7/21/2011

Entro a lo grueso: the thick of it.

hello my lovely family and friends,

I have been in my community now for 2 weeks. I say 2 weeks, but in my mind and my heart the notion of time is altogether very different than what it was before. 2 weeks is a month, is a day, is a journey through space and time. Yesterday I left my community for the first time after having arrived. I hopped on the back of the truck that comes to and from town 3 times a day, rode away from the past and into the present, watching the rolling hills of greenery disappear around me. It feels as though I am living in the 1800s sometimes, watching the men go by on horseback with their sacks of rice, or the woman walking through town carrying them on their heads (I am determined to learn this skill!!! and i will demonstrate upon my return!!). Men here often work not for money, but to earn peones. A peon given, a peon earned. In other words, I work your fields today, you work mine tomorrow. Its a culture of mutuality, of sharing, of cooperation. It's really quite beautiful. I have to say, I feel lucky to be there. I have many peons to repay already...they have been so so good to me.

For those who want the summary: We have about 250 people in our community, 3 small kiosks where they sell the basics, a public phone that works so long as it doesnt rain too hard, an elementary school of 50 students with a huge farm and chicken coop (I have been helping them make organic fertilizer for the farm), and an evangelical church. We also have a very successful farmer's cooperative that is working on building wood efficient stoves, solar latrines that produce compost from human waste and prevent watershed contamination, starting up bean production in the community, and in the past they've done some reforestation, tilapia ponds, and coffee planting. Eventually I will be working with the cooperative, as well as with the school garden, and possibly with the students (I hope!). There is also a middle school in the nearby community where our students attend, though I have not yet gone there to visit.. For the first few months I am just getting to know everyone (as is the strategy of the peace corps), evaluating the community's strengths and weaknesses, learning a lot, trying to find where my skills and knowledge will be most useful...the work will begin later. I have been staying with a family and will continue to stay with families until october, when I will begin renting my own house. It's a cute house, made of adobe, surrounded by little streams. It's next door to the president of the cooperative, too, and right off the main road. I am considering getting a horse when I move there, though I have not yet looked too seriously into this.

For those who want the details: It is hard, as you can imagine, to put into words what I have been experiencing. I have been trying, late at night under the glow of my headlamp, to record a minimum of 5 memories a day, just short phrases, moments in time. I feel like this may be the best way to paint you a picture, as the picture is very large. I'll share just a few of them:

- Piglets and puppies. Horses and cows. Plentiful kittens. A train of baby ducks crossing the road. Chicks so small they'd fall through the cracks of your fingers if you weren't careful.

- The nicest, sweetest, most generous people you could ever imagine. So giving, though they have so little to spare. I am never hungry. I am never lost. I am never alone. They take care of me as if I were their own. Everyone knows my name, and each day they ask me to come over to eat this or that, to learn this or that or the other. We echar cuentos (tell stories) for hours, one house to the next, mostly the same stories over and over again. We talk about the weather, our families, the volunteers who came before, I show them photos of colorado and my family. They feed me so much I feel like I am going to explode (you can't say no). They tell me my hair is beautiful and soft, like a baby's hair. They like to feel it, braid it. They say my eyes are the color of chocolate.

- No need to buy food here, just to cultivate. Fresh picked baby corn toasted on the fire is amazing. Did you know you can eat the leaves? The ends are sweet and soft and juicy. A thousand and one oranges, all of which are gifted to me by barefooted boys scrambling up to the treetops to toss the ripe ones down. 5 different types of bananas, maybe more. Mangos. Coconuts. And of course, the never ending supply of rice. Rice rice rice rice. We grow a lot of rice. We have a rice husker that is run on a car motor. It was purchased by the cooperative. Before that, they husked the rice by hand in large pilons (wooden bowl type things that you smash the rice in with a big thick wooden stick). Now, every wednesday you can hear the murmur of the motor running throughout the town, husking away. And every sunny day wherever you walk the people have their rice laying out on sheets of zinc, sunning it to dry, preparing for the next wednesday.

- They love it when I sing to them in English. Their favorite song is “If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.” They say it's beautiful. They have a song in church with the same melody, so they just love it. They ask me to sing almost every day. It's precious, really. Can you imagine it? If you're happy and you know it clap your hands.....clap clap.

- At night we lay in the hammocks drinking coffee under the glow of the kerosine latern, called a guarricha. It's one of my favorite things. The light is so soft and beautiful. The world outside is so calm, tree tops and pastures dimly lit by just the moon and stars. In the distance we can see tiny specks of light coming from the town of Los Pozos. For them, it is a distant glimmer of hope. Every day we wait to see when the electrical company will come. Every day they say it will be today, but of course they do not come. They wait in silence, in the darkness, under the guarricha, wondering if it will be tomorrow.

- There are a million and one ways to eat corn. They are far more inventive than we are. We eat it boiled, in soup, as a tortilla, a grilled tortilla, bollo, changa, chocolo, cream of corn, corn juice, tamales, tamales of new corn, pastelitos, grilled, baby corn, and this is just to name a few.

