So I’ve gone over a month since my last post. Sorry about that. So the plan today is to do a couple of things:

1.       Post a whole bunch of photos of the Ngobe people, who I’ve failed to include in this blog and who obviously make up a huge part of my life and work here.

2.       Offer a recap in words and photos of my house, which is now officially completed.

3.       Tell a funny story (which, of course, was funnier in real life).

4.       Talk a little bit about my other life here in Panama.

A happy Ngobe family and their cow.

Ready? Ok good.

So a word on the Ngobes. I’m not quite sure how much I’ve explained already, but they are one of 4 or 5 major indigenous tribes in Panama (including the Embera-Wounaan, Naso, and Kuna) and are the most populous with a population of many tens of thousands (don’t quote me on that).  They live in their own semi-autonomous region of the country which amounts to a small province of sorts. All-in-all they are a very shy people and are hard to interact with, especially at first, and especially with the women (for white males, at least).  They have lived as subsistence farmers for a very long time and originally occupied from coast to coast across the central mountains. Due to the conquest of the country by various imperialist powers, namely Spain, and the subsequent colonization of all the good land, the Ngobes were driven from the lowlands near the coast and into the mountains where they now reside. They find themselves in a nearly constant battle with the government of Panama for the right to use their land for themselves, and made international news earlier this year when they staged massive protests objecting to two mega-projects (a hydroelectric dam and one of the worlds largest copper mines) which were being undertaken on, and affecting, their lands without the consent of the native population. These protests unfortunately culminated in the death of 2-3 Ngobes and saw the Interamerican highway closed off for a matter of many days, bringing the country to a standstill. But the construction of the copper mine was halted and the dam project delayed….so it was a partial success.  Aside from the battle with the government over the use of their land (which, as of 1997, is legally granted to the express ownership of the Ngobe people; a fact which the two mega projects ignored), relations between Ngobes and the rest of the Latino population are highly strained with, I would say, equal degrees of racism existing on both sides of the divide.

Ngobes men dress fairly ‘normally’, as we might say. Pants and short sleeved shirts are the norm. Women, however, wear a dress which is called a Nagua and is decorated with very bright and various colors and patterns. But before we get misty eyed about traditional dresses, it is probably important to note that women have only worn these dresses for maybe the last 60-70 years after the arrival of Christian missionaries who encouraged the covering of the female body as opposed to the previous nudity. But still, the Ngobe women have made the Nagua a part of their identity.

Some Ngobe women draw a map of Pena Blanca (on the gringo's orders). My host mom is in yellow with my 2 year old host sister standing behind.

Ok so my house is finally done! It’s been a humbling, frustrating and lengthy process (it lasted for nearly 2.5 months) but I finally have a place of my own to live.  It’s doubly satisfying that I built it with my own two hands (with help from friends) from materials locally available and of my own design. I won’t say too much more about it, but here are some pictures of various stages of the project.

Breaking ground

Finished! 12'x13' room with a 5'x12' porch. The ladder leads to a loft for visitors' sleeping arrangements.

Story time. This story has gone over pretty well during the last couple of tellings so I figure I’ll share it with you all. Last Saturday I held my second community meeting to discuss possible plans for projects in Pena Blanca. The meeting went fairly well, I think, and afterwards I was invited to a big party in town, where I was told there would be chicken soup for sale. Not one to pass up food here in the Comarca, where it is often fairly scarce, I walked down to the center of ‘town’ to find my soup. Of course it wasn’t ready but the local men were heavily drinking some chicha fuerte which essentially fermented corn juice which they make by adding sugar to corn mush every day for a week. So I stood around by myself, being stared at by somewhere near 100 Ngobe’s, in my shorts and flip-flops waiting for food. A younger guy, who I know, approached me and asked me some questions that I didn’t really understand, so I did what I do so well and nodded and said yes. But it turns out I had been asked, and agreed, to be a judge for the local annual beauty pageant.

