Two years is not enough...

Hello!  I know it´s been a while, so I figured I would send out another update.  Things are still going really well, now that I have my own house and don´t feel quite so much pressure to be busy every second of the day.  I still don´t have a cat (hopefully next week), but I have adopted my neighbors dogs, and two of my host family´s dogs.  At any point in time, I have at least one dog following me around – to school, to run, to random events – but one of the dogs, Mop (pronounced Mope), has my heart.  I have taught him to sit, and we are currently working on stay.  He hangs out at my house when I am not there and greets me when I arrive.  At night he sleeps under my window outside and barks at anything that comes near.  And in general, he´s just a really sweet dog.  I love him very much!  I am going to buy him flea shampoo soon.

Things are also going well with my service.  My activities and projects are evolving slowly.  I go to the school three times a week to help with agriculture class, and starting next week I will be giving an hour or so of environmental education to 4 of the 6 grades.  I had my first youth fun time – I brought Uno and invited all the kids to play in the community house after school (15 came!  That´s a lot.)  The First Lady´s Dispatch is working in the community teaching people how to have organic gardens by their house (although almost everyone makes a living here through agriculture, very few people grow or eat vegetables) and I have been supporting this project and learning for my own garden.  I am also working with a new women´s group that wants to start a bakery, and my group of men who make organic compost want to start a community vegetable garden.  And I am going to try to work more with the local cooperative, though that is still uncertain.  I am planning on having another meeting with the community to see which of the projects mentioned in the last meeting they want to work on most.  I´m hoping that once I get those projects started, I will feel better. 

For now, I still feel like I am in limbo.   I still say that I have two years left, but really it´s more like one and a half, and that makes me feel frantic.  Time keeps flying by, and I still haven´t done a dozen things I want to do.  I know I am the first volunteer here, so I am not expected to move mountains or anything, but I want to move mountains.  And two years is really not enough.  All the other volunteers say that the first year is practice.  You experiment with different activities, different levels of participation, different projects, and by the second year you really have your groove down.  You know what you want to do and what the community will do with you.  So I have about seven more months to experiment with stuff, and figure out how much I want to be in the school, in the different community groups.  One thing I have learned here is patience.  I have learned how to feel things out, watch ideas and activities evolve, and to nudge them in the desired direction.

For now, I am still enjoying my time with the people here.  They have a great sense of humor and are so generous.  I continue to receive gifts of eggs, yucca, plantains, cucumbers and fruit.  And now that I have my own house, people have started to visit me, so I give them coffee, juice and cookies.  Despite the bouts of homesickness I still feel for cafés, good pizza, brownies, and a night life, the people here make it so that I never really want to go home.  For now, my home is here.

Traveling

For the first three months of service, volunteers are not allowed to leave their site, the purpose being for them to really invest in their community and fully integrate.  My three months ended in June, and for the fourth of July I went to the beach with a bunch of other volunteers to celebrate.  It was a really good time – there was swimming time, ultimate Frisbee time, relaxing time, and for dinner there were chili dogs and sparklers.  The beach was on the Pacific side and was long and straight.  At night the tide was low and the moon was full, leaving a wide stretch of wet beach that looked like glass in the moonlight.

            Since the July fourth celebration was kind of far from my site and it was only a little farther to the mountains of Chiriquí, I decided to go see some friends and hike up Volcán Barú, the highest point in Panama.  A fellow volunteer who lives near the volcano found me and my friends a guide to take us up the mountain from her community, and he brought along three youth from the community as well – a 16-year-old girl who was going up for the first time, and two brothers (14 and 16) who had already gone up four times before.  Our guide was training the 14-year-old to be a guide as well, but they were all going up for fun.  As with all traumatic events, my memory has blocked out the near-death experiences and I look back on the trip fondly.  In a few more months I may even be able to convince myself to go again.

            It started out so promising, beginning the hike at 6am, with good spirits and carrying as little as possible.  We were told to prepare for a cold night at the top, with some warm clothes and food, so when I first put on my backpack I hardly noticed the weight.  The first three hours we were walking on a narrow trail through a beautiful cloud forest in the mountain.  We refilled our water bottles with cold and delicious spring water our guide showed us along the hike.  We rested periodically and ate peanuts and looked at the bamboo and tall trees, listening to birds.  We were starting to get tired when we burst forth into our first picturesque view of the surrounding tree-covered mountains, with the town where we started cradled below us in a valley.  At this point, we thought the hike was challenging, but not too difficult.  Then, after four hours, we left the montaña and entered the part of the hike that was the actual volcano, which was a combination of steep uphill hiking and rock climbing.