- I learned to fish tilapia by tossing the net. On my second toss I caught a big one! They were very impressed. Then I learned to cut it, identified the various organs, and we fried it and ate it with pastelitos and coffee. Delicious!

- Bathtime. I bathe with a bucket and bowl, and I am never truly clean. But it is so lovely to bathe at night when the temperature is right, when the moon is above. I turn off the flashlight just to see the stars better. We bathe here twice a day, which is all together necessary given the amount of mud and sweat and dirt. I am clean for about 30 seconds each day, until I step out of the shower onto the slippery slope and make my way back up the house. By the time I arrive my feet and legs are already muddy.

- Demons, duendes, and evil spirits. My community is evangelical, and apart from going to church 4 times a week, they have some very interesting beliefs. They are afraid to walk alone at night because of the evil spirits that appear. They say that only dogs can see the evil spirits at night, and that is why they bark in the middle of the night. But supposedly if you take the goobers that come out of the dogs eyes and put them on your eyelids, you, too, would be able to see evil spirits. No one does it though, because, as they say, man could not take it- it would drive him to insanity (not to mention its totally disgusting to think about.) They also believe that there is a leprechaun that lives in the forest, called the Duende, and that he appears to children and elderly folks and tries to entice them with sweets or by playing a flute or with gold. And when they follow him into the forest they disappear and are never seen again. Everyone believes this, and they will all tell you that they know someone that knows someone, maybe a friend of a cousin, or a friend of a cousin's friend, who was taken away by the Duende. Some of them also believe in a mysterious man who lives in the peak of the mountain who has special powers to cure injured wild animals, and that when he calls them they come to him, and that he smokes tobacco. And if you want to hunt a wild animal, you can bring a pouch of tobacco and leave it in the forest for the man, and he will send you a wild animal to hunt in return. Their cousin's friend did this once, and they brought back a huge deer for the town to eat- true story.

- Falling. I think my legacy so far is that I smile all the time and I fall a lot. I'm sure they will talk to the next volunteer about this incessantly. “Oh Alison, she sure fell a lot!” The soil here is terrible...there is no top soil whatsoever, which means it is clay, and wet, and slippery. I have fallen at least 10 times, and when I fall in one place, everyone in the community soon hears about it. “Alison! You fell today when you were at the soccer field, didn't you? Did you hurt yourself?” When it rains or when I am walking up or down hills, the people who see me all say, “Be careful that you don't fall!” But not to tease, they say it genuinely, they offer me their hands when going down a particularly slippery patch. I laugh when I fall, and so do they. In fact, the house I'm staying at put up a railing going down to the shower and latrine because one time I fell there. They are so sweet.

- Movie nights. We have one television, owned by the cooperative. Once every few weeks they charge a quarter and people come, walking through the darkness with their flashlights, to the cooperative at night to see a movie. They plug the TV into the car motor that is used to run the rice husker. The motor is so loud you can't hear a thing, but for them it is a special event. And it so cute to see them, all gathered around the blue glow of this old TV, the motor purring loudly in the background. If you didnt know it was movie night, you'd know when you heard the motor turn on. They crank it by hand to get it to turn on, and when it finally goes, in clunks and clanks and a plume of black smoke shoots out the back. We watched a Rocky film last week- they love the action flicks. Everyone brings their cell phones, too, to charge while the motor is on. For us it works just great.

I could keep going on and on with this list, though I won't, because time does not stretch for me the way it used to. I'll let the photos tell you more. In sum, I am happy here, mostly healthy, and extremely well fed. I miss you all a bunch and talk about everyone to my community. They love hearing about where I am from, what I used to do, my friends and family and work. I am learning so much..... today I will head back to town in the afternoon, back onto the truck, away from the buzz of cars, away from the background static of appliances, away from the bright lights, back to the glimmer of the guarricha and the slick mud paths where not even horses will pass. It is not distance that separates Ciprian from the rest of panama, but rather time.

Not sure when my next email will be out, probably in the next two to three weeks I will get to somewhere to use the internet again. And for those who have been trying to reach me by my cell, I am unable to get service there with my current service provider, so Ive got a new one. Send me a text message or leave a voicemail though because I dont leave it on during the day (no way to keep it charged) and when I do turn it on I will hopefully get your message-- this phone is a lot more reliable when it comes to text and voice messages than the other. It's 6914-1876. I have to go to school or the stick at the top of the hill to get service, so it may be a while before I get your message, as I dont go there every day. Still, I would love to hear from you and I will text you back or try to call if the payphone is working- it's a whole lot cheaper for me to call from the public phone than from my own. Still no updates as far as snail mail addresses go...im working on it though. ill let you know when i know.

I really appreciate all you folks writing to me, so much. I only wish i could spend a whole day sitting and writing back to each and every one of you or better yet calling.. It puts such a smile on my face to read your messages. keep em coming! I love you all and miss you. My heart is with you always.

p.s. the link to my album will come in another email.

Big hugs.