The days run slower here, mainly because of the heat and culture in general, and it’s been difficult adjusting to no exact-time-consuming-schedule everyday like I had during training. My relative schedule these first few months is mainly learning and adjusting to the lifestyle with various random activities in the community. And by this I mean adjusting to things like itching fits in the middle of the night from chigger bites, and forming new habits like shaking out my clothes and shoes before I put them on to avoid such man-eating creatures such as scorpions, spiders, and cockroaches. I’ve even had to hide my flip-flops on multiple occasions from the family parrot, Rey (meaning King in English). He can’t fly, but somehow always manages to sneak into my room looking to nosh on my shoes. I’ve started washing my clothes in the river, which I’ve to be a surprisingly relaxing activity. That is until my host mom starts smacking my jeans as hard as she can on a rock. This apparently helps get the all the mud out (because there is a lot of mud here). My clothes have already been through the works, with holes, permanent mud stains, and the occasional mold. And yet all the Panamanians here have perfectly clean white clothes. I don’t know how they do it!
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| Rey, the little rascal |
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| We don't get along. He's tries to bite me at every opportunity. |
I’ve been visiting all the houses and farms, talking about what kind of work I’d like to be involved with, and everyone seems really interested, but unmotivated to actually do anything. I’m thinking maybe they were just smiling and nodding to be nice, but don’t really care about what I’m saying or don’t fully understand what I'm talking about. So one day I decided to be more aggressive and said to my host family that today we’re going to make a compost pile because it’s a simple and cost-free thing to get started with, and they went with it. So far it looks great, and whenever anyone comes over to visit the house I take them out back and show them what we did, explain how it worked, what you can use it or etc. Now after seeing one person with compost, everyone wants one, so my plan worked, because everyone wants what someone else has. Now I’m filling my schedule up with visits to different houses make composts. In the meantime, I’m trying to track down seeds to start up some gardens with all the rich soil we’re making. Seeds are hard to come by here; even the ones they sell in the store tend to be old and crappy.
I’ve also been playing a lot of baseball with all the kids. I showed all them up with my mad skills, telling them that yes, girls can play sports too. One day I went to a community a few hours away where there was a decent baseball field (aka it was flat and free of barbed wire) and saw the Panamanian version of a baseball tournament. They was a lot of drinking going on with the men, and the tourney ended early because fighting broke out and someone got stabbed. I was far away from it all, and got the hell out of there after it happened. I’ve learned this is fairly normal. An unfortunate aspect of the culture here is that drinking is strongly encouraged and pressured on the men, and there are never good results.
On a happier note, I’ve begun to teach English classes at the school two days a week. My first few classes were mainly teaching them the alphabet. Of course the kids were timid and didn’t want to repeat the letters out loud in front of me or the other students. It’s also just the culture of the education system here. There’s no active participation from the students. They are taught that there are right answers and there are wrong answers and no more. The teacher writes something on the board and the students copy it, with no further elaboration, critical thinking or responses. This aspect made it difficult to get the kids to talk, but soon enough I started singing the alphabet song like a crazy fool, and they giggled and eventually chimed in with me. I’m trying to make class semi-interesting and fun, not just another lesson in copying what I write on the blackboard. Teaching isn’t easy; I’m learning to have more patience.
And I have doing some construction work (dad you’d be proud) at a church that is slowly but surely being built. The guys laugh and give me strange looks, wondering why I would want to do physical labor, because all the women are off to the side making lunch for them. This whole I’m-an-independent-woman-this-is-normal thing is foreign to them, but I realize I’m already pretty weird in their eyes, so what the hell, let’s go machete something! I figure I’m just breaking down some gender roles- I can play sports, I can work construction, I can do labor in the farms. And plus I’m burning off at least some of the massive amounts of rice that been clogging the interior recesses of my soul.
Speaking of eating, for a while here all I talked about with my host family was how good vegetables and salads were, because it’s something I very much miss. So one day host brother brings back cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers, and I couldn’t be more excited. So for dinner that night my host mom says she’ll make a salad to go with the other usual food. Come dinner time, my host mom holds the cabbage up to me with raised eyebrows and asks “what’s a salad?” So lately I’ve been teaching my host mom how to make a salad with an easy dressing and how to incorporate vegetables into the meals that they’re already cooking, like with soup and chicken. But veggies are expensive for them and only found far away in the city, which is why I’m hoping now they’ll be more interested in starting up a home garden with me.
And as I’ve been sharing the concept of vegetables with the my carnivorous friends, I’ve also been broadening the horizons of my former vegetarian self with meat, and mainly through the obligation to eat whatever is put on the plate in front of me. One night for dinner I had a lovely coconut-iguana stew served over rice. The meat was a little slimly, and the skin a little chewy, but if I closed my eyes and went to a happy place it didn’t taste half bad. Later that week though, a very nice man brought us a freshly caught baby sea turtle, so my host mom smoked it right up and we had it for dinner. Tasted like chicken. However, my body seemed to know the decadence I was ingesting was that of endangered animals, and responded its disgust in the form of violent diarrhea. But I’m ok now. I think they mentioned rabbit being next on the list of meats I should try..