One thing that we learned was the difference in how Panamanians view time, and how Americans view time.   For the next four hours, whenever we asked our guides how much further they said ¨poco, just around that wall way up there and then a little further.¨  Unfortunately, one of my friends got sick (what with altitude, questionable hotdogs the night before, and lack of sleep), and I spent a lot of the next four hours coaxing him up the mountain.  The guides were extremely patient and kind.  They refused to leave us (though I´m pretty sure I heard the brothers say to each other that if we were Europeans we would have already arrived), gave encouraging words, and one even pulled my friend along with strap of his backpack.  Of course, my friend was not the only one suffering – I used his frequent breaks to cover for my own slow pace and to recover from my lack of breath (there´s not a lot of oxygen on top of a volcano), light-headedness, and the constant feeling of lactic acid in my legs.  Then, as I was sitting with my friend, trying to get a little more energy to go ten steps farther and contemplating how terrible it would be if I dropped my water bottle (or myself) down the mountain, we heard a shout and watched as the backpack of my other friend (who was much farther ahead of us) began tumbling down. And down. And down.  We did, I am glad to report, make it up the mountain in one (albeit exhausted) piece with all of our belongings – the 14-year-old trotted down the mountain to retrieve the fallen backpack and caught up to us before we trudged all the way to the top.

            That night we stayed in the bunker at the base of some radio towers.  We all went to sleep immediately (2pm) and renewed our metabolism with Ramen Noodle Soup (good old Ramen, helps out every time).  There was perfect signal for the TV in the bunker, so I got to watch my telenovela (score!).  But the best part was the next day, when we hiked to the tip top to watch the sunrise.

WOW.

They put a cross at the highest point (very common here), and there were a bunch of other people who had come to witness the event as well.  A lot of people actually leave around midnight to hike to the top and then come right back after sunrise without sleeping (how????).  It was on the way down, of course, that we discovered there was a dirt road that went all the way to the top.  Our guide said that he preferred the other, more difficult path, because there are rocks and plants and handholds to help pull you up the volcano, rather than a steady and relentless incline you can only walk up.  Since I had already started to forget how much pain I was in the day before, I agreed with him.  Also, since the worst part was over, walking downhill felt like a piece of cake.

fruits

I know that this may seem silly to some, but I still love how exotic fruits are different here.  When I think of exotic fruits, I think of pineapples, mangos, papaya, passionfruit and starfruit.  But here, they think of apples, pears and grapes.  I was at school when the first and second grade teacher was having her students color pictures of common fruits.  What would I have done in first or second grade?  Yellow banana, red apple, yellow pear, purple grapes, oranges, or red strawberries.  Here, those things (except for the bananas) are a delicacy.  Instead, they colored in papaya, pineapple, marañón (cashew fruit) and mangos.  It blows my mind still!  Here, perfectly good mangos rot on the ground where they fall because there aren´t enough people to eat them all.  What they love are apples and pears, which I get sick of in mid December because they are the only economical fruit available in the States.

Four months (July 17)!

            I have a house!  A really nice one, actually, and sometimes it makes me feel guilty.  Peace Corps volunteers are supposed to live in one room wooden houses with an outhouse and no electricity, not a three bedroom concrete house with flush toilet, four hammocks and a fridge.  But I have decided not to complain, because this was literally the safest and most economical house in my community to rent.  And I have already made friends with my neighbor´s dogs, so they come and hang out every once in a while.  I also have a calf in my front yard that moos at 5:30 every morning (it belongs to my neighbor) and there are plenty of chickens running around making a racket every morning (also my neighbor´s).  What I don´t have (much to my frustration) is my cat.  This will be necessary soon, because when I am by myself at night, having a cat for company alleviates silly fears and loneliness.

            I have been here four months now, and in the past month I had my community analysis meeting.  For the first three months I got to know practically everyone, asked a bazillion questions about the environment and the community, and have been working on a community analysis document to send into my boss.  At the end of those three month, every volunteer in my sector has a meeting with the community to present to them what they learned (we played a very competitive and loud game of jeopardy) and discuss what projects and activities I, as their volunteer, would do with them for the next two years.  A good showing to these sorts of meetings is typically 20 to 30 people, but I am very proud to say that 50 plus people attended!  It was, in fact, a very successful meeting, and I felt very loved by the people who came (let´s be honest, who wants to walk 30 minutes with a chance of rain to a meeting after a long day of work?)  The meeting was also really good because I now have a direction to head in.

