Lisa & Ben´s Panama Adventure

New address...

2011-04-29T14:13:00.002-05:00

We've moved again- the office this time... Here's how you can send us stuff, because we're still here!

Peace Corps Panama
Ben and Lisa Spink
Edificio 240, 3er Piso
Calle Víctor Iglesias
Ciudad del Saber, Clayton
Corregimiento de Ancón
Panamá, Rep. De Panamá

We're still here, in Panama!

2010-12-11T10:46:00.001-05:00

Yup, we're still here, but we've moved! We're living in the BIG city, Panama City. I'm working for the office as the Technical Trainer for the CED program and having a blast. Ben is a Peace Corps Response Volunteer, working with IPACOOP (the national cooperative authority), advising them on Agri-Business practices. He's been busy traveling all over the country completing marketing diagnostics with agricultural cooperatives. (Peace Corps Response is a special program, initally set up to have PC volunteers respond to crisis situations - formerly Crisis Corps - but now offers assignments to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers for 3-12 months traditionally working with a Host Country Agency.

So, in case anyone wants to snail mail us anything, our address has changed, and we've come full circle - back to the Peace Corps Office:

Lisa and Ben Spink
Cuerpo de Paz Panama
Edif. 104, 1er Piso
Avenida Vicente Bonilla

Ciudad del Saber, Clayton
Panama, Republica de Panama

Ben's current PCRV position is for 6 months, which would finish at the end of April 2011, with options to extend. He's thinking of staying up to July at the latest, and then he's going to law school! Where, we don't know yet, but his applications are ready and being sent soon.

I will be here until December 31, 2011 (mas o menos), under my contract with Peace Corps Panama! So, one more year! And I'll try to keep popping in here and updating all of our dedicated followers about our Panama adventures!

Turning 30 - A Birthday to Remember!

2010-08-23T15:04:00.000-05:00

That's right, I'm 30 now, 30 + 1 week! As many of you know, I haven't been living in the community of Hato Chami for a little while now. I was asked in June if I would come help plan training for the incoming group of volunteers, so I more or less moved to Panama City on July 1st. I am sharing an apartment in the city near the Peace Corps office.

I went back to Chami for a week at the end of July, and it was fun to hang out with my beloved community members, and I spent the work doing an informal arts & crafts camp with some of my favorite faces there. As I left that week, I promised to come back up and celebrate the big 3-0!

Originally Ben and I talked about going all out - going someplace exotic, far-out, having a big party or something of the sort, but on further thought, what more memorable way to celebrate such a milestone than by spending it in a remote indigenous village in the mountain cloud forest! So, on Saturday the 14th, I got on a bus out of Panama City bright and early and traveled all day to get up to Chami. (I've had SUPER bad luck traveling long distances lately - another story - and the chiva broke down on the way up). I spent the night in town, and then the next day I baked a cake and took it down to Balbina's restaurant.

Her family and our landlord's family came, we ate a little, sat around, talked and laughed, ate cake and got chocolate frosting everywhere. Juana & Marizin (two of the young girls) ran all over town in the rain to try to find balloons for me, with no luck, but when they got back they decided to be creative and make their own pinata.

The girls took an empty rice bag and filled it with candy and flour - you CAN'T have a good pinata without flour in Panama! They then proceeded to throw it all over me! I was COVERED! It was a blast. That's turning 30 in style. I don't think I'll ever forget this birthday. It was a day filled with my new Panamanian family, my best friends in the area, some awesome kids, and Ben. Not much could have made the day better. My parents asked me what gifts I got this year, and I realized I didn't get anything. Nothing material at least, what I've really gotten is the most amazing experience of my lifetime. So cheers, and many happy years to come!

Lisa's Peace Corps Reading List

2010-08-23T14:45:00.000-05:00

After several requests, I'm posting my Peace Corps reading list. One of my personal goals for my Peace Corps service was to read 100 books - I'm just past that mark, and have read quite the variety of books. From this list, you'll probably be able to guess some of my moods, some of my favorite authors, some projects I was working on, and some of my future career thoughts! For the record, I only read ONE book in training, the rest is in the nearly 2 year period since. Enjoy!

1. Touching My Father’s Soul by Jamling Tenzig Norgay
2. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
3. Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
4. Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
5. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
6. The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant
7. Atonement by Ian McEwan
8. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards
9. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
10. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
11. The Cloud Garden by Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder
12. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
13. The Path Between the Seas – The Creation of the Panama Canal – 1870-1914 by David Mc Cullough
14. Under the Banner of Heaven – A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
15. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
16. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
17. Crossing Zion by Keith Mark Johnson
18. My Friend Leonard by James Frey
19. Sand in My Bra & Other Misadventures Edited by Jennifer L. Lee
20. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
21. Good to Great by Jim Collins
22. The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain
23. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
24. Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
25. Exodus by Leon Uris
26. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
27. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
28. Night by Elie Wiesel
29. Two Ears of Corn by Roland Bunch
30. The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights by John Steinbeck
31. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
32. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
33. Merle’s Door by Ted Kerasote
34. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
35. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
36. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
37. QB VII by Leon Uris
38. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins
39. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
40. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
41. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
42. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
43. Marley & Me by John Grogan
44. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
45. A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain
46. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
47. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
48. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
49. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin
50. The Red Pony by John Steinbeck
51. Organic Coffee by Maria Elena Martinez-Torres
52. The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost
53. Emma by Jane Austen
54. The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck
55. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
56. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
57. The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck
58. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
59. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
60. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
62. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
63. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
64. Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
65. The Long Valley by John Steinbeck
66. The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
67. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
68. Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
69. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
70. The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho
71. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
72. Career Diplomacy by Harry W. Kopp & Charles A. Gillespie
73. Inside a U.S. Embassy Edited by Shawn Dorman
74. Realities of Foreign Service Life, Volume 2, Edited by Melissa Brayer Hess, Patricia Linderman & Marlene Monfiletto
75. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
76. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
77. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
78. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
79. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
80. Left for Dead by Beck Weathers
81. The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky
82. A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
83. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
84. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
85. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
86. Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen
87. Gone Bamboo by Anthony Bourdain
88. Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway
89. Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors
90. Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
91. Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins
92. Black Boy by Richard Wright
93. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
94. The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
95. Shopgirl by Steve Martin
96. Harry Potter y La Piedra Filosofal by J.K. Rowling
97. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
98. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
99. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
100. Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut
101. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
102. The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner
103. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
104. The Tailor of Panama by John le Carre
105. Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

We still have lots we should blog about, so look for future posts on Ag-Biz seminars, the Business Plan Development seminar, what I'm doing now in the office/what we're staying to do, our last few months, etc!

Travels & Visitors: The story of our life from April on...

2010-07-02T09:14:00.001-05:00

We've now caught you up on some of our activities and work through March, and if we had to sum up much of our time since then (in two words) we'd say: Travel and Visitors!

We've been on the road quite a bit lately - traveling for work purposes - working on revising materials for each of our "Community Economic Development" iniatives, seminars, charlas, etc. and hosting lots and lots of visitors!

The flood of visitors started in late April with my sister Sandra. She brought "Christmas" with her - or in other words, she brought a lot of replacement stuff with her from what was lost in Ben's bag. Even though we spent our own money replacing most of the items, it was still awesome to get so much new stuff at once - and even better to get a bag of Easter candy too! Sandy spent 9 days in the country, and she was our first visitor to spend 2 nights in our community! We had to brave a few significant bug attacks, but we had a great time and she got to experience an 18th birthday party, Comarca Ngobe-Bugle style! Complete with arroz con pollo, a "chicha" made of fruit cocktail, a cake baked in my oven, and a pinata filled with candy and flour! Not only did she brave our site for that long, but we all almost got stuck in the area because our chiva drivers went on strike on the day we tried to leave! Good times!

We also spent time in Cerro Punta, we hiked in the Parque Internacional La Amistad and saw a great waterfall - it was a steep hike and we all learned about "shaky legs syndrome" in the days to follow! We had good spa time, and then headed to Boquete where we ziplined through the canopy! We also spent some time at the beach. It was a full trip, and made all the more exciting the last day when our David-Panama bus broke down TWICE. The first time we had to wait an hour and a half for a replacement, the second time (with different bus) we lost the AC but continued on. Because of the break-downs we barely got her checked in for her flight on time, but we made it! Major kudos to Sandy for her patience with all the public transport (and it's issues)!

Sandy and I pose in Casco Viejo in Panama City.

Visitors = Good food! We enjoy Mexican food in Panama City.

We even cook better foods for visitors! Here I show how excited we are about "garlic bread."

And Sandy sure looks excited to eat it, or by how awesome our house is!

Lovely Las Lajas. Ben is enjoying a Panama.

Sandy & Ben play a heated match of Ping Pong in Cerro Punta.

Look, something cool in the jungle - hiking in PILA outside Cerro Punta.

Picking mud off Sandy - the climb down to the waterfall was steep and slippery!

In mid-May Pat & Casey came to visit us from Fairbanks, Alaska (our farthest visitors) for two weeks. Ben and them hit up the city briefly and then saw El Valle and did some horseback riding in the rain. Then they met up with me and we worked around some of our work commitments and regional meetings and saw Las Lajas, Boca Brava and then our community! From there we spent some quality time in Cerro Punta and then made a summit attempt on Volcan Baru. We turned back at 1am, and it was a good decision. Not a fun hike! Our visit to Boquete was quick, but we then headed back across the country to go to San Blas - PARADISE!! We spent two nights in the land of the Kuna, relaxing in the crystal clear waters of the carribean before they jetted off back to the U.S.

Outside Finca Dracula with Pat & Casey.

Getting ready to climb Volcan Baru with a group of Volunteers.

Hanging out in Carti, Kuna Yala, waiting for our boat to go to Devil Island.

Exploring Devil Island, view of Dog Island.

Combing the reef and shoreline for cool things.

Sunset - looking at a hut, and toward Dog Island.

Nice Catch!

(Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from other visitors on this computer, so you'll just have to wait, or visit us on Facebook.)

Ben also flew out of Panama that day, to visit my family in Virginia for a week. He went back to study and prepare for the LSAT (law school admission test). He had an excellent week hanging out with Nikodemus, eating lots of awesome food, and bragging about it to me everyday. I was in our community, hanging out with the bugs and soaking in the rain. Poor me. :)

When Ben got back, he stayed in Panama to help with a few training activities and then his parents arrived to spend 9 days here! They flew to David and rented a car to come up the mountain and met up with me in site in time to enjoy a 5-year olds birthday party. This was the birthday party to beat all Comarca birthday parties! A significant portion of the town was there, we used a formal agenda, we had special invitees (us), and lots of good food and the biggest pinata I've ever seen! It was a fun cultural experience for Doc & Meg! Then, true to our normal hotspots, we hit up Las Lajas, then Boquete where we learned a lot about coffee and then on to Cerro Punta to learn about orchids and to relax! Ben then headed back across the country (in airplane, lucky duck) with them and then saw them off.

In the meantime, I was off to the Business Plan Development seminar (the culmination of A LOT of my time and work in the past year) with my incredible counterpart, Balbina. She is writing a business plan for her restaurant. Just as an aside, Balbina is so awesome - she entered her business in a contest for Female Entrepreneurs in Panama recently, and was selected as a finalist and presented herself and her business in Panama City - she won $1,000! Go Balbina!

Ben arrived the next morning to help with the seminar because I was facilitating many of the sessions, and he was a great helper in helping Balbina to write her plan. We've got one more weekend of the seminar coming up in July and then she will have a complete plan!

After the seminar, we both headed back to site (the first time we've had some "alone and together time" up there in a while) for a few days, and then Ben headed back to the city to meet up with his sister, Sam and her husband Rob. They rented a vehicle in Panama and drove right up to our site to meet me (I'm always in site!). Instead of a birthday party they came up on "San Juan day" - which basically means that all the men get REALLY drunk and race around on their horses through town all day. Interesting. The second night (they also stayed 2 nights), there was a "discoteca" in town. Discoteca in Chami can best be described as a junior high dance with alcohol. No one really dances, they stand around the edge drinking a lot. After a long night, a few brave souls might lose enough inhibitions to dance a little, but the music pumps until daybreak, or longer! In our time in Chami, we hiked out to Escopeta (the somewhat abandoned mining town), and saw the "sights" of town. We then went to Boquete where we did a coffee tour, and then ziplined the next morning. Then it was off to the beach, and then back to Panama. Always on the move!

We've really been blessed to have so many awesome visitors lately, but to be honest, we're also glad to be done (for now!) - it will be good to get back into our routine, and get more time in our community. Our time is drawing to a close (our time in our community, at least) and we really want to enjoy every moment we possibly can. We've only got about 3.5 months left in our service now, and we're looking to the future. We've decided we ARE staying, for a while. We are currently working out the details, and some of them are supposed to be kept under wraps for a while, but look for the info in a blog coming soon!!

Project Management & Leadership Seminar

2010-06-17T07:06:00.000-05:00

First of all, YES, we're still here, and YES, we know that our last blog was kind of a "bummer," and YES, we haven't updated it in a while. So, for all of our loyal fans, we're going to try to get caught up on some of the memorable moments we've had in the past few months. And we should start with our Project Management & Leadership seminar that we held in our community in 4 days (over 2 weeks) in March.

Before we go into the specifics, we want to give a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who donated funds to our project. We sought funding through the Peace Corps Partership Program, which links Peace Corps volunteer projects with people in the U.S. through the official website. We asked for nearly $700 to help us (and the community) make this seminar a reality, and we couldn't have done it on our own. So thank you to everyone who donated - it was a great success.

First some background info (I'm taking much of this from our project proposal submitted to Peace Corps Washington). The purpose of the Project Management & Leadership seminar is to help community leaders obtain the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to be proactive and transformational in the community and within their respective organizations. The objectives of the seminar are:

1. To develop a shared understanding of concepts, strategies, and skills which equip community leaders with practical, people-oriented leadership tools applicable to business or project management at individual, group, community and institutional levels.

2. To orient community leaders to the practical, social, emotional, and logistical challenges which await them in the business or project management process.

3. To encourage community members to adopt a proactive approach to leadership, by focusing their efforts and actions on the areas of personal and project development which they have the power to change or influence.

The Project Management & Leadership seminar seeks to cultivate leaders and stimulate positive change beginning on a personal level and eventually extending to an institutional level. Skills and knowledge that will be acquired by community leaders through the implementation of the Project Management & Leadership seminar include the following:

At the individual level -
• How to identify values, goals, projects and priorities to have a clear personal and organizational direction
• How to manage resources of time, information and money using agendas, filing systems, budgeting and tracking of expenses

At the group level -
• How to get the right people involved in organizations and assigning them the right roles and responsibilities
• Defining and implementing productive group norms
• Structuring successful meetings
• Conflict resolution skills
• Designing a project plan based on a common direction

At the community level –
• Empowerment of other community members
• Community involvement through communication and education

At the institutional level –
• Drafting profession letters
• Public speaking and presentation skills
• Protocol and strategies for interacting with agencies

Through the knowledge and skills transferred and cultivated in the Project Management & Leadership conference, leaders grow on a personal level to be positive agents of change in their groups and in the community at large. In the long term, the knowledge and skills gained through the seminar will continue to be transferred to other community leaders and members through practice and future trainings.

At present, the people of our community and the Comarca province of the Ngöbe-Bugle people are going through incredible social and economic change. Since they began to seek the formation of a comarca (reservation) 40 years ago, they have had to organize their family groups into a government recognized at the national level, adapt their economic system from sustainable farming/bartering to a monetary-based system, and end their semi-nomadic way of life. They are now largely bi-lingual, are educated in classical public schools, and have an increased awareness of modern health care. The upshot of these changes is an astonishing population explosion and an increased dependence on the outside world.

To better manage their shifting situation, the community leaders of our region want to learn how to deal with management issues such as: improvement on an individual and family level, leadership of local groups, facilitation of relationships within the community, and interaction with the other Panamanian ethnic groups. While many of the groups will need individual attention, they all need the basic skills, knowledge, and attitudes demonstrated in the Project Management & Leadership seminar.

Conducting a Project Management & Leadership seminar in our community was initially proposed by our two community leader counterparts. Both counterparts attended the national level Project Management & Leadership conference held in March 2009 and returned to the community inspired to pass the concepts, strategies and skills learned on to other community leaders and members of their respective organizations.

In addition to the enthusiasm of the community counterparts to share the Project Management & Leadership curriculum, through the analysis of an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, conducted with numerous groups, community members identified the need for training in the areas and themes covered by the seminar.

Thus, we started the funding and planning process. In March 2010, it became a reality. We invited 20 leaders from communities across the Nole Duima district of the Comarca to attend the 4-day seminar. We had a few people come and go, but overall we had great participation and 15 leaders left the seminar feeling invigorated, empowered, stronger, and ready to tackle the challenges ahead of them in the management of their respective community groups.

The PML seminar was originally developed by our former boss (MAJOR props to you Zach), and is an incredibly dynamic learning experience for both participants and facilitators. Participants enjoy lots of "dinamicas" (what we might call "icebreakers," games, energy builders, etc.), skits, and activities in every session to help put new concepts and ideas into practice. We had the help of 4-6 other volunteers from our area in pulling off this incredible logistical feat (MAJOR props to our facilitators: Meredith, Erin, Eli, Gaurav, Andi and Tyler). Participants were invited from volunteer facilitator communities.

Things started slowly, but trust in the group built quickly, and everyone adhered to our chosen norms: respect for everyone and positive participation (among others). I've selected a few photos from the second part of the seminar (Ben has all the rest on his computer) to share with the world!

