Around the Casa

I don't have time for a real blog post right now, but I thought a few tasteful pictures from around the house would keep things interesting:

This is me at my friend's house.  And if you're wondering, that is a cow head next to me.

This is me lifting up that very heavy cow head.  Some lucky neighbor took it home for the bargain price of $2. 

These are crazy spider-like things that aren't quite spiders.  They're pretty skittish and harmless.

I harvested some ripe cacao fruit, dried the seeds in the sun for a few days, roasted them over a fire (pictured) and later ground them up and was ready to make delicious hot chocolate!

A harvest of bananas from my backyard.  It was incredibly heavy, and after about a week of overdosing of potassium I never wanted to eat a banana, green or ripe, ever again.

An armadillo in my yard digging for delicious worms in the soil

My favorite pic of Kelly and I hanging out at her house.  She 3 yrs old and now knows how to  say "mother" and "I want food" in English

Battle and Love

Recently, after one air-conditioned night in Panama City, skyping with the padres and vividly retelling my tales of the campo designed to terrify their cushy life of electricity and running water, I got to thinking about something.  I realized that all the pictures and writings on this blog are kind of fun and happy and about my work.  But that's not always my experience in Panama, in fact that's not even half of it.  Where are the nitty gritty battles of survival that my camera fails to capture? Because life within the jungle elements is indeed a battle.  And so, I will work to remember and record those little moments during the day where I stop and realize that those particular moments, as normal and every-day as they seem to me now, would not be considered normal in the Illinois suburbs.

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So who likes tarantulas?  I don't like tarantulas.  They're hairy for god's sake.  Generally, I have some house rules that I've formed in regard to spiders.  If you [the spider] are less than the size of my fist, you are free to roam around my house and help me defeat the smaller not-dangerous-but-still-quite-annoying bugs that fly, crawl, or worm inside my room.  However, if you are fist-size or bigger, you will leave immediately or face my machete.

I have another rule: never go to the latrine at night.  Nighttime is when big venomous things come out and hunt.  I will gladly pee on the side of my house instead of wandering over there.  But sometimes you just can't help it if that chicha your neighbor gave you earlier that day was made with some shady looking water (and were those ants in there??), and the moment to poop arrives with urgency.

This situation was realized one evening as I reluctantly ran to the latrine with only the weak light from my cell phone to guide me.  And lo and behold there's a tarantula in there, right next to the toilet seat.  I almost stepped on it because I could barely see.  I terrifyingly did my business as I kept my cell phone light on him to track his whereabouts, and then I scurried out of there.  Usually I would've have grabbed my machete and faced him man to man for breaking my rule of being larger than my fist and within my territory, but I broke my rule of going to the latrine at night, so I called it a draw.

The next day however, during the daylight, I went inside my latrine and there he was again, chilling in the corner.  I gave him a chance last night and he blew it, so I returned with my 22-inch machete.  But when I got back, there was another one.  They must have been there for a while then, slowly multiplying and planning their attack.  Let's just say I took care of the situation, and it was really gross, and there was maybe some swearing.  Since then I've had various others pop out at inopportune moments, and am still working to control the sudden tarantula population in my latrine.  What are they even doing in there?  It sounds like a terrible place to live.


And now everyone has a lovely image of what I'm doing every morning.  And speaking of terrible things in the morning, one morning specifically, something very painful happened.  Beware the picture below:

Oh my god isn't that gross?  As it goes, I was simply opening my door one morning, a door that doesn't touch all the way to the ground.  I opened it up quite fast, and the door happened to catch on the toenail of my big toe and rip it off like one would a band-aid, except more painfully.  It was actually still attached at the base, but after a while I managed to work off the rest.  It was a nuisance with a nail painfully sticking upwards.  Isn't that lovely.

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I think it's best now that I move on to something more happy, like when I saw a three-toed sloth in my backyard!

The furry little guy later stretched out on the branch, hanging by his feet, to dry in the sun after a hard rain

This is Mama Nilsa, my favorite host mom, trying to weave a bracelet.  I've started teaching a lot of the women and children in my community how to weave different types of bracelets and to make jewelry from magazine pages

A team of kids from the school along with the teachers and I went to the Mini Olympics to compete with teams from all the other neighboring towns.

