Wow...can't believe its been over a month since I wrote you all. It doesnt seem that long ago. I guess I've been busy!! i cant even remember if i ever sent you pictures with the last email, so let me know! if not i will be sure to send that link out.
Well, I guess you are probably wondering what Ive been up to....its so hard to summarize, but Ill try to give you a snapshot...
Blessings:
In breve....The long and short of it is that I am happy, healthy-ish, and genuinely enjoying my peace corps experience. My community is just too adorable. I mean it. I really lucked out. Sure its not an easy life. They work really hard to makes end meet. There isn't enough money to send most of the children to middle school. Its dirty. Its hot. I fall all the damn time because its so slippery and muddy everywhere, which wrecks havoc on the lack-of-clean-clothing situation (and makes my community laugh). The food is really really really unhealthy (everyone has stunted growth, im pretty sure, including the animals). There are parasites in the soil that come from all the pigs (I got my first one last week!! They took it out with a needle!) They kill every single wild animal they find- some they eat, many they dont. Theres no electricity, still.. Handwashing my clothes on a wood plank is my very least favorite thing EVER. it takes up so much time and they never ever ever come clean, nor do they dry. BUT. at least we HAVE plentiful food. and at least we HAVE work. at least people in my community are eager to learn, self-organized, active and interested in improving their lives and their community. at least we have water to wash our clothes with, to bathe. We can even DRINK IT. imagine that. My community is actually at the very top of the watershed, so we have 4 of the springs that feed the river, and the water here, as opposed to in most of downriver Herrera, is potable. there are communities in herrera that have not had potable water for over a year.... Yes, we are blessed.
And me? I am very very blessed. They are so good to me. I am never hungry. I am never without help. Little children offer to carry things uphill for me. People give me yuca and platano to take home when they see me pass by their houses. They send me on my way with a bag of oranges, cashew fruit, whatever they've got growing. People are always happy to recieve me in their homes, without invitation or forewarning. They tell me to come back soon. That we will make bollos. We will make tortilla changa. We'll go hunt shrimp in the river and then fry them and eat them with plantains. We'll echar cuentos (tell stories) and drink coffee. We'll sing songs. We´ll chase toads. We wont kill the birds with slingshots at least while youre here, promise- just come over and spend time with us. (yes, they really do kill all the birds with slingshots, and the boas, and the armadillos, and the pacas, and whatever else they can find. yes, its really hard to see, and yes, i feel there could be an opportunity here to teach people about the importance of wildlife, and yes, i hope that i can at least plant a seed with respect to this. how do you convince a substinence agriculture community that wildlife have an important role though? for them, they are all competitors. I am still working through this question....)
This is basically my typical day at this point-- I wake up, I eat breakfast, bathe, do laundry, go pasear (walk around and visit) different houses, chit chat, eat, learn, help out around the house/farm, play with kids, pasear to another house, repeat, pasear, repeat, pasear, repeat, maybe play some soccer or play with the kids in the afternoon (jump-rope is my favorite. we use vines instead of rope), bathe, eat dinner, lantern lit hammock time with a cup of coffee and the family, go to bed. i am also working on meeting as many people as possible, introducing myself to all the agency workers, neighboring communities, etc. Just getting out there!
Bokachi:
The work is finally beginning. Technically I am still not working, as im still in the process of doing my community analysis and I havent done my presentation or gotten any real community input yet (october marks my 3 month date, an important milestone for the PC volunteer). But, in the meantime, theres bokachi. Bokachi is a type of fermented organic compost that is popular in panama, largely due to the availability of ingredients. We make it here with the following: rice husks, rice dust, ashes, carbon, chicken poop, molasses from sugar cane/chicha fuerte from corn, yeast, some good soil, and diligent turning. Since it is fermented, it heats up dramatically, thereby increasing the rate of decomposition. The whole process from start to finish takes just 15 days. Currently in my community you can sell a rice sack of bokachi to the environmental agency for 8 dollars, which is a lot of money for us camposinos, especially if you make 10 sacks at a time. (While the incentive might have more do with the money than pro-environmental values, its a start. Its a seed of an idea, a notion that perhaps, on some level, using this organic stuff instead of chemicals is actually really a good idea. So good in fact the government is willing to pay for it....) I was sort of "thrown into the bokachi fire" in week 1 when my counterpart told me I should do it with the padres de la familia for the school and the school director got super excited about it. We made a batch using my counterparts recipe and I helped out, learning as I went along. i found out that other people in the area were involved in bokachi too, so I went and saw and learned, and i learned more, and i compared recipes, and i revised and relearned. Then there was the second batch..... this time my friend Adela came to find me. she wanted my help with compost. I came over and she started asking me about how to make bokachi. She told me she had all these ingredients but didnt know if she was still missing something, and didnt know how to go about actually doing it, and if I could help. She said she wanted to do it right. She asked me questions about it, why certain ingredients work and others dont. She wanted to learn! So we made it together, and each day i came and helped her turn it. And while we made it we talked about sewing, and children, and cows, and life in general. Then came the third batch.... Yani, another friend, asked me what ingredients she would need if she was going to make compost with her woman's group to raise funds for their bakery project. i let her borrow a recipe i had printed out, left town, and when i came back she and the other woman had already found all the ingredients and were making their compost. At the end of the day one of the kids in town came to find me and told me that Yani was looking for me. I thought maybe they wanted help turning it, but to my surprise, when I arrived, they had already done everything. They just wanted me to look at it and let them know if i thought it was well done, to give them a thumbs up before they covered it. It may not sound like much, but I was really proud of my community, and I was really proud of myself, too. I felt, well, like a peace corps volunteer.