Participating in a "dinamica" - using only our fingers, we had to lower the tube to the ground as a group. It took several tries, but...

They did it! Another great lesson in the importance of communication and teamwork!

Participants literally "fill the bucket" of others - learning to communicate motivating messages and empathy to get the involvement and buy-in of the community. This lesson can be particularly challenging and FUN. In the Ngobe culture, people just don't say "thank you" (there's no word in their language), nor do they say things like "good job." Those words really can mean a lot!

"From your perspective, what do you see on the floor?" - a "dinamica" to teach that communication is not always straight-forward. People interpret messages in different ways. This lead into our discussion on promoting your group/project using messaging and logos!

A participant shares his group's logo and it's meaning.

Agripina shares her logo. There aren't many women leaders in general in the Comarca, but I invited quite a few up and coming ladies from our community and they did all women very proud!

Gaurav teaches about formal letter writing. And on the wall is literally the LARGEST letter I've ever written!

Checking out some examples of formal letters. Panama has a LOT of protocol to follow when it comes to writing letters.

Tyler, in the role of Devil, and Andi, as a guardian angel, teach Meredith the "do's and don'ts" of presenting in public in one of our skits.

Participants prepare to present in public. For some, it was their first time ever to speak in front of a large group.

The graduates and facilitators with their certificates! Great job everyone!

Thank you again to our donors, volunteer helpers, and to our community leaders. It was such an incredible experience to host the seminar and to see so many leaders grow even stronger. Peace Corps has offered us a lot of quote "Peace Corps moments" - this was another one to remember for the ages.

Worst Week of our Service. We hope...

2010-03-31T17:40:00.002-05:00

So, it´s been a rough week. This is probably one of those blogs best done by both of us, but Ben is off finishing the leadership seminar that we were both supposed to be at. I´m sure I´ll mess up the details of his part of the bad week, but I´ll try to summarize as best as I can!

!Beware, if you´ve been ¨freaked out¨ by our blog in the past, you probably shouldn´t continue on. If you do continue, prepare yourself for lots of poo talk!

Last Thursday, Ben traveled to the carribean side of the country to the province of Bocas del Toro for his Agro-Business seminar. (He´s the co-coordinator of the initiative - he represents the business sector, while another volunteer in our region, Kat, represents the agricultural sector.) Bocas del Toro is ¨famous¨ for it´s tourism - beautiful islands, surfing, etc (I haven´t been yet). As such, there´s a lot of gringos roaming around up there. To get to the beautiful islands, you get off the bus in the town of Almirante, before the end of the bus line, which is in Changuinola. So, usually lots of gringos get on the bus in David with their large backpacks, and then get off early. Ben was going to the end of the line for his seminar. (I´m building to it, it´s like a math question from middle school). So, what happens when all the other gringos get off the bus in Almirante? The ayudante (literally, helper, or the guy who takes money and handles baggage on the bus), gives Ben´s large backpack to the other gringos. Ben arrives in Changuinola with only our computer case. Mayhem ensues. The company deduces that they took it off early, but who has it?

That evening, they thought maybe it would come in on the next bus, it didn´t. So, with everything closing for the day, Ben decides to take up the hunt the next day. Friday he goes to Almirante and asks around. He talks to the police and tries to get the water taxi manifest with passenger names so he can find the other tourists. He calls our office, because the bag had his Panamanian i.d., and he files a report. Then he goes out to the touristy island and actually finds this couple in a park. They tell him that when they got in the taxi, the driver put the bag in the back and they didn´t realize it until they arrived at the boat launch, where they refused the bag and the taxi driver said he´d take it back. Back where?

Ben goes back to Almirante, talks to cab drivers in the area and using a description from the tourists, they figure out who it is. They try to flag him down, he won´t stop. That took all day. That night he wrote up a statement and estimated the value of everything lost. $1,275!!!!! Saturday, Ben goes to the DIJ (roughly the department of justice) to actually file a report ¨denouncing¨ what happened. They take him to Almirante yet again and to the house of the cab driver. He wasn´t allowed inside, but the guy was apparently very defensive and no one saw anything. Then they were supposed to go to the office of the cooperative that runs the bus company to file the complaint so we can get some amount of compensation and they were closed, and wouldn´t be open until Monday. Everything, EVERYTHING takes so much time here.

Ben couldn´t stay because of the leadership seminar he´s now at, so he left saying he´d come back again to file the report with the company. So, the bag is gone, and in it - the camera, back up hard drive, the backpack itself, all of his Ngobe clothes made for him, other nice clothes, shoes, toiletries, medications, well, just about everything of value that we own now. What a blow. And it´s gone.

We´ve come to terms with it more now, but after giving up so many material posessions and comforts just to be here and do this, it´s hard to lose pretty much the only things of value that we did have. So, now we´re at Saturday.

I´d been in our community agonizing over this issue waiting for phone updates. Saturday I came down to attend the going away party of our former regional leader. But when I arrived in San Felix, I decided that I really just needed to see Ben, and the heat was killing me, so I jumped on a bus to David. About an hour after I arrived, the diarrhea started. To set the stage, a week earlier, I came to David and went to the clinic for 6 months of recurring symptoms of diarrhea, and was diagnosed with giardia. I got my medications and left. So, diarrhea again, story of my life. Never have I had so much diarrhea in my life as in this year and a half, hell, never have I had so much as I have the last 4 days. It came on fast and violent.

By the time Ben arrived in David that night, it had quickly escalated into nearly constant, extremely painful diarrhea, and I lost my appetite. We went to bed and I didn´t sleep because I was up probably over 50 times with the diarrhea. At some point in the middle of the night, I noticed the blood. LOTS of blood in the diarrhea (how many times will I say diarrhea?) It wasn´t getting any better. I felt faint, had a raging fever, still had the pain, if not more, and couldn´t face sitting on a bus for 5 hours in the morning to go to our seminar (you´re not allowed to poop in the toilets on the buses in Panama). I woke Ben up by saying I was going to the hospital. I got there at 8am to be told that the doctor would arrive at 930am. I dozed off a couple times and finally was in, and almost immediately admitted into the hospital.

I waited some more, got my first IV, and then got the poop and pee cups- what a relief, I was going to explode. They ran those tests as well as blood tests and came back with the exciting results. Giardia (not gone), a bacterial infection AND amoebas! I´m such an overachiever. All three of those alone give people wicked diarrhea. Monday they seemed to get ready to discharge me until I said I still had diarrhea. Then the main doctor came and said that because of where I live, and how bad I really was, I needed to stay until everything was dead, that meant at least 2 more days there. Yesterday, at about 1am, the nurse came to give me new meds (I think they loved waking me up) and she blew threw the vein my IV was in on my left hand. Time to try a new vein, new hand. First try she blows my vein. So, the third attempt goes in on the side of my right hand. My hands are messed up now. Typing this pretty much sucks.

But, I was discharged today after four days of laying around watching American TV channels and receiving about 10 gallons of medicines through my IV. I feel MUCH better (aside from the hands), and I have a mountain of medications to take over the next week.

So, it´s been a full week. Not a good week. But we rise up and continue on! Earlier this week, we both discussed that this was probably a much better time in our service to experience these setbacks, rather than earlier. I´m looking forward to seeing Ben sometime soon (everything this week made even harder by not seeing each other but for one night) and we know that we´ve probably got something good coming our way soon! Things can be replaced, and my health is restored!

February & March 2010 - In Photos

2010-03-21T21:25:00.001-05:00

We've been busy in the last few months, so we've decided to post a few photos from our many adventures to help everyone catch up - but don't you fret, we've still got more to post about, including our VERY successful leadership conference that we just finished! These photos start with a few from our trip to Boquete with my friend Michele and her mom, who visited from the states. From there we've got some pictures from our community, the birthday of a friend, and our quick vacation to San Blas (aka the Comarca Kuna Yala) on the Caribbean coast. Enjoy!

River above Boquete.

Yay Peace Corps!

Me, by a waterfall (not huge, but not bad for Panama!)

Watch out for cars falling off cliffs around this corner!

This business works REALLY hard, they have a 25 hour a day schedule.

This chiva is *pretty* full!

Playing with the neighbor girls - they're pretty awesome!

And the neighbor boys. They love hamming it up!

Hello grasshopper! We found this lady laying eggs outside the school.

David, with our cat, in a hat.

I'm drawing the Chilean and Argentine coasts on our world map.

In mid-February the freakishly strong winds came back and ripped the "rancho" off our house one night.

I took this picture from my "seat" on the spare tire in the back of the chiva. There were quite a few people riding down with us that day.

Celebrating Andi's birthday with a flaming flan! Ben wanted us to use trick candles. The flan was tiny. Ben almost burnt his hands, but it was a good time!

Latrine in San Blas - where does the poop go?

Huts in Carti, Comarca Kuna Yala (San Blas)

San Blas gorgeousness from Devil Island. Looking at Dog Island.

The huts on the beach on "our" island.

Beautiful! We swam over here to enjoy Dog Island for a while.

Combing the reef for cool sea creatures.

One of those sea creatures, a large sea urchin, stung Ben.

Then, the next day he stabbed his hand with his knife while peeling coconut flesh.

Meligo's grandkids! Isabella's babies!

All the animals are interested when the Spink's wash dishes. 2 dogs, 1 cat and a chicken...

This guy was on Ben's neck when washing dishes the other day.

"What are you painting?"

2010-03-21T15:19:00.000-05:00

Ben and I recently decided to take on the popular task of painting a world map in our community. We started thinking about this early on in our service, based on the popularity of the world map we have hanging in our house. Community members often pop by to say hi, stare at all of the stuff we have, and to look at the world map and ask questions about places they've heard about. "Where is Haiti?" "Where is Panama?" "Wow, we're TINY!" At this point, we could continue on to a probably much more interesting blog topic "What it feels like to live in a zoo exhibit..." but we're not.

The map's popularity sparked an idea - lets paint one at the school! We'd be helping community members to learn about the world, and geography, and it's a physical piece of work that we can leave in the community (working in business concepts doesn't always give us that "we've accomplished a lot" feeling). We approached the director of the school at the end of the last school year (December) about painting over the summer and finishing the map before the next year started (early March). In early February Ben and I received a small amount of funding from a Peace Corps Panama volunteer organization, and we got to work.

The World Map project actually is something pretty well organized (developed by a Peace Corps volunteer) and popular. We used a book to help us with each step of the process. Step one - pick a place and get it ready! The school director decided that the best spot would be the new school library. For the record, the library is only full of textbooks and a couple of really outdated Encyclopedias -in ENGLISH. Ben and I went to work deciding how big the map would be (6 feet by 12 feet), measuring it out on the wall and scrubbing the wall. Even though the library was only built a year ago, the wall was covered in dirty hand and foot prints and other various interesting items.

Step two - paint the whole rectangle in "ocean blue." Step three - From there we drew grid lines covering the whole area - each grid was 2.5 inches square, which meant a total of over 1,500 grid squares. Why a grid? - so we could use much smaller photocopied grids from the book to basically free-hand draw the world onto the wall. Why paint it blue first? So we wouldn't have to paint all those coasts twice (with the color of the country and then the blue - what a GREAT idea!) In hindsight, we drew our gridlines too dark. We realized this when we had to erase all those lines and ripped a lot of flesh off of our fingers in doing so.

Step four - Draw! This wasn't so bad, and went a bit faster than we expected it too, but we drew everything very detailed - which just meant that painting would be even more detailed. Which leads to the obvious next step, five, Painting! We bought 4 colors of paint, red, blue, yellow and white and mixed other colors from those. Painting went much slower than drawing, and Ben ended up doing most of the super detailed countries (the colors red, purple, and part of yellow) and I painted the light green, green, blue, pink, orange, and most of yellow.

Step six - we drew a few extra items - the Panamanian flag, the Peace Corps logo, and a compass rose, and painted them as well. Step seven - erasing the gridlines - BOO! This took over 30 rectangular erasers (we're not talking the small erasers on the ends of pencils), and much of the flesh off our hands. Step eight - sealing the map. We hit a speed bump here. When we bought our sealant we conveniently did NOT notice that it said it was white, in ENGLISH on the can. OY. So, we were working on the map two days before the school year started when we discovered this. The next day, I made an insanely fast trip to David (leaving site at 5am, and getting off the chiva back in site at 3pm) so I could exchange the sealant for a transparent one, and get back to get a coat on in the afternoon. The next day, step nine - labeling! After one coat of sealant, we labeled the countries and oceans with black permanent marker, added our beautiful signatures, and then slapped on two more coats of sealant and called it done on the first day of school as the kids watched.

All in all, it took 2 weeks of time - we're not talking 2 work weeks in the states! 14 whole days, 8+ hours a day. It was a lot, but it's great! And more important that this physical reminder of our service, we're already educating people with it. All throughout the process of painting, children and adults would pop in to watch us work, and it was amazing how often we were asked what we were painting - they had no recognition of it being a world map (even when it was done). We were also often asked if it was just a map of Panama. Nope, the WHOLE world! The kids have already really enjoyed reading off all the names of the countries (in Spanish, of course) and the teachers are already using it in some of their lessons.

When things slow down a little for us, we also hope to teach a few lessons here and there at the school on geography and world events. In the meantime, at least most people in the community can now identify that 1. it's the world, 2. where Panama is, and 3. they can say that Panama is pretty important to the world despite it's size!

Reverse Camping

2009-12-28T22:36:00.004-05:00

We are getting ready for bed, a rest too short for our weary bodies. Our stay with our families was too short as well. We'll be asleep only a few hours before we have to get up to catch a 5am flight back to Panama City. It's been three weeks since we were in site; I'm sure that our cat has made the most of it.

During our first week out, Felix (a family name that also happens to be the "sainted" name of the town at our entrance off the interamericana) feasted on the toads and birds that dwell around our jungle shack while we were in the City for training-of-trainers. Then, I'm sure he chased the neighbor's female vixen in heat while we visited my parents in Phoenix. And towards the end of our vacation, he surely warmed himself in the new-summer's sun that dries out our muddy yard while we slogged through the slush in Virginia.

As our thoughts turn towards our shack like iron filings toward a magnet, a phrase that Lisa and I have been bantering around comes to mind: "reverse camping". We realized a few weeks ago that much of our activities could be described to the people back home, who would be and have been pumping us for information, in much the same terms and timelines as camping, only in reverse.

We plan our outtings to the world of electricity and hot water (hopefully) in much the same manner as one goes about planning a camping trip in the United States. We get our clothes and essentials together. We assess the food situation. We check on the life of our batteries. We pack our bags. Headlamps? Check. Lighter and candles? Check. Cash and cards? Check. We lock up the house. We hike down a wooded path.

The major difference between camping and reverse camping is that we do much of it backwards. The batteries that we checked are not coming with us. The food situation we apprised tells us how much to bring back home. The essentials that we are lacking will be bought on the trip, not before or on the way out. The hike through the woods (albeit in our case rather short) is to get to a car and down the mountain rather than into a camp site.

We also spend much of our time at home acting like Americans do while camping. We shower in the water from a mountain stream. We cook over a small propane stove. We eat only items that are non-parishable or that we picked up recently at a local food stand. We wash our dishes and clothes outside. An unusual amount of time is spent reading in the hammock or sitting with people (the latter being a major pasttime for much of the world outside America and doesn't necessarily mean we talk much, just sitting with someone is gratifying.)

There is a freshness to our camping lives as well. Every day holds the promise of something new. Every day we are likely to learn something new about ourselves, our friends, our worldview, human nature, simple trivia, or an number of sundry facts and truths. Our time is our own. Our culture is what we make of it, as a couple or as a small group of volunteers getting together. We can come and go as we please. Much like being out on a weekend retreat, we are free.

Not everything is analogous, however. Unlike a pleasure trip to a national park (though some volunteers in Panama actually live in a national park), that much free time ends up meaning plenty of time to do our work. All the independence puts more pressure on us alone to do it right. There is no one else to blame. If something goes wrong, no one else culpable. No one else is even around to affect it. We are it, total and complete.

Some PCVs hate that liberty and its burden, and they leave. Some learn to live with misgivings about success and how to define it, tell themselves everyone feels the same and accomplishes little, and they focus on the goals cultural exchange. Some throw themselves into every available project and task so that they will know with certainty that they did everything they could, but risk burning out. Some find a serene bonhomie in their core, learning more about themselves and about the art of self-direction, of honest self-appraisal and impetus.

I believe that this last discovery is one of the prime motivations for becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer. We know going in that helping people improve their own lives will not be easy, so the challenges are guaranteed. We are understand that our personality will be magnified in a new culture, so self-awareness is assured. We are conscious of our choice to leave everything that makes us comfortable, so we recognize that we will have to redefine our comfort zone. We know we are leaving our family and friends, so we've got to know that we will be all alone. And one is never so alone as in a crowd of strangers.

Like camping, part of being a PCV is getting out there on our own. Some of the appeal the self-directed and self-apprasing of going solo. And much of the experience truly is seeing just how far you can go. "How far will you go?"

Forces at Work

2009-11-30T10:31:00.009-05:00

There are strange forces that act upon our world, turning it inexorably towards the future. Usually we are in sync with them, understanding them intuitively and matching ourselves accordingly, but occasionally we will be out of step, or they take an odd turn, and we are reminded that there are things we just don't get, and maybe never will. Yet the wheel keeps on turning, and those things that are ground down take on a new shape that matches with world and are back in sync.

For us, these forces peeked out through the chickens.

