11/24/2011

Dear friends and family,

Just wanted to let you all know that I am so grateful for each and every one of you. Thank you for your love, support, for just being you. I am so lucky to have such amazing people in my life. I mean it.

I think being away from the states makes me appreciate Thanksgiving even more than when I lived there. I tell my community members about it...the idea that we have special day once a year when we take time to be grateful for one another, for our health, etc. It's actually a very beautiful tradition when you think about it that way.

I am actually spending this thanksgiving relaxing in the private comfort of a hotel room, not because I don't have anywhere to go to celebrate with others, but because I wanted to. It's nice to get some alone time every once in a while, plus this way I can spend some quality time writing and calling friends and family back home, which to me is very important. I have made some wonderful friends here, both within the Peace Corps circle and in my community, but the truth is that I feel like YOU ALL are just a step above. I love you guys so much.

What can I tell you in this email? Things are going well. Slow of course, but well. Not a whole lot has happened since I last wrote you, especially considering that I've been out of site for a week and a half for a training course. the moon and sun was right, though, so my rancho is completely done, dry, adorable, homey. I have 2 benches and a hammock, which is great, and the children have totally covered my outside wall in nature drawings.

I also finished making 2 parcels for my home garden, built the fence, started a seedbed, planted some seeds directly...i've got carrots, watermelon, tomato, cucumber, lettuce, green onion, and celery going. i havent been there to actually see what's growing and whats not, though my friend mirna tells me things have sprouted. i'm going to do this garden organically, and with any luck, get the children involved and the parents interested. use it as a tool for teaching. during training we went to this man's farm, his name is Santiago Gomez. He is a radical panamanian with just a 6th grade education who, as an adult, self-educated by reading and attending free seminars and classes, and decided some 20 years ago that for the health of people and the health of the planet in general, he had to stop using chemicals and make a radical shift to organic agriculture. he says the first 5 or 6 years were hard and he suffered a lot of losses, but now he's got it all- he makes his own organic fertilizers, organic repellents...he grows organic corn and rice and yuca and coffee, oranges, mangos, coconuts, cashews, papayas, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, celery, etc etc etc. He spends $0 on chemicals and his only food costs for his family are sugar, oil and salt-- impressive, right?? he gave me some recipes for making organic fertilizers and repellants and also gifted me some composting worms. I already have worms, but it's always a good idea to mix up the gene pool ([plus I am afraid that over the last week and a half they might have died!) He's going to donate some seeds to my cooperative, too, when they are ready to be harvested in january. i am hoping to bring some community members with me next time I go so they can see the farm with their own eyes.

What else? The girls club is still going. I love it. I wrote a grant to get some funding for it for next semester. If it fails we'll have to do some fundraisers, but that's okay. We did a really cool worm composting activity the other week, and I had the girls teach their classmates about it the next day and then the next week again. They did great! next semester i am hoping to get some support from ANAM with this club, and hopefully be able to do a field trip.

I've also been helping my friend Mirna with her children's program, Cruz de la Ninez, which is funded by the Social Development ministry. it's centered around learning children's rights and values and morals, but it's fun and I enjoy helping her. it's important, too, that these kids have something else to do rather than killing birds all day long.

Summer is approaching, which means school will be let out. I haven't exactly decided what I will do to take advantage of this opportunity, but I'd like to start working with the middle-schoolers a little more since they will be in the community every day. summer vacation is from january to march, so there's a large window of opportunity. we'll see what i can come up with.

I'm working on bringing wood-efficient stoves to my community as well. This is kind of a big endeavor, which I am halfway excited about and halfway dreading. It means getting a rather large grant, which I see as a rather unsustainable solution, but it also means reducing wood demand in my community, which is super important considering our location (top of the watershed, inside the forest reserve). my community members really want this, so i am going to see what i can do. it will be a long process i think.

Other than that, life marches on. I'm happy, healthy, and well taken care of. I'm still trying to navigate my role as a volunteer- it's harder than it sounds. Slowly but surely I think I'm starting to understand more and more of what I should be doing. Our training was a good opportunity for reflection. Today I plan on going to a coffee shop, sitting at a table, and writing up a list of good ideas, a timeline, and some motivational words to keep me on track when I head back into the wilderness tomorrow. Everything seems so clear and straightforward right now, but its easy to lose site of things out there. So wish me luck!

Lastly I will leave you with some photos. i'll attach just a few this time for those who just want to see a few and send you a link for the album later for those who want to see more.

1) me with the girls and a handful of composting worms at my house
2) i had a lot of visitors before the house was even finished...here they are reading books and drawing pictures
3) my friends putting the roof on the rancho....
4) home sweet home!
5) for Mirna's youth club she had to do a lesson on responsibility and afterwards we took the kids on a hike up through the forest up to this hill overlooking the fields and let them use the binoculars to check stuff out. i started casually picking up trash along the way and of course they all got into it and started handing me all sorts of stuff they were finding, so we talked about how we were practicing responsibility by taking care of our community and our environment...i actually ended up having to tell them that we could not pick up any more trash because we didnt have enough bags but that they could do it on their own any day they wanted but that it was a very good thing to do. :)

Okay, well, that's all for now. I hope you all have a great holiday and eat some delicious grub, and I hope you all have many wonderful things in your lives right now to be grateful for. I love you and miss you and hope to hear from you soon!