Unable to back out, and having been assured that my participation would ensure free lunch and melon juice (non-alcoholic), it was explained to me that I would be judging four categories: two dances (Panamanian tipico and meringue, which I obviously know nothing about), the crowd support for each of the three candidates and the speed and quality of their answer to a question (think the miss America contest). The whole ordeal was equal parts hilarious and tragic (two ideas which were very intertwined). I spent most of the 3 hours biting back a laugh at the ridiculousness of my position sitting in the middle of a crowd of indigenous Panamanians attempting to judge something I (or they, for that matter) knew nothing about. The most tragic part, I guess, was that the candidates were petrified to be in front of any number of people and it was quite painful to watch their agony.  Apart from that, as an American who is used to seeing highly prepped and beautified women take part in this kind of pageant, it was a shock to see that two of the three contestants had extremely crooked eyes (quite possibly the result of inbreeding, which is quite prevalent in Ngobe culture where there are very few, but very large, families). The whole situation was, again, tragic but for that very reason, I had no option but to laugh uncontrollably in my head, especially when the other three judges, all of whom have completed high school, were unable to add up their scores, and passed their sheets down to the gringo for tallying….an unfortunate product of the terrible educational system in Panama, which is even worse again in the Comarca where the kids are lucky if the teachers show up to school at all.

In the end I had a good time. The party was fun, I got free food and there was plenty of drunken heckling from the back of the crowd. A genuine good time.

So today’s last subject is an explanation of my other responsibility here in Panama, and that is to be a graduate student. Right now I am typing this from the town of Volcan (Spanish for volcano) which fittingly sits on the side of Panama’s highest peak, the Volcano Baru. I am here this week trying to put together a proposal for a project that will include the study of the seismicity (earthquake events) of the volcano, which compared to most others is quite inactive. This is a responsibility which will take up another significant chunk of my time here in Panama, but I’m working with a great private geophysics consulting firm here in Volcan to help me with the project and I’m quite excited about how it will all play out.

View from the top of Volcan Baru (not my picture, I haven't visited yet). But a common  trip for Peace Corps volunteers is to hike it to watch the sunrise...with a view of the Pacific and Caribbean.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll be sure to post again soon (I’m going to an international soccer game in Panama City next week, so I’ll have to let you know how that goes).

I've decided that this post will be called: Occupational hazards of the Comarca Peace Corps Volunteer.

Just another morning in the Beach Corps

Animals: Although other areas of Panama have a larger variety of dangerous animals, we do have our share here in the Comarca. Really, these are limited to scorpions, snakes, spiders and possibly large felines. Scorpions are apparently more common for volunteers at lower elevations, but I have seen a few up in Pena Blanca (although apparently not life threatening). The spiders here may or may not be dangerous (I don't remember what we were told in training). I've seen some large types, but have yet to be bitten, so we'll see. The biggest real danger is the snakes. We have anything ranging from 10 foot constrictors to smaller varieties but these do include coral snakes (one of which we killed outside my house a few weeks ago) and some other highly poisonous varieties. Perhaps the most amusing story I've yet heard involves tigers (the orange and black striped variety). The story goes that a horse was killed in the town of Tugri (45 minutes walking from Pena Blanca). The owner, suspecting a large predator, apparently placed poison on the partially eaten carcass and waited. The next day there was a dead tiger lying beside the dead horse. This being the Comarca, where food, and especially meat, is quite scarce, the locals ate the tiger and mounted the fur on the wall.....Now I would give this story maybe a 30% chance of being true, but I do have an offer from friends to take me to the house to see the actual pelt....maybe it really does exist.

This is a big tree. Am I a bad person for cutting it down?

Don Francisco exhibits the correct form.

Transport: I've described the chivas which I take up into the mountains (the trucks with tarps covering the benches in back). If it weren't for these, I would have to do much more walking than I do currently (which is already a significant amount). But they do come with their risks. About half way up to my site, the road changes from bad gravel and some paved road, to legitimate 4x4 terrain. Most of it is still quite passable when it is dry but because the soil is really just clay, when it rains it is nearly unmanageable. Case in point, my last ride up to site last Wednesday started at 6:30 at night (it gets dark at 7) in a heavy rainstorm. There were only 4 people riding in the chiva that night (they can legally carry 15 and I've seen as many as 22) but at two separate locations we were forced to get out so that the driver could navigate up the more dangerous hills. With passengers riding inside, the driver was still too scared to slow down for fear of getting hopelessly stuck, so I was thrown on more than one occasion into the lap of the man sitting across from me. We did finally arrive in Pena Blanca at sometime around 9:30, an hour after we should have arrived, slightly shaken and glad to be safely home.

This hurts more than the smile suggests.

