that make strong compost) we debreifed by candle light and the good stuff (from box of course!) I have made some amazing friends!

I feel as though I need to make a statement. I have tried to be really honest in this blog. I have shared the very best and the most uncomfortable of what I have experienced here. It´s been lonely at times and I´ve struggled, but I am really glad that I am here. I have no doubt that this is where I need to be right now. I have also probably never had so much fun. I have a larger and more diverse group of friends than I have ever had before. The relationships I have formed with some of my fellow volunteers are really strong, and my friendships within my community are maturing into real, honest friendships. I do alot of laughing in and out of site. So thank you all for your support, your concern and your love! I miss you all, but I´m really happy here and I wouldn´t trade this experience for anything!

Photo Album

2009-02-25T13:53:00.000-08:00

After a camp for teenagers (regarding auto-esteem and safe sex) we took some kids to the beach. For many this was the first and maybe will be the only time they see the ocean up close, even though, for example, the kids from my site can see the sea from our ridge.

They loved it.

My host brother, age 14, headed for the waves.

Hello all,

It´s been a busy month and as always I find myself swamped with things to do at the internet cafe. I just got back from celebrating Carnival. We had alot of fun, we did some dancing in crazy outfits at crazy hours, slept under the stars on the beach and ate alot of ¨street meat¨. Now its back to work, harvesting beans, beating bean pods with sticks to release the seeds, and then carrying them to the road. (My host father plans of harvesting 800-1000 lbs of beans this year). It´s quite a shock to go from the thump-thump-thump of the base in a discoteca back to the comarca.

Last night the vacation ended with a bang when our minivan (driven by a fellow PCV´s friend) was pulled over by some cops at a checkpoint. We watched the scence with somewhat giddy anticipation as the cop took two of the guys across the street to a scetchy dark building to talk to them. Kate left the car to help with the negotiations. Maybe they needed a woman´s touch? Aparently so. The cop, satisfied with several bottles of liquor and cranberry juice and a Maxium magazine, happily posed with his billy stick, pretending to hit the two gringos. Then he helped us flag down a bus to take us girls home. It may have been the funniest thing I´ve seen in Panama. I´ll try and get the photos!

The summer keeps getting hotter and dryer and its harder and harder to stay clean. After a week of no water I finally went down to the stream to fill up some bottles to take back to the house. The stream that my family had pointed me too is about 20min down the hill and has dried to a trickle that that seeps out of the rocks, catches in a peice of halved bamboo and dribbles into a murky pool about one foot by two feet.

This is really depressing, so dont read it if you dont want to. I wrote about a little girl that came begging to my house frequently After several times I began to turn down her requests for sugar, salt, rice, and the really hard one, milk for her baby brother. I hadn´t seen her in weeks and had wondered why until three days ago I heard that her family had left when her little baby brother died. My mind made an instant conection which may or may not really be relevant. I know milk on that one occasion wouldn´t have saved the baby´s life. And the one occasion would have multiplied as the word spread that I was giving out food. But how would I have felt if this had happened similarly in the states? or in my first months here? I know I would have felt more affected. I would have been upset, felt guilty and regretted the lost opportunity to safe a child´s life. But I watch my reaction with a feeling of distance between me and that baby, I feel removed even though with each passing day I spend in my community I am in truth less removed. So many babies are born here, and so many die. It´s not shocking like it was before. And my jaded lack of guilt,my assured reaction that in the name of ¨sustainable development¨ I could not have done anything doesn´t really shock me either. It suprises me, maybe. I wonder if I am in essence loosing my humanity. I had a conversation with a young man visiting Panama about a similiar topic. I tired to explain why I do not lend or give money to anyone (in most occasions). He argued that to make a difference in one person´s life, for example, supplementing the diet of a child in their formative years was more important than being fair to everyone else. I tried to explain the debilitating effects of paternalism. But even as I felt the heat rising up my neck as I tried to defend the actions that I have debated so often inside my head, I knew it would not be last time that I had this discussion, with someone else or with myself.

My neighbor Benida, with her brand new baby. This may be confusing so I will clarify: This is not the baby I wrote about.

Winds that charged throuh our area at 115km per hour tore roofs off even the sturdiest buildings. The light on the floor is let in by a missing sheet of zinc.

One of numerous photo sessions. My neighbors standing by the church. The red writing says ¨God gives you time. Don´t wait until tomorrow.¨

Summer ... and the Livings Easy

2009-01-23T10:01:00.000-08:00

I feel like I´ve climbed to the top of a hill ( in reality that´s all that I´ve been doing during the past 7 months: climbing up hills, literally and figuratively.) Speaking figuratively then, looking down into all hte rolling hills and high peaks around me -the real ones which are being slashed and burned to a crisp- I know the challanges aren´t finished and that the lows will still pull me down, but it feels different. I feel different. I ´m calmer, less affected by the funeral of a baby , the endless demands for money, the sloth-paced speed of life and the absence of easy success.

The other day two kids chased me up the hill from the church. ¨Take my picture! Take my picture!¨I ignored it at first and they must have yelled it at me 20 times before I turned around and said, Ï´m not going to take your picture. Go away.¨They stopped screeching form y camera and they sniggered down the hill, seemingly unaffected by my cold responce.

Perhaps my realitive peace of mind can be attributed to the lull of work to be done here. The beans have been planted and only the men leave with their ¨bombas¨to fumigate the plants with fertilizer once a week. It´s easier to feel ok about not having work to do when no one else is working either.

I gave a pretty good lecture on agrochemicals the other day. I used more illustrations than anything else. They must have liked the drawings because they were involved and interested in the topic. Dropping words like ¨Sterility¨ and ¨impotence¨helps get attention, too.

Walking through my community I notice that most still fumigate without the masks and gloves I solicited for them. But some do use them. And that makes me feel good.

