Hallie Has An Adventure: 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.

*****************

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.

*****************

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

****************

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

******************

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