One day, as Lisa and I lounged in our hammock together, the heat of summer slipping through grip of another soggy winter, I whispered to her, "Look at the chickens." I had to whisper, for the forces of the world were strong and strange. I immediately knew we were out of step with them. Lisa raised her head from her book and gave a little gasp.

All of the chickens that are normally in constant motion (peeking, stratching, clucking, raping or being raped, and generally annoying us) had been pushed down on their sides with just one wing or leg sticking out. Or maybe as if they'd fallen out of the sky, but chickens don't fly and they weren't hurt. It was an odd position, and one that they seemed unable to overcome. A rooster might try to stand up and peck at a hen, but after moving for a second or two, they'd lay back down in the same position. We were fine, but the planets must have lined up funny for them. Maybe Jupiter was in the chicken coop.

This went on for a half hour or so. The weather was warm, but not too hot. The breeze blew, but not too hard or too soft. The sun was out, but so were some clouds. For us, it was a normal day. But for the chickens, something had pushed them to the ground and held them there. Then, all at once, the entire flock stood up, and, in normal chicken fashion, clucked, and stratched, and pecked, and went on with their stupid lives as though nothing had occurred.

Something similar happens every year here. During the beginning of November, when we American foreigners look forward to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, anticipating some a few days off with family and some feasting and football, the Panamanians are already in full swing with their Mes de Patria (Patriotic Month).

There are so many days off for the kids at school, that they essentially stop going, especially in the campo where the teachers already only work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The farmers still go to the fields to harvest, but now there are juntas with fermented corn drink randomly sprinkled throughout. The women look after the children and stay inside out of the heavy rains hoping for a sunny morning to wash all the dirty laundry. And every few days, there is another national or provincial holiday.

The 3rd and 5th, the 10th and 12th, the 15th, 22nd, and 28th were all times when our entire corregimiento (county) were all celebrating something or other with alcohol. (And we had our Thanksgiving on the 26th.) At each of these gatherings, men and women, and sometimes children, got drunk and had fist fights. Just the other day, we watched as every 20 minutes or so three to six fights broke out as men pulled off shirts and circled up. Mostly these are all in good fun, though sometimes they are used to settle old grudges. Luckily, we seemed to be exempt from the sparring, which is good because the people are powerfully built and tough as coffin nails.

This may be the time of year when foreigners feel the most out of sync with the rest of the country. Last year, we were brand new so everything was unusual. This year, we did our best to present ourselves but drink moderately, dance but not arouse jealousy, and still have some kind of forward motion with our work.

In the end, we mostly just enjoyed the company of our friends (both Panamanian and American) and get a lot of reading done. Nevertheless, we still felt the strange forces of a wheel we were not perfectly matched up to, which seemed to knocked down the chickens and men alike.

A Study in Muddy...

2009-11-24T10:57:00.000-05:00

Mud. You learn to love it, or at best, you get by, because you have to during this time of year in Panama. And even though we live at an altitude of 3,000 feet or so, we still deal with a lot of the brown, mucky, boot sucky stuff.

Our house is situated in a fairly level area, with about 5 other homes in the family group - on the edge of a decent sized field that the kids in the area like to use to play various sports, or just run around like crazy. This field is actually a secret lake in the rainy season. When the rain starts, the ground will soak up some of the water, but not anymore!

What this means is that life in a dirt floored house, situated on level with the secret lake, gets quite interesting as the rains get harder and more consistent. Before you fret too much, know that our dirt floor inside the house actually stays pretty nice and dry, thanks to some draining ditches that Ben dug around the house to divert the water flow. We do drag in a lot of mud though, and stepping even a foot outside our house now is a dangerous activity without rubber boots.

Oh how we love our rubber boots. Almost like 4-wheel drive in the mud - you can go just about anywhere and not worry - unless the mud gets as deep and sticky as it now is around the house. A trip to our water faucet, a mere 5 feet or so away involves inches of mud, and the trip to the latrine is much more perilous. Thinking about showering? Wear your rubber boots, then strip out of them into flip flops to shower, then try to dry your feet without getting your towel muddy so you can put the boots back on to get to the house in one piece. But we careful, you'll probably have to stop at the faucet to wash off the mud that you've splattered onto your upper legs, arms, back or any other exposed flesh.

I've started a bit of a mantra when going into and out of the house. Boots go on, boots go off... Boots go on, boots go off. Why so much on and off though? Well, if you keep them on, your feet don't breathe - so you end up with moist foot rot. Which you're going to get anyways from wearing socks for 5 days on end (yeah, we do, we don't have many pairs) and putting them into and out of the boots so much, but - it won't be as bad as it could have been.

Once we leave the house area, we have to slog through 6 or more inches of mud/lake to get to the horse gate, climb up the path to the main road, and then you're safe - heck you may not even need the boots - but don't you dare not wear them and think you could just wear other shoes and wash off the mud. No, this path is deceptive. It's muddy yeah, but part of it is pretty solid - and MOLDY. That mold is slippery. So, avoid the mold right? Ha! Then you're in the 6 inches of mud just to the sides of that moldy hardpacked path. What to choose? Either way involves shuffling along, and a lot of concentration.

Case in point: we returned to site one day - laden down with our backpacks, computer case, and bags of food. We get to the top of the gentle slope down to the horse gate, and start inching our way down. I'm wearing my crocs (stupid idea). I'm about halfway there, and have already slid around a bit, when a girl yells "BEI!" - I say "Hola" and watch my feet fly up in front of my face, as I fall on all my bags, and slide into the mud. She ran into the house to inform everyone of my hilarious act. After much cursing, I found my footing and worked my way to the house to scrub up every inch of my body and salvage the bags.

Sometimes you've got to embrace the mud. I also recently played a game of baseball with the area kids in the secret lake. The water receded - but I was fooled. This game quickly turned into a game of mud baseball. And mostly, I was the one covered in mud, because even in my mud 4-wheel drive, I couldn't keep my feet on the ground. I dove for the ball and fell on my butt and hands. Then at bat, I cracked a nice hit to the outfield, and took two steps to run to 1st - and ended up on my hands and knees in mud. The game didn't last long, but I gave the kids a lot of laughs - something I'm apparently pretty good at. The ICY cold shower afterward actually felt pretty good, and I didn't forget the boots!

When will it end? Hard to say - maybe a month - based on last year's experience. Time will tell, and until that time, you can imagine me saying "boots go on, boots go off..."

Check out photos in the "study of muddy" on facebook! Enjoy!

We're still here, but...

2009-10-29T13:38:00.001-05:00

apparently just don't have much to blog about. Our great friend Andi summed it up best on her blog with the following:

"It has been so long since I've updated this 'ol blog. But it's funny, the longer I'm here the less the experiences I have impress upon me the need to record them. They become less out of the ordinary. I don't carry my camera with me as often and my journal, instead of filling with the happenings of the day, is a place of introspection and answerless questions."

Life is pretty "normal" for us now. We've got our routine, we're settled in, and it really takes something crazy to shock us now! We're happy, healthy and busy, but none of that is very interesting. But, we'll keep up with this - we're done with one year in our community, which means less than one year to go!

A preview: The next blog to come promises to be of real import - a discussion on the abundance of rain, and thus, mud in or community. We know you're sitting on the edges of your seats waiting for it!

* You may have also noticed an addition to our disclaimer. Corriente Resources, a mining company from Canada, recently took and used a photo of ours in a powerpoint presentation in our community WITHOUT our permission. Peace Corps volunteers are not allowed to be involved in political activities. If anyone would like to use or reproduce content from our blog you will need the express written consent of both Ben and I. Thank you.

Tale of Two Birthdays

2009-09-05T12:45:00.006-05:00

As many of you know, Lisa and I have our birthdays two weeks apart. Hers usually comes first so she has time to plan mine based on how well I fared with hers.

This year, we had a really good friend named Andi come up for the day and spend the night. She lives in a village a couple of hours away. Early that morning, I snuck out of bed and joined our neighbors/landlords at their store to help butcher a cow. I'd written on their announcements all around town that the cow-killing was for Lisa's birthday though they had planned it before they knew. After an hour and a half of waving flies off the meat with a leafy stick, all the edible parts had been sold and I went home to find Lisa up and ready.

We paseared a bit (strolled around the community passing the time), waited until Andi came, and had a nice little snack for lunch. We'd started a chill afternoon, just hanging out with Andi and another couple of new volunteers who just started their tour in the Comarca (one lives in our village and the other uses it as a chiva stop before his two-hour hike.) As we were discussing how to get the meat smoked in the communal fogon (three-rock cooking fire) that our family group shares, a gringo was lead up to our house by our old host grandpa.

This guy was very white, appeared to be in his late 30's, and spoke excellent Spanish. He immediately asked which of us was Ben and Lisa. He explained that he was traveling around Central America to look at different mining projects. Although we were weary at first, he soon explained how he found us and what was his angle.

This guy was a professor of a university in Canada and part of an NGO that monitors the mining activities of Canadan companies around the world. It seems that he was at another volunteer's site a few days before and had gotten our names from her as the closests PCVs to the huge (4th biggest in the world) copper deposit further up the road from us. He was interested to know what kinds of propaganda and trainings the most recent petitioner had been offering to the indigenous people.

After talking with the guy for a while (during which I'd excused myself for a bit to smoke the meat), and introducing him to our neighbor so he could ask some questions directly, this newcomer invited himself to Lisa's birthday dinner. The two new volunteers had already left for their own meals with their host families. We turned the fresh delicious cuts into fajitas. We'd brought up tortillas, refried beans, and salsa already and picked up some veggies from the local market. They were scrumptuous, but it was kind of a drag having a stranger around, even though he left us with a beer and some fruit juice.

Lisa was a bit frustrated that most of the day had been about mine. It was not the best birthday on record.

My birthday, on the otherhand, was better. Again, we had some strangers come to visit, but of an entirely different sort. While I was acting as a training facilitator for the new group of business volunteers, our boss pulled me aside to ask if a married couple could visit us that weekend. This was Monday and they would basically be coming back with me on Thursday. Another curveball: Lisa was supposed to be out of town for the first few days of the visit although that ended early so it was only one night. Originally, the couple had been scheduled to go to another site, but those volunteers had ended their tour early so a quick change had to take place.

Being the flexible, hardworking PCVs that we are, we agreed right away. Nevertheless, it was another birthday for me with people that I barely knew. This has happened to both Lisa and I often in our lives because our birthdays are late in the summer and because we moved so much, thus we were able to have a good time regardless. It also helped that the people who came to visit were very friendly and a lot like us (you could say he's a smartass and she's the planner).

Over the weekend, we hiked to villages around us where Lisa and I have been working. We gave a talk about planning, paseared with families that we enjoy spending time with, and started a clay oven. They held up really well, and like us, fell in love with the Comarca cloud forest almost as soon as they arrived. It was a bit rainy (it is the rainy season) during their visit, but all in all it went well. The best part was the cake that Eli cooked for me before we went to work on the oven. MMMM: double layer chocolate cake covered in chocolate frosting.

Overall, we really had a good time with them. We played hearts in the evenings and joked almost constantly. They did some of the hardest Comarca hikes/car rides and held up admirably. We are looking forward to seeing much more of them, especially considering they'll be back for Tech Week on the 20th!

Random Fact from Lisa: Government of Panama is building a sidewalk in our community.

What's new?!

2009-07-22T11:43:00.002-05:00

Time is flying by, and it's been a while now since we've taken a moment to step back and blog. This blog doesn't have any particular theme, but I thought we'd update you on the happenings in our lives over the past month +.

We've been busy, for one! We've been finding ourselves traveling more and more out of our community for various seminars, office initiatives, trainings and other commitments. It's great to be busy, but it feels really good to come home to our little shack, rest, relax and hang out with the wonderful friends we've made! I'm looking forward to getting back tomorrow after more almost 2 weeks gone. Unfortunately, most of our time in site recently feels like it's filled with endless washing of clothes that never dry.

On that note, all of our clothes smell like blue cheese. This is not a good development. Mold is good in cheese. Not in clothes.

We're going through a time of transition right now with Peace Corps volunteers. We had the latest training group arrive in April, and swear-in in July, which means we've got new faces, and another new volunteer in our community, working in agriculture. He's settling in, which means that we'll soon be saying goodbye to Stephanie as she finishes her 3rd year in our community and is moving on to bigger and better things. Change is good, but it will be really hard to see her go - we've developed a really strong bond with her, and she's been such a great influence in our lives! On top of that, as one group enters, another one is leaving, so we just said goodbye to a group of volunteers, of which included some great friends as well. And if you can still follow this, the next new group arrives in mid-August, like we did - almost ONE YEAR AGO! Wow!

Ben and I are going to be quite involved in the training of the new group. Ben will be coming in during their first whole week in country to train them about community analysis, and share our experience of community integration. I have been working on developing an analysis tool for our sector. Something that will help us assess the needs of groups and communities and help us target our work a bit more - "community economic development" tends to be a bit vague! On top of that, we've been asked to host the Technical Training week in our community - the 7th week of training, for the new business sector volunteers. This means that we will host 19 trainees in our community, and help them to go through the process of assessing a group's needs, planning a presentation or other activity with their group, and then delivering a community-wide presentation. It's a hard week - and I remember from my experience, after coming from my culture week in the Comarca, and into my tech week, I was drained! Having everyone come to the Comarca during this week will definitely be a strain on some people, but we're excited, and we know our community is a great place to host this special training!

What else is new? Well, in the beginning of July, Ben surprised me with a trip to Cartagena, Colombia to celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary! It was a huge surprise, and he had me thinking of a million different possibilities, but definitely not Colombia! The trip was AMAZING! It felt so nice to get on an airplane and be somewhere so quickly and easily! The city was beautiful, and we spent the majority of our time wandering around the streets of the old city, with no particular agenda - popping into museums, soaking in the scenery, drinking fresh limeade and eating lots of delicious street food! We also lived it up a bit and treated ourselves to some really nice dinners and Ben bought me an emerald ring - we were in Cartagena, right?! More than anything, it was nice to get away, and be "normal" again (aside from the blue cheese smell which followed us in our clothes).

After coming home from Colombia, Ben went to the doctor in David to check up on a little diarrhea issue. He'd come down with it a while before, and was supposed to send in samples while he was in Panama City, but didn't, and then it passed, so he figured he was fine. Not so. Upon returning from Colombia, the diarrhea returned, so he went in, and they found that he had not one, but two different types of amoebas living in his system! Hopefully he's cleared out now, after all the medications he was taking to clear out his system, and replace the good organisms. While at the doctor's office, he was weighed with all his clothes, shoes, hat, things in his pockets, etc, and weighed in at 201! This means at least a 50 pound weight loss for him! Incredible! He looks and feels great!

The last thing is that we're coming home for Christmas time! We've scheduled a two-week trip back to the states to see family, and we're really excited to see everyone and hang out!

That should cover everything major! To sum things up, we're pretty healthy, very happy, and really enjoying our time here in Panama!

Changes....

2009-06-11T15:05:00.002-05:00

Before discovering I was robbed this morning, I was reflecting on a potential blog topic about things that I´ve noticed have changed with me since coming to Panama - most of them for the better.

Changes to Lisa:
1. I eat, and actually enjoy now, a lot of white rice.

2. I am a lot more patient. I can think of a lot of examples, but lets just say that most involve children, culture shock or a candy bar.

3. I´m a lot more comfortable being alone with myself. At the beginning, I think I had too much time to think. Now, it´s not so bad. I´m pretty cool. *giggle* Although, I do realize that I need to learn how to quiet my mind.

4. I´m also a lot more comfortable being around Ben 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Which makes number 3 seem totally ironic. Let´s just say that going from our life in the states to being around each other constantly was a struggle at first.

5. I get a lot more male attention in this country. It makes me angry when I´m hissed at, called ¨joven,¨ my queen, baby, etc. I didn´t know this about myself before.

6. I don´t miss food much anymore. Along that line, I´ve had a lot of time to think about my food issues and wrestle with some demons.

7. I can speak Spanish! And a tiny bit of Ngöbere. That´s pretty cool.

8. Although I still really like having stuff to do, I am now fine with dedicating a day to a good book in the hammock.

9. I´m a lot more social in a community sense than I ever was or wanted to be in the states.

10. I feel a lot more appreciative of just about everything. It´s really easy to take so much for granted.

Now, how about some things that I miss... (and I think that it goes without saying that I miss family, friends, and Nikodemus ♥ )

1. Carpet. This may seem odd, but when I think of home, it´s one of the first things that comes to mind. I want to squish my toes in carpet. This is probably because my floor now best resembles a litter box.

2. Being able to follow just about any conversation. I can speak Spanish, but it´s not perfect by any means. I have to still piece things together at times, and if you throw in a conversation in Ngöbere, I just try to catch a verb here or there and laugh when appropriate.

3. Cold. Winter. Snow. Bundling up in lots of clothes.

4. An indoor toilet. Hell, a toilet for that matter. I´d still go outside for it if it flushed away the shit.

5. A dryer. Maybe this should be number 1. Clothes don´t dry here. Everything we have is at varying levels of moldiness.

6. A washer. Washing clothes in the campo sucks. I´m convinced nothing is ever really clean. Stupid mold.

7. Dryness (is that a word?).

8. Nice clothes. Dressing up. I think this experience is making the girly girl in me scream to come out. Oh how I used to hate dressing up for work. Now I´m a perpetual scrub. And now, a perpetually muddy scrub. Lets throw in cute shoes too. Although, I do love my rubber boots.