Overall, I get more satisfaction from the daily one on one interaction than anything else. I think most of the kids in my community have heard the story ¨Juan and the Magic Bean Stock¨at least once. And I love grabbing them as I read ¨I smell the blood of an English man!¨and hearing them squeal.

The other day I hiked down to a town at the bottom of the mountain with Micheal, my 14-year-old host brother. He acted as guide after Paula warned me about vacas bravas (angry violent cows) that graze on the trail. The whole time he told be near horror stories about close calls with the vacas bravas (¨But then I grabbed its ear....!¨) and snakes (¨Si, those are dangerous, they can squeeze a grown man to death, and you know, they´ll chase you!¨) On the way up a woman named Maura stepped out of the bushes onto the trail. ¨Boo. Did I scare you?¨she asked me. ¨Whew. I said pretending to catch my breath. I thought you were a witch!¨I replied. Maura uses every possible opportunity to engage me in converstation about witches, twins and kids born with tails. ¨¨You know, ¨She said, ¨I saw you both pass this morning and I thought, At last! Betdi found a man and she´s going to the river with him!¨ We laughed at her mistake and I pretended to be slightly scandalized. I tell her in Ngabere, NO MAN! I think it has a nice ring to it.. Brare Ñagare!

2009-01-05T05:41:00.000-08:00

Summer is great here....

Take 54.... or so it seems

My favorite time of day is dusk

Guandú, our first bean harvest.

Carmel Popcorn! Gilberto Jnr, Nini, and Jesenia mis hermanos.

The view from my porch

A muñeca (doll) representing the old year. They often hold a bottle of liquor. On New Years they burn the muñecas. This one has a note above it from a grandfather reminding his grand children not to forget their culture.

I hope everyone had a great holliday. Christmas in Kuna Yala was fantastic. You can tell from the photos. We slept in hamacks, visited a private island every day, payed locals for coconuts, which we ate sitting in the shaded white sand, and gorged on king crab and lobster. You wouldnt believe me if i told you how cheap it was. However, not for the tourist looking for luxery. ( I cannot spell today, please bare with me). I pulled on my pants one night after returning to the beach and was promptly bit by a 5inch centipede that was hidden inside. We were all screaming as I, with my pants around my ankles tryed to distance myself from the bug jumping around like a crazy ginga. An old sage looking Kuna man said ¨The same thing happened to me. It hurt real bad. The next morning I woke up vomiting blood.¨ But I didnt and the rest of the trip was a blast.

I stayed in my community for New Years, it was rather lonely, but I went to church with my host family and I could tell they were glad I went with them. Pastors from a more developed town brought in a PA system to the church (remember, we have no electricity). So imagaine my suprise upon returning to my community and hearing the screeching of a mic too close to the machine. Then, rather than saying -testing 1-2-3- they kept saying - Gloria a dios, gloria a dios (glory to god) over and over again. It made me giggle. my host mom Paula sent Nini up to my house with a bowl of their new years dinner. I freigned excitement (I´ve been sick with, as it turns out ameobas) and went down to their house to eat with them. She had made my plate especially without noodles, the gesture just momly enough to make me tear up. Later that night the kids and I made carmel popcorn, which was a hit. and of course, I was only to excited to share my favorite ambrosa with the fam. I started, again, from scratch on my garden, I built a raised bed and filled it with horse poop and compost materials. So, it was good I stayed in site.

The other day Nini had come asking to hear a fairy tale. We sat down and began reading. Ever so nonchalantely she threw her arm around my neck and leaned into me as she looked at the pictures. As I read I marveled at how far this little seven-year-old and my relationship has come. Nini was slow to warm to me. She rarely smiled and wouldnt look at me in the eye. She´s amazingly mature for her age and often was the one that would cook when I was still living with her family. I remember coming home some days so hungry and trying in vain to knock oranges out of a tree to eat something! I remember her watching me and feeling so out of place and so shamed, somehow. By a 7-year-old! So that sisterly show of affection ment alot.

I´ve been ill. I wont go into the details, except that in one midnight trip to the latrine with purpose, a giant spider the size of my hand crawled around the rim of the seat. I did a little dance as I tryed to decide what to do. Everytime I focused my light on him he crouched and stuck his butt in the air. But sometimes the urges are just stronger than aracnidphobea. So we negotiated.

I´m in my regional capital taking 3 different medicines for ameboas, I have had them for I dont know how long. Should have gone to the clinic much sooner. As irony would have it even though I rarely stopped pooping during the last week, when the doctor asked to collect a sample, well you can imagine. That is all I will say. I dont feel very good, and the meds make you feel sick for a while, but things should clear up soon.

Happy New Year!

Kat and her Lobster..

Feliz Navidad Prospero Año y Felicidad!

2008-12-20T13:05:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-09T14:59:00.000-08:00

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!

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T12:36:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-11-04T06:18:00.000-08:00

The 3rd of Noviembre Panamanians celebrate their seperation from Colombia

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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!

Coffee and corn but no time to write

2008-10-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

It´s cosecha time in the comarca. I´ve been keeping pretty busy. I´ll be out in the city for the election and hopefully have time to update more. There just aint time. I miss you all so much!

Ti tara ju!

2008-10-10T11:38:00.001-07:00

Translation: I have a house! Gilberto constructed my house solo in about a week. I helped with what I could... but I m not a very good helper. I ve been cooking. I made cornbread last night! It tasted great, but looked more like scrambled eggs. I have been making some great soups with lentles and whole grain rice and lots of veggies (all I have to bring in from outside...) I did harvest the first fruit from my somewhat idle garden... a 4 inch cucumber. The members of the grain group came over the other day and had a good laugh. - a 4 inch cucumber for 30 men!- they laughed. Usually, I see the humor in situations like this, like the beans that grow better in the grime behind the kitchen sink than in my garden, but on that particular day it took significant effort to laugh and not cry.