Building a house: So as you know I've been wading through the process of building my own house. Given the slow pace of life (and, frankly, the laziness of some of the people involved) the process is long and frustrating, but also kinda dangerous. The first step is cutting down a tree to begin to make your own lumber. In my case we cut down maybe the biggest tree anybody could find (and it has provided nearly ALL of the wood for my house), but this presented the problem of being very difficult to fell. We spent a half an hour, most of the trunk having been notched, trying to figure out which way it would fall and the chainsaw man not wanting to cut any more for fear of killing himself. Once it was felled, though, the challenge (which we are still grappling with 2 weeks later) is getting all of this wood down from the mountains (a 2 hour hike). This is maybe the single hardest thing I've done here, and also the most humbling. Most Ngobe men will carry at least two 10 foot lengths of floorboard, which must weigh more than 300 lbs having just been cut and still very wet, down very slippery and very steep mountainsides. I can't do that. First, I'm not nearly as strong as these men. But aside from that, I have no idea what I'm doing. I was wearing my nice hiking boots that I brought from the united states....which are completely useless in the clay....and the result was both Chet and the wood he was carrying tumbling down the mountain no less than 3 times. Once I figured out that the 7 dollar rubber boots that everyone wears are much better in the clay than my USA boots, I still couldn't figure out the correct way to carry the wood (having brought a t shirt for cushioning which resulted in two completely numb arms and the inability to lift anything for a few days). The correct solution is to bring a large blanket or a pillow. Luckily I've figured it out by the 3rd go-round, but it still hurts carrying this stuff.

These are probably the greatest dangers to my well-being currently. If I encounter more, you guys will be the first to know.

I think today I'll give everyone a rundown of what my day-to-day life is like here in the mountains of Panama:

I get up usually around 6:30 or so, more or less with the sun which rises everyday around 6 (but doesn't hit my house for a while given the surrounding mountains) and sets at nearly 7 (there isn't very much seasonal variation). After using the nearly full latrine (I'm fortunate enough to have one), which I do quite regularly...I sit down in the 'kitchen' area next to the open fire which is used as a stove and wait for breakfast (when I get any).  If there happens to be breakfast this particular day, it can one of a small variety of things: boiled green bananas (which are kinda just like potatoes...they're rarely allowed to age enough to have any sugar in them), yucca, otoe (like a big purple potatoe), or rice and beans (by far the most common). None of these options have any sort of taste, especially by our American standards, so it has been quite a challenge getting used to not looking forward to meal times. But as time has gone on, I have become accustomed to eating these things and have learned to appreciate very subtle differences in taste which can make a HUGE difference. Just a little bit of salt, or a couple of pieces of onion in a bowl of rice can go a very long way to making a slightly depressing meal into something capable of brightening my day (really...I'm not kidding haha).  If there's not breakfast however, I'll invariably get a cup of coffee.  But I should explain that coffee here, even if it is locally grown (often from "just over there") isn't like coffee in the States. Here the coffee is completely drowned in sugar, which, though disappointing so some in the States isn't so bad once you get used to it....you just have to think of it as juice, I guess. And since it's consumed in VAST quantities (maybe a gallon a day) it's probably better that they don't drink espresso.

Still alive. Still with mustache. Although I did pay a guy 1 dollar to cut most of my hair off since this picture was taken.

Once breakfast is done, I have some options as to what to do with my day.  Once or twice a week I wash my clothes, which of course is by hand here. And I try to do it as often as possible to prevent mold from growing on sweaty (or even slightly moist) clothing, although some mold is completely unavoidable in this country. If there is no laundry to be done, I might read (which I do a LOT), or go visit some of the people in the community to try to learn names, problems, let them ask me questions, etc...Sometimes I'll go to help in the fields.  Last week I helped my counterpart (the guy who is informally designated as my main partner in town) dig out and fumigate a colony of nasty big red ants in his field.  It turned out to be about 6 feet deep and extend out about 20 feet in all directions....pretty big.  Other times, I'll go to my 'cell phone hill', which is the nearest point at which I can receive service (about a 45 minute walk) to check messages and such.

Family compound. Kitchen/grandparents house on left. Mom's house on right.

If I'm home for lunch, I eat more or less the same thing as I did for breakfast, although on select days it might include a small piece of chicken on top of the bowl of rice (and the same thing for dinner), of course accompanied by 'coffee'.  

