Chiriqui!

On Wednesday we all gathered in Chorrera to find out our site announcements. I’m headed to the mountains of Chiriquí, just below Volcán Barú National Park. That means the climate is cooler and a great place for people to visit. Hehe, actually, I’m not kidding! Come visit! Chiriquí Province is located next to Costa Rica in the western part of Panama. Above it are Bocas del Toro Province (think lots of islands) and Comarca Ngobe Bugle (a reservation for the Ngobe Bugle peoples). It is considered the bread basket of Panama, as the climate is great for growing all kinds of veggies and coffee. I’m looking forward to starting a garden of my own. I think the school has a garden and chicken project too.

My community has 300 people, 70 houses, and electricity! I’ll be headed out to a site next to mine for Cultural Week where the Aspirantes of each Province gather together to learn more about the food, language, housing, etc that each has in store for us. My main projects are reforestation, environmental education, ecotourism, and aqueducts. I’ll need to have an EH (Environmental Health) volunteer come visit to help me with the aqueducts as I know nothing about them and won’t be learning anything in this first ten weeks of training. We do have IST (In-Service Training) where we can get specialized training on topics relevant to our work, but that won’t be for quite a while.

The school in our training community has been closed all week as the community leaders decide what to do about the fiberglass panels that make up the ceilings of most of the new classrooms. The decision has been made to start class up again next week in various locations around town (four in La Casa Cultural, some in churches, some outside…). The school won’t be used until August since they’ll fix the problem in the two week break in July. “Fibria del vidrio”, as it’s known, is a hot topic throughout Panama with some schools without class for over a month. Kids go to school for about 4 hours a day in the morning or afternoon, so hopefully they’ll get them back and learning again soon.

We were going to be doing an Eco-Parade with the kids at the school, but since we haven’t been able to sit in on any classes and pump the kids up about it or anything, we’ve canned that idea. Hopefully we’ll still be able to do more of an Eco-Festival. I’m heading it up, so cross your fingers for me!

Last night a bunch of us were hanging out after dinner. It turned out that all six of us who went swimming earlier in the day were there, plus another CEC and one SAS. (After checking out another finca, aka farm, and riding horses for tech class, Carlos and Francisco took us for a break at the chorro, aka waterfall. Three guys and three girls jumped in while the rest just sat on the rocks around the pool. And boy was it nice to cool off!) Anyhow, we’ve got a great group of people down here!

Our garden is looking amazing too. We’ve got it all fenced off with chicken wire complete with a swinging and locking gate made with some bamboo and other materials. Our seeds have sprouted in our semillero. We’ll be transplanting the tomatoes later tonight before we head off to a baile in the town next door. Our beds are sprouting too with cilantro, peppers, beans, some natural insecticide, and a bunch of tuber plants. We just planted some pineapples yesterday so I can’t wait to see if that takes. Our medicinal plants are just about ready to transplant into our double dig beds, made with our very own compost. We’ve also built a huge structure to shade all of our little plants until the rainy season really takes off and the sun isn’t quite so harsh on them. We were going to try to make a whole Swiss Family Robinson-style watering system for all the beds with bamboo, but we decided that it might be too much work for the one day we have before we take off for two weeks. Hopefully one of the families in town will water everything while we’re gone or the rains will start!

I leave early tomorrow morning, perhaps 4:30am or 5am, to catch a bus into Panama and then another bus and chiva to Cultural Week, followed by Tech Week in the middle of the country. I’ll try getting online between the two, but I can’t make any promises! Oh, I have a phone too now. So if you want, you can call me at: 011-507-6602-9142! (That’s complete with country code, cell phone 6, and my phone number.)