I must admit that today I am not in much of a mood to write, nor would it be a very good idea. It was a long, hard, humbling week. But I want to jot one of those crazy moments that I had when I know what I m listening to is profound, but I am unable to understand why.

I mustered up the ganas to talk to Benida (the woman from the previous entry who asked for money) two days ago. I have been pasearing to every house in the community to let them know about the meeting that will take place next week with my boss. So I walked up to her house as the fog closed in around our hill and mist started to turn to rain. She s sitting outside her hut, picking lice from her grandkids hair. I sit next to her and we exchange the usual pleasantries. She comments on a bandaid I have on my thumb.
-What happened?- she asks
-I cut myslef.- It s a lie. It s from degraining corn, a testiment of how sensitive my hands still are. But I have pena to tell them the truth.
- But Bedi, You must be carefull. Blood is money.
-Blood is money?
-Si. Even a little drop... a little drop is like $50.
-Ah- I say. - So I should have saved it! In a little cup, or a bag...- I m joking now, but Benida doesnt laugh.
- Once,- she says, - I spent $150 on blood.

Finally I shut up and let her talk. Her daughter, at 16, was diagnosed with what Benida described as stomach cancer, but what I imagine was cervical, or ovarian, because the doctors explained that she would not have children in the future.

Benida told the story in a dry, removed way that let me imagine what this Ngabe woman had experienced in the cold, forgein environment of a hospital that may have as well been in a forgein country. She barely speaks spanish. The doctors told her that her daughter would die if they did not operate, but to operate they would need 3 pints of blood, at $50 each. They told her she must go to the bank to buy the blood. She left crying from her daughters room and walked through the hospital wondering where this bank was where one buys blood. Finally a hospital guard pointed her in the right direction. When she arrived, whoever was selling the blood told her, - yes, for $150 your daughter might get better... but for $200 it s almost guarenteed.-

Anyway. I feel like I{ve had verbal diareah all day. and I dont have much ganas to write. But... I do want to thank all of your for your letters, emails and boxes! Wow! Amanda! I ate chocolate chip cookies walking through the rainforest while watching morpho butterflies flitting around like they do. I had this debate: which are cooler? Gluten free cookies or morpho butterflies. I still cant decide!cookies taste better! It{s so great to hear from all of you!

Some Photos

2008-10-03T09:26:00.000-07:00

Beautiful view from my hill

Some journal entries

2008-10-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

A PERSPECTIVE GIVER:
I´m a pretty tough person. Ok, not always, but I can be. I have raced so many body crushing 1500 M in my life I could never count. I´ve walked 500 miles across Spain in a month despite shin splints, falling arches, blisters and perpetually swollen ankles. My resume is short, but neither of my claims to toughness were easy. Having that said, carrying the lumber for my house up a steep, slippery, endless trail through the stifling heat and humidity of a Panamanian forset was the most physically challanging thing I have ever done. I made four trips, each taking more thatn an hour to complete. The trail is steeper than taking stadium stairs by two, and its muddy and covered in vines so that you trip going down and slip coming up. We hade invited 8 grown men to help carry the wood, and I had provided food. One came, one sent his 12-year-old son adn the rest... MIA. ALong the trail two youn girls, both under the age of 13 asked if we had chicha (juice made from corn). We told them that we did, in fact, have enough for 8 grown men. So they joined our ¨junta¨. They each made 3 trips carrying about 60lbs, just as much as me, and faster. When all was said and done the girls recieved heaping bowls of rice, beans adn chicken, and juice. But here is what made me want to cry: 2 pre-teen girls would want to do what for me was the hardest thing I have done in my life for the promise of some corn juice.

TWO VERBAL SNAPSHOTS:
My two little sisters are huddling under the overhanging zinc roof, giggling and pushing eachother under the streams of water that funnel down from the sky. They are so beautiful in their red and navy nagwas up against the wood pannels of the house: grey streaked with floresent green moss. I want to frame their smiling faces throught he doorway and over the hand crank Singer where Aida sits sewing. But my point and shoot would never blur the foreground and background the way I want, and the secound I take out my camera the smiles change, the moment is lost and I´m nothing more than a tourist.
----------
Little Lilly is walking around with small dead sparrow in her hand. She shakes it about to the tune of happy, God-praising evangelical rock and its limp head wiggles like a noodle. Mikeal deftly popped it out of the mango tree with a home-made slingshot and soon Paula will pluck and fry it up on top of white rice. Until then, 3-year-old Lilly fingers its soft down and smiles at her toy.

QUÉ PESADA
¨Señora Bedi¨she called me. No one has ever called me señora. It made it feel like there was so much distance between us. It´s worse than being called Gringa. I was carrying my secound load of 50lbs of rice from the road to my host families store. The woman who addressed me is a friend. I have spent much time in her house, she sharing what she has- rice with a chicken foot; and me eating what she has offered, also a sacrife. She has a wonderful sense of humor and I love the way she takes my hand to shake it but then doesn´t let go. But my gut tells me this meeting is different. It´s a sixth senth I´ve developed for guessing when people want something of me.

She starts talking. ¨I´ve been afraid to ask,¨ she tells me. But there is nothing else she can do. There is no food in the house and she needs to buy clothes for her grandchildren so they can go to school. Could I please lend her $10? I explain that I can not lend her money because I can not lend money to everyone who asks, or to everyone who needs to buy food. ¨But Bedi,¨ she assures me, ¨I will pay you back as soon as....¨ something. ¨
´
¨Then five, just five so I can feed my family. ¨ She says this holding up the five fingers of her right hand. ¨Just five.¨ I shake my head again but I´m starting to loose my composure. She is one of my favorite people in the community.