We had to team up with another community because we didn't have enough kids to make up one team

I was invited to go to a "Day of Producers", sponsored by one the local agencies I work with, to celebrate all the local producers and all the hard work they do in agriculture.  It was held on a huge self-sustainable farm in Colon

This was still at the event.  They called this thing a buffalo, and made me get on top of it for a photo op

The view of Lago Gatun from the farm

Cute kid pretending to ride a horse

Later that same week I visited a friend volunteer in Veraguas to help her facilitate a seminar for the youth in her community.  We gave talks on topics like self-esteem, goal-setting, values, finding your strengths, etc.  They don't get this kind of education in the schools and rarely at home, so many volunteers try to bring these ideas into the rural areas.

This is my friend's house.  It's made of mud, cow poop, and hay.

She lives up in the mountains and the view from her house was incredible

In the schoolroom, where the kids are talking notes on our lectures

That's me giving a talk about values

And of course I taught them all how to weave bracelets, my new favorite hobby

This picture is actually at the school in my community, during an English class.  We were learning vocab for parts of the body, so I gave everyone a post-it with the name of a body part in English and they had to run up and stick it onto the corresponding part of this boy

The kids at the Evangelical church did a little biblical drama for us.  It was cute.  The tall girl there is Jesus.

The group of little actors and their director

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As far as the fish tank is going, it's almost done!  There's just a little part left to dig up, and once we can get the tubes and baby fish we'll be set.  Ugh, we've worked hard on it.

That's me in front, sweating profusely.  It was way too hot that day.  The whole time I kept thinking that if we had a tractor this work could be done in only a few hours.

Some of the junta workers inside the almost ready tank

I also invited a fellow volunteer who is the coordinator for fish and rice tanks within Panama Peace Corps to give a talk to other interested people in my site.  Now that my one and only fish tank is almost completed, people are seeing the results of what is possible, and are now more interested in doing the work.

My friend Emilio giving his fish tank talk at my house.  Sorry, no Power Point here

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And now for my favorite pictures, Andrew's awesome visit to Panama!

We went to the Miraflores locks to see the canal, but sadly there weren't any boats passing through, but that's ok.  To get to my community you have to pass over a tiny bridge that goes in front of a different set of locks, so he'd see it in action soon enough.

Checking out the view of the locks

We walked along the Pacific ocean

Strolling through Panama City

The Meat House! Right up my alley (no seriously, I will never go back to being vegetarian..)

Me up in the Comarca Kuna Yala.  It's a huge section of Panama where a group of indigenous  people called the Kuna Yala live.  We were on our way from the Pacific coast up to the Caribbean coast to check out some islands, and we stopped for a photo.  The road there was very windy and hilly and we all got pretty motion sick

Over an hour on a boat took us to where we would stay, called Isla Diablo (Devil Island).  Out in the water near that island in front there was a large sunken ship that we could snorkel around.

It was very pretty there.

Andrew running around and exploring as the sun went down.  At night we were able to see some bioluminescent algae light up in the water 

There were hundreds of tiny little islands out there

These were the type of huts we stayed in, made out of coconut leaves and sticks.   There was only an air-mattress on the sand floor inside and the sea was our shower.

This is one of the women of the Kuna Yala who live on this island, dressed in her brightly colored traditional clothing, the picture taken from the door of our hut

At one point we encountered a gecko attack.  This little guy crawled into the bun of my hair and had a really hard time getting back out again.. 

Andrew in front of Lake Gatun, on a stop in our travels to get to my community.  Later we ate delicious roast chicken and fried plantains.

In the same town.  Why so many shoes hanging up there?