Trusty buddy Peluchi. Pretty much impossible to stop him from following me everywhere....mostly because I don't hit him with sticks like the rest of my family...

My favorite days, lately, have been helping cut wood for use in building houses.  This is done purely using a chainsaw.  The tree is cut down, a clean surface is cut and then the lines for the board (they cut either 2x4 or essentially floorboard (called tabla) which measures whatever they can cut, usually 1"x10-12") are painted using a string. How straight and square the lumber is is directly proportional to the skill of the individual chainsaw man and is quite a funny process to observe. I have a picture that I promise to post in the next entry (I've forgotten the correct cable to do so today). I can assure you, though, that OSHA would very much approve of the whole process...

Community meetings are also a great way to spend my time (if I'm informed that they are happening). I've been making the rounds to various health committee meetings, women's groups and actually went to a meeting for the organization of the entire transport system of the Comarca which was exciting since the reservation here is quite young and the government is still trying to take shape.

The chiva (or carro): Comarca transport solution. In this case it is transporting  the corrugated 'zinc' for my roof although we also carried some people up with us as well.

A couple of evenings a week I do a language interchange with maybe my closest 'friend' here in town. His name is Chirachi (pronounced Chee-raw-chee) and he speaks enough english that we can have a conversation.  So I help him with his english and he helps me with the local language (called Ngabere). My community has also given me a Ngobe name (which is the name I go by): Tochi Kin Ngimo (pronounced: Toh-jee Keen Gee-mo) which means Tochi from Pena Blanca. I like it, although many of the kids still just call me 'gringo' which more or less means 'white man', although they're learning.

More to follow soon,

Chet

Hey all. Apologies as always for the length of time since I last posted. Im going to have access to the internet every other week at the most frequent from here on out. These post may also become slightly shorter since I'm sitting in a crowded internet cafe full of kids who just got out of school...

Anyways, since I last left off we've officially become Peace Corps volunteers (PCV's) which took place on the 5th of July at a ceremony at the Panama Canal Museum in Casco Viejo (Old Town) in Panama City. It does honestly feel like much more than two weeks ago. That night we had a sushi dinner in the city and ran around to some bars (including the first microbrewery we'd seen since the US). The following day we headed to the beach to celebrate for two nights and rest before finally heading off to our sites for the next 2 years. Training had officially ended and it has been a whirlwind of a ride for the last two weeks.

For a start, my site is called Peña Blanca, and is in the indigenous reservation Ngobe-Bugle (reservations are known as Comarcas) on the West side of Panama. The journey from the city consists of a ~5 hour bus ride, and a 2.5-3 hour ride in the back of a pickup truck up a 4x4 road, which is by no means the least accessible site in the country. These trucks (called carros or chivas) are just old Japanese pickups with a cage constructed over the bed and two benches along either side.  For rain, they're covered with a big tarp. I'll try and grab a picture of one for later posts. In any case, they're not comfortable but they are far better solutions than simply walking (which is what happens when the chivas are broken, like today).

For the first three months here I'll be living with a host family. My host mom is a single mother and lives with her parents and two young daughters. Shes an incredibly nice lady named Ofelina who speaks good spanish (which is nice here in the comarca since, at least in my town, everyone speaks Ngobere, the indigenous language, if they have the option). Ofelina's parents, Marcelino and Porfiria are also fantastic hosts and are very understanding of my American-ness, that is to say my terrible attempts at the local language and general misunderstanding of nearly everything thats going on. I live in a small stick 'hut' next to the houses of the other family members just above the center of town (town is about 100 houses and 500 people, for those who are interested).

Welcome to Peña Blanca. The town itself sits at the foot of that mountain in the background which  bears the same name.

My house for the first three months.

The location of my house in the future (for now).

My task here as a volunteer is not clear as of yet. The general idea is that I have some sort of positive impact on the sanitation practices and health of the community in general but exactly what that might mean requires a process of community analysis and much pasearing (walking around talking with people) in which I try to sift out exactly what the needs of the community are. That being said, some communities are more aware of their needs than others and, at least at first glance, I seem to have arrived at a community that can identify at least one very pressing concern: latrines.  In a town of 500 people, there are no more than 10 latrines that I can see so far.  In the various community meetings and personal talks I've had with people these past two weeks, this subject has been the overwhelming priority. So, for now at least, my large goal will probably be to provide sanitation education and eventually latrines to Peña Blanca. This will be a process of many months and years, so I'll be sure to keep you all up to date on how it progresses.