Even though I am growing wearier of pleas for money, or loans, or cell phone minutes, I know that I, in her place would do everything I could to feed my grandkids. Especially if I considered the gringa a friend and someone with whom I had shared as much as I possibly could. It´s enough to make me want to stop going visiting from house to house. I´m literally indebted to every family here, even though I am constantly reiterating that I do not Pasear for food, but to pass time and make friends with the community.

¨Bueno, bueno.¨ She says, letting go of my hand. ¨Fine.¨ She isn´t looking at me now. ¨Jatuita Bedi.¨ Goodbye.

As I walk away she calls after me. ¨For this I come only to you. Only to you.¨ I have no idea how to respond, so I say nothing.

Later as I return home with the load, I see her standing outside my family´s store talking to my host mom. ¨you arrived.¨ I comment, determined not to treat her any differently after the akward episode. ¨Sí, I arrived.¨ she says. ¨I arrived to my house crying.¨ Again I am left without response. I don´t know if she is making light of the situation or if her biting humor has turned against me. So I shrug and walk into the house. Somehow I feel even heavier, despite having just thrown down the 50lbs of rice I´ve carried for 45 minutes.

Rice, this is war.

2008-09-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

That´s my ridgeline. They farm the sides.

I suppose I can say that things hace been calming down for me here emotionally. I wake up in the morning with less anxiety about the day to come. And if I have nothing to do, I resign myself to reading, studying Ngabere, or sewing my Nagwa. I worry a little less about ¨not doing enough¨. Food is still a stressor and a source of guilt. I feel listless and anemic, even though I eat more with my family than most people in the community. None the less, three bowls of white rice do not a balanced meal make.

Things still set me of, making me angry or sad, or both: The dying plants in my various gardens, the kids who demand, ¨Hey gringa, give me money!¨, the dirty kitten with two dislocated back legs that scoots around covered in it´s own filth because some guy ¨booted¨it, the kids who sit smooshed against me on the truck ride up to my site and literally burn me with their raging, perpetual fevers, my host siblings getting in my bed when I am not at home leaving muddy footprints on my blanket (and maybe lice?)

But things are funny too. Like yesterday, for example. I was literally going to wash my hands of my garden, where one by one plants die or just disapear. I walked to the cement basin to wash my hands and staring up at me from inbetween a crack in the concrete, growing from years of filth and old coffee grounds, was an eight-inch bean stock, sprouted from some dinner weeks past. Apparently I´m just planting in the wrong place. But my host mom and I got a good laugh out of it. so now when she asks me if i think cabbage will grow here, I say, ¨Well, maybe... if we plant it behind the kitchen sink.¨

I´ve made friends and they invite me to husk rice and eat their food. They like to ask me questions like, ¨Do you wash your clothes?¨ ¨What do you wear under your pants?¨ ¨Do you eat bananas?¨ ¨In the states if you need money you just go to that building where they make it, right?¨ ¨Does money really grow on trees there?¨ ¨what did you do to your hair?¨ Most questions make me laugh. some dont. ¨Do babies die in the USA?¨

I continue to be daunted by my role as an agricultural volunteer. Planting here is like planting on the moon. Everything has to come from far away, even soil. On the flip side, sometimes I can give a guy a list of compost ingredients and they appear from seemingly nowhere.

Someone told me the other day that if the land gives the way it should, 35lbs of rice comes from one hectar. (1000m2). This blew my mind. On average families eat 5 lbs of rice a day. that means that one hectar feeds a family for only a week. Countless hours go into this one hectar, and for many people they only have on hectar of land to farm. The rice must be planted (7 seeds per hole, 6¨ apart. ) the rice must be weeded with machete, which is no small feat with the bunches so close together, and esentially planted on a cliff. They usually weed each plot twice. Then the rice is harvested, toasted or dried and husked. every step of the way is tedious and back breaking. for a week. This makes me hate those three bowls of belly-expanding, un-nourishing, empty white rice even more. To all my fellow volunteers who eat nothing but boiled green bananas: I´ll trade you!

Country girl in the city.

2008-08-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

Just made my first city trip with some amigas. It´s been great to touch base with them. And to eat fruit. And to pee in the middle of the night without making the muddy trip to the latrine. The shock is there. I cried when I took a hot shower. well, it had been an emotional two weeks anyway. and crossing the street poses all sorts of challanges that I haven´t delt with in, well, months. But I am sure the real culture shock comes when how you live in site becomes normal. Regardless, Kate and I found oursleves rendered useless in the supermarket with so many choices.

During the past two weeks I´ve continued to restle with inner demons, and I think I´m championing them until I get hit with a day when I don´t have anything to do. THen I go a bit crazy, but it passes. And it´s really good for me.

I have since planted a secound school seed bed, hopefully this one does better. To do better only 4 seedlings need to come up. My standards are lowering. My plants in my garden continue to rot, leading my host family to believe that all gringos talk to plants, no, PLEAD with plants.

I´ve been stood up more than I´ve been met up with recently. But thats normal, so I stood up my English class the other evening when it was raining. I felt pretty guilty, but only until it turned out that no one came either. Looks as though I´m getting the hang of things.

My host brothers took me to harvest corn severel days ago. Again I was struck by the amount of effort put forward to even produce minimal amounts of food. the ears of corn are small and white. I can´t help but wonder if the caloric output need to produce food is is greater than obtained through eating it.

I miss you all so much! I´ve been reliving alot of old memories lately, and alot of you waltz through my dreams in really unexpected ways... keep doing it! I like seeing you!

Lo Bien, Lo Mal, y lo Feo

2008-08-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

The gorgous beach which is my refuge an hour and a half from my site by car.
IF you come visit me we will make a trip.

I am trying to get shots that illustrate the grade on which these farmers are farming. It´s hard to really get the scope of it in a photo. But it´s steep...

