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