            I have been working a lot at the school, primarily in the subject of agriculture.  We planted green beans, cucumber and sweet pepper, and although the sweet pepper has yet to make a showing, the green beans and cucumber are coming along pretty well.  Of course, we are now facing our first pest: leaf-cutter ants.  These ants cut up leaves and carry them back to their nest where they cultivate a fungus, which they then eat.  In an objective sense, they can be seen as farmers, just like my community members, but in reality they are responsible for massive amounts of defoliation in the tropics, including our precious, green bean seedlings.  Today I went to check on the garden and all that was left of one of the plants was the tiny stem.  So we are in search of effective and environmentally-friendly means of completely destroying the ants´ nest.

            Also, a soccer update: the muchachos have started passing the ball to me!  I think I impressed them when I dribbled the ball for the first time, instead of just kicking it frantically to the nearest teammate.  Slowly but surely I am eking my way into their hearts.

First (and last? Fingers crossed) ailment

Well, I’ve had my first Peace Corps ailment.  It started out as a bunch of bug bites all over my legs, so I didn’t think anything was unusual when it started to turn into a rash, even when my host family told me it looked infected or like an allergic reaction.  I thought it was just a usual reaction to foreign bug bites.  But as the rash started to spread over the bug bites and break out in places where the bug bites never were, and my host family continued to be concerned, I finally called the Peace Corps Medical Office.  As Peace Corps Volunteers, if we are going to do anything medical related, like go to a doctor, we have to call the med office first.  We also can only go to certain doctors that have been approved as legitimate medical providers. 

Here in Panama there is a lot of traditional medicine practiced.  For example, you shouldn’t expose yourself right after heat.  This means you can’t open your fridge after ironing, you can’t shower after walking in the heat of the afternoon, and you need to cool down before you can go swimming.  It also means a lot of herbal remedies and teas.  And Vicks is their febreeze – it is used for everything from colds to headaches to bug bites.  So, if I need medical attention, I have to go to a clinic in my provincial capital, an hour and a half bus ride away.  There I was told that despite my fears of leishmaniasis, it looked more like an allergy, and I was given medicine and a cream.  Now, three weeks later, my rash is going away, though the marks remain and people keep putting in their two cents about what caused it or what I should do to make it better.  I also have to put up with people telling me how concerned they are that my beautiful legs will be forever marred by the marks, and have I told my boyfriend yet that I don’t have pretty legs anymore?  I just tell them that it’s a good souvenir from my time in Panama.

Fashion Limbo

As Peace Corps volunteers, we frequently manage a balance between integrating into the Panamanian culture and following Panamanian expectations and maintaining our own North American identity and image.  This means that my new native language is Spanglish, my cooking is a mash up between Panamanian cuisine and my North American cuisine, and I wear clothes I would never wear in the U.S. without quite fitting into Panamanian fashion either.  On the one hand, it means I can’t really go wrong: if a North American sees me, they will give me the benefit of the doubt and realize I have different shopping options here; if a Panamanian sees me, they will also give me the benefit of the doubt, because I’m a foreigner.  On the other hand, I have a really hard time finding clothes in my size.  There are a lot of clothes here that I really like, but people here are generally a lot smaller.  It was never easy to find shoes I liked in my size, but now it’s even harder.  The fact that the average sizes are smaller, combined with the really low prices, means that I settle for buying clothes I would never buy because they are only $3 or $4.

            I did realize the other day that women here purposely buy really tight clothes, even if they are not the most flattering by North American standards.  When women want to dress up for special events, they wear tight jeans with sequins or rhinestones, high-heeled sandals, tight “cute” shirts (also with sequins, rhinestones and, frequently, English phrases or words), and coordinating makeup, accessories and makeup.  However, a lot of women have what they call llantas (“tires” in Spanish), or what we might call muffin-tops.  Some llantas, according to a member of my community, are the size of a bicycle while others are the size of a taxi, but all women have one.

            A few weeks ago, my host mom wanted me to try on a pair of jeans, certain that they would fit me.  After looking at the size, I told her they wouldn’t since they were two sizes too small; however, after she insisted I at least try them on, I managed to squeeze into the jeans.  I emerged from my room to show them the jeans, the zipper and button strained closed from the difficult task I had asked of them, thinking that this would prove to my host family that I was right.  Instead?  “¡Qué bonita!”  “How pretty!  The jeans fit you so well!  Turn around, look at how pretty they fit you!”  Well, I was pretty floored by their reaction, and so showed them how these jeans accentuated my llanta, but they told me I just needed to cover it with a shirt.  And how pretty I would look if I put on color-matching makeup!

            So although I realize that my looser wide-legged jeans probably look a little shabby and messy for my Panamanian family, I refuse to wear jeans that tight, if for no other reason than because it is way too hot for me to stand wearing tight jeans.  And so, I am finding a balance between what I am willing to wear and what I am willing to just blame on my strange North American fashions.