A view of my community on our hike down there

Looking good for our last night out in Panama City

La Vida

I've been more observant of my surroundings as of late- flowers, sunsets, roads, and all the corny colors and pretty little things I had unintentionally ignored before.  Earlier my life was all the stress of adjustment, language and technical learning, trying to do good work (or even get people to do work with me).  Now that things have settled and I've finally found a relatively content and productive place inside my community, I've had the time to take a good look around, with fresh confident eyes.  Why did it take a year to accomplish that?  I don't know, but that's probably why Peace Corps is two years long.  They say the second year is the productive one, and I fully believe that.  Which is probably why I haven't written a blog in a couple months.  I've been busy.  Crazy concept.

This is one of the flowers that sprouted up in my yard overnight.  Once the rains come, everything grows  like weeds.

This flower's called a "gentleman"

This is an otoe leaf, covered in morning dew.  It's a purple root vegetable common in soups, but I think it tastes like shit. But the leaf made for a pretty picture.

This is the sunset as seen from my house.

Part of the road leading into my community.  Either it's dry enough that cars can get in or it's mud half way up your knees.  That day was dry.

The kids in the school, drawing on the board before class started.  There's a really bad bat infestation.  Every morning the kids have to sweep a layer of guano off the floors and desks.

This is the school garden we started up.  This photo is a bit old. We've already harvested all the cucumbers, made lots of salads for the kids, and right now the tomatoes are starting to ripen.

The one on the right immediately starts crying when she sees me.

A couple of the moms making food for the school kids.

Playing softball in the only flat part of town.  I played in a baseball league for a while.  We invited 4 other communities over every Sunday to have a tournaments, made lots of food to sell, and had a great time.  I got to wear a shirt that said "Nueva Esperanza", and we ended up winning the whole thing!

This is the team, minus me (no one else can work a camera).  Our coach is all the way to the left.  All of the guys except one are his sons, that the other is his nephew.  Somehow they all seem to be in their 20's and can dominate any sport.  After the softball games ended they started up a soccer league, but I decided to sit that one out.

Remember the other pictures of burnt ground?  Well now there's rice growing there.  Again this picture is old, and people are busy right now starting to harvest the first of the "arroz nuevo".  When it's fresh they toast it over a fire while it's still in it's husks and then everything smells like peanut butter.

Coffee update:

For the most part my coffee group and I are just doing a ton of manual labor, preparing the farms for when we will eventually transplant the coffee trees from the nurseries.  We will have at least 1,000 trees to transplant for each producer in the project, and there are 8 producers.  This means a lot of work in all their farms, involving machete-ing down all the weeds and most trees, marking down with stacks where we will transplant the trees, and planting at least 500 plantain and banana trees throughout this area.  The reason we're planting the plantains/bananas right now is because with coffee farms shade management is very important.  If there's no shade (or too much shade) the coffee will suffer and die.  If we plant the bananas trees now, by the time we transplant the coffee the banana plants will be big and there will already be some shade.  And we don't want just any old trees to give shade, we want plants that have other functions as well that will help the farmer: bananas and plantains are an extra source of food and potential income.  That's why we are also starting to plant citrus and lumber trees in the farm.

In addition to this work, we are doing fundraisers every month or so to make us some money for the business/cooperative they eventually want to start.  We do things like raffles, the prizes being things like a gallon of oil (very popular prize apparently).  Most recently we spent a day making tamales to sell within the community.  It was a huge success (pictures and stories are further down).

One of the better-kept coffee tree nurseries.

Fungi are really common with all the rain, so the leaves occasionally gets black rotten spots and we are constantly spraying them with organic fungicides.  But the ones pictured look really healthy.

Measuring out where we will transplant each coffee tree and where the plantain and bananas trees will go.

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The Adventist church, featuring the local pastor (and our softball coach).

This is the Japanese Fish market in Panama City.  It was featured on Anthony Bourdain's show a while back.  Good ceviche, but the place smells terrible.

These are some of the fishing boats hanging out next to the market.

As I slowly get to know Panama City I've been checking out some artisan markets.

They have really beautiful handmade things from many indigenous tribes.

These crazy guys are always crawling all over my porch.  Their spikes can be dangerous.  When you scare them you can see a clear-yellow venom start seeping out of the spikes.

