The Tiger House

"Hallie, where do you live now?"
"Who me? I live at the Tiger House."

That is the official name of my house, as known throughout my community, for lack of an actual numerical address.  Why? Because once upon a time a little girl painted a big tiger on it.  But more importantly, this means that yes, I am at last living on my own, in my own house!  As much as I enjoyed living with my host family,  it was time to move on.  No more living with 12 people, 50+ chickens, 32 cows, 12 horses, 10 ducks, 8 pigs, 4 dogs, and 3 cats.  No these figures are not exaggerated, it gets a little loud at over there.  Now, I am able to chill on my hammock in the morning with a cup of coffee, listen to the creek and birds, and get some privacy.

This is the aforementioned tiger, well half of a tiger.  People ask me all the time if I'm scared living alone, because they say the witches will come and get me at night.  I say it's cool, I have a tiger to scare all the witches away.

This is me, every morning, chilling in my amazing hammock.

I have lots of frogs that hang out with me.  Also cockroaches, spiders, termites, rats, and bats.  So you see, I'm really not alone in my house.

This is the front view.  I feel like it's my rustic summer log cabin that I come to for relaxation.  It's very tranquilo.

The first night at my house my solar panel lights weren't working, so I spent the night watching the full moon.  It's incredible how bright it gets.  I was almost able to read under it.

The view from the house looking out at my yard.  This picture is kinda old.  I recently had people over to machete my lawn, and in return I killed a chicken and made a soup to feed them.

A tree in my yard.  They use these leaves to make the roofs of some of the houses.

More views.  I'm lucky to have a cement floor, it's one of like 3 houses here that have them.

My room, kind of messy at the moment.  I have an extra bed for when people come visit me.

I don't have the entire house to myself.  The room all the way to the left is filled with the landlords junk, and the other doors are to my room and kitchen.

This is inside my kitchen.  I have a another sweet painting to look at as I cook.   I recently put a horn on the horse to make it a unicorn, kinda giving the house my own little touch.  And just maybe one day I'll paint more random junk on my walls.

This is the other side of the house.

I have a cacao tree.  When it fruits I'm going to try to make chocolate from the seeds.

A little creek runs right next to the house, wonderful to sleep to.

More of the yard.  The casita pictured there is where the previous tenants would cook over a fire.

This is where I wash my clothes and bathe.

I have some banana trees.

This is the casita that's obviously falling apart.  People haven't lived at this house for a long time.  I've cleaned all that junk up since this picture.

Some plantains.

My kitchen again.

An awesomly furry flower in my yard.

This is culantro, in the same family as cilantro, and tastes exactly the same.  It grows like weeds around here and everyone uses it in their cooking.

Coffee (the seeds still in their cherry) is drying out on big tarps.  They used to be bright red, and after drying for days they've turned blackish.

This is the pregnant dog of one of my former host families.  I told them I'm taking of the puppies when they come, because everyone knows I need a compañero at the house.

Some houses dotted in the landscape.

The kids are finally not terribly afraid of me.  And most of them finally learned my name, no longer yelling and pointing, "Gringa! Gringa!"

A little chick hanging around on my arm.

One of the gardens I'm helping with.  Pictured are cucumbers growing.  Right now the sun is so intense because of the dry season that a lot of the plants are drying up and dying.

This is the technician that I'm working with.  He's looking at some tomato plants.  He doesn't like his face in pictures because, like many Panamanians, he believes in witchery, and tells me that a long time ago a witch put a curse on a photo of him, which brought him terribly bad luck.

One family here has a squirrel tied with a string for a pet.

More beautiful gardens.

We have gotten lots of harvests of cucumbers already because they grow so fast.

So remember the pregnant dog in the other picture?  This is her litter, only 3 days old in this picture.  They found a little cave-like place to hang out for the meantime (until I steal one).

The little pups rolling around.

The mom with her pups.

I've finally gotten some people to continually take their food scraps, cow/chicken/horse manure, leaves, grass, ash from their fogóns , etc and put it into big piles to make compost.  But most importantly, they're starting to do it on their own now, without waiting for me to come and help them.