Another, hopefully shorter, process I'll be undertaking is the building of a house for myself once my first few months with a host family are up. The plan right now is for me to build it behind the house I'm currently living in, and it would pass on to the ownership of my host mom once I leave (maybe for another volunteer to rent in the future). The question right now is what to make it out of, how much it will cost, who will help me make it and how soon can it be done. If I make the house out of tabla (rough floor boards, used as siding for some 'nicer' houses) I'll have to buy it locally and pay the guys to make is using chainsaws (I think). The plan right now is for a one room house with a little porch for a hammock. We'll see what it actually becomes.

I'm going to have to cut this post kinda short, I have to get lunch and get some other errands done before hopefully catching the chiva back home. I hope everything is well for all of you back home in the US! I am surviving fine down here, although living in such an isolated place (emotionally, physically, etc...) is quite exhausting. I miss you all and I'll hopefully make it home to the states to see you sometime in the next two years.

Cheers,

Chet

I’ve been catching some flak for not keeping up with this blog on a more regular basis, so I apologize to those who may have been waiting patiently for this next entry.  To those who have been partying in Italy, namely my dear sister, you will just have to take a deep breath and wait patiently with everyone else….love, Chet.

Anyways, I’ve got a lot to bring everyone up to speed on since I last wrote.  Probably the most important development is that I’ve selected both hair style and facial hair options which better agree with Panamanian norms…..which of course is a lie, but my appearance makes me laugh every morning when I look in the mirror, so I’ll keep it for now.  When we first got here I was talking a lot (more as a joke than anything) about getting a fohawk, which, for those readers not familiar with European soccer, is a cross between a fade and a real mohawk (see picture below).  But as time went on, and I continued to talk, everyone began to expect me to actually cut my hair….and that’s what I was forced to do.  So one day after class some friends and I walked to the neighborhood barber’s house to get some Panamanian haircuts.  I had asked our Spanish teacher what the Spanish word for ‘fohawk’ was and it turns out it’s mango chupado, which, roughly translated, means ‘sucked mango’ after the appearance of a mango that has just been bitten.  So I walked into the barber shop/house combo and asked Tin-Tin (the old barber’s nickname) for a mango chupado and he immediately began taking off large hunks of hair.  Tin-Tin also did a straight raze and then sprayed what was probably rum on my head to “kill whatever’s on there”.  As it turns out, my hair doesn’t work well for a mango chupado since it’s too suave to stand up straight but with enough hair gel it’s possible to get a mini Ace Ventura/John Travolta in Grease hairdo which works alright.  I’ve also started to grow a mustache, which for most of you is a great joke, since facial hair has never been my strong suit, but the men in the group have decided to grow out mustaches for our swearing-in ceremony (when we become real volunteers) on July 5^th, so I had to get a head-start.  In any case, the combination 50’s hairdo/terrible mustache combo is quite a sight and makes me chuckle to myself, so I’m gonna keep it for a while.

This is Cristiano Ronaldo. He plays soccer (although not as well as Messi, of course). The kids watching me type this say he's gay.  But they also say this is what my hair looks like.

On to more serious business.  We got back last weekend from the city of Chichica in the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle, not very far from where I went to visit Chris Kingsleya.  We were there for what’s called ‘Tech Week’ which is designed to give us more of a real experience of what it will be like to live in the very impoverished areas in which we will be serving as well as to give us basic experience with constructing infrastructure in the campo (a blanket term for ‘the sticks’).  Throughout the course of the week we worked mostly with concrete which we mixed by hand, either in piles on the ground or tossed back and forth in a tarp between two people.  The gravel, sand, water and cement, as well as rebar and tools, had to be carried-in to the some of the sites where we were working to build reinforced planchas (platforms which sit over latrine pits).  Later in the week we were working on ferro-cement rainwater catchment tanks (the one I worked on was maybe 70 Gallons and made strictly of cement and chicken wire).  These catchment tanks are a used as a solution to water shortage problems, especially in areas where groundwater is difficult to distribute (flat areas near the coast) and where it’s too expensive to dig clean wells.  In a country that gets as much rain as Panama, especially on the north side of the central mountain range in places such as Bocas del Toro where there is no dry season, these can be the perfect solution to a house’s water needs.