9. Good mexican food. Yeah, food was bound to show up somewhere.

10. A reliable power source. Charging my phone over the past two weeks has been ridiculously difficult.

Okay, one more. A bug-free environment. I´ll take those whimpy spiders and tiny crickets in Colorado again anyday. I killed the largest spider I´ve ever seen in my life the other night. While I do realize that I feel more like a badass for that, I´d just rather not have to do it!

This is turning out to be harder than thought. I guess the bottom line is that while I do miss things from home, I´m happy to be here, and I´ll have those things I miss again in the future. And if most of my personal changes end up being good ones, then I´m all the better for being here, and doing something I love.

A reflection on being robbed.

2009-06-11T10:12:00.002-05:00

A long, LONG time ago, I remember my dad taking my sister and I to a museum in Boston for a day. I had a little purse, I probably didn´t have much in it, but it was mine. We had lunch in a Friendly´s restaurant in the museum (they had these wonderful peanut butter chocolate sundaes), and I left my purse on the seat of the booth when we left. When I realized it was gone we returned, but no one had seen the purse. I remember being sad - how could someone steal a little girl´s purse?

Now I reflect on a new robbery. Yesterday was a day when, as fellow Peace Corps volunteers would say, ¨Panama got me.¨ Everything went wrong. I left Santiago in the morning after attending the Volunteer Advisory Council meeting (that´s fancy talk for an organization like student council) the night before as the new Treasurer-elect. I had work to do to prepare for a Business Plan Seminar that I´m helping to facilitate at the end of next week, so I made a plan to stop off in San Felix, hit up the Internet cafe, do my work quickly and head back up the mountain to home. The first problem was that I didn´t look at the work beforehand, and actually ended up having a lot more to do than I thought. So, after 1 hour at the cafe, I decided to shift gears, print a large document to read on the bus to David, so I could plan, and then spend the night preparing my work in the comforts of the regional capitol.

I went to ask the manager of the cafe to print my document, and found out that he finally hooked up the 6 computers there to the printer so I could do it myself - what this meant is that my jump drive was in and out of my bag, and things were shuffled around, BUT, I know I put it back in my bag on my way out. I then waited for a bus to David. In the meantime, some kids asked me to help them with their English homework (this actually happens a lot), and I tried to offer some advice, and then the bus came.

The ayudante (or pavo, as they are sometimes called, which is a totally funny sidenote since pavo means turkey, but I digress) grabbed my backpack, and put it in through the window of the bus near the back, on a seat. I didn´t think of it until I had a panic attack half way through the ride, wondering if I had my jump drive. I reassured myself that I did, although I probably should have trusted my intuition.

I got to David. I get my hotel room. I look in my bag. No jump drive. Well, not the end of the world, I probably did leave it in the internet cafe, right? And at least we downloaded everything from it onto the computer recently. I called Ben, upset, and left a message. Upon getting it (he´s still out having marvelous adventures in the Darien), he called the internet cafe, they hadn´t seen anything, but the guy who was there was I was wasn´t in at the time.

So, last night I head to another internet cafe to get down to work. I spent hours planning everything out in the hotel, and just had to revise and make up my powerpoint presentation. I could only save my work to the computer, but I could email it to myself right. Wrong. I wasted a lot of time (after working for hours on the presentation) trying to get the huge file to attach to email, and it wouldn´t do it. But, I was at the ¨nice¨ internet cafe, they even sell jump drives, sweet, I´ll just get a new one right? Wrong. They don´t sell them anymore, but they do sell floppy disks. Floppy disks? Do computers even have slots for these anymore? Apparently. So, after another panic attack, and cutting down the presentation to just what I had added and edited, I get it to save, and miracle of miracles, to email.

My next move - some dinner and a beer. What a day it had been. I saw a good friend on the way back into the hotel and got to vent about the day, and then watched movies until 3am. Oops. This morning I get up, I want to shower, but WHERE ARE ALL OF MY TOILETRIES????

Then it hits me. I really was robbed. I should have noticed that my bag was less full when the turkey showed me the bag sitting on the sidewalk after arriving in David. There were people sitting in the back of the bus. Even the turkey himself hung out in the back for a while, so there was definitely an opportunity.

My first instinct is to tear apart my bag again (mind you, this is a small backpack) and even crawl on the floor looking under the bed (did I somehow put them there in my panics yesterday? Oy. I´m sure it was a funny sight).

I was robbed. It´s a little hard to misplace a black rectangular toiletry case. This is the first time I´ve been robbed since that small incident so many years ago. It could have been much MUCH worse. The most valuable item I lost was my prescription medication, but I can get that soon. But the worst part is the feeling. Someone went through my things and took them from me. Hopefully they enjoy my new shampoo, my toothbrush that smells like mold, and that Mach 3 razor that I really did like, and the jump drive. Ugh.

I cried. I probably cried way too much for lost toiletries, but the feeling of violation is the worst. That someone hit me up when I was already having such a frustrating day. That I did what I´ve done on countless bus trips here - hand my bag to someone to be stored - but that this was the time. I´m thankful that they didn´t take my expensive raincoat, any of my clothes, my work documents, and my knitting project that I just started. And I´m thankful that they didn´t take the whole thing. But reflecting on it all... being robbed...being robbed in a foreign country, when you´re by yourself...really sucks.

Croc Hunting in the Darien

2009-06-09T18:28:00.006-05:00

After fighting through the guerrilla barricade and blasting my way into the FARC stronghold, I strode alone through the fecund jungle gardens of illicit drugs into the heart of the Darien. Among stilted villagers’ huts and captive gringo hostages, I sat down to unpack my presentation on formulating business plans and the proper way to set up group norms. It was time to get these kids organized and renouncing violence. Peace Corps Fuck Yeah!

Actually, I had a very peaceful ride in a white Peace Corps Toyota with several other volunteers. We passed a few checkpoints and had to make sure to have our IDs on us at all times, but we are in a very safe place. The capital of Santa Fe is a nice little town with several supermarkets, internet cafes, restaurants, and a big Catholic church. The site of our seminar is a nice concrete, wood, and palm leaf two story rancho at a complex run by nuns.

Nevertheless, I am out in the Darien Provence, the only place from Barrow, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, Chile/Argentina where the Pan-American Highway does not go through. Neither Columbia nor Panama has a military presence in the center of the Darien Gap, thus leaving it to the control of local militias and paramilitaries. With the Peace Corps staff and other volunteers, I’ve crossed the American Embassy’s security line, but that was just to go to the closest bank and do a little shopping.

I am here as the future co-coordinator for the Agro-Negocio (Agro-Business) Initiative from the Business Sector side with Kat Fraser as my partner from the Agriculture Sector side. We are learning from the outgoing group about the structure and subject matter. The participants are all local farmers or future farmers, some indigenous and some Latinos, who are learning more about the financial, legal, and general business aspects of farm planning. It has been a great experience thus far and we are only half way through the workload.

The first night we were here, the Regional Leader volunteer and business volunteer who live in Santa Fe told us about a caiman (little species of alligator) that had moved into the fish pond on the farm at the nuns’ complex. They said the lizard wasn’t very big and the fish pond was small but deeper than a person. The local guys to run the farm weren’t about to get him. I offered to try to catch him myself.

The next day we went to the farm during the seminar and I looked for the caiman. I didn’t see him. Back at the Regional Leader’s house, where all of us facilitators are staying for these few weeks, I got more information about crocodile hunting from Leah’s boyfriend Colin, who said that you can see them at night with a flashlight and that it will help hunt them.

I went out that night with new batteries in my headlamp. I spotted the alligator almost right away, but I wasn’t sure I was looking at it because it was just a strange orange reflection on the surface. I watched him for about an hour and a half. I saw him float around, dive and resurface, and could kind of see his body beneath the murky waters. I also saw bullet ants, leaf cutter ants, and a crazy-big beetle, heard night birds, and got eaten by a truckload of mosquitoes despite my Off Spray. I returned home to get some more data before getting into the muck-water. Besides, I’d just showered.

This brings up a fascinating and often-cited fact of Peace Corps: the network of volunteers has rarely failed to offer up information on a topic. You can send an inquiry into the grapevine and it will come back with anecdotal and/or technical answers to nearly anything like grad schools, countries’ GNPs, or alligator wrestling. And generally, that’s just in your own country. These are amazingly capable and experienced people.

In this case, Colin knew from first-hand experience living in Ghana that the beasts hunted at night, that a flashlight in the eye confused them allowing a single person to get close enough to pounce, that it was best to grab them around the neck and hold them while they thrashed to let the lactic acid build up in their muscles and quickly exhaust them, and that you can then inch your hands up their snout until you close and can tie their tooth-filled jaws shut. He had a memorable event in his amateur wrestling career late one night at a campground (alcohol use possible) with a seven-footer that he tackled outright. Beware the quiet ones!

Armed with this invaluable information, I returned to the pond the next night, and I convinced two other volunteers to go with me this time. I hadn’t showered and had sweated buckets during the seminar all day so I figured the water would do me that good at least. We had a rope and flashlights, and Ed and I had had three beers each. We were ready. Mateo didn’t feel the need for bravery-in-a-can.

We found him after only a couple of minutes. Ed and Mateo kept an eye on him while I walked around the rest of the pond to see what’s what. When I came back, the gator submerged, but that was fine. I wasn’t planning on going in dressed.

I left my boxers on so that I would have something to which to clip my one-hand-open knife. This handy little three inch blade has been helpful since my days in Alaska and I trusted it to be a quick weapon if necessary. In my shorts with my headlamp, sandals, and rope, I eased myself into the water and approached the lizard. When I was close, I could see that his belly was enlarged like a ballast and guessed he used it to keep effortlessly afloat.

When I got within two arms lengths, he did a lightning quick U-turn and dove into the murk to my right. Remembering that Colin had told me he would resurface soon, I stoically scanned the surface while trying to ignore the constant bubbles bumping up my legs and torso. After several quiet minutes, I saw his eye again, in the opposite direction from which he’d dove, about five yards further and slightly left from where he’d been the last time.

Even more slowly this time, I slipped nearer and nearer until I was closer enough to make my move. I kept my body low in the water as the bottom came up so that my arms and shoulders could mobilize without alerting him. The whole time, I’d been wondering if I was really going to go after this beastie barehanded. I could get bit. I could get in trouble with the Peace Corps Medical Office. I could look foolish and overconfident (or worse) to the other volunteers.

This time, the caiman slowly closed his eyes and sunk backwards into the dirty water. I shot out my hands and caught him by the snout and throat. I raised him out of the water easily, lightly, and saw that he was only about three feet long at the most. He scarcely could struggle as I carried him back to Ed and Mateo, but he couldn’t do much.

We marveled at his ancient looking eye and strange ridges. We tied up his mouth tight. His tail whipped whenever free. We figure it couldn’t have gone any better or easier.

We gave the lizard to Ishmael who sleeps at the farm as well as runs it. The next morning, he showed him off to the seminar’s participants before taking him to the river and releasing him. He’s now happily fishing in a bigger place with more variety and less humans.

Both Ishmael and the nuns asked me if I had seen the two caimans. Or their mother. She hasn’t been seen in a while, but we are going to go back to find any more little ones. Kat called the next one, though Leah is itching to impress her fiancé and Ed and Mateo might want to get their feet wet. Peace Corps Fuck Yeah!

Balseria

2009-05-21T10:57:00.001-05:00

The summer was ending.

The rains were coming.

The traditions called for it.

The people wanted it.

The time was ripe.

Balseria.

They came from all over.

They came to Ceble.

They came from tiny villages.

They came from our town.

They came from the capital.

They came from the other side of the mountains.

They came from San Felix, and San Lorenzo, and one even came from San Francisco, CA.

There must have been 300, at least.

They had made the chicha fuerte and sancocho.

They had covered hats with vulture feathers sticking straight up high.

They had fashioned musical instruments from turtle shells and cow horns, bones and conchs, and bits of left over modern trash.

They had dried out hunting trophies in splayed eagle to hang on their back: jaguars, sloths, monkeys, and a little squirrel.

And they had cut the balsa wood in five foot lengths.

The slightly sloping field can be seen from our town.

A lush green of short grass dotted with large black volcanic rocks.

We three girls and three boys hiked for over an hour and a half.

The trail drops off precipitously at first and then picks its way over hill and creek.

The sun was shining high and strong.

We were sweaty from the start.

The Balseria had started a few days before.

We had been planning to go for some time.

We learned that it had been moved, and then moved back.

We heard the balsa throwing would continue for one morning more.

We didn’t want to miss this.

We passed people on the trail headed in the opposite direction.

We asked each for the latest news.

“Are they still throwing the balsa?”

“Is there still chicha fuerte?”

“Are people still there?”

Many of these people had mashed up faces, swollen lips, cut eyes.

They had blood on their shirts.

Vomit on their chins.

Grass and mud on their knees.

They walked with a limp.

Sometimes we passed them without a word for they were passed out under a tree.

We arrived.

We were questioned.

They wanted to know who we were.

Why we were there.

Then our friend saw us.

He wanted to know who was the owner of these women.

Ryu and Eli pointed at me.

Lisa and Steph laughed.

Jen protested, loudly, in English.

We saw more friends,

We drank the chicha fuerte.

We tried to get our faces painted.

We made new friends.

We drank much chicha fuerte.

We joined the groups in the main field.

Only men were playing then, though women do, too.

Each group was split into two teams.

The teams came from the same family or village.

There was much bellowing, oohing, ahhing, and hooting.

Many men were wearing naguas (Ngobe dresses) to hide their legs.

One man has the balsa.

Another stands his ground.

The balsa-thrower may skip in close, circle the target.

The balsa-dodger might taunt, blow a whistle.

The thrower cocks his arm lifting the balsa high.

The dodger rolls to the balls of his feet.

Like a javelin, the balsa flies.

Only between knee and ankle can the balsa fly.

Like a dancer, the dodger’s feet move.

IT FLIES.

IT STRIKES!

The dodger’s teams race to pick up the balsa.

The thrower becomes the dodger.

The one who got the balsa becomes the thrower.

The dance begins again.

Eli, Ryu, and I race after the balsa.

We are excited to try our luck.

I get the balsa after a throw.

I chuck it rather lamely, easily dodged.

It is the receiving that I want more.

Balsa wood is a light wood.

I had planned to let them hit me.

I had planned to show my Alaskan strength.

I had thought that the balsa would be shorter.

I had thought that the balsa would be thrown sideways.

I had assumed it wouldn’t hurt much.

I was wrong.

The other side picks up the balsa.

There is much shouting for the throw at the gringo.

The other man begins to approach, running in a circle.

He moves in right to my shoulder.

He wants me to be scared.

He wants me to be distracted.

He backs up to throw.

I lose my nerve, try to dodge.

I throw my left leg out straight in fear.

The balsa hits my right leg, not fast enough to evade.

The inside of my right calf explodes with pain.

I do not fall or cry out,

But I regret my decision to show off.

The welt rose immediately.

The welt continued to rise for some time.

The welt drained blood into my ankle hollow.

The bruise was ugly for some time.

The rest of the day I dodged much better.

We drank more chicha fuerte.

We played the turtle and the horn.

We whistled and bellowed, oohed and ahhed.

I didn’t get hit again. Ryu, twice. Eli, not at all.

The women fended off marriage proposals.

Normally shy, respectful men become enamored.

"You are the sun in the sky.”

“I do not yet have a blonde wife.”

“Come meet my other wife to see if you like each other.”

Not one proposal was sufficient to ensnare a gringa.

At midday, the bare-knuckle fist fighting began.

Shirts were removed to protect them.

Men stepped up to square off.

Always one man fought with only one man.

They aimed for the head and nowhere else.

I had planned to fist fight as well.

I saw the bulging farmers’ arms and chests.

I saw the blood flowing freely.

I saw that the fights don’t end quickly.

I chose not to fight.

We hiked home early in the afternoon.

We started off a little tipsy.

Soon the sun and hiking cooked the booze out.

I had to limp a little for a week.

Ah, balseria, we can’t wait for next year.

2009-04-28T20:17:00.000-05:00

6 months. We’ve been living and working in our community now for 6 months, which means we have 18 months remaining in our service (if we choose not to extend). So, in terms of time in site, we’re a quarter of the way done. Now, if you choose to look at our whole service (training included), we’ve been in the country for over 8 months, although training is advertised as being a 3 month commitment, making the whole term of service 27 months. Thus with 18 months remaining, we’re one-third of the way through our service. What do all these fractions mean for us? This is flying by!

What have we been doing in our six months so far? The easy answer is – we’ve been trying to figure out what we should be doing. The slightly more detailed answer (because it is hard to know without experiencing it) is that we’ve been talking a lot. We’re talking about the culture, the people, the history, talking about their work, their needs, their dreams, their failures and dashed hopes, their knowledge, their fears, their curiosities about life in the United States. We’ve learned that only in truly knowing the people, and being accepted as a part of their community, can we begin to know where our business knowledge and work can fit in and help in the future. And we feel like we’re getting there!

Initially we thought we might spend much of our time here working on developing business plans for many groups to use to solicit funding or other necessities. As time went on we learned that actually, the first step is teaching about planning. What is a plan? Why is it important? What is the situation today – good and bad? And what are our dreams for the future? Then, how do we get there? That’s been our work so far. We could push people to develop business plans, but in truth, we wouldn’t be doing them a service by giving them anything that they don’t understand or see the use in on their own. We might, in fact, be doing them a disservice by wasting their time, raising false expectations, or producing yet another poor interaction with the developed world.