See what I mean? The corn planted here looks almost plain, but its not.

I finally unsheathed my camera today. It may have been a mistake. But they really do have few oppertunities for taking family photos. So I took this for them, standing in front of the Evangelical church.

This one I took for myself. Right as the shutter clicked on the previous photo they swarmed me for a glimps of the view finder. But before showing it to them I snapped one more. Yes the little boy is wearing a plastic bag on his head, I think they had just put some type of medicina on his head to treat a bot fly (lays larva in your skin).

What a couple of weeks. Honestly, I sit in front of this computer and I dont know where to start. Here is a list of some funny, cool and uncool things that are happening.

The uncool:
I walk around, pasearing from house to house, trying to get to know people. I sit down. We laugh a bit about this and that, and plenty that I dont understand. And then they ask me if I have money to give them, or that I have a camera, or if I want to take their youngest son with me. ¨No really. Take him.¨ ¨But... I... don´t you...?¨I stumble. ¨No,¨ they answer. ¨You just take him. At least when you leave to go allá

My plants are dying. That is only if they came up. Most of them didn´t. That is all I have to say about that.

The Cool:
I´m slowly making some friends. Mostly women, it´s not really acceptable for me to just go hang out one on one with any man of any age. I even had someone ask me if I was ¨with¨ my host dad yesterday. Anyway, friends... basically just people where i go and hang in their thatched hut kitchen and they help me make my chacra (bag). There is one house in particular that I enjoy visiting. They always give me alot of food, which makes me feel a little uncomfortable since I am always the only one eating. Lat time I took with me a lb of sugar to share coffee with them. They were very appreciative, then proceeded to give me crema de maiz (corn meal) bollo (tamale, more or less)a fried egg and a bowl of rice and beans. It was funny, because all day I had been contemplating how little I am giving, and how much more they will always be able to, or insist on giving me.

I went on a hike last week with the school kids and an old man who guesses his age at 85. The teacher organized the hike to give the kids the oppertunity to pick this old guy´s brain about the way things were before. The maestro explained to the kdis that they should be learning from the abuelo, asking him questions about how things were before. I wondered if they would stay quite like the ngabes so often do, or if they would be too cool like American kids their age. But to my suprise they began asking questions which led to stories about estos días (them days)when men still hunted tigers and it was dangerous to walk alone because of the abundance of threatening wildlife. The abuelo acted out his stories, crouching low as the tiger, using his walking staff as a spear, barking like a dog.
We continued walking and arrived later at Cerro Pelado (Peeled Peak), so named for the giants who used to live there, naked or peeled. Eventually we arrived at a mountain spring surrounded by old forest amoungst the feilds and hills of pasture grasses, just a pocket or how it was. Stick crosses adorned by small offerings- a miniture chacra, 2 bows and arrows made from bark and string, surrounded the spring. The kids drank and washed their hands and faces. Abuelo asked me if I had yet drank from the medicinal pool. I explained that as a gringa I have to be careful with spring water. ¨I have to filter my water,¨ I told him. ¨Untreated water makes me sick.¨ ¨But we are on Cerro Dios (God´s Peak),¨he assured me. ¨This spring never dries, even in the summer. There is water way down there, and way over there, but where does this water come from? This spring is blessed by god. It won´t make you sick.¨ ¨Of course not,¨ I agreed. But I didn´t drink.

The funny:
A certain old coffee producer in my community has been a great guide. He comes every sunday to take me around the community introducing me to the coffee growers in the area. He´s a little man, maybe 5´1´´ with a thin mustach and a round face that is smooth and rinkled and the same time. He is missing many teeth but still has a distinguished air of experience about him. Last sunday he walked into our kitchen wearing the typical work attire: rubber boots, dark trousers and an old T-shirt. But he had added something special to the outfit todaÿ: A poofy, black news boy hat studded with sparkly sequins. I think it is the same one that Brittany Spears wore early on in her career as teeny bopper pop star. I almost ran for my camera. But instead I just complemented him and asked him where he got it. ¨You know. In town.¨

One Month Wrap-up

2008-08-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

It´s become increasingly difficult to update this blog, not just for the obvious reasons like, for instance, lack of computer, internet and electricity, but also because my first month in site has been a rollercoaster. Actually it´s been more like one of those rides that takes you up really fastonly to drop you into freefall, leaving your stomach in your mouth and your head.... somewhere else. It´s hard to sum it up.

The hardest relization thus far was the discovery -day 1- that for the first time in my life, I have no one to affirm that I am doing enough. I have no professor to grade my article, no swim coach to tell me I did all I could, no boss to appreciate my hard work, not even my mom to tell me I´m pushing myself too hard. I´ve been aware in the past that I have always thrived on postive feedback (perpetual brown noser? maybe)but I never realized how much I have depended on it. So here I am setting my own pace in a place where there is no pace. One day I might spend 6 hours in a meeting that started 4 hours late and listen to nothing being accomplished. The next I may go work in the field with my host family for 8 hours without food, drink, shade or rest.

So, I´ve been talking to myself alot. Sometimes the ngabes hear, but I dont care. I tell myself I´m doing a good job, that its ok to call it a day, that I can make it to the latrine before the next wave of diareah and nausia catch uo with me. Go Andi, go!