I lived with the family of the evangelical preacher of Chichica that week.  They were extremely nice to me but Ngobe culture is going to take some time to get used to.  Many of them, the women especially, are very reluctant to talk to us gringos and spend a significant amount of time just staring.  They had no electricity and shared a tap from the town aqueduct system amongst the three houses on their extended family compound, although the water only came for an hour or so in the morning.  My house, specifically, was one room made of sticks shoved into the ground and covered with some sheets of corrugated steel.  It was about as simple a dwelling as you’ll find.  Inside were three beds: one for myself, and two more for the rest of the family: dad, mom and 5 kids (I think, they’re hard to keep track of and get mixed up with all the other kids).  When I say bed, I mean only a platform made of bamboo up off the ground and away from the chickens (but not away from the cockroaches haha).  Apart from the beds, the house contained only some shelves, a hammock and one wooden chair and a wooden table where I ate.  The Comarca diet consists of Yucca, rice, canned sardines, boiled green platano (big bananas which are essentially flavorless when boiled green) and coffee which, as with everywhere in this country, is served insanely sweet.  This food was probably the most difficult part of the week as it would often times take me 30-40 minutes to eat four whole Yuccas or five boiled platanos with only cold coffee to wash it down.  But surprisingly enough, this diet does grow on you and it doesn’t sound all that bad, especially after your stomach becomes accustomed to holding all of that starch.

At the end of the week we gave practice health and sanitation charlas (the Spanish word for a talk/lecture) to groups of university students in Chichica.  This went off without much of a hitch, which is somewhat of a small miracle, and afterword we partook in a ‘cultural exchange’ which consisted of the Americans teaching swing dancing and the limbo and the Ngobes teaching one of their traditional dances to a line of 24 white kids.  It was a good deal of fun.  To end the day, we were challenged to a game of volleyball; gringos v. Ngobes.  To be honest, we didn’t think it much of a contest given that the Ngobe are a pretty short people in general and most of the men in our group are well over 6 foot tall.  We won the first game easily but then the Ngobes decided to put in what turned out to be their ‘varsity’ team who had just been sandbagging on the sidelines and we failed to score more than 6 points for the rest of the night.  So Ngobe volleyball skills are something to be reckoned with.  It turns out they play every day…

After Tech Week we were given a day off to do as we pleased, so we spent it at the nearest beach (called Las Lajas).  We stayed in little beachside cabins (again just made of sticks) for something like 15 dollars in total for the night and filled them with 5 or 6 people.  We ate at an American owned resort just down the beach a ways and generally made a great day out of it in various states of consciousness.  The next day was back to civilization where we have been completing our last week of classes and wrapping up our stay here in Santa Rita.

The biggest news is the announcement of our sites, which happened yesterday during a little ceremony at the Peace Corps office in Panama City.  So for those who are interested, I will be living for the next two years in a town called Pena Blanca not too far up into the mountains from where I visited Chris and where we spent Tech Week, so I’m already quite familiar with the area.  It’s a town of about 500 people at the base of an enormous, picturesque mountain which bears the same name.  We have a little bit of information about the community but I will save it for when I actually get there and see it for myself.  For right now it will suffice to say that I will be living with a host family there for the first 3 months at which point I will be free to move out and live in my own house.  We leave this Tuesday (today being Saturday) for what’s called a ‘community entry conference’ where we will meet one member from our community and do some activities of some sort.  After that, we will go to our sites for a week to move most of our belongings and get somewhat settled in our new homes.  After that week we will return here to Santa Rita for a going away party and then on to Panama City for the last few days of training before we swear-in and are finally released to our own devices for the next two years.  Stay tuned.

(Sorry for the lack of photos, they're refusing to upload....with the exception of Mr. Ronaldo)

So I’ve finally gotten around to starting this blog so y’all can follow how I’m doing down here in Panama and what I’m getting up to. Feel free to distribute this blog address to anyone who might be interested and I’ve forgotten to send it to. First, a little background for anyone who isn’t aware of what I’m doing or how I came to be here:

I’m here in Panama as a part of the Peace Corps, which is a branch of the US government started by JFK in the early 60’s with the goal of providing interested countries with a pool of trained Americans willing to live abroad for just over 2 years and work in areas thought to be central to the country's needs.  In my case, I am being trained as a member of Peace Corps Panama’s Environmental Health sector.  This means I will be working in the areas of water resource availability and general community hygiene.  What exactly I will be doing is subject to uncertainty for a number of reasons.  First, we won’t be told the exact location of our site until sometime at the end of June.  Currently we are living with host families in the town of Santa Rita, about an hour outside of Panama City and going through the roughly 9 week training program the Peace Corps operates here.  This training involves a mixture of Spanish language classes, technical classes designed to build leadership skills and teach us the specifics of environmental health and activities designed to familiarize us with the culture, customs, transportation and general life of a Peace Corps volunteer.  The second source of uncertainty over what I’ll be working on is the fact that every community in which a volunteer is placed has different needs.  Some are really in need of an aqueduct system or of new latrines and are ready for such things to be built.  But others are still years from such tangible results.  In many cases we are tasked not with building water systems or latrines but with educating a community in the needs for proper hygiene practices and building the community’s capacity to work towards a common goal.  In the end, even if a new aqueduct looks nice in the short term, a community that doesn’t understand how to use it and cannot work together to maintain it cannot possibly benefit from it in the long term.  The idea is that any positive change should be sustainable after we volunteers have left and for that to happen the community must be invested in the success of a project and have the means and ability to keep it working without help from Peace Corps volunteers or other outside organizations.  The phrase being passed around the office here is that we should be ‘working ourselves out of a job’. 

The hammock: A Panama must

A little background on Panama: it’s a country of around 3 million people at the joining of North and South America.  It’s almost always very hot and very humid, although there are variations to this theme, especially up in the mountains where it can get quite cool.  At first glance it is a bustling and rapidly growing country with a big commercial hub in Panama City and international influence derived mostly from shipping traffic through the canal.  Upon closer inspection, however, Panama is two separate countries: one busy, affluent, rich country and the other a country of poverty and need far from the city.  The country’s indigenous population has least benefitted from the influx of money into Panama City and these people are among some of the poorest in the world.  They live on reservations (called Comarcas) in various parts of the country (generally separated into distinct tribes) and are, in some respects, self-governed.  These poor communities are the bulk of our reason for being here (especially as environmental health volunteers) and the majority of us in my training group (25 of us as of right now) will be placed in these Comarcas.

With that in mind, I guess I can begin the narrative of what I’ve been up to since I left home.  I jumped on a plane to DC on the 1^st of May (I think) where we went through a brief ‘staging’ event designed to help us get our bearings in the Peace Corps.  They gave us our Peace Corps passport, had us sign some more papers, put us through some preliminary talks about expectations and policy and that was it.  We flew out quite early the next morning after little to no sleep (on account of a really good bar just down the road in Georgetown) on the way to Panama.  We were picked up by our APCD (Assistant Peace Corps Director, get used to acronyms) Leo and taken to Ciudad del Saber on the outskirts of Panama City.  This is where the Peace Corps office is located as well as a good portion of the embassies and offices of international organizations.  It’s also the location of one of the old American military posts in Panama and sits right next to the canal (the US owned the canal until 2000, when it was returned to the Panamanians).  In any case, we stayed in Ciudad del Saber for about a week getting acquainted with Panama and all this heat as well as sitting through more lectures and getting more vaccinations. 

Eventually we left for our training site, Santa Rita, where I am living currently.  My family, the Aguirres, is fantastic.  They are a young family with two kids, Alison who is 4 and generally as energetic and curious as all 4-year-olds, and Aaron who is 8, autistic and probably the toughest little kid around given that he has, up to this point, survived a bout with leukemia as well.  Erica, the mother, stays home with the two kids and takes Aaron to school in the nearest city every other day, which takes quite an effort especially with Alison here at the school in town.  The husband Gilberto is an absolute riot.  I don’t really have to be all that inquisitive about anything because he’ll probably have explained everything about this country by the end of the week.  He drives a bus currently (they use American school busses for public transport here and paint them with all kinds of religious slogans, murals, futbol team logos and they may even be equipped with racks for bottles of rum) but worked for some Americans at some point as a day laborer doing anything from concrete work to laying tarmac (I’m still fuzzy on the details).  Erica’s cooking is fantastic, and I’ve devoured everything I’ve been fed but apparently I don’t eat all that much. Although in comparison to some of these Panamanians I don’t suspect many people do.