The deadline-driven, results based, “get a good grade to know you’ve done well” part of me isn’t a big fan of the slow pace of the work at times. There are days when I feel like I’ve done nothing here. That I should be planning more to do, having more meetings, touching more groups, etc. And that I can’t possibly be “saving the world” through repeated use of a SWOT analysis, and talking about a vision and goals. Luckily, I also have something inside me that is slowing me down, and reminding me that more than anything, my work is about sustainable development, and even more than that, about being a member of the community. I had a nice experience this last week to remind me of my most important work.

Last Thursday afternoon, I spent hours sitting with a group of community members under the campamento in town (a tall open structure with a metal roof), as they ground corn to make chicheme (a corn based drink). Ben was at home working on making me a door for our latrine (YES!!!! After 4 months of living in our house, I finally have a door on my latrine! No one can see me peeing, or more, anymore!) so I was just hanging out. In all honesty, I did nothing to help them work on making the chicheme, but they were teaching me about the process, and they answered my questions about the “corn with beards” (the corn kernels with sprouts) and how to make the drink. In the hours I was there though, we spent most of it just talking and sharing stories. The people had heard that Ben and I went to the balseria near our town in early April (that will deserve its own blog shortly), so we laughed as I told stories about how men didn’t want to fight Ben for me because he’s so tall and has such a big beard. We talked about all kinds of things related to life in the states. They asked me about life in the community, and we talked about pulling ticks off our husband’s asses (yes, I did this the other night too). I can’t remember everything that we talked about that day, but at the end, they asked me how my work was going. As I sat there, reflecting for a moment, I thought about SWOT analyses, and my presentations, but I also thought about sitting around with some incredible people, sharing stories, and being an accepted and important member of the community, and I answered that the work is going good. Really good.

Lisa's Parents Visit Panama

2009-04-19T12:15:00.003-05:00

We have just seen Lisa’s parents off to the city. Chuck and Carole are heading home after a week plus here in Panama, and we had a great time. They arrived in Panama City and worked their way through customs and immigration alone because the buses running from the national terminal got Lisa and I to the airport a little late. The city buses don’t even drop people off right out in front; you have to get off several hundred yards away on the passing highway and hoof it over to the building.

The parents brought us a new computer that we’d decided we just had to buy to facilitate our Community Economic Development work; even though we don’t have electricity in our site, we can work on things offline and upload or email them when we get out. It should save us valuable internet café time. Ever generous, they also brought us an extra battery, purchased insurance for us, packed in an optical mouse, and picked up and arranged a new pelican case that will protect against nearly everything.

We stayed around the Panama City Causeway for the first couple of days. Originally, the parents had set up a tour of an Embera village on Good Friday, but the coordinator called and postponed it for the holidays. How Panamanian? Schedule a tour for the biggest day of the Holy Week of Christianity and then have to change it at the last minute. Nevertheless, we were able to set it up for a week later.

During our days in the City, we went to the Canal Museum, took a boat from Gatun Lake through the Canal’s Pacific locks, ate some excellent food, and enjoyed the comforts of a great hotel. Mostly we stuck to the Canal and Causeway side of the city. Even with a rented GPS, getting through the many construction changes and disruptions in a fast paced, rules-be-damned downtown is sometimes a harrowing experience.

After Panama City, we got on the Interamericana and drove all the way across the country to Boquete. A stay at another first-rate hotel allowed us to see much of the beautiful mountain town. The highlights for us were a tour a world class coffee farm and a walk around an exotic animal rescue center. At the coffee farm, we got to the see entire modern process from start to finish, marvel at the oldest drying/roasting machinery in Panama which is still functional, and learn about and try to cup some of their best coffee.

At the rescue center, Chuck and Carole, who are raptor enthusiasts, got to see macaws, parrots, toucans, owls, and many other large and small birds of which I cannot remember the names. They flittered and fluttered, screeched and cawed. A toucan decided to taste our toes, following us all around the bird-house enclosure that shelters many of the smaller birds. We also got to interact with several types of monkeys, see three large cat species (margay, ocelot, and puma), walk around their new picturesque Japanese gardens, and watch a baby anteater feed on some milk.

From Boquete, we began to work our way back to Panama City. In David, we picked up some food supplies and magazines. In San Felix, we got some plastic chairs and rope. After strapping the chairs to the roof of the Suzuki, we were ready to make the ascent to our site. Through hill and dale we rode, stunned by the steepness of the slopes and the rugged loveliness of the communities. For Lisa and I, it was kind of like seeing it all again for the first time, this act of showing off our new environs. We could point out things like fellow communities and volunteer sites, but much of the ride was silent.

At home, we introduced Chuck and Carole around to our neighbors and friends. We drove up to higher villages to see the eastern valleys and ridges spread out below us. We could just make out the ocean, but it was a bit hazy that day so we had to settle without it. We presented our new kitten, Felix, to them (he’s still living with Meligo). A short hike below our house brought us to a ridge where you can see all the way down the western side of our ridge. With Chuck, I hiked up a small hill outcropping to see it from a new vantage point that really opened it all up. We could even see the beach that we would be visiting later that day.

Down at Las Lajas, we stayed in the new Beach Resort that was just completed by an American ex-patriot. The Pacific was like bathwater with surf. The beach was fine sand crawling with snails and crabs. The pool was comfortable and fairly clean, except for the suicidal beetles. The food was delicious, as it was at all the tourist spots we enjoyed in Panama. I lost the room keys in the ocean, but not until we were nearly checked out.

To get back to Panama in time to meet up with Embera tour group the next morning, we had to skip out on our El Valle de Anton plan, but we had fun at the now familiar hotel by the Causeway. The next day, Vladimir picked us up and drove us out to the Chagres River National Park. The Embera village providing our excursion lives upriver and in the park, which means that they cannot farm, fish, hunt, or otherwise affect the natural environment. Panama cannot afford to have anything disrupting the natural watershed that supplies the water for the gravitationally powered canal locks.

We worked our way up a very low river, low because it is the end of the dry season here. At many places, the outboard had to be lifted to get through a shallow spot. We were delivered to a tributary and lead up the river bank to a gorgeous waterfall. Had it been the rainy season, we could have been dropped off right at the base of the waterfall’s pool. As it was, we had a short hike.

After the waterfall, the dug-out canoe took us back down river a ways to the village itself where we were allowed to wander around. We looked at their artisan crafts, thatched homes on stilts, and striking bead clothing. The people also presented us with a dance and an explanation of the works. Afterwards, we purchased a few items, ate a normal local fare of fried fish and patacones served in a rolled-leaf cone-bowl.

Back in the City, we relaxed at our hotel and had a few more norteño meals. We played some more cards, as we had done about half of our evenings (I won the last game). For our last day, we visited Albrook Mall and National Terminal. From there, after a little shopping and lunch, we said goodbye to our family. They used the GPS to work their way back to the airport and Lisa and I caught a bus west. It was a great visit, especially for us to get to see more of the country while enjoying the company of Chuck and Carole.

Buabidi - Land of Rainbows

2009-03-19T13:39:00.004-05:00

Wow, it´s been a long time since our last post, nearly a month. We would have posted about a week ago when we were last out but the internet cafe was really slow and frustrated the pants off Lisa. Instead, we gave up and went back to site, barely getting our necessary work items accomplished. I´m down in San Felix alone today looking for concrete, gravel, and sand to make a cement floor for our house and shower. Unfortunately, the costs are prohibitive so I´ll be looking for a more complicated (and possibly manual labor intensive) way to get-er-done than simply purchasing the rock and sand. Lisa is at home doing ¨woman´s work¨: washing clothes!

First, the Saga of the Salmon has finally ended. Our boss brought the stuff to us from Panama City when we attended our reconnection training. Sort of anticlimatic but I´m sure they will be delicious when the little suckers are opened.

We recently hiked to Ñano Tugri (named Buabidi in Ngoberi), the capital of the Comarca. The Comarca Ngobe-Buglé was created in 1997 when the people living here marched on Panama City to demand some land of their own to self-govern, like the other provinces have. Comarcas are similar to reservations in the U.S. To choose their new capital, the story goes that they looked at the map, found the geographical center, and named the closest significant village to it. It didn´t have a road, though one has been built in the past several months and a second one from our town has been partially put down.

We hiked the 5 hours through hard winds so that we could attend a coffee convention. Our guide and fellow Chamí-ite Stephanie was planning on giving a little talk about a couple aspects of coffee cultivation and processing, and Andi, Lisa and I tagged along for the adventure. There was also a vote for new chiefs that we were interested to witness. Lisa and I had knee issues along the way, both of us carrying far too much stuff in our backpacks (a good learning lesson for our next overnight hike.) We carried on despite the pains, slowing down our companions more than we would have liked but it was worth it.

As we ascended the last hill before Tugri, the wind that had been whipping over the continental divide nearly knocked us off our feet, making our steps all the more painful. It carried a mist that lightly, slowly drenched us. I was wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and good boots. Lisa was more sensibly dressed in pants and a jacket. Still, the hike itself was invigorating and we were in such great company that was really enjoyed ourselves.

And there, as we pulled ourselves up the last hill, we spotted a rainbow in the direction that Steph had indicated for Tugri. Each of us hurried to share it with each other, but I think that we had all seen it at once. Since we were above this village nestled into the high mountains that receives heavy winds and misty rain nearly every day, we were looking down on the rainbow rather than up. And the end of it came squarely down on the biggest visible buildings, the school, to which we were headed. It felt like our destination was literally at the end of the rainbow, and as with most rainbows in Tugri that trip, it was a double.

We found the best path down the hill and to the school. Steph found a friend of hers and got caught up on the latest news. He offered us a place to stay in his small home, but she had already arranged another place with a different friend. We headed to the new government building in the center of town and searched for booths that lined the open space for some dinner and coffee.

We were quite an interest to the people gathered there from all over the Comarca. They were impressed that we had hike in on foot. Most of the big wigs and those who came from really far (it´s a 3-day hike over the divide) had come in by car from Tolé. Though I´m sure most of the folks walked themselves, and many from farther than us, I think seeing some Gringos trek in made it feel a little more special, like a sideshow at a circus.

After leaving the gathering place, we sought out our sleeping arrangements. The roads were a bit changed since Steph had last been out so it was a while before we found her friends home. As some strangers led us to the home, a rainbow bloomed over the man´s property. Unfortunately, the politico who had been given the building to arrange sleeping quarters for the out-of-towners was not advised that we coming and didn´t have any more space for us. Literally, every bit of space on the bed-tables and floors was taken up by other people. He did tell us that they had opened the church up the hill to take in people.

We spent a comfortable night on the smooth, concrete floor of the beautiful, austere, wooden church. It appeared fairly new and didn´t have access to the aqueduct yet. Nevertheless, we were very happy to get out of the cold wind and rain and into our sleeping bags. Andi and Steph found us some snacks from the store and Lisa broke out her usually prudent supply of extra bars and raisins.

The next morning, after going down to the open space around the government building again to see and be seen, we got back on the trail. We wanted to be home before dark. As we left Tugri, this time with the sun behind us for it was still before midday, a rainbow showed us our path toward home. There was a beautiful waterfall that we hadn´t noticed the day before (primarily because we hiked up and over it and then away from it) and the rainbow arched perfectly over it as it cascaded down into the jungle. It was gorgeous.

Of course, we took tons of pictures of our trip. And of course, I´ve left the camera behind today. When we have a chance, we´ll look into getting this post upded so that you all can see a bit of it as well. I apologize for flubbing that one up! I would also answer the questions that have been sent to us today, but the majority came to Lisa´s email and I don´t have the password for that. Next time, then.

As All-American as Apple Pie

2009-02-24T16:00:00.005-05:00

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.

2009-02-14T14:28:00.006-05:00

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.

Saga of the Salmon

2009-01-31T11:31:00.003-05:00

There once was some salmon. They were born in Alaska (or maybe Canada) and swam all over the ocean. One day, they were caught, cut up, and canned. Now they are tasty.

There was a man, living in Panama and working in Peace Corps, who wanted to eat these fish. His wife and another PCV were also interested in eating them. The man requested his friends from Alaska who were planning on visiting to bring these fish down to Panama so that he could eat them. He also wanted some wood bowls from the Great Alaskan Bowl Company.

The friends arrived on Christmas Day 2008, but they were not planning on visiting the man and his wife for many days. They asked where they could put the fish and bowls because the fish needed to be kept cool. The man´s boss suggested the office of the Peace Corps headquarters in Panama City where the friends´plane landed.

The friends tried to go to the office, but when they got out of the cab and saw the building, an armed guard began quizzing them about their activities. Not knowing Spanish, the language of the guard, the friends had trouble communicating this strange task of leaving fish and bowls at the office. The guard decided to get help and an Italian passing by offered to help. He translated for the friends. In the end he offered to hold onto the fish and bowls until the man from Peace Corps Panama could come pick them up. The friends took his name and phone number.

During their travels around Panama, the friends lost the phone number, but remember the Italian´s name. They let the man know the problem, and the man asked his boss for help again. This time, all the boss could offer was to look for the Italian where he was last found, walking passed the office. The man, his wife, and the other PCV were heartbroken about the loss of the fish and the bowls, but such is life.

The friends had their visit to the man´s site and left the next day. They had a good time and the man and his wife enjoyed their visit very much. Their only regret was that it was so short a time for a visit because the friends wanted to see more of Panama and the man and his wife had meetings and work to do. They knew that the kind Italian would enjoy the fish and bowls and that these things would not go to waste.

The day the friends were to board their plane to go back to Alaska, one decided that they should look for the Italian. Another considered this a bad idea and a waste of time. How would they ever find this Italian again? Nevertheless, they returned to the office...and immediately saw the Italian walking down the street! He welcomed them back and gave them back the fish and the bowls that he was still keeping for them. He was a very nice Italian.

The friends were overjoyed. They called the man and spread the joy to the man, his wife, and the other PCV. They were all happy to hear that the fish and bowls would be theirs again. The friends dropped off the fish and bowls at the office with notes to say who they were to go to. The friends then returned to Alaska on their plane.

The other PCV went to Panama City a short time later for work that she had to do. She wanted to pick up the fish and the bowls for the man and his wife, and for herself too. Unfortunately, she could not because she got too sick to leave her hotel room except for her necessary work. She could not go to the office. The fish and the bowls had to stay at the office a little while longer.

An office staffer came out to the regional meeting of the man, his wife, and the other PCV. He could have brought the fish and the bowls, but he did not. Still the fish and the bowls are at the office. The man and his wife have begun to wonder if these fish and bowls were ever really intended for them or if fate has some other purpose for them. The man and his wife have begun to wonder if the fish and the bowls every really existed at all.

(Stay turned for the continuation of the Saga of the Salmon)

The good life...

2009-01-31T10:21:00.005-05:00

We´re still here, we´ve just been being ¨really good¨ volunteers and spending all of our time in our site, and neglecting this thing called the Internet. I heard it was a series of tubes or something...

So, where do we start... We are living in our own home now! And we´re very happy about that. We´ve had some time to get things settled, although we´ve been in the house for a month now and still don´t have a bed that can sleep both of us, nor a table, a bench, or anything to keep our clothing bags off the floor. But we can cook for ourselves, and that´s a lot. Thank you Kraft, for exporting Macaroni and Cheese. It really is the cheesiest.

Here are some pictures of the inside and outside of our home. It´s basically an 18 foot by 20 foot wood box with a zinc roof and a tiny window. Our floor is dirt (boo), and we share our home with an assortment of cockroaches, scorpions, other bugs, and the occasional chicken that sneaks in.

On the work front, we´ve been busy. We´ve got meetings scheduled for almost everyday, and our calendar for February is already full. We hold a lot of meetings with groups in our community, but we also hike (for many hours sometimes) to visit other communities and work with other groups. We feel fortunate to have so many groups so excited to work with us, and at last count, we´ve met with 22 different groups, and many of those several times. We´re starting to get a feel for their needs, and now we´re getting down to writing some ¨charlas¨ or presentations, to give to groups to teach about numerous subjects and themes. I think the best part of our job is where we live. It´s gorgeous country, the people are amazing, and we feel really well suited to be working where we are, with the groups we are.

It´s not all meetings though, and we do get time to play with the kids that live near us, or to go on a hike to check out a new spot. This last week we headed off to climb up Peña Blanca, a large, imposing mountain we can see from our community. It took nearly 4 hours to get to the base of the mountain from a friend´s community, and from the base, another hour up, on the craziest trail I´ve ever seen. Most of it was through very dense jungle, ripping at your head, face, legs, anything. I got trapped and tripped by vines at almost every step. Much of it was also along a cliff, so you had to grab at anything above you to stay on trail – which led to quite a few scratches, holes in my hands, and bruises. When we emerged from the jungle, we went straight up, up, up and there we were – the top! I´m guessing it may be nearly 2,800 meters in altitude (I´ll let you do the math). The views were amazing, you could see miles in nearly every direction, and quite a bit of the Pacific ocean. If you want to see more pictures, check out my (Lisa´s) facebook page.

So many things have been going on for the last 3+ weeks, so I´ll try to pick a few stories to share before signing off.

One interesting experience was a hike to Canoa for a meeting with a small group of farmers. We took off from our town in the morning, and didn´t know where we were meeting up with our group, so when we got in Canoa, we asked around. First we ran into a guy we see a lot, who asked me how to say ¨This place is beautiful¨ in English several times, and then regaled us with a tale of American soldiers being in there community in the past when Noriega was in power. He apparently armed the Ngobe people in the area and asked them to defend him, but when the soldiers arrived, the Ngobe´s didn´t want anything to do with this battle. Interesting story, and eventually we got the guy to guide us to the man we were meeting with. We get there (after learning the name for every tiny hill, valley, and anything else notable along the trail), and then head off with a guy from the group we were meeting. He has a machete, a gun and a horse, and leads us off onto a tiny trail into the jungle, us walking in front of him. And we keep getting deeper and deeper into the jungle, the trail keeps splitting, and I keep asking which way to go. The trails almost seem to double back on themselves, but we keep going, and going.

