The Comarca Visit - from Ben´s Viewpoint

I got beaver-fever. We walked a lot, uphill, both ways. We ate plantains, bland, bland plantains, with white rice sometimes. Lisa got pink-eye. Lisa got eaten by bugs. Lisa fell down naked. All we ate was plantains.

That´s how I feel looking back now, after a shower and a fastfood meal from Pio-Pio (a fastfood chain specializing in chicken, ¨Pio-Pio¨ is the sound baby chicks make in the latino parts of Panama). I´m in a slightly air-conditioned internet cafe in Santiago, Veraguas. And looking back on our little adventure from culture week is easier than living it.

Lisa summed it all up pretty well, though I´d emphasize that it looked like her eyes were bleeding except the blood wasn´t running down her cheeks, after the swelling went down enough to see her eyes. She´s covered in bug bites, more and more every day in Panama in general. We had our mosquito net up but the wall of our shelf-bed was sloped so we couldn´t get the net to spread out in that direction. Mosquito nets block mosquitos unless they don´t have to go through the net.

I believe her description of the home failed to capture it properly. These are some very poor people, though they do love to smile and laugh. Mostly, they seem to laugh at the misery of others, including each other, but hey, I´ve always said the root of comedy is bad things happening to other people. And they are happy.

Back to the home. Picture a slopping, packed-clay floor. Put in some mostly-straight tree trunks about 3 inches in diameter. Attach a ¨zinc¨ (sheet metal to a non-camposino) for a roof, slopped to catch rain water. Put up a few more zinc for walls, but don´t bother to have it meet the roof, ground, or each other; we´re not making a complete wall here. When you run out of zinc, put up anything else: tarps, old clothes or blankets, some large leaves. Holes in the material are not patched up in any way.

Build some shelves to sleep and sit on. Another large one for a fire (there was an old fogon location outside but I think the wife appreciates not cooking in the rain). The shelves are more tree limbs, fairly straight, and a couple of cross beams held together with a nail or two and a lot of twine...a lot of twine, or shoe strings, or anything else around. I think I only actually saw one nail used in the structure, but I´m assuming there are others. Then lay some halved tree limbs across the cross beams. Now top it off with some of that carpet padding that you put down before the actual carpet, or more old clothes/blankets. (the outhouse or latrine is made the same way)

To complete the picture, put in two hammocks, a bunch of twine to dry clothes or hang stuff so its not in the mud, lots of smoke from the cook fire, and bits of trash. Not too much trash though. Although they were recently a nomadic people and used only organic materials thus creating a strong ¨throw it on the ground when you´re done with it¨ attitude, I think this younger generation realizes that stuff´s not going away, and neither are they.

You can mentally see where we were, if you add a couple of gringos for the week, their mosquito net, a couple of giant magic bags that seem to produce a new wonder toy each day, and everyone with a flashlight because it gets dark early. Unfortunately, they were also terribly shy, except for the dad of 38, so they didn´t even talk to us in our (and their) second language: Spanish. They talked to each other in Ngobere and just stared at us. I´d say that most of the questions we did get from people (other than the dad) were about how much things cost, and the dad asked that a lot too. But hey, these guys don´t get any catalogs.

I also had an interesting conversation with an uncle. The mom´s brothers seemed to come and go as they pleased and would claim a bed from one of the children whenever they were there. We ¨met¨ at least three but its hard to see them in the dark (¨met¨because they never did give their own name, I´d just ask the oldest son later). This conversation was about how much I thought he could make if he went to America. Bear in mind that he came right to me from outside, I´d never seen him before, didn´t even say hello, and it was almost dark. I tried to explain that it really depended on his skills, what part of the country he would go to, and later that I´d never had, worked with, or met a house keeper (which he apparently thought was a typical job for any immigrant, even a farm laborer who probably doesn´t know what our houses need or look like).

We also spent much of our time each day in language lessons. Our schedule said it would be Spanish and Ngabere, but it was always Ngobere (it can be spelled either way) which was explained in Spanish. My Spanish is still trying to find itself in my mouth. It was frustrating for us, wore us out really, and definitely frustrating for our two teachers, though they didn´t show it very much. Another aspirante´s host mom said, seriously, that she would be able to speak Ngobere by swear-in. Another heard from a Ngabe said that the volunteers we´d met spoke it well, but the volunteers themselves disputed that and laughed. They said that if you even try, all the community will say that you speak it well.

All in all, I really like these people. They laugh anytime something gets hurt, but so do I. They have some hard living conditions, but nobody chooses where they are from. They are some of the hardest working people I´ve ever seen, and apparently I´ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. They say both the men and the women, all small people, will carry 100 pounds using only a strap across their foreheads, and they walk up and down some damn steep hills. And the site that we saw was accessible by road. Most of the environmental health guys will have an hour or two hike into their sites, over mountains and streams. I gotta hand it to those guys. I´m looking forward to being dropped off in our town by a chiva.

Speaking of chiva, I´ll leave off this culture shock entry by talking about my umbrella. It was $4 and I bought it weeks ago. It was big and wide and green and I liked it. I took it all the way out to the Comarca, changing buses and riding a chiva. My fault, but I forgot it under the bench in the back of the chiva (damn they crowd those things). On the way back down the hill, because its a one-way trip up, I asked the crowd to reach under the bench because I forgot my umbrella there. The driver explained to me that it was now another person´s. She took it with her when she got off at the end. The volunteer hosting our culture week said she´d try to get it back, but when she said it was a two hour hike up the hill and then off into the woods, I told her not to bother. It wasn´t worth $4. Then I rationalized it by saying, she probably needed it more than me anyway. She made a face that said ¨not really¨, which was the same face I got from each volunteer who came to visit when I told them the same thing. Now I know why our host dad told us umpteen times our first night that our bags were his responsibility and that no one would mess with them in his house, we could feel assured. He was saying it because it wasn´t a part of his culture to have things belonging only to one person.