Never a dull moment with one of these running around the house: Alison Aguirre

                                         

As part of our training, last week we were sent to visit current volunteers in their communities.  I was assigned to Chris Kingsley who is living in the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle, way up in the mountains.  I hopped the chiva (either trucks with bench seats in the bed or multi passenger vans) from the house here to the main highway at 5 AM,  got a bus to the city and then a coach towards the second largest city in the country, David (on the West side).  I was riding with one of my friends, Tyler, who was visiting a volunteer in the same general area and we got off in the mountains at a town called Tole where we met our volunteers.  Chris has been here in Panama for nearly his full 2 years now (although he is extending for another year) and aside from the long blonde hair and sandals could probably blend in pretty well as he speaks both Spanish and Nobere (the native language, although I’m not sure of the spelling) extremely well.  We met up with some other friends of mine and their assigned volunteers who arrived on a later bus and jumped on another very full chiva up into the mountains of the Comarca itself.  It took about 45 minutes accompanied by views of the Pacific as we drove North to reach our stop where we began to hike.  It started to rain as we got off the chiva (in Panama when I say it rains, it really rains) so we were soaked for the duration of the 3 hour hike.  Chris claims it’s the most difficult hike in the country (to a Peace Corps site) and I can’t say I doubt it.  Maybe 1000 vertical feet, two river crossings and a lot of reasonably sketchy trail later, darkness fell as we made it to Chris’ house.  In the Comarca, there isn’t a lot of space to rent (none, in fact) so volunteers generally have to build their own houses with the help of the community members while they stay with a host family.  Chris designed his house himself and located it on a large hill above the area’s school building.  It’s a circular, grass roofed hut built out over the hill on a series of tree-trunk stilts.  Often volunteers opt for walls but Chris didn’t, building only a little room in which he can lock his things.  The benefit of this decision was immediately apparent as I woke from my hammock the next morning.  The view afforded from his house starts some tens of miles away in the Pacific which you can see dotted with islands in the distance.  The mountains rise from the ocean in a succession of deep green ridges rising eventually to meet the house.  The valleys are filled with thick white clouds but the sun shines at Chris’ house and the whole scene is just gorgeous.  Reason enough to live without walls.

The humble abode of Mr. Chris Kingsley

That day we left the house at 7 AM and got back at around 9 PM, working the entire time on a latrine project of Chris’.  It was not only a learning experience for me but fascinating to see how Chris had been able to train this group of Ngobe men to be self-sufficient in making concrete platforms for pit latrines.  We were there helping but they didn’t really need us.  They cut and bent the rebar, mixed and poured the concrete, and dug the holes themselves.  These were skills they simply didn’t have a year ago, but now, even after Chris has left, they can make a latrine for anyone. As it pertains to Chris, this is the textbook definition of working yourself out of a job.

Unfortunately, hiking in Chacos on the way to his house and a pressure point in the back of my boot the next day meant I blew a couple of holes in my feet, so the following day was spent exploring the other half of Peace Corps life: sitting in a hammock reading a book and writing in my journal.  The next day was spend doing much of the same, although we did venture out to wash clothes in the river and visit some neighbors (to walk around visiting ones neighbors is to pasear) which, in the Comarca, means sitting around watching chickens and kids while the adults seemingly ignore you, and then drinking some coffee and maybe eating some rice with a chicken foot.  It should probably be explained as well that the Panamanian take on coffee (as with most places in Central America) is equal parts coffee and sugar, so it’s more of a juice in most cases.

The entire site visit was an incredibly eye-opening weekend, designed to show us how volunteers actually live.  It was equal parts sobering and exhilarating and most everyone came back wondering why we couldn’t just skip the rest of training and start with our service now.  We returned to Santa Rita on Monday evening (today being Friday) but training life has become slightly duller in contrast.  Fortunately, we’ll be back in the Comarca next week for what’s called ‘tech week’ learning to construct some of these things we’ve been talking about.

Transportation solutions: back of the banana truck. Note that Andrew is seated in a rocking chair.

Apologies for the length of this first post.  Thanks for reading and feel free to leave any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions, insults, jokes, etc…  If you would like to hear about something in particular that I haven’t covered, let me know and I’ll try to oblige.  I’ll try to keep up regular posting on this blog throughout service, although that will become more difficult when I get assigned to a community.  

More to follow soon, 

Chet