Eventually, we´re both privately wondering where were going, when we´ll get there, and wondering why he´s got a machete and a gun, with 2 gringos in the lead. Ambush? Nah. It got even more curious as he pointed out the cemetery to us – on our left. Then we get into a section of even denser jungle, where you can´t even see where you´re placing your feet, and then we´re there. At a house, and a farm, and we get ready for a meeting. And the meeting was great! The people were so enthused that someone finally came to visit them, and to offer support and hope. An interesting and memorable experience!

On the health side, we´re doing well (other than a wicked case of gas I have now after eating some rich food in David), but we did get to try to pull a bot fly larvae out from between the toes of a cat recently. We noticed that the cat had a sore, a sore with a worm. It kept poking it´s little head out for air, so we thought it was small, and if we covered the air hole, we could grab it and pull it out. We tried, and tried, for over an hour, to no avail. The next day, the locals put poison on the wound, killing the worm and then pulled it out. It was HUGE. Google the bot fly if you really want to see what I´m talking about. Ben wants one. OY.

Speaking of Ben - He´s quite hairy. I think that says it all. Check out any recent pictures of his beard for proof. He´s also getting quite skinny. Even cooking for ourselves now, we just don´t have the appetites that we used to. I guess 2 months of white rice, and hiking a lot almost everyday are a pretty good weight loss regime.

That´ll probably be all for now, but we should be on more frequently. We´ve got some more training coming up soon, and more time in the land of electricity and connectivity!

Feliz Año

2009-01-06T19:25:00.002-05:00

Feliz Año is how you wish someone a Happy New Year (Feliz Navidad = Merry Christmas), and we are really looking forward to a great one. This year of 2009 will be our only full year in the Peace Corps, supposing as I do that at the end of two years we´ll be dying to have our first baby and our work with the Ngobe will be so successful that they won´t need any more help from volunteers. Here are a few things we are looking forward to over the next dozen months.

We have moved into our own shack and are having fun outfitting it. Setting up a home on a Peace Corps budget is only slightly less taxing on the finances as it is back in the states. Although we lack the urge to have everything that makes our lives a little easier, it is still not cheap to buy a bunch of new stuff when you have very little income. We need to find a whole kitchen set including a stove and storage containers (strong enough that rats and cockroaches can´t chew through), build our own kitchen table and bed-table-thing, and pick up a load of new, dry food to get started. Luckily, I´m happy to buy some new tools, albeit the cheapest on the rack.

Lisa has been very easy-going about going without, I think because she is so excited about having complete control over our food and meal times. She is happily planning on cooking with only one pot, one frying pan, and one burner. We have not been able to find a gas stove with an addition oven built in, but that hasn´t dampened her mood one bit. So far, we´ve had two dinners in our house, and both involved macaroni and cheese. Somehow, we forgot the white rice!

Even without express permission, it looks like we might be able to build our own house, if we are so inclined. It also appears that the prices might be low enough for us to afford the raw materials. While we only have a few months left of summer in which to complete the building, one doesn´t need as solid a structure in the topics as we would back in the temperate zone.

The Ngobes in our immediate area really seem to be taking a liking to us, and us to them. We are finding friends in all the surrounding communities, and so far we´ve managed not to disappoint them. Of course, our work is just getting started and we´ve hardly had a chance to demonstrate all of our skills and determination, but it all still looks promising. Each day, our calendar is filling up more and more. Its getting to the point now that people are realizing they can´t just pick a day on their own before talking to us because it´s not likely to be free. And these are all just getting-to-know-your-organization meetings.

And speaking of friends, not a week had gone by in the new year and already we had some Estadounidense (Americans) come and visit. Ian, Josh, and Scott from Fairbanks, Alaska made the trip down for Christmas and New Years, and we were able to meet up with them at the Interamericana. Actually, they had already arrived from an adventure in Bocas del Toro in their own rental car while we did not get back from a New Years Eve and New Years Day visit to our old host family from Santa Clara until midnight.

The next day, we headed up to our site and showed them around. They got to meet a few Ngobe, try out a meal or two, some Seco, and see a bare-shirted, bare-knuckle fist fight. Scott even spotted the first scorpion in our new house, and it had eggs when we chopped it open. It was really fun to sit back and tell stories by candlelight and by under the bright, unobstructed stars. It was the kind of thing that only .05% of tourists will ever get to see; the Comarca Ngobe-Buglé is still not listed in travel books so most don´t even ever hear of it. Of course, there are very little amenities that travelers are used to. We had a ball anyway, and thanks guys for bringing the booze and cigars!

We are also looking forward to other trips from friends and family. While most are still in the early scheduling planning stages, Lisa´s parents have bought their tickets for April. Hopefully by then our Spanish will be passed the most painful stage (really, it feels like that is already passing) because they have some elaborate plans of seeing much of the highlights this little country has to offer, and they want us to tag along! We are really looking forward to seeing some more of the historical or ritzy parts of Panamá.

We certainly are anticipating an exciting and productive year ahead of us. Hopefully, you guys out there have as much in front of you. Of course, if you need a little adventure, get a hold of us and arrange a trip to the end of Central America. We are down here and would love to share it with you.

A peek into the private thoughts of Lisa...

2008-12-26T12:54:00.002-05:00

This is a special blog, and a special time, because it marks the first time in my whole life that I've actually written in a journal for more than a day or two, and after 5 months in Panama, have filled a journal.

The night I finished filling my first journal, I had a great time going back and reading snippets of my thoughts, and figured it might make for an interesting blog. So, here are a few peeks into my brain over since August 11th, 2008...

8-14 - We're here! We've done it, and made it through the process of applying, and Staging! It's still a bit unreal to be here and everything has been a blur so far. .... After that, we got to go swimming! Yay! Except that it was also a test - 10 minutes swimming and treading water non-stop and then we had to jump in the pool with our jeans on, pull them off, tie the legs in knots and create a working flotation device with them. I think my jeans won't be dry for months.

8-15 - I cannot speak Spanish.

8-16 - Happy Birthday to me! ... I got my first real unique Panamanian food experience today with chicheme. The best way to describe it is as corn milk. Milk with mashed corn (chunks and all) in it. Milk you chew. Delicious!

8-18 - I think a roach crawled across my neck last night. Something did. And I found a roach on it's back near the bed this morning.

8-20 - Today I was called a bon-bon in the supermarket but I had no idea what the guy was saying until I asked our Spanish teacher..... An off topic note - Ben just told me that he wishes he was covered in those lizards that live on the walls and near the ceiling that eat bugs. I had a hard time writing that because I was and am laughing so hard.

8-23 - Our first session today was about tropical diseases and it was pretty freaky. We also watched a video of PC Panama volunteers removing bot fly larvae from a fellow volunteer. So, if you get bit by a bot fly, they lay eggs in you, and then it grows under your skin. The way to remove it is to put duct tape ont he spot for 24 hours, then when you take it off, it pokes it's head up for air and you have to grab it and pull it out without killing it. Nasty.

8-27 - I saw my first wild monkey today. I was sitting in tech class and saw it before the kids ran up with slingshots.

9-8 - I was just attacked by a beetle. Ack.

9-17 - I am sitting in the Comarca, with pink eye in both eyes and I'm miserable. ..... And we hiked and hiked and hiked up the mountain - then down the side of a muddy cliff to our place. Our family is very, very poor. The house has a zinc roof, but not many walls. There are 10 people living in a space the size of our tech rancho in Santa Clara. We got there, dropped our bags and then started the most (or one of the most) uncomfortable nights of my life. The family just stared. ...My eye started itching this morning at the school and now I feel like there are needles in my eyes. ... The food sucks. Last night I got cold rice with a veggie similar to green beans, and luke warmsoup with a chicken head in it. I have no appetite.

9-21 - But to add insult to injury, or in this case, injury to injury, Ben and I went down to the quebrada to bathe after classes, and just as I stripped down, I slipped on the rocks and fell hard on my arms and back.

10-21 - We've come full circle now - back at Ciudad del Saber - where we started life here in Panama over 2 months ago. We swear in tomorrow, and looking back, 10 weeks really have gone by quickly. ... Two weeks ago now we left for our community partner conference, and it went well. ...Ben and Reinaldo went to the MIDA office to pick up supplies, and Edilsa went to buy chicks, so for a while I was alone in the piquera, but in my time, a boy drew a picture of me standing there and showed it to me. It said - Bei es muy bonita - Bienvenidas. It was cute, and touching. ... We basically live in a cloug forest, and it's neat to watch the clouds and mist roll in and envelope the mountains and the town. ... I think they might only speak Ngobere, which is totally intimidating. How can I work with people I can't communicate with? ... Peeing. Another issue. I always seem to have to go all of a sudden and I feel like my bladder is going to explode. I run to a latrine and nearly pee myself everytime while trying to rip my pants down and squat. Not to mention that the latrines are so full that if you have to go #2 you're likely to get a good dose of splash back.

10-29 - Noteworthy - toilet paper. Here toilet paper sucks. It's 1 ply, and at times resembles swiss cheese. But at the ambassador's house, they have the good stuff. 2 ply (at a minimum). It felt like I was wiping my ass with a towel. I didn't even dare try to flush it as no system here can even handle the 1 ply. ... The family was excited to see us, especially the kids, but they immediately started asking if a bunch of our stuff was for them. They also had their hands on and in everything. We quickly learned that just about everything needs to be out of reach. ... Meetings here last forever and accomplish very little.

10-30 - Today we went to one of Reinaldo's fincas, and we hiked up in the mountains for nearly 2 hours to get to the farm. When we arrived we got to work and they told me to clean up the trash, which was old plants that had been chopped down and died. My tool was a stick.

10-31 - I was thinking about our apartment for some reason, and how great it felt to crawl out of bed and stumble across the carpet and to the bathroom in the middle of the night. ... I'm not sure what the night has in store for us, but I bet it involves white rice.

11-3 - I have a peeing problem. Since being in Panama, the urge to pee seems to attack at once, and now it seems even worse. Up until now usually I could run to the latrine, or somewhere outside, depending on how dark it was, hold it, dance around, try to rip down my pants, and then go. But now I'm not even able to stop myself. Las night I held it, and didn't even know I was going until I felt warm wetness spreading. It's a bit frustrating to feel like a child that can{t control themselves. ... I think I just wiped DEET in my eyes.

11-7 - We went to Guaca to meet with the artisan group there. I kind of learned how to make a chacara. They started the bottom and handed it to me. And boy is it ugly. Really it was a day of being talked about, and not to, and of providing a lot of laughs with my super sucky chacara. My hands are tired and my butt is sore, but I spent a day with the people, and they want me to spend more time with them, so that is a good thing.

11-11 - At one point, one of the men proudly showed us a viper he came across, and killed, when we were all out working in the field. That makes 2 deadly snakes seen in the course of less than a week.

11-15 - Our patience is running thin. Annoyances: 1. Being asked for everything and anything. The neighbor asked for a loan. Everyone wants to use our phones. They want to use our flashlights, etc. 2. No privacy. They are in our side of the house all the time and it's obvious. They come in when we're here and when we're not. Our stuff is moved around. 3. They take and eat our stuff. We came back from David once and were missing half our hangers. Today we're missing a bag of M&Ms and a bag of chips. 4. They're noisy. They wake up at 4:30 a.m. and play music, talk, read aloud, scream, throw things, etc. All noisy. I know there are huge cultural differences, and I remind myself of it, but it's frustrating. We have a lot. A lot more than them. A lot they've never seen, so I want to share, but I can only do so much, and I won't be used either. I here to work. Not give hand outs.

11-17 - The dog would not stop barking last night. And it doesn't just bark, it growls when it barks. I feel like I haven't had a good, restful nights sleep in ages. And the food situation just gets worse and worse. I've woken up in the middle of the night starving. I think malnourishment + no sleep = crabbiness. I don't want to do anything today.

11-21 - I feel like shit. I've now had the shits for 5 days, and I have bouts of nausea and feel weak and irritable. ... Last night around 2 am we had a good scare. A noise woke us up and we couldn't figure out what it was, but them we saw a dog shoving itself through our door. It jumped up on our table, got muddy footprints on all our magazines and books, ate some cookies and them left.

12-1 - 13 days of diarrhea, possible parasites, a bacterial infection in my intestines and 4 days in the hospital and here I am. .. The other news of the trip is that Ben's grandmother, Dorothy, died on Friday nigth. It's been quite a week Stressful, painful and sad.

12-3 - Yesterday I celebrated a small, but important milestone - my first solid poop in 16 days - complete with latrine splashback! ... I hate canned fish. ... I can't wait to have our own place.

12-13 - They've developed a major case of the "we needs." We need food. We're hungry. We need rice, salt, sugar and coffee. Now we need eggs, oil, and bread. Now we need matches, and chicken seasoning and more vegetables. Ben went and bought a lot of food, but they always want more. Their parents better return soon.

12 -19 - Last page! We've been in site for nearly 2 months now. The time is passing by fairly quicly. Things have been rough at times, and great and uplifting at times. I'm glad we're here. I never could have experienced something like this without taking this risk. Peace Corps F@%# yeah!

There it is. A tiny bit of journal number one. Stay tuned!

¨Twas the Week Before Christmas

2008-12-17T12:50:00.004-05:00

And all through the Comarca,
Not a creature stirred,
Except bugs, rats, cats, dogs, drunks, birds, Peace Corps Volunteers, lizards, spiders, kids, etc

No, there is no Christmas in the Comarca. Sure, the people of Panama know about Christmas and even celebrate it, but they do not experience the whirling maelstorm of consumerism that seems exclusively American. While the world bemoans a coming recession and Americans still buy 21.6 presents per person (down from 23 last year) on average, the folks in the Comarca quietly go about their lives without much of a thought towards the day that Jesus was registered with the government (he was born in April). There are no presents, no trees with decorations, no songs or mistletoe. There will probably be a Christmas service for those who were converted by the recent missionaries, but very few are thinking about doing anything special, let alone even hearing about ads and sales from Thanksgiving to end of the year as they are not getting them over the radio and they don´t have TVs (or electricity).

But here, in this little shack, in the corner of the village, in the heart fo the jungle, there is one young blonde cutie who wants to hear some carols, decorate with garland, and put up a tree. She sings softly those songs that she carries inside, gathering a small herd of children to her like the Pied Piper of Hamburg. She does a little piroqette with the twinkle of a tear in her eye as she wishes whole-heartedly to be in a place that celebrates this favorite of American holidays, this wonderful time when we all put aside our differences and think about what is good for everyone. We take time to ponder the meaning of world peace and the brotherhood (sisterhood) of man (woman). We plan trips to see family, or at least a phone call to touch base, and we search the stores and malls for those perfect gifts for our loved ones, presents they will actually use. We attend churches with sermons full of hope, and read many a Hallmark card with lovely sentiments.

While we feel like we are doing a good deed by being here, and we are happy to have friends like the other PCVs we will be meeting up with at the beach on Christmas Eve, we do indeed miss that special time of year when even an old grouch like me has trouble uttering a bah-humbug. When the stores and schools and court buildings are all showing their Christmas spirit and playing those classics, and even strangers are a little nicer to each other than they have to be. Its a time when there are plays and TV shows about being a better person, Santas in malls offering hopes to kids and outside of stores offering hopes to the poor, and we can all hope that the item we really want (that was at the top of our gift list) is under the tree decorated with memories of past Christmases.

We are going about our lives as we had expected ourselves to, searching for leaders of the community and encouraging them to continue to fight for a better life. We are just starting so it is a time of hope and optimism for us, even without the holiday spirit. And yet, somehow, I´m sure that this little blonde of mine will have us some plane tickets back to the States next year, because she is not going to want to miss more than one Christmas in a row!

The Mute Screams

2008-12-10T11:29:00.004-05:00

First of all, Lisa is better. After one regime of pills for parasites, she went the other hospital in the capital and they took a stool sample, then they kept her on an IV for three days. They said that the original diagnosis was wrong and that she had a bacterial infection instead. At least she is now better and poops like normal again.

We have had some interesting theories put forth from the people around our communities. I´ve come to believe that they are largely a combination of poor education and guess work:

The other night around 3:39 a.m., a man was yelling at the top of his lungs in the middle of the road, obviously straining for every last decibel. AAAA-OOOO-EEEEE! After a half hour of this serenade, during which several dogs offered their own counterpoint to which he responded in kind, he went suddenly silent. While no one around here complains when their sleep is interrupted (except for Lisa and I) they had all heard the man and had some ideas about what was going on.

One suggested that he was inebriated, as Lisa and I assumed, and called him a borracho, which is a derrogatory term for a drunk, then got himself falling down hammered a few days later. Another said he was a witch and could bring an evil wind to make people sick. And yet another, Lisa´s favorite, said that he was a mute...who was screaming. I think that theory involves a curse or something but they didn´t offer any kind of coherent explanation.

And we have picked up on some other strange statements. After I said that we weren´t getting a good signal today due to the thick, dark clouds, I ¨learned¨ that cell phone reception gets better when its sunny because the sun recharges the signal with electricity. Rice is the most nutritious food in the world, which is why everyone eats it, every day, for every meal. When the earth shakes with anger, the weather changes...and after our recent 6.2 quake near David, the weather did in fact change (from wet to wetter) and we had a 40-year flood!

