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.