The technician and one of the farmers in the garden.

Some chickens from the project as well.

Some sweet girls I was visiting.

Some beautifully growing tomato plants I planted in an old wheelbarrow at my house.  I later planted some garlic around them, to hopefully serve as a repellent and keep the bugs from eating up my plants.

Back to my house, after I had people over to machete my lawn.  Now there's just a bunch of dry grass everywhere.  Also that structure over there contains the large hole I poop in.

More of my yard and hut.

This is my fogón, which I made a big soup over.  I recently had a lot of fun destroying it.  I'm going to use the lumber to build something else.  Besides, I bought a gas stove- it saves the lungs.

This is my worm box, from which I'll eventually share with my neighbors once I have enough worms so we can all make rich rich fertilizer.  They're multiplying very quickly, and I'm going to have build a bigger box soon.

One day on my hammock I saw my neighbor pass by with a cow's head sticking out of a sack.  He said it was our lucky day, someone killed a cow and was selling off the parts.  Red meat isn't very common to eat around here.  If people have cattle, it's usually to sell in the city to get the cash instead because it makes good money.  Here it was smoked and dried and sold off to whoever came by.

These are a variety of green beans, pretty much ready to harvest.

Some healthy squash.

One example of a chicken coop.

A cluster of houses in one area.  All of them are extensions from the same family.  A long time ago I lived at one of the houses here for one month.

The Adventist church.

One family that wasn't part of the garden and chicken project still wanted to raise chickens but lacked all the fancy food and water dispensers that were given away, so she was clever and cut up some bamboo to make a food dish.

One of many crazy bridges in these parts.

One of the families involved in the garden project.

Taking care of their chicks...

...and cats.

From Bubble to Bubble

I've just returned from a lovely trip to see all my loved ones in Chicago, and I will talk more about that in a bit.  First, I wanted to give everyone a quick update about what I've been doing in my community for the past month or so.

Right now I've been taking a hold on doing the fish tanks because 1) People don't want to dig holes or do any kind of work that I suggest, 2) Technicians don't want to return my calls, and 3) Agencies are just too slow and unreliable in providing tools and PVC pipes.

So right now my efforts are focused in developing home gardens and nutritional knowledge.  I'm coordinating with a project developed by the First Lady of Panama, given to the poorest areas in Panama (aka my community).  The project gives away various work tools (axes, hoes, shovels, machetes fertilizer pumps, etc), vegetable seeds (a rare commodity here), chicken fencing, actual chicks, and so on.  The main goal is to promote family nutrition through the building of vegetable gardens, and also chicken houses for protein.  A technician working with the project comes in once a week to visit all the participating families to explain how to start up garden beds and chicken houses and give technical advice to any problems they've encountered along the way.  If after 3 months a family isn't doing any work with the seeds or tools then the technician has the right to take it all away and give it to another family.  So there are certain regulations with these hand-outs.

Lucky for this technician there's a Peace Corps volunteer working in the same community doing essentially the same thing that he's doing (minus the hand-outs).  So the technician and I teamed up, a synergistic way to strengthen both our projects.  I'm in the community most of the time (not just once a week), so I'm available to troubleshoot any problems and make sure stuff gets done, therefore helping his projects succeed.  And since I lack the monetary means to provide any kind of physical assets, I can use the technician's resources to help me with my garden projects by providing seeds and tools.  It's a win-win situation.  He has even taken me under his wing a bit, laying on all his advice on how to work successfully in such a difficult environment and with such a different kind of people.  He's had 20 years experience in this kind of work, and realizes the sacrifice and commitment and patience necessary to get something done without going crazy.  It's all been very helpful and motivating, and I'm finely starting to feel productive.

As part of our integrated projects, I'm taking the reins on teaching about organic fertilizers and organic insecticides.  Fertilizers are extremely important in the very malnourished, red and acidic, clay-based soil that exists in these parts.  And the organic part is important too, finding a way to increase soil fertility using things they can find in their home or in the jungle.  And speaking from a strictly economic point of view, they simply don't have the money to buy chemical fertilizers.