We´ve also been discussing a bit of astronomy. It seems that the people from a nearby town believe that people can walk to the sky. People I´ve talked with think that the stars are holes through some kind of fabric or dark film. The moon is strong enough to break through the ground up there, but the stars cannot, and if we wanted to we could walk there. We can see that the world is not flat because there are all kinds of mountains and water, but round like a ball, you´re crazy, Gringo!

I´ve tried explaining that the objects in space are spherical, including the earth and that the distances between them are incredible. I talk about how the moon rotates around us and us around the sun and that they are in no way close to each other. I was pretty sure I lost some credibility when I tried to explain that the light of the moon and the light of the sun are actually the same, but that the moon is reflecting that same light off a white surface. It sometimes feels like I´m the wharthog from The Lion King: After Simba says that the stars are our ancestors watching over us and Timon says the sparkly dots were ¨fireflies that got stuck in the big bluish-black thing,¨ Pumbaa responds, ¨Oh. Gee, I always thought that they were balls of gas, burning billions of miles away.¨ Timon-¨Pumbaa, with you everything is gas!¨

Thanksgiving and Flooding Updates

2008-11-27T15:38:00.003-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving! First the good news... The standfast phase for our area of the Comarca was lifted shortly after it was placed, and Ben came down the mountain and joined me in David on Wednesday, along with other members of our group located in the Comarca. We are planning to go out and have a nice meal at a restaurant in town tonight to celebrate.

The not quite as great news is that I just finished up my rounds of medication to fight my parasites, and people say I should be feeling better soon. But the medications are strong, and it feels like there is a battle being waged in my abdomen between the parasites and the pills. I´m hoping my body and the pills are winning. So, I´m still not feeling great.

The worse news is that the rain continues to fall. The Bocas del Toro region and the Comarca portion on the Carribean side are devastated. Many people have lost everything. Several Peace Corps volunteers in those areas were stranded in their sites and had to be evacuated out by helicopter and the rest were consolidated. Today a small plane brought most of them into David, and they may be here for several weeks or up to a month while roads are repaired. Today we spent our morning unloading trucks of supplies - mostly clothing and medical supplies - to be sent to areas in need. The flooding hasn´t gotten much news coverage in the world (from what we´ve seen), but the situation is pretty dire in areas. Please continue to keep the people of Panama in your thoughts this Thanksgiving.

Parasites, Earthquakes and Flooding.. Oh my!

2008-11-25T12:58:00.004-05:00

There are a lot of crazy things happening in Panama right now, so let´s get started.

First of all, we´re now approaching nearly one month in our community and we´re having a great time. We are BUSY! We have been meeting with countless community groups and businesses, as well as groups from communities up to several hours away from ours, to get to know them and how we might be able to best serve them. We´re also getting into a routine in the community and everyday feel a little bit more like it´s home to us. And, let´s face it, we´re still in the ¨rockstar¨phase in town. Kids and adults alike have taken to shouting our names as we pass by, and we´re asked to visit and stop in often.

Now, the other stuff...

1. Parasites. I (Lisa) have parasites. Lets just say that 9 days ago now, I started having diarrhea, which got progressively worse everyday. I also felt nauseated a lot, and would waver between having no appetite at all, or feeling like I was starving to death. My energy level was minimal. Last Saturday night was rough. I couldn´t stop going. If you get my drift. So, Sunday morning, we called the Peace Corps doctor, and I was on my way to David to go to the hospital. Yesterday morning I went to the hospital, and was immediately hooked up to an I.V. and they did a blood test and told me that I´ve got parasites! Now, I´m on medication to kill everything off and try to get me back to normal, but it´s got me feeling icky too. But, the explosive diarrhea is a thing of the past. I should count my lucky stars that this is the first bad thing health wise I´ve had to deal with (should we count the pink eye experience or falling down and hurting my back in the river) when other volunteers in our group have had issues from day one.

2. Hunger. I´ve never before felt hunger like I´ve felt it here in the past few weeks. I´m guessing that the parasites are mostly to blame. Anyone that´s done Weight Watchers can probably agree that the first week you´re on plan is hard, and you feel like you´re starving. That´s nothing. And really, I can´t begin to imagine what real hunger and malnourishment is like. But having my hunger wake me up in the middle of the night, and keep me up for hours because it´s consuming my thoughts, is a new level of hunger for me. To be fair, I should mention that the food just isn´t doing it for me. I eat tons of white rice. Tons of nutrient lacking, flavorless white rice. The vegetables that were in abundance when we first arrived have disappeared. We´re not even getting the boiled green bananas anymore, which I actually miss. And at times, we´re now getting canned fish, which is making my stomach flip right now just thinking about it. Before it sounds all doom and gloom though, I will say that it makes the prospects of cooking for ourselves soon seem so much better.

3. Earthquake! Last Wednesday morning we experienced the strongest earthquake we´ve been through, at a 6.2. We ¨woke¨up shortly after 1am to the strong shaking. I actually crawled out of bed at 1am to relieve myself, and came back in the shack and noticed that the dog from next door had snuck in our house. It was cowering against the wall and freaked me out. I shooed it out and went back to bed. At first when the quake hit, I thought ¨what a freakishly strong wind!¨ (People have shared that we get very strong winds in the summer here - which is nearly upon us) Then I realized it was shaking. This quake was different from my last big one (in Fairbanks, Alaska at a 5.8) because we were about as close to the earth as possible this time, and the last one hit while I was sleeping on the top floor of an 8 story building. Our host dad woke up and thought about getting us up, but told me the next morning that he knew we were sleeping. I reassured him the next morning, that if he thinks the zinc shack is going to fall on us, he´s more than welcome to scream and yell and get us out of bed!

4. Floods. We´re in the rainy season right now. There´s also a tropical depression hanging out on the coast that´s threatening to become a cyclone. That´s not a good mix. We´ve had no issues in our site because we´re living at about 4,000 feet, but all of the water has to go somewhere, and unfortunately it has caused really devastating flooding in the provinces of Bocas del Toro, Chiriqui and ours, the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle. So much so that the Peace Corps Panama powers that be have declared that everyone in these areas has to stay where they are right now, until further instructions arrive. This means I am in David (see number 1), and Ben is still in our community. We originally planned to have a nice private Thanksgiving in Boquete, but Boquete is devastated by the floods. Then we thought David, or the beach, but as it stands, no one is going anywhere, and we may not even have the holiday together. Which brings me to my last point...

5. Giving thanks. There is a lot for us to be thankful for this year. I could try to list them all out and would surely forget some, but I´ll sum it up by saying that we´re thankful for this opportunity and experienceand we´re eternally thankful for family and friends. And machetes (which are great for killing roaches).

Please keep the people of Panama in your thoughts in this difficult time. Also, if you´re feeling like you´d like to help the Peace Corps, or our projects in Panama, please take some time to check out the Peace Corps webpage and click on Donate Now!. You can choose specific countries, projects or volunteers to help fund.

Getting Started

2008-11-11T19:46:00.009-05:00

We´ve been in our new community for a couple of weeks now and are really enjoying it. There are a lot of business opportunities surfacing with each new meeting and the people seem really motivated to try to capitalize on them. Of course, some people appear to be most concerned with the money that might come with our support, but we just explain what Peace Corps is over again. We get the random ¨give me money¨shout out, most recently (in site, since I was called out to on the street here in David when we arrived) while I was gathering firewood from a little kid claiming he was an orphan. Not knowing whether he was or not, and being the bleeding heart that I am, *snicker snicker* I talked to him and his two friends about Alaska and how poorly hand-outs have gone for the indigenous there over the past three decades. I´m not sure if it sunk in though; when I finished, he tried to negotiate it down from $1 to 50¢ and then 25¢.

Its assumed that we gringos all have money to give, and the culture here is strongly weighted towards hand-outs after a generation or two of the communist experiment. Although its a bit discouraging at times, you do have to stop and say to yourself, well, we do have money, don´t we? Nevertheless, it won´t help them out to continue to get a hand-out instead of a hand-up, or as I told the ¨orphan¨, by not giving you money, I´ll help you learn to take care of yourself and not rely on anyone else to live.

We live in a part of a house with the family that we visited during our site visit week. They have young kids that seem to have really taken to us, almost too much at times. We are not sure how much longer we are going to be staying with them, but we have made some basic improvements for our comfort so we could probably stay for quite a while. There are some other options to explore, and some minor annoyances provoking us to try something new, but we are having fun with them and they are very nice. Besides, we´ve had so much on our plate that we haven´t had much time to just walk around and talk to people...what they call ¨pasear¨here in Panama.

We´ve been holding meetings with groups and individuals almost every day. When we are not learning more about the businesses in town or learning their weaving techniques, we go out to the farms to till the soil, or chop and clear the weeds, or clean up the corn fields. Usually, we have to walk for hours in the mountains just to reach the farm, but they usually feed us lunch when we are out there all day. We have some wicked blisters on our suave office hands!

We have entered the rainiest time of the rainy season. Its awesome to see the clouds rapidly roll in, like they are a living thing. Occasionally the rain will last all night, and, a few times too often, we´ve been caught out in it while we are walking or farming. It can be a little chilly, but nothing that would threaten our health. We are really close to the equator here afterall. Although many people talk about how much it rains, its still not as much as Southeast Alaska. There is time to almost dry your clothes in the hot sun each morning!

We´ve gotten out of our site a couple of times now. Its been nice to have a period to settle in. We were supposed to have something akin to that through our training, but not much really prepares you for the poverty level of our site, or the pace of life. Our training site could have been a rural town in America (and I´m not the old person who says that!) It did work for our Spanish proficiency and for the basics Spanish culture (like the soap operas on the TV in the internet cafe right now) and, of course, for our understanding of our job and Peace Corps.

That not withstanding, its good to come to David. First, to see Obama win, as Lisa quickly posted last week, and now to have a meeting with the regional office of IPACOOP, one of the main agencies that we will be working with as business volunteers. A good many volunteers from the western part of Panama came into this city for the elections. We had kind of a party atmosphere, with the newer volunteers heading to the casino (where the operators had been persuaded to put up CNN on four of the dozen TVs) for food and beer while the seasoned volunteers had themselves a much cheaper pre-party in a larger room of the hotel, cheering each new breaking news as a state was called. I believe that everyone of us here (not surprisingly) was rooting for Obama and hoping for some good change. Most of us are at least partly concerned with our nations reputation overseas!

Unfortunately for an old news hound like myself, I couldn´t hear the TV in either the crowded room at the hotel or in the casino. And the casino only turned on the volume during the acceptance speech, which apparently was just a little too long because they brought out the dancers and switched on the music right before he finished. Instead of hanging out with the groups, I spent my evening walking between the two places (escorting our female counterparts if they were planning on going alone because it was also a holiday week here in Panama) and checking on in with our laundry lady who perpetually needed just 20 more minutes. In between, I lounged with my six-pack in our little hotel room switching between the two biased news channels of CNN and Fox News, trying to soak up as much information as possible. And really, I had a ball. Later, I walked Lisa back from the casino and we watched together when they called the race and had the speeches. Damn proud to be an American.

Hooray America!

2008-11-05T15:13:00.001-05:00

Congratulations Obama!

Yay for absentee voting!

Yay for Colorado going blue!

Swearing In

2008-10-26T15:54:00.004-05:00

We swore in as Peace Corps Volunteers on Wednesday, as Lisa mentioned in the last post. Her post was before the ceremony so I´ll take a moment to describe it.

Busy morning of last minute sessions. A couple of hours of free time and a quick meal to the last minute trainees. Finally free of sessions. People are giddy, laughing at silly stuff. People are busy with nothing. A little time in front of CNN World Report.

The little yellow buses arrive, mere mini-vans in the U.S. A quick drive through the hot city. A heartbeat and we leave ratty shacks and old business for lavish front lawns and amazing high security fences. Fences make good neighbors. We wait at the gate of the compound.

We wait. We wait for awhile more, and then we are told that the security was told we would arrive 45 minutes later. They want to impress their new boss, our new ambassador. They want to run things right. We were supposed to arrive later.

After a time, the staffers convince them to let us leave the air conditioned vans. We get to stand in the sun. We have various pictures taken, by the buses, in front of the tennis court, there´s the pool. We have a big group one on the front steps. Now just the girls. Now just the Bocas group. Comarca group, where are you? Oh hey, did we do the boys photo yet?

The inside is fabulous. The air conditioning is perfect. So much space and elegance. If you didn´t feel a little excited before, if it didn´t feel real yet, being here on U.S. soil again in full Western beauty and landscaping will get you going. The water is fresher here, the air sweeter, the hor dóeuvres were scrumptious.

The ceremony starts. First an official from Panama welcomes us and speaks of the table of important people. He talks of working together. He says very nice things. He mentions the vice minister. She stands and talks to the table. There´s been a signing of documents, a renewing of trust between partners, they are related to the work of the Corps. We are all feeling pleased with our understanding of Spanish. The Country Director talks to us. He seems to think our group´s most uninvolved member, our hermit, or pariah, or self-outcast, is our leader, but his dignified words are a complement to us all. He has good jokes, too.

We get a story from our second in command. This is his last group of newbies. He´ll be with us for a few more months only, a victim of an excellent idea: Peace Corps staff should be Returned Volunteers who served the Corps within the last five years. His fifth year is up next Spring. He will be missed.

We take the oath. We will uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. It is solemn and heartfelt. The paper was already signed yesterday. We only lost one trainee along the way, and gained three from another program that fell. In that, we came out ahead of where we started.

Our group wrangled one of our best trainees, now volunteer, to give the speech. She is masterful. She impresses us CED trainees. She impresses the EH trainees. She impresses the new volunteers from the other country that fell. She had worked hard on this, got the editted words other trainees and the perfect translation from our teachers. I´m sure she was no slouch herself on the original. She must have practiced out loud because her prounciation is spot on. The Panamanian staffers all smile and nod along with her. We understand the Spanish better for her enunciation. The most visibly impressed are the table of important people.

The EH speaker is also impressive. He´s known around these parts as a poet, and he is going to impress as well. Although is Spanish is a little rockier, he still has a poem that works only in Spanish and it beautifully describes our current feels as we get ready to head into the field. He has a second one that works only in English, but we are there to appreciate it as well, though not many Panamanians can be on board. We clap hard for both of our speakers. They have made us proud. We are volunteers!

Today is the day!

2008-10-22T07:41:00.003-05:00

TODAY WE ARE SWEARING IN AS OFFICIAL PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS!!!

We initially were supposed to swear in tomorrow, but things got shifted, and now we're swearing in today, this afternoon to be exact.

I had an interview yesterday with the Country Director and at the end I mentioned that we've been waiting for this day for a long time, and now that I've thought on that statement a little more, we really have.

We don't know the exact dates, but at some point many years ago we made the decision of whether to pursue the Peace Corps, or have a family. (And before that we talked about Peace Corps quite a bit). Obviously we chose Peace Corps. But that decision (in 2005?) set a lot of things in motion. Ben went back to school to get his degree and finished in December 2006. In January 2007 we sent off the first paper applications. May 2007 we had our first interviews with a Peace Corps recruiter. August 2007 we got our nomination to Latin America for the following year. In October we put our house on the market, and we closed on it in February. In March, Ben was medically deferred for 8 months, meaning we would miss our program. We appealed the decision and it was approved! In June we were facing the end of our lease on the apartment and had no news, but then we got our invitations to Panama!

August 10th we flew to Miami for staging, and August 13th, we set foot in Panama for the first time. Now, we've been here for over 2 months, we've learned a lot about Panama, Panamanians, their culture, a lot more Spanish, more technical skills, and of course a lot about ourselves. We both feel incredibly lucky and happy to be sitting here today (many years later), literally fulfilling one of the dreams that we've shared together for such a long time. YAY!!!

What´s your ETA, Bei?

2008-10-15T17:28:00.002-05:00

Filed teeth, crossed eyes: first impressions. Sharing cultures: Are there indigenous people in the United States? They are afraid of frogs, planes, and being alone at any time, but not chivas without adequate brakes. Plantains are still bland, bland, bland. They can carry 100-lbs loads in grass-woven bags attached to their foreheads, up and down giant mountains on muddy trails for hours. We are going to be living with some interesting people.

My name in Ngabe is Eta (pronounced eh-duh) Lisa´s is Bei (pronounced bay-ee). We were named by our counterparts when we met them, and everyone we meet in town loves to laugh at us upon introduction; look at these funny gringos with Ngabe names!

We went to our site for the first time this week, and we love it. It´s in the Comarca Ngabe-Bugle, high in the mountains in good coffee country. It´s jungle, to be sure, but beautiful and full of mystery. While we were there, it rained nearly every day and the clouds surrounded us so that they were more like mist. We are told that we have a great view, but I only got to see a little of it on the first day.

On the chiva ride up, Lisa got to sit in the front so she saw more of the gorgeous green mountains with a view of the Pacific Ocean. I was late due to an impromptu meeting with our counterpart so I had to hang onto the back of the truck for dear life. It was painful and the rain made me wet, but at least it was only an hour and nine minutes.

When we met our counterparts at the little conference we had, the woman had filed teeth and the man had crossed eyes. As it turns out, these are not strange qualities here. The filed teeth came to three little points on each tooth (so that only two triangles had to be filed out). The other filed teeth I´ve since seen are one or two points per tooth so our lady had something extra special. She´s also an accomplished artisan.

The man is quite intelligent and an excellent public speaker. Despite how he would be received in the States where corrective surgery for this ailment is very common, he has no problem talking in front of anyone and is quite convincing. His Spanish is excellent as well as his Ngobere; he´ll use both to win over anyone to his side. Moreover, he is very intelligent and looks for every opportunity to expand his knowledge. I´ve really enjoyed our conversations in the evening.