Ive also been working on developing relationships with the teachers here so that I might be able to work with the students soon. A few weeks ago we had some great bonding time making banana bread on their stove using my recipe, and they LOVED it. (Now everyone wants me to go make banana bread with them. :) Its fun! and lord knows we have the bananas!) Anyway....The director of the school is interested in youth development, so I am currently tossing the idea of an afterschool club for our community. A lot of kids dont go to school past 6th grade here, and during 4th, 5th, and 6th, they really start losing interest. The director would like to see a program that motivates them, teaches them self discipline, pride, and gives them the skills and ambition to stay focused on their education and their futures. I think i can help with this, and I would love to.... there is a chapter of Boy and Girl Scouts that is strong here in Panama, so thats might be one option...im also considering adapting a version of GASP for our community. Ive got some research to do though, some community prepping, some conversations to be had, connections to be made, etc. Still, this is on the horizon. I want to make it happen.
What else?? The community is planting coffee currently to reforest the watershed. I havent been involved in this yet, but it just goes to show how awesome my community is!! Since we drink a LOT of coffee, this will also help people to save more money, maybe even make a little money. We went on a tour recently to chiriqui funded by the cooperative to learn about coffee production actually, and it was super neat because the cooperative members really caught onto what they were doing up there (which is much better practices than what we do here) in terms of using shade trees, combining the coffee fields with plaintains, etc. I was really amazed to see how eager and excited to learn everyone was, too. For me, that was the most impressive part of the whole trip. AND! one pretty exciting result of this tour was the level of interest it sparked in home vegetable gardens, which are very common in Chiriqui. EVERYONE in my cooperative went crazy over all the vegetables. Oh man, you should have seen how packed our pick up truck was on the way back. They talked about vegetable gardens and parcel home gardening for weeks afterwards....I really hope this might pick up speed, too, as we desperately need to improve the diet around here. Thats the one thing thats been making me sick....so much salt, sugar, and oil.....i am starting to realize that part of my service here needs to be spent in the kitchen. by going over to peoples houses and cooking with them, or cooking for them, i am able to teach them a lot. the complication is that a) we have a limited selection of foods to choose from, and b) they just dont know other ways to cook things, and c) they love pig grease SO MUCH. i bought some herbs in chiriqui for an herb garden...they still dont really understand what i mean when i say im going to cook with them. cook with them? are they medicinal? why would you do that? are you going to fry them?.....
Bevin:
This past week I had my first vacation when Bevin Luna came to see me. She is heading to Mali in october for her own peace corps stint, so it was so nice to be able to see her before she left. We had a great time checking out panama city, went hiking in a national park with monkeys and butterflies and slothes and trogons and all sorts of other awesome naturey things, checked out the little quaint little Azuero town of Guarare, home to the nationally famous folkloric music festival centered around the mejorana, a small traditional style panamanian guitar, and a beautiful beach, and a salt marsh with a million shorebirds (no, really, a million. never seen so many birds in my life). i took her to my community where everyone fell in love with her. they told her she should just come to panama instead of africa, hehe. she played guitar with my friends and we stayed up late singing with them by flashlight. i took her to the river, up the hills, down the hills, to see the compost, to meet as many people as possible. she got to try some of our local foods, see the school, the community center, the cooperative, meet the pigs/ chickens/ dogs/ cats/ children and get on a horse and even got to see a parasite get taken out of my toe! a very well rounded experience, right? we happend to be there when there was a FAO meeting, too, which was really interesting, and i think it was a good introduction for her to learn about the peace corps, esp since she will be working in agriculture and environment. and we did a great amount of just playing and seeing panama, too, of course. overall the vacation was so relaxing. oh man. i love showers in clean hotels. i dont think i knew how much i love showers until i joined the peace corps. you can get really clean in a shower!!!! like, clean-even-between-your-toes-
Whats to come?? i am actually just heading back today from all that, so im refreshed and ready to dig my heels in back in the community. I am ready to get this community analysis done, start collecting the information I need to be successful, to start working. I am ready, too, to see some amazing folkloric events, as tis the season here. In fact, this weekend there is a big fair in Las Minas called feria del flor de espiritu santo, named after the national flower, an orquidea that opens up and looks exactly like a dove on the inside. its breathtaing really. I will take lots of pictures for ya´ll. :)
Anyway, I should get going now to catch my truck into town, over the hills, away from the lights, into the campo. I love you all and miss you all dearly. Please write whenever you have the chance. I love hearing from you.
Big hugs to all.
Ciaoito
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