A quick list of things I´ve been up to lately:
1) learned how to say ¨you are stronger than me¨ ngabere - appropriate when a man passes me on the trail carrying 200lbs of rice on his back.
2)Cooked successfully, rice and beans (arromumabeh) over a cooking fire for my host siblings when their parents were gone.
3)worked in school garden
-built soil retention barriers
-planted nitrogen-fixing plants in the clay, i mean soil
-planted tomato and pepper seedlings
-given classes to school kids in English and about sustainable agriculture. poor kids, how boring
-built my own house garden. the fence in ugly, but i´m no carpenter
-cut my right hand with my machete (first peace corp scar!)i´m not sure how. I still cant remember what I was doing with my machete in my left hand
-learned how to sew nagwa (traditional women dress). it is also ugly, but it makes people laugh and I joke about how it should only be worn after dark.
-survived 3 arguous panamanian meetings ngabe style. 6 hours long, nothing accomplished. I tell myself I am doing penence for being type A.
-Walked around the community getting to know the people. Telling kids its rude when they ask me if I´m wearing panties and no, i dont have money to give them.
-stared down 4 horned cows for their manure. I thought they were going to trample and gore me, but really they were just interested in what I had in my sack. I think they were dissapointed when they discovered it was what they had just excreted.
-carried said excretement (about 25lbs) on my back uphill for an hour in blistering heat. I sweated, the shit sweated and the juice ran down my back and legs and into my rubber boots. It was a first.

It´s a ride all right. WIth high highs and low lows. but I´m learning alot, about my community, about myself. more later, entonces.

Just some pretty views of my ridge-line community

My future house, and my current room in my host familys house

My Host family´s house in terrential downpour, and my host siblings

My two gardens, the school garden and my home garden.

One week in site... and counting

2008-07-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

Photos:
Isaac and Chantz, championed the fire despite torrential downpour.

Last Diablo Rojo ¨red devil¨ bus ride...

Left: Swear-in ceremony Right: lightning storm at beach

I am so frustrated with the computer right now! It keeps wiping my entry clean! Oh well. So I´ve spent the last week in my site grappling with the real weight of staying here for 2 years. It´s hard to imagine when getting through everyday is such a challenge. It´s such a contrast to be so removed from all the people to whom I´ve grown so close and spent so much time with for the last 3 months and no to be so alone! I came down to town today because I stupidly forgot stuff at the office and they had to send it to me. Also, I am feeling a pretty violent need to be connected, so I decided to try and upload some photos.

Above: I´m afraid to unsheathe the camera so I take alot of photos of peoples backs. If they see it I foresee a lot of requests for photos.

All things considered, this week has gone very well. I arrived to my site late last Sunday, and it was exactly as I knew it would be... raining. I made the treacherous decline alone with all my bags (only 2 thank god). I slipped the entire way. My pants were falling down they were so heavy with rain water. Some little kids with an umbrella approached me, I thought maybe to help, but as it turned out the little boy just wanted to ask me ¿Cargas panties, verdad? You´re wearing panties, right? Well, obviously.

The week has been full of unexpected successes: Making compost with the 6th graders in the school, (live and dead barriers tomorrow). Planting tomatoes with my host dad Gilberto, making Chacras with my host mom, working on several farmers fincas...

I´ve been filling my free time by pasearing from house to house, trying in vain to remember peoples names. Most are difficult for me to even wrap my mouth around. Others surprise me like Wilma, Betsy. I walk up to the house, say hello Kubu kwin Deka, usually no one answers. I say it again, a shy woman might come out of the house. I give a little speech in Ngabere in which i introduce myself, say how glad I am to be living in the community, that I am here to work in agriculture and that I live just over that hill. Sometimes I get blank stares, others spit off rapid fire questions that I dont understand. Sometimes I get a glass of pulpy juice. But usually I just explain that I should keep going and as I turn to go I close-line a close-line or I fall on the slippery grown and get red clay all over myself. That usually breaks the ice.

I miss everyone at home immensely, and all of my PC buddies too. Hang in there guys. Sector conference will come before we know it!

Swearing in as a Volunteer (de verdad)

2008-06-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

Here we are again, hanging out in the same place we spent our first week in Panama. It's weird to be back, sitting in the same place with the same people (all of them I might add, as no one has left during all of training), eating the same food and sleeping in the same beds.

Tomorrow is our swearing in ceremony, marking the 45th anniversary of Peace Corps in Panama (not really 45 years because for a long time Peace Corps wasn't allowed in the country... whatever).

And then on Sunday we head to our sites. It is an exciting and daunting thing.

As for now, we are all enjoying the time we still have together. Frisbee, cranium, jam sessions, movies...

I really don't feel like writing, and their certainly are people who do and are waiting for the comp. so thats all for now. I will post pics soon. Please note new mailing address, and cell phone number.

No time to write... too much to say

2008-06-16T08:24:00.000-07:00

Hello. So much has happened during the last 3 weeks since I have updated last. I spent one week doing intensive coffee training, learning how to improve coffee production from seed to cup. (see picture of coffee cupping/tasting). Then we had one week back in our training community. We all had major ganas to be active so there were a lot of jogs, some ultimate Frisbee, and some slack lining of the river near our houses. Finally, we have spent the last week in our future communities. It has been pretty emotional and I am definitely coming out of the semi-oblivious, dream-like state that training has left me in. This week left me with 2 reflections: 1) I really have learned alot during the past 8 weeks, and I can hold my own in agricultural discus ions with people, even in Spanish. 2) That anything that my community implements or experiments with in regards to their agricultural production potentially has a huge impact on their lives. I had entertained this thought before, but I hadn´t really let the weight of it hit me. If I suggest something, ex, using organic herbicides, and it fails, and their crop suffers, that´s on me. It´s been easy to focus on why this experience has been awesome and difficult for me, and how it is going to change me, and how much I am going to learn. But really, that isn´t what is about. So, summary... I´m feeling insufficient, and it´s scary. And I´m wondering if its hubris that brings me here, thinking I can tell anything to these people who have been doing this type of agriculture for years. I know these are feelings that alot of new volunteers face. I´m looking forward to checking in with everyone and seeing how they are feeling too.