It is a large town, with many amnenities such as three restaurants, a large Centro de Salud, a cooperative, a small 5-room hotel, a bunch of little kiosk stores, and a high school. Many people from outlying villages have moved here or hike an hour or more to work here. The chiva goes up to our site and many people take it down to the Interamericana.

We will be having another Volunteer living in the same town as us. She has an agriculture focus and has been working here for two years. She´s extending for a third so we´ll be getting the full benefit of her experiences and she´ll be helping us meet many of the movers and shakers. She asked for a business volunteer to follow up on her agriculture work. Now that many horticulture groups are growing tasty organic food, they and other groups like the artisans, the cooperative, the restaurants, and the stores would like help with accounting, marketing, etc, that she just can´t provide. She was as excited as the townfolk to hear that they were getting two instead of just one, although they are apprehensive because the last one left after just one month many years ago.

Needless to say, we have a lot of opportunities to work. While some people just seem able to envision us finding funds for them, many others want more specific help that we are ready to provide, after an acclimitization period. We will be working closely with people on a hands on basis to learn their work and gain their trust. After we feel comfortable with our understanding of their situations, we can begin to make suggestions for improvements. I think our days will be very full, especially at first, and already there are people arguing about having us work mostly with them.

Our physical conditions are fairly rugged. I´ll just give a few little highlights to let help you feel what we are looking at:
Sleeping on wood planks, it´s cold at night.
Cockroach in my breakfast, just feed it to the cat, the rest is tasty.
Splashback from the latrine is never nice, score: Lisa 3, Ben 0.
Can´t seem to pick the right shoes, Lisa wore nice stuff when they lead us through forest trails and almost lost a sandal in the mud, jeans and tennis shoes for a trek in the rain, and rubber boots for our first agency meeting.
Baby still has a cough for a couple of days after starting meds from the Centro de Salud, after some natural herb meds and a day, parents say they work better.
Lisa´s eyes burn in the smoke, and host explains that it´s from the cold air, not the smoke, of course!

Lisa refers to our site as Heaven in the Comarca or sometimes Alaska in Panama. We absolutely love it and look forward to our two years up there starting next week.

A Few Afterthoughts

2008-10-06T08:35:00.002-05:00

Mangrove Mud is the Kryptonite of Velcro.

Hot dogs are breakfast sausages when fried.

There's always room for another person on the bus.

Giardia is the new fad diet.

If it's endangered, its a delicacy, but not more expensive.

Whistling and catcalls are respectful complements that you will miss when you're back in the States.

Grassroots meets Government...

2008-10-05T15:06:00.003-05:00

I guess you could already say that the Peace Corps is an organization that works on a grassroots level, through the government, but this week our training group had the pleasure of meeting the new U.S. Ambassador to Panama, and got to truly see how our work affects so many people on so many levels here!

On Tuesday, the Ambassador visited us and we had a pizza lunch and then shared a little bit about who we are and what we´re here to do. After lunch, we broke into groups by sector and had a more in-depth discussion about our role here as ¨Community Economic Development¨volunteers and what that means. We had some interesting discussion about challenges and measuring our success, as well as how the Ambassador´s office, and the U.S. government and Peace Corps can work together for change. It was an interesting meeting, and Ambassador Stevenson is a fascinating woman!

The rest of our week was pretty much routine. We were back in our training community and spent our days attending technical class and language classes. On Wednesday, Ben and I facilitated a portion of the technical session about accounting and bookkeeping concepts (although it´s been about 5 years since I studied or tutored in accounting concepts!). We´re also in separate language classes now, Ben has been in Spanish classes, and I´m in Ngabere classes. Techinically, at my ¨mid-term¨language test I scored higher than required for passing the Spanish, so that might play into it. I guess it´s also meant to give us a bit of a mix, although I would love to learn more Spanish as well. Right now we´re gearing up for our site visits - we leave the training community on Tuesday afternoon and meet up with our future site counterparts in a location in Cocle, and then on Thursday morning, we´ll travel with our counterparts to our communities, returning back to training on the next Tuesday.

During our visit, we´ll be tasked with figuring out our host family arrangements for the first three months in site, and with developing the beginnings of a work plan with the community. We are excited to get our feet wet and see where we´ll be living and working in just a few short weeks now! That being said, we really are enjoying our family situation in the training community and know that we will miss them a lot! It will be hard to say goodbye to them! They´ve done so many great things for us in our time here, and our time has flown by!

Shorter edition today, but more soon after our site visits! Thanks to everyone for their continued support! We miss home, and everyone, but we´re happy and doing well!

Tech Week Adventure - for Ben

2008-09-29T17:42:00.001-05:00

Lisa and I split up during our tech week, as you can tell from her post, to learn different subjects. While I didn´t really feel that I had learned as much as I had been expecting to, I still had a great time and really liked the family that I stayed with. The senor of the home was in Panama City for the week receiving scheduled medical treatment so I was only with his 70+ year old wife and their granddaughter. I also got to meet the girl´s mother and father, although they didn´t live there.

Both the grandmother and granddaughter were very friendly and helpful. The girl is very intelligent and was trying to learn English at school. We spent time each day translating words for each other and talking about them. She was in 4th grade so we were probably on about the same level.

It took me all week to begin to understand the grandmother. Like many old ladies, she has an accent all her own and much of the time I needed a translation from the girl. Nevertheless, we both liked each other very much. What we were able to talk about usually resulted in much laughter. When I left, she cried a little and kept hugging me until I told them I would come back to visit.

We spent much of our time working with the kids at the school. It is a large school, and includes grades 10th, 11th, and 12th, which means they are specialized classes here in Panama, similar to associates or apprenticeship programs. This one focused on agriculture, and students came from so far away some had to be boarded. We had a tour and a business plan with some of these high school students, but most of our time was spent with the younger kids.

We observed some classes and taught a couple of computer classes. We did some Junior Achievement lessons and read some children´s books with them. I really enjoyed working with the kids; their interest and excitement is contagious, and they really were interested in learning. I just wished we had more time learning about cooperatives and/or mentoring potential leaders because I told that will be our focus in our site.

We had a few adventures along the way as well. We got to kill some chickens for sancocho, then pluck and clean them. I got to kill two of them so I got to try snapping one´s neck and cutting the throat of the other one. After all that I´d heard about killing chickens my whole life (and I´ve never lived around them before so every scratch-and-peck, squawk, cock-a-doodle-do, and various other stupidity had been as fascinating to me as I was to the people in the Comarca) I´m glad I finally got to do it myself. Unfortunately, it wasn´t really as much fun or glamorous as it sounded so it´ll probably be just a chore now. I´ll have to stick to hunting, fishing, crabbing, shrimping for more fun and excitement.

Speaking of crabbing, on our last day, half of our group got up at 4:30 am to slog our way through a mangrove forest to the ocean. We cut some mangrove roots to use as handles on either side of a net and dragged a river for crab. We got into a bunch of the really expensive ($2-$3 a piece) crabs and caught about 25 big ones and 8 or 9 little ones. They had some really pointy and sharp shells and claws. When they saw that they were going to be grabbed from the net, they spread their pinchers out wide and then clapped them together. It was really cool. Their pinchers were sharp enough to draw blood, as we found out first-hand, and were dexterous enough to reach almost anywhere. The big ones were about 9 inches wide.

In our nets were also filled with fish. Some were little and had spines on their backs and fins. The spines had venom that numbed one member of our group´s hand for awhile. We also had some little black and green ones, bigger than the venom fish, that had white bellies. These little guys were puffer fish. When you squeezed their heads a bit, or they were just scared, they´d puff up with air. You could rasp their bellies against one another and they´d stay all puffed up.

Well I´m running out of time here so I´ll sign off. Thanks everyone for your great posts and for some emails to boot. Keep them coming!

Tech Week - through Pink Eyes...

2008-09-29T17:05:00.003-05:00

We´ve survived another week, and compared to culture week, it was worlds apart. My culture week was in Santa Clara in Chiriqui, about a stone´s throw from Costa Rica. The climate was Amazing! We were in the mountains, at altitude, surrounded by coffee farms, and it actually got cold at night, and even during the day at times! No sweating for a week - what a treat! The views were gorgeous and the town was quite well off, comparatively speaking of course.

I showed up recovering from my pink eye and moved in with another host family, and started eating a lot of food (which lead to a rather unpleasant gassy period on Tuesday night: Very little food one week + tons of heavy food the next = pain).

Tech week is all about the technical aspects of our work, and my group was focused on agricultural work and artisan groups. We spent our week preparing and presenting charlas (presentations) on accounting and marketing concepts for two different groups. We also taught Junior Achievement in the local school one morning. Much of the week was spent learning about working with youths, and preparing for our charlas, but it was great to get our hands dirty and start working. And better yet, information that we´ve gotten about our site suggests that the groups in our future community want to learn about accounting and marketing as well as other things, so we´ve got somewhere to start!

No crazy illnesses or injuries this week - aside from the again noteworthy painful gas experience, and I did fall down in a gravel road when walking down a hill, and happened to land right on the same spot I hit last week in the river in the Comarca! My bug bites stopped itching and are healing now, just in time to return to our training community and get some new bites!

My host family experience was great - I actually stayed with another trainee in a home with a mom (her husband and son are living in the U.S.). The house was big, we each had a bedroom, and we had walls! Yes, walls! Like I said earlier, it was like being in a completely different world. And the contrast really made me think about poverty levels. When I got to Panama a month and a half ago, I would have thought that people in this community were very poor compared to the U.S., and they are, but here, they seem so wealthy when you see other areas. I´m greatful to have had the opportunity to see quite a few places in Panama so far, and to really see that contrast. It´s been very eye opening.

Other highlights - on Friday we went to a large finca and did a coffee tour. We got to see how they process their coffee from start to finish, and then got to do a ¨cupping¨ afterward. They roasted the beans for us, then ground them. We then sniffed them in a particular way, and then we added water, sniffed the foam, then slurped and swooshed, etc. The coffee was STRONG, but good. We learned that coffee has a 100 point scale of quality and this was ranked in the 90´s. After the cupping, they brewed up some coffee and enjoyed some time relaxing on the farm and checking out their collection of local bugs and artifacts.

And after two weeks of hard work and travel, on Saturday we had a little free time and we got our first taste of Panamanian beaches! Most of our group met up at a small, undeveloped beach site and enjoyed the sun, waves and warm water before returning to the city area last night.

This week we are in training pretty much like normal, but we are getting ready for our site visits that take place in the middle of next week! We are really excited to get into our actual communities and start seeing what we´ll be doing for the next two years! Training is nearly over now, and has really flown by. Swearing in gets closer everyday!

The Comarca Visit - from Ben´s Viewpoint

2008-09-20T16:45:00.002-05:00

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.

A taste of the Comarca - from Lisa´s perspective!

2008-09-20T11:47:00.000-05:00

Right now I´m sitting in David, stinky and dirty from a week in the Comarca, and waiting for a hotel room for the night. We (Ben & I) were in the Comarca this past week for our culture week visiting another current volunteer along with 5 other aspirantes (trainees) from our group. We arrived Sunday afternoon and went off with host families. Ben and I were placed with a family that lived far up the mountain, but once you got up the mountain along the road, we also had to slide/hike down a muddy mountain cliff to their home. And talk about a bit of culture shock. Life is hard in the Comarca, and will be hard in the Comarca, but after a week there, and coming back to civilization, I really feel that it´s the place where we are needed most.

The family we lived with had 8 children, 2 adults, and last week, us. Their house had a zinc roof on some logs, and a few small sheets of zinc around the outside that formed bits of walls. Inside there were 5 platforms for beds and nothing else. The first night was uncomfortable and awkward. We arrived and unpacked a few things and set up our bed area with mosquito net, and then we were stared at all night until our host dad woke up and tried to communicate with us. We´d heard stories from current volunteers about experiences in the Comarca with a family of 12, being stared at, eating food you can´t see in the dark, and knowing that you´re being talked about and laughed at as you hear ¨gringo...¨, and our night definitely fit the mold. The people were very shy the whole time we were there, but were opening up to us somewhat as time passed. We ate our breakfasts and dinners with the host family, and food was typically boiled plantains, overcooked white rice and maybe a bit of beans. Lunches were with the group of aspirantes and were rice and beans. I won´t lie - I didn´t like the food. And I miss cooking. Living with a host family for 3 months after swearing in will be challenging, but I think we´re ready.

Now, to the fun stuff. On Wednesday I got pink eye, and full on, in both eyes, pink eye. They were both goopy and gross on Wednesday and into Thursday, which is even more disgusting in a place where you´re always covered in mud (I´m officially in love with my rubber boots- FYI). Yesterday my eyes apparently looked like they were going to leak blood at any second, and today they still look wicked (my first look in the mirror), but are ¨much better than before.¨

Also, on Thursday, Ben and I trekked down to the quebrada (creek) to bathe after class and I slipped on wet rocks and fell on both of my arms and my back - hard. I´ve got some nasty bruises and a pretty sore back now. AND... I have more bug bites than I´ve ever had in my whole life, easily. I look like I´m diseased on my arms. Andrea counted 15 bites on the back of my neck this morning (all new from yesterday), and my neck is probably the least bitten part of my body aside from my face.

So, I´m a mess, but have had a lot of good laughs at myself over the week! Everything else from the week was great - we did a lot of hiking up the mountain to different places. We visited a coop farm one day, and on Thursday we went to a presentation by a local artisan group. They make really awesome dresses and bags, and we got to watch them break down the fibers in leaves that they use to make string. I´m very excited to learn more about the local artisans and the type of work I may be doing in our community soon!

What else? I used a machete for the first time in my life to make leña (firewood) and actually was doing pretty well with it (i.e., no missing fingers, toes or legs!). Wednesday we went to the school in the community and presented charlas about the world map and the continents to each grade level and then shared a lunch with the teachers. And we didn´t miss the electricity. The area was gorgeous, much cooler than the city and it rained quite a bit.

I also shed some tears from frustration. Like when I was walking to class with full on pink eye, and Ben noticed that I had an army of Ngobe children following behind me. I turned around to smile at them, and they saw my eyes and said ¨BREN!¨ Which means ¨sick¨in Ngobere. I later joked that that would probably become my Ngobere name at this rate! We also had an uncomfortable night our second night with the host family because several drunk men showed up at the house and were arguing with our host dad about how much money they got from us for staying for the week. They spent a lot of time talking about that and staring at our stuff. We also got lots of questions about how much EVERYTHING costs. And no matter what you say, it´s a ton when your host dad makes $5 a day working hard at a farm.

I was telling a friend this morning though on the way to David that this feels right. We´re not here to be comfortable, and we knew it wouldn´t be. This was just a taste, but there´s so much we can learn from the people, and so much we can give as well. And I´m ready for it - red eyes, bruises, bites and all!!

Tonight I have a night in luxury - my first hot shower since the states, AC, and maybe some mexican food, before going off to tech week in Chiriqui near Costa Rica. Ben is heading toward Veraguas right now for his tech week, and said he´ll be checking in here to give his perspectives soon!

Welcome to our Blog!

2008-09-13T12:19:00.000-05:00

We´re just getting this set up, but intend on using this as our major mode of communication with home and friends for the next two years. We won´t have internet access a lot, and sending individual emails quickly gets overwhelming, so we hope you like our blog!

We´ve been in Panama now for over a month and overall, we´re really enjoying our time so far. This week we found out our site location for the next two years, and Ben & I will be going to an indigenous community in the Comarca Ngobe-Bugle. The community has about 1,000 people and they speak Ngobe first, but some people will speak Spanish as a second language. We will be close to other volunteers, and quite a few others from our training group. We will be working with a coffee cooperative, women´s artisan groups, micro-enterprises and youth groups in the community.

This next week we are going to the Comarca for Culture week, to experience life in a community similar to ours and start working with the people. The following week we´ll be in different locations for our Tech week, to learn specifics related to the jobs we´ll be doing in our communities. Ben will be going to the Veraguas province to learn more related to cooperatives, and Lisa will be going to the Chiriqui province to learn more related to artisan and youth groups.

Overall, life is good! We´re almost half-way through pre-service training in Santa Clara. It´s a beautiful, small town, and we live with an awesome host family. We´ve been very comfortable living with them, and have been picking up Spanish quickly from them, and our 4 hour Spanish classes every day! Their home is beautiful, we have a flush toilet and indoor shower, unlike many of the trainees. It´s very hot and humid here, and sometimes showering twice a day is a necessity. Our food so far is great, but our mom is a great cook who likes diversity in what she eats. A lot of the typical food is fried and a bit flavorless, so we´re happy to change things up!

In the Comarca, we can expect to eat a lot of rice, plantains and yucca - all flavorless, and with little nutritional value. The people are small and skinny (from what we hear), but hardworking and motivated. We expect them to be shy, but very friendly. We´ll be following up after another volunteer, who will actually continue to be in the site with us for one more year, so we hope to jump right into working side by side with the community. Our town is a bit of a hub for other communities, so we hope to be working with other volunteers in their sites as well.

We won´t have electricity, but we should have running water most days. We´ve been told that the homes typically have a thatched roof and a dirt floor. It rains a lot, but we´ll be in the mountains, so it will actually get cooler at night (than we´ve experienced so far). The higher mountain locations are the best for coffee growing, so we´re bound to become coffee drinkers (again for Lisa).

Keep checking in with us, we hope to post about every week or so, and leave comments! We´ll also be checking email from time to time for more personal stuff! So starts our adventure in Panama!