If I'm ever in my house chances are I have tons of school children running around my porch.

I always have a white board hanging on my wall and the kids like to show off their English skills or will demand impromptu classes.

Right now there's lots of pifa ready for harvesting.  It's the most amazing food ever.   You need to boil it for like an hour and a half and put a lil salt on it and it kinda tastes like a nut.  But its a challenge to harvest.  It grows really high up on a palm-like tree, but the entire trunk is covered in sharp 5 inch spines.

Panamanians' favorite food: pifa con cafe

Speaking of food, here are the tamale pictures.  I never realized it would involve so much to freaking time to make tamales.  But it makes sense, because every ingredient was made from scratch, within the community, and that takes a long time.  For instance, growing, harvesting and processing the corn, or killing/defeathering/cutting nine chickens after months of raising and fattening them.  About a dozen of us were working by 7am and we didn't leave until 7pm.  But we made a bunch of money, because tamales around here are a treat.  It takes too much work to make so when they do come around everyone snatches them up.

Little by little grinding up 25 pounds of corn.

Chicken, guts, and head.  Do this 8 more times.

Preparing all the chicken pieces from scratch was probably the longest part of all.

Mixing into the corn a blend of  red achiote seeds (for coloring), various spices (garlic, cilantro, onions, etc)  and oil 

And us grinding it all up by hand.  As I said before, no one else can work my camera.  It took 10 minutes and 5 Panamanians to get this one photo.

We collected lots of banana leaves and starting making the tamales: the corn mixture followed by a piece of cooked chicken and more onion and spices and wrapped up in more corn mixture.

Then we had a station of guys wrapping up the finished product with string made from dried out banana trunks. 

They had to boil for maybe half an hour.

Making more.

Ready and waiting to go over the fire.  In total we made almost 150 tamales.

Ready to eat after an exhausting day.

Lots of bamboo grows around here.

Annabel and I.  When I wanted to take a picture she freaked out and ran to her room to change her clothes into something that said "I love Hanna Montana" and gathered a bunch of flowers for us to pose with.  It was her birthday, just turning 16, and she's like my best friend in site.

Kelly, the cutest most sassy girl ever.  

My one and only fish tank project is slow, but going.  Everyone else decided they didn't want to do any work except for one determined dude who is eager to do any of the projects that I suggest.  The biggest job with the tank right now is making the hole in the ground.  We've had two juntas so far, which involve a few of us getting together and working, and the host provides lunch and dinner and chicha fuerte, an alcoholic fermented corn drink.  It's a lot cheaper to provide food to the workers instead of paying them all for a days work.

A fish tank is way more complicated than just digging a big hole in the ground, but you gotta start somewhere.

Working at the junta.  If only we had a tractor.  I couldn't move my body the next day.  And the chicha fuerte did something ugly to my digestive system for the next week.  Note to self: never drink homemade alcohol.

The fish tank will be connected to this rice tank through a PVC pipe, the idea being that the fish poop and such will fertilize the rice.  As you can see, the rice tank isn't functioning properly, it's not even all underwater.

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I visited my friend  Ruby's site for couple days.  She's in Colon as well, but I had to take a boat to get there.  Unfortunately it started pouring rain and we and all the cargo were all bent and huddled under this plastic for the next 2 uncomfortable hours.

I'm weaving a bracelet with string.  Anytime I go to Ruby's we end up doing arts and crafts with the kids in her site.  I recently went crazy shopping for string and beads and other things to start making jewelry with the kids and women in my site.  I always work with all the men in the fields, because they are the only ones that do agriculture work.  So now I want to start something more with the women, something besides helping them cook dinner.

I rented a horse to get back to my site, but this horse really sucked.  Look at my feet: if my legs were stretched out they'd practically be touching the ground...  Long story short I ended up walking instead, with the horse behind me, carrying my baggage.  But all I had were my flip-flops, and the road got really muddy really fast, so I was forced to go barefoot.  Again the road was worse than I expected, and more than once I fell in the mud up past my knee, so the journey took like 5 and a half hours.  It was utterly exhausting.