Anyway, it was a pretty amazing week. Really high highs and pretty startling lows. It´s beautiful there. My community is perched precariously on the ridge of a mountain, on one side it looks out to the Pacific on the other you see the spine of the mountain range that runs through Panama. The people farm on the mountain sides. The slopes are amazingly steep. My photos don´t do justice to the deepness of the vallies, but if one were to fall they´d be hard pressed to stop.

I bugged my host family to include me in their activies, during all of which I felt really silly. They laughed at me alot, which for the most part is the best type of interaction one can hope for for the first time with the Nobe people. They took me to plant corn on the mountain side. I did more slidding down than anything. The 21 year old daughter took me to plant otoe and look for firewood and taught me how to make the thread with which they use to make typical Nobe bags called Chacras. It´s amazing how fast people grow up out here. I am 2 years older than her and she already has 2 kids one at least 5 years old.

I am really excited. And very nervous. But I would definately put the experience of planting maiz with my host family on a dangerously sloped mountainside late in the afternoon as the mist is closing in, as one of my coolest expriences so far.

the comp is taking a really long time to upload fotos. might have to do it later.

Revelations and Yoga

2008-05-24T07:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Site Announcement

2008-05-14T15:19:00.000-07:00

What a day. It seems like itś been a really long time that weve all been waiting to get our placement announcement, I think we all got the ganas during our site visits... in the past trainees havent been told until later in training, but regardless today, when it all came down to waiting through the shiver giver peace corps video, then our regional directors multiple jokes about how nervous we all must be it seemed like forever. But we all have our sites, and people seem excited.

I am headed to a small town of 500 people in the Comarca Ngabe Bugle. I will be working primarily with growing beans, rice, maize and a little bit of coffee. Some business and marketing will be involved and maybe some work with an womens artisan group. I am really excited! Tomorrow we start to learn the language, which should be a welcome challenge!

Next week we head to culture week, in my case within the comarca then directly to training week (I think I will be attending coffee training.) So the rest of training is going to go fast.

Please forgive the bad grammar... I cant seem to figure out who to make an apostrophe on this machine.

One month in and all my clothes are stained...

2008-05-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

Actually, the whole clothes thing really doesn´t matter, but the four tshirts I brought are not doing the trick. A couple of us came into Panama city today to do some sight seeing and hit the abnoxiously large mall for some cheep clothes. I was successfull, so mom, don´t entrerpert this as a request for some of my clothes at home.

We are nearly halfway finished with our training... and it is going to go very fast. We are to spend 3 of the 6 weeks remaining out of our training community. On Wednesday I find out where my site will be for the coming 2 years. I am nervous to find out what I will be doing and where I will located. As of now I only know that I will be with an Indiginous community ( Ngabe Bugle). I went and visited a coffee volunteer last weekend in the Comarca. We stayed with his wonderfull family, (the beautiful children are in the included photo). We hiked alot, and I sweated more than I ever have before. But it is so beautiful that I didn´t mind. I think I got a pretty good snapshot of what being an agrobusiness coffee volunteer would be like. The Nobere people where very friendly, although a little more reserved than their latino counterparts. The site where I visited was beautiful, high in the mountains, much of which seems to remain unslashed and burned. The community was spred out and didn´t have anything resmebling a center.At first I was quite intimidated by the isolation, but after several days the 40 minute walk/hike seemed less significant. (although I can see the steep trails being more difficult in the rain season).

I am looking forward to getting started... all this training and theoretical information is getting old. At the same time, I hate to think about the 40 something volunteers being spred over the entire country. There will be some of us that will rately see eachother.

Well, I´ll post after I find out where I am going... I am finding that it is hard to sum up everything that is going on. I don´t really have the patience to do a play by play... lucky for you guys!

2008-04-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

I forgot to add these fotos.
My first morpho buterfly
The waterfall in our town where we go to swim and unwind. amazing!
Some fellow äspirantes¨cera to my house

End Week One

2008-04-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

Hola a todos!
So much has happened during the last week. Things are going well. I have been going to bed every night pretty early because I am so tired during the day ( I blame it on the humidity and heat. It has been sunny, no rain yet although they are supposed to start any day now. The temp averages about 85-90 every day with humidity of 95%. I never thought I would surive it but we are getting used to it.

In the mornings we have 4 hours of tech training. This week has been a large overview and we have had experienced volunterees come in every day and tell us about what they have been doing and the challanges they have faced. We´ve covered rice tanks, fish tanks, composting, home and school gardens, cacao and coffee and lots of other cool stuff. I am pretty sore from swinging the old machete around. no blisters yet.

In the afternoons we attend a language class (all classes take place in homes within the community. We usually sit outside on the terraza or in a ranchero (a open structure similiar to a car port but the roof is made of palm leafs.) Next week I will begin helping in the school which I am excited about because I dont have any kids at my host families home.

I really like my host family. My ¨mom¨calls me her daughter which is actually kind of funny since she isn´t that much older than me. She is a nurse at the local clinic and has a great sense of humor. I think she is dissapointed I dont want to gossip more about the guys in my group. I keep telling her we haven´t had much time for gossip or ¨bochinche¨to develope.

We are all getting pretty sick of the food already. They fry everything. Fried hotdogs are a breakfast staple. I haven´t had too much trouble with the gluten although I made some stupid decisions yesterday...

It is really beautiful here, it´s very green and there are fruits everywhere mangos, oranges, platanos, and lots of different stuff none of us are familiar with.

I think of you all very frequently and hope everything is going awesome. Libby, Alea, hang in there with the waiting process! So far I have to report that it is worth it!

Visit to Volunteer Site

2008-04-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

Hey Everyone!
What an amazing day! We got up early and piled into 3 Peace Corps Land Cruisers to drive 2 hours to a PCV who is working with a group of farmers who implement alot of sustainable Ag. projects. The drive was pretty much everything I have ever expected, from close calls with large buses with people hanging on the outside to bumpy curvy dirt paths. It is amazing to imagine that at one point all of the pasture lands, that resemble the foothills in SLC, were once covered in forest. The "Slash and Burn" technique has really devistated the landscape. It is a practice that many conservationists are trying to stop.

