As All-American as Apple Pie

Today, for lunch, we had a quick snack at the grocery store. Every time we come to David, the capital of Chiriquí, we pig out and eat too much, wasting good money on unfinished food by the second evening out. Today, instead, we ate at the grocery store so that we will have room for a nice steak and some wine at dinner.

We saw some apple pie behind the counter and some delicious apple soda in the cooler and figured that sounded good. Nothing better than all-American apple pie. Unfortunately, as we hope the photo shows, our apple pie turned out to be apple gelatin-y stuff on pie crust, as if they took all the juicy-ness from apples and apple pie and made it into jello. Here, take a look!



The apple soda was far better than the apple pie. I guess we shouldn´t expect something as tasty as all-American apple pie if we aren´t in America.


We have large appetites but small stomachs because we have become a bit skinnier. We got on the scale today for the first time in a long time and found that we have lost some weight. Although we pigged out before leaving the country, artificially inflating our beginning weights, Lisa has lost more than 15 lbs and I´m down more than 40! Yes, FORTY! Lisa says I may have lost more if I would only trim my beard.


What has brought about this incredible weight loss you ask? Well, I´m glad you asked. I´ll tell you what it was. Walking up and down mountains for hours in both directions to meet with our hosts in the Comarca about basic business practices. Eating rice and beans, or rice alone, or boiled green bananas for breakfast and lunch/dinner for two months straight. Then we were able to move out on our own and eat better, but the portions have remained small and the walking has become more frequent. Lisa says that bacterial infections of the intestines could be a factor as well.


How can you get on this amazing diet? What ways can you experience this phenomenon yourself? Get a plane ticket and come on down! We are looking for a few good folks to share some of our experiences first hand! Get out the map, read a little on the internet about sites you´d like to see in Panamá and shoot us an email or phone call.


Also, we´d like to extend the offer of a little Q & A visa vis this blog. We ALWAYS read the comments, often weeks later when there´s been enough time to accumulate all there are going to be, so go ahead and pop some questions in there. Or, of course, you could shoot us an email at the host email of this blog (lisafroggirl@yahoo.com) and we´ll be happy to answer them in the next blog.

Destruction.

Last Wednesday (February 4th), the rain came. It rained hard all day, which is a bit unusual in our ¨summer¨ season. That night, the winds came. Unbelievable winds. Constant, furious, strong winds. Destructive winds. We laid awake nearly all night listening to things hitting our roof, and at 3:30a.m. heard a huge crash. We turned on a headlamp and looked around, but things looked fine so we actually slept some until first light when we had to pee and noticed that the giant ancient tree that used to be behind our house was now ON our house, and part of our roof was crushed.

Luckily for us, the gigantic tree actually fell at an angle to our house and not straight on it. Otherwise, the part of the house where we were attempting to sleep could have been crushed. We got up and began chopping up the tree with our landlord and neighbors, and it took about 3 hours to get enough of the tree chopped up to get it off and away from the house, but a significant portion still remains. Our only real damage is some bent and crushed zinc on the roof and 2 beams that are cracked on the inside of the house, and Ben broke his machete while chopping up the tree.

The rest of our town didn´t fare nearly as well. Trees fell down all over the place, crushing homes and ripping up aqueduct lines. Homes were flattened by the winds and rooves, walls, clothes, possessions and other items were scattered and gone. The destruction was incredible after the first night alone, and just continued to get worse. We had to leave the community on Sunday evening to head to our In Service Training (3 months after you go to your community and 6 months after arriving here) and the winds were still blowing.

It´s horrible to see that people had nothing or next to nothing, and now have even less. Rumors keep going around about agencies arriving with help and food and water (there was no water in much of the town for 4 days), but it didn´t come. No one could start rebuilding because the winds kept raging. People moved out into the jungle because they feared that their homes would collapse, yet the jungle was dangerous too with trees falling and zinc flying. The destruction is incredible.

There are a lot more pictures on Facebook. I´ve seen to hit a limit on pictures for this blog.