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.