We spent most of the time walking around the farm looking at honey bees, worm composting, veggie gardens and chicken coop. We stopped frequently to taste fresh goat milk (right from the teat... ok, from a glass, but it was FRESH) and some strange fruit. I have never experienced textures like that before. Some were cottony and turned smooth in our mouths, and others came from inside a small hard shell and we like a fruit snack with a seed in the center. I tried it all, and suprisingly, my stomach feels fine!

One of the volunteer's projects is a rice patty. We took off our shoes, rolled up our pants and talked through the mudd and water, pushing last crop's stalks deep with our toes so that they don't grow and compete with the new seeds. We also helped her plant a couple rows , which she could have done faster without us... not the point.

Her host family made all 26 of us lunch. Cooked on a mud stove in an enormous pot, were four chickens, broth, potaoes and something purple. The stew was served with rice and Orange/pineapple juice. It was amazing.

When we got home we went to the pool to cool off. An interesting interaction with the lifeguard insued. He came over and told us that the girls who were wearing shorts and the boys who were wearing shorts with belt loops needed to remove themselves from the pool. A married couple were preparing to get in the pool, the woman wearing a suit and some femnine shorts and her husband wearing some quickdry REI zip off pants. He istructed the girl to remove her shorts and give them to her husband or they would not be allowed to enter the pool. The entire group lost it. It was hard not to with the mental image of Brandon wearing his wife's short turqoise running shorts.

We leave for our training site tomorrow morning. It should be interesting to see how we pass most of the day with our new host families. This may be the last time I can use the comp for a while!

Oh yeah. They took us all to my machetes today. Mine is 22 inches. I will leave you with the idea of me, wielding a 22 inch knife.

Pre-Training Retreat

2008-04-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

So here we are in Panama. 47 of us are currently staying within a compound outside of Panama City. On sunday we will go to live with our training host families. All of the Ag. and Conservation volunteers will be living in the same town while we complete our training.

There was a mix up regarding my project assignment. I arrived thinking I was with conservation, but turns out I was sent the wrong information and I should have been in the sustainable agriculture group. The director told me it was my decision to choose between the two different, albeit similar programs. It was a dificult decision to make. I spent about 24 hrs mulling it over and decided on the Agriculture postition because it is where I have the most experience and because the Ag sites are generally more rural, possibly indigenous.

We spend most of our days in an airconditioned building discusing safety and health, but that will all change on Monday when we offically begin to train.

I really like the training staff and other volunteers. Everyone seems possitive even though we are putting in pretty long days on a consistant basis. Yesterday we went to the pool for safety training. Our country director actually jumped in the pool with his clothes on to do a demonstration on how to make your pants into a flotation device. Most volunteers in other countries only meet their country director when they complete their service as a volunteer. It is pretty unusal to have a director who is so envolved.

The food is good. Rice and beans and meat and awesome fruit:water melon, papaya,pinapple, and some soggy veggies. I haven't felt so gluten free in months.

We have a great group of volunteers, including 5 married couples. Most of the volunteers are girls/women, probably about 60%. But everyone brings with them lots of different experiences. Lucky for me, there are many people who want to do animal husbandry, so hopefully the biggest thing that I have to kill is a chicken.

I fluctuate between being really excited and confident about the upcoming challanges and feeling a bit overwhelmed. I am going to have to take one day at a time I am sure.

This morning a group of us met outside our villa and did some Yoga, also known as feeding yourself to the mosquitos,. We figured it was time to get used to it. For those of you who know me a bugs will regognize this as a big step.

We started language today. It was all conversational, which makes sense since we will mostly be talking... but I have such a hard time saying the word correctly if I cant see it writen. We should have a better idea of the classes next week.

It's lunch time. Must go.

Finally....

2008-04-10T16:46:00.000-07:00

So here goes. Damn. I've been meaning to practice congugating verbs (yes, I am THAT much of a nerd) but everytime I get on the computer I find something else to do. Like the Facebook group that all the other PCVs have joined. While not usually drawn in to the gossip and photos of drunken rondevus (sound it out) so graciously posted by people I long ago should have forgotten, I have been spending quite a bit of time checking the page. Enough said. Obviously no verbs are happening while I try to remember how to spell french words in the English language.

Anyway, I have spent the last week scrambling around doing lots of things without doing anything. Like in my swimming dreams when I'm trying to get behind the block but keep getting distracted by the muffin vendor or fall asleep behind my block before my heat. I wish I didn't have those still. I got my hair chopped off. 8 inches. oops. no more pony tails. I handed out my pottery to those who had made orders before portland. I spent way to much time seeing if I can more effectively cram my underwear into my hiking boots in the name of space conservation. And I've gotten to spend some quality time with my fam. and friends (utah friends only...bummer, colo.) I've so enjoyed seeing those of you I could.

I will miss you all so much! Please keep me posted on all that you're doing. I will try to write frequently, but who knows if I will have access to a PC or internet, or if I will have time. One returned PCV described training as a "bitter piece of hell" and I've heard they keep you busy... After the last couple of months it should be a real nice change. So... If you don't hear from me don't worry! But I'll try!

One month and counting...

2008-03-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

So I'm a blogger now! My journalism professors would be so proud. And I can check my spelling, (doesn't mean I will).

I've been doing this whole Peace Corps thing for almost a year now, but during the last couple of days the fact that I am really going has become less surreal. Which is good. And scary. I don't know how many more times I can pack my bag, then unpack it because I need the clothes inside. I guess I really should just wait.

Anyway, this blog should provide me with the means to update family and friends at home.