After coming back from a training event I was given a little box of red California worms to start up some rich worm composting.  I arrived at my host family's house and completely out of context yelled, "Hey everyone, I got worms!"

My host mom looked worried and replied, "Dios mio you have parasites!?  Are you taking any medicine for it?"

Realizing what I had said, I explained, "Noooo, I don't have worms in my stomach.  They're here in this box, for making compost!"  Only in Panama would this kind of mix-up occur..


Right before I left for my holiday to Chicago, I gave a charla, or a talk, about organic insecticides, using their local resources.  Not too many people showed up and we started 2 hours late, because culturally that's just the way they are here.  But, at least I know the ones that did come were there to learn, notebooks in hand and lots of questions all around.  At the end we all helped prepare and cook an insecticide that they could take home with them in bottles.

This is me eating some breakfast before the big charla.

To start out the talk, I divided everyone into groups and gave them questions to work on, and then we discussed the answers  in front of everyone.  It was a good base to get an idea about how much everyone already knew about managing insects, what insecticides do, and what local plants/materials can be utilized.  These kind of talks are meant to be informal and are really supposed to get people talking and sharing.  I've found that there's a lot of local knowledge floating around, but no one wants to share their experiences or ideas.

Some of the ingredients included a couple pounds of garlic and onion, so everyone helped chop them up.

The papers from which I gave my talk (power point wasn't really an option).  I talked about the functions of different ingredients and local plants, as well as cheap and easy recipes.  At one point I explained how to use cow pee as a repellent and fertilizer, which got a big reaction from everyone, mainly laughs. They asked me, "Are we supposed to follow around a cow all day with a bucket?"

More prepping for our insecticide.  It smelled great.

We used the school kitchen to cook everything up over a fire.

The main ingredient is a plant called Balo.  It's leaves have a bit of cyanide in them, and so it's good at killing insects even in low concentrations.  It also has the added benefit of being a nitrogen-fixing plant, therefore doubling as a source of nitrogen fertilizer.  Cooking the leaves gets all the good juices out.  Later we discarded the leaves and added the garlic, onion, and a bottle of hot sauce to the juice.

Everyone reviewing the charla papers and talking about different recipes they can try.

A few days after my talk, I headed up to the big cold northern lands known as Chicago.  I've gotten so used to tropical weather down here that sometimes at night I'd be freezing.  How was I ever going to survive up there?  I was also pretty sick for a while before leaving, so much so that I went deaf in my right ear for a couple days because it was so infected.  I got drugged up right before leaving, but was in no mood for flying.

Also, honestly, I was nervous.  I've been living in my Panamanian bubble for so long that I grew accustomed to the craziness of my life.  The language, the culture, everything.  It became my world, a bubble in another part of my brain, where pig slaughters and riding horses and no electricity were normal things, just my life.  And now I was about jump into my other bubble, the world that I've known for most of my life and yet seemed to exist in a completely different reality.  I had to switch my mind to English mode.

I may have felt foreign arriving, but I immediately fell into this world again- munching on delicious foods, taking hot showers, and wearing nice warm clean clothes...I felt a lot better.  I had plenty of veggies and protein in my belly, and my clothes weren't covered in mud.  This was certainly a step up.

Andrew and I at Holiday Magic at the Brookfield Zoo. 

Looking at the dolphins in the underwater viewing area.

Matt and Grandma Kluge at her nursing home.

Mom and her mom.

Cheryl, Matt and I

At a shindig in Jen and Steve's new house.

What a great meal.  How I miss delicious food.  Not one can of sardines in site.

Jen and Lisa

Aunt Carol Ann and I

Good friends of Jennifer.  Colleen was in the Peace Corps many years ago in Ecuador.  It was great to compare and contrast our experiences between Peace Corps now and as it was before.

Jess and Uncle John

Jake and Renee

Dad and I

Hey Cubs

And of course I missed my kitties.  My initial reaction when I saw them was "Oh my god they're so fat!"   Sadly I'm accustomed to seeing rib cages and skin conditions on the animals down here.