Week 3

I finally plugged in my computer today to charge it for the first time. The extension cord hanging into my room just can’t handle it. I bought a surge protector and have it plugged into the main extension cord that comes in through the living room window and feeds the tv, the fan (when it’s not in my room), and another extension cord. That cord is connected to the kitchen/family room/dining room light bulb, the mini-fridge for the kitchen, and an extension cord into my host family’s bedroom (parents, baby, brother). That cord feeds a light in their room, a fan that I think broke, and an extension cord that runs into my room. While the only thing I have plugged into my room is another light bulb and the fan (from the family room at night), you can probably see why it wouldn’t charge my computer and why I was hesitant to force it without a surge protector. Grandpa, you can rest assured that I’m not fearful of an electrical fire, as our house is made out of cement! So to make a long story short, I am typing up this update before I get to Chorrera. (I´m posting it today in Arrejan as I didn´t make it to internet then. The pic is of my ranchito behind my house along with some neighborhood kids I play with.)

We’ve been busy in Tech class as we’ve prepared double-dig beds, made and planted our semillero (seed growing house), took cuttings of medicinal plants and have those growing in our vivero in little bags, made special soils, 14-day compost, learned community assessment tools, leadership skills, and more! Currently we’ve split into three groups to continue work on the garden, implement a community environmental activity, and coordinate a school eco-parade. I’m in the eco-parade group, yet we are all helping each other with our respective projects. We’re also going to be do a big community assessment complete with maps of the community according to different perspectives of residents, calendars related to holidays/crops/etc, daily schedules of different types of residents, biodiversity surveys, etc, etc, etc. One part is FREESOP which includes family (f), economy (e), politics (p). Another is more specific to our sector which has been dubbed BADCEG (pronounced Bad Keg) which includes water (a), soil conservation (c), and environmental education (e). It will be great practice as we’ll be responsible for doing this assessment in our own communities once we’re on our own.

Spanish class has improved by leaps and bounds. We’re practicing a lot more and even giving mini-charlas on topics we’ve learned about in tech class. Mine today was a little disorganized as I skipped out of class just as she called me to give it. Then I jumped right into it after Carlos dropped me back off. She still had lots of compliments, and my errors included things like Islas Caribes instead of Islas del Caribe or something like that… You see how much I retain new information! My biggest problem is I know the grammatical rules, but I still don’t use them all when I talk. Poco a poco…

So as I mentioned, I went on a volunteer visit last weekend. My volunteer had a site up in the mountains of Chiriqui on the border of Costa Rica. It is coffee country up there with lots of plantations everywhere. The weather was leaps and bounds colder than here, as I don’t think I took off my polar fleece the entire time! Okay, so it was probably just around 60’, but I’ve become a wimp to the cold. I do know that it never gets above 80’ there and that’s saying something for a country so close to the equator. Her community was rather small (or at least going by the number of houses in the town center where we pasear-ed which is basically just small talking neighbors. I think the population is actually around 300. However it skyrockets during the coffee harvest when at least 500 Ngobe Bugle (an indigenous group) arrive to work in the plantations.

We peaked into La Amistad National Park which straddles the two Central American countries. It is a beautiful park filled with rolling green mountains shrouded in clouds. Howler monkeys could be heard in the distance with their bellows echoing at the start of the rains. We hiked up to an eco-lodge (pictured) an eco group in town received funds to build. However, it was a little disappointing to see parts of the park, especially surrounding the ANAM ranger station, clear cut and planted with more coffee or tomatoes. I suppose that’s part of the reason why I’m here. Teaching environmental education and developing alternative economies in my community will be an uphill battle. We’ll find out next week where we will be placed. I have my second interview with Francisco, my APCD, to help determine my placement as well as take tabs on my progress in Tech class. I think he decided many of the placements before we even got here. Many of the kids in my group already know where they are going. But at least I can put in my two cents after what I liked and didn’t like about the site I visited.

I’ll wrap this up for tonight. I’m dying to take a shower, but I want to wait until the water comes on instead of taking another bucket bath. I have no clue when that will be, but I know it’s sometime after it’s dark and the sun is setting right now. Until next time! Keep the emails coming as I love hearing from you all. And if you haven’t written yet, know that I can receive emails about once a week when we come to the city. I miss ya’ll and have been decorating my room with your pictures.