Hallie Has An Adventure: Pups and Crocs

There have many new happenings in my site these days, the most exciting being the addition of a compañera at my house. I finally was able to pick up my new puppy!

A little kid in town named her, and I liked it. She´s called Pelusa. It means something like ball of fluff. Now that I have some company at my house, people have finally stopped bugging me so much and worrying about me living on my own. And it´s great to have someone to play with when I´m bored at my house.

A forewarning: this blog will be particularly focused Pelusa, and quite shamelessly, because she is the cutest darn thing in the world, and you´d be crazy not to think so

This is Pelusa when I first got her and she was almost a month old. After a full belly of milk she would waddle around drunk and collapse into a deep sleep.

She was so tiny.

I believe most people have seen this picture already when it was circling around Facebook for a while. Thanks mom.

This at one of my favorite spots on my hike into site. There are lots of hills (and I´m ususally carrying lots of stuff), but vale la pena, it's worth it with these views.

I built a little dog house under my rancho for her so she would stop scratching and howling at my door all night. It took her awhile to just adjusted away from her mom, aka I didn't sleep for a week.

Me attempting a typical Panamanian dish- fried fish over boiled cassava.

These are some chickens from the garden and chicken project, all fat and ready to eat. These are the chickens of a former host family, and also the people who gave me my puppy.

So the family invited me over to eat, and I had the honor of killing the dinner for us that evening.

After cutting the throat you need to let all the blood drain out. It was delicious.

Oh yay, more Pelusa, sleeping in her favorite dirty bag.

Destroying all my shoes. I usually wake up in the morning with my shoes scattered all over my yard.

She's loves to play and is a big hit running around with the kids, probably because she's one of the few healthy happy fat animals here.

A random duck that now frequents my yard and eats my banana peels. It's a weird species with ugly red bumps all over it's face.

These are the epic leaf-cutter ants, carrying little bits of leaves on their backs, and that have absolutely destroyed all the orange and avocado trees in my yard. They eat all the leaves within a matter of days, and then the tree dries up and dies. There's usually a giant line of thousands of ants, and their force is unstoppable.

Sometimes (many times..) I'm really bored at my house, so I find things to occupy my time, like read, play with Pelusa, and make totumas..

How To Make a Totuma:

This is the fruit from a tree called calabazo. It looks and weighs about the size of a bowling ball. I found this on a hike one morning, and decided to spend the day making two bowls out of it.

The shell is thin, but super hard to cut through, especially with a really dull machete.

After cutting through the shell you need to scoop out all the fruit, but you can't eat it because it smells like shit.

The inside is clean and dry.

Then you can scrape off all of the green stuff on the outside or carve pictures into it. My hand was swollen and achy after all the hard scraping all day. I´m writing the name of my town, Nueva Esperanza.

After everything's done you have to boil the bowls and then dry them in the sun for a couple days. I have no idea why.

Playing around.

This is a common view in my community right now. At this point in the dry season everyone starts cutting down all the trees and burning them (slash and burn), in preparation for planting rice. All day the air is filled with smoke.

On the bright side, this was my first harvest of tomatoes, from a local Panamanian variety. I had beans growing as well, but a damn cow came into my yard and ate them all.

I was getting very sick of rice and beans everyday so Idecided to buy a chicken, kill it, defeather it, gut it, cut it, salt it, and dry it over smoke, all by myself! It was a very proud moment.

But first Pelusa wanted to play with dinner. Her favorite pastime is chasing chickens.

The good thing about having a dog is that it's so much easier to get rid of chicken heads and feet and all the other parts I can't stomach eating.

If you look closely you´ll see that Pelusa has one ear a lot shorter than the rest and kind of sticks up.

Another tomato variety growing. Lots of people have harvested veggies already and are on their next planting.

What a cutie.

Another new development in my site is a coffee projected I've started doing. I'm working with an outside agency to get new coffee seeds and provide tools and other technical assistance. All the farms here are so old and unproductive that we need to start planting new ones. I've also recently starting helping people prune their coffee trees that they already have, in an attempt to revive something out of them. It's all been keeping me fairly busy, which is always a good thing.

These are the coffee seeds in their seed beds germinating.

The next step is to put them into baggies and make a tree nursery, where they'll stay for 6 months before planting them in their farms.

Because I've been working a lot with coffee management and stuff, another volunteer here asked me to come visit her and give an informative talk about coffee to her community members who are interested in planting coffee. Or maybe it was an excuse to run around and see Panama and call it a work-related travel, either way...

This volunteer lives in an indigenous community, called the Embera, who live on the other side of the country from me, more towards Colombia. It was very remote and beautiful and I was stoked to see a non-latino site.

This is Kelly, the volunteer whom I visited. We rode in this dug-out canoe for about an 1.5 hrs to get to her community. The boat is quite old and has lots of holes in it, so to prevent us from sinking we all had buckets on hand to bail out the water as it flowed in.

A big part of their livelihood in this area is fishing because they're right on the lake. This guy is selling tilapia.

Me on the boat with an umbrella to protect myself from the sun. Like a stroll through Venice...

This is Kelly's hut. All the Embera have their houses raised, in case the river floods in the rainy season.

This is the roof to her hut, which I thought was pretty. Apparently she has a big problem with snakes and bats and scorpions living up there. And at least I don't have tarantulas in my shower.

This is me giving my talk about how to start working with coffee. About a dozen people showed up, which is a really good turnout, and everyone seemed interested and were asking lots of questions.

The wrap-around skirt I'm wearing is called a paruma, and is what all the women here wear. The more tradicional Embera women don't wear tops at all, or sometimes have many strings of necklaces across their chests. On special occasions the men wear loin clothes and paint themselves with the juice of some kind of fruit. It's not a permanent tattoo (kind of like henna) and is supposed to be a mosquito repellent as well.

I think the reason we had so many people show up is because Kelly bought all the food to feed everyone lunch.

Everyone lunching away.

Enjoying delicious chicken/protein.

Later that day we went and visited around the community to get to know everyone. At one house, a guy wanted to show me more about their lives there, so he invited us to go alligator hunting that night. How could I turn him down. I said lets do it!

When it was dark out about 6 of us went into a tiny little canoe and paddled through the river. It was cramped and I couldn't imagine how an alligator was every going to fit in their with us. We all had our flashlights out, skimming the surface water, looking for the shine of the alligator's eyes in order to spot them. We slowly went through forests of water hibiscus, the men occasionally reaching in the water and pulling out shrimp, and the fish occasionally jumping in the air and smacking me in the face, scaring the shit out of me.

When some gator eyes were spotted we made our slow approach to it in the canoe. The man in front stepped onto the front of the canoe with remarkable balance, and grabbed his harpoon in a warrior-ready pose, waiting for the strike. Up until this point I thought harpoons were only for whalers in the late 1800's, but this works too. He made his attack various times with various gators, missing all of them because they were small and fast. One time we caught a baby one, but they don't have enough meat so we threw them back in the water, waiting for the big guiys, which eventually came. He struck it with the harpoon in the shoulder, and dragged the gator up to the surface to check it out. It thrashed and swung against the boat, and he swung it in my direction to try and scare me, which may or may not have worked. When it was still and close to the canoe, he pulled out a rifle and shot it in the head twice, and lugged it on board.

With our prize in hand we paddled back to the dock, slowly going along the rivers edge where the jungle meets the river, flashing our lights in the trees above to try and find snakes, which I found to be numerous. They were huge, maybe 7-8 ft, nestled in the branches above us, some with swollen bellies of a recently eaten rat. It was obvious these people wanted to give their special guest something to talk about later, which worked.