Making a house a home

I finally feel like I’m moved into my house. Well, I still have a ways to go, but I’m getting there. I hosted Culture Week and had quite a few guests staying at my house. One of whom was my Regional Leader (RL), a third year Volunteer who works with agency relations, site development, and volunteer support. She stayed with me earlier for a Volunteer Visit (aka my one-year mark). And she was just as frustrated as I was with my lack of tables.

My house in Chiriquí had a great big table, just moments before I moved into it. Then my renters exchanged it for one half of its size. This time around, I moved into my new house with no tables. My renters were about to take the bed out of the house too when I stopped them and explained that I had no furniture to move into the house. Later that first week, he brought over a table for me to use.

A table was a big improvement on none. However, I have a home office. Yes, that’s right, in the middle of a rural town in the tropics of Panama, I’ve set myself up with an office. Or at least it seems like it. I have loads of manuals that I refer to frequently, currently sitting on the ground in molding cardboard boxes turned on their sides for makeshift bookshelves. I bought a printer just two months after swearing in due to frustrations with customer service at internet cafes. Well, I think my printer might have some problems right now because cockroaches were living inside of it at my second host family’s house. I tried getting all the turds out of it, so we’ll see if it works better now. And then I have my baby laptop, external DVD drive, and mouse. Those I keep in watertight bags when they aren’t in use. And they get a drying out every once and a while with the school’s dehumidifier. Needless to say, I used the table for work.

That left nothing little surface area for the kitchen. Heck, rice and beans don’t require too much prep, right? Okay, so I don’t really eat rice and beans unless I’m out of money for the week and can’t get onions or meat or… oh wait, sometimes the store doesn’t even have those. (I load up on veggies in Penonomé.) I used a shoe-rack, turned food shelf, for my stove and toaster oven and kept my blender on the floor. For a cutting surface, I’d either balance it on the top of the oven or a five gallon bucket. (I’ve got lots of buckets for when the aqueduct runs dry, like today.)

Evidently, my RL didn’t think I could or should live like that. She was doing half the cooking so probably got frustrated herself. I have a couple kids who aren’t (very) afraid of my guard dogs and come to my house often. While I was out, she told them that they needed to tell their parents that I needed tables, one to put my stove on and another for food prep and to eat at.

The very next day, I got a handmade table delivered to my door and moved into my kitchen! It’s super pretty. Okay, so it’s campo style, but you wouldn’t believe the work that went into it. Have you ever sawed boards of tropical hardwood by hand? Oye, I did once in my old site, and luckily, I haven’t had to again. So the boards were cut, and hewn? I don’t know the word, but you know when they shave them down so they look all pretty? (Boards are made by chainsaw, the only machine used in this process.) And the legs of the table are all decorated with an in and out kind of design, cut by machete. I had to go to the city the very next day, but I sure appreciated his rush order.

Upon my return, I was greeted by a second, larger table. This one is made out of even heavier wood, as I have difficulty lifting it and moving it by myself. (My homeboy moved it into my kitchen for me, but I did some remodeling after he left.) I think I’m going to use the little table to eat and work outside on. It’s light enough that I can carry it back and forth. And the new table is lower than the last one, so I can type on it easier, and stand up while cooking on the old one. It all worked out perfectly!

In other homemaking news, I bought some bright fabric to make curtains for my house. I had some already, but they were all random: Winnie the Pooh on one window, Mickey Mouse on another, flowers on some, and green lace on others. Unfortunately, I didn’t measure my windows first. Some were 50” wide like I thought, though others are larger. I didn’t buy enough material, so I decided a two-tone design with a large stripe of color in the middle on the larger ones would look pretty neat. After hand stitching three curtains this way, I hung them… only to realize that my room now looks like the circus came to town. Oh well! It’s better than kids peeking in. (I still need to teach them that they can’t just come barging through my door, though my office/living room, and into my kitchen when they think I might be sleeping… Ah privacy, I can’t wait for that again!)

Once I finish all my curtains and clean up a bit, I’ll show you a tour of my house. Until then, I’ll be thinking about all of you!

Camino Real Gira

Since I haven´t been so great about updating my blog, I figured I better share some of my friends´ blogs with you to give you a better idea of what I´ve been up to. We did a gira or hike through Colon, the province north of Panama City through indigenous villages, crossing rivers, hiking over the Continental Divide, and finally reaching the Carribean Sea in one of the hardest backpacking trips I have every completed. Though we only covered thirty miles, much of the hike was in rivers and then in streams... which still spanned over ten meters wide and over three feet deep. Fighting the current and bracing against the pain caused by sand rubbing off layer after layer of skin around our ankles made for a challenge. Once we finally made it to our final site, an Afro-Antillian community on the beach, we couldn´t wait to take showers and clean up. Though we were to find that the town had been out of water for the past ten weeks. Hmmm, back to the river it was to soap up and rinse off! It was a great experience, packing with history of the Camino Real, teaching and learning about nutrition and alcohol in rural villages, and relying on eachother to make it through.

Here´s Elena´s blog with links to the history and maps of our hike and pictures on Facebook: http://panama.tumblr.com/

Ashely, who lives in Colon where we ended our hike, spoiled us all with her cooking. She's a great cook, and they have more food in their house than a tienda (town store) due to a Costco run while her parents were visiting. Her pantry is probably on par with a typical pantry in the states. Our eyes were wide and our mouths were drooling over it all. She also had a bunch of recipe books, including one called Four Ingredient Cookbook. It is a really pretty book with lots of great recipes that don't call for a ton of different ingredients. Wihle some of them are a little impractical here due to some random ingredients, there are plenty of good ones I want to try. By the tiem Courty visits or whoever comes next, I'll have Hollandale sauce for eggs benedict, soup stocks, and breads and veggie dishes all from scratch. That's the hope at least. But at least I won't be at a loss of what to do when I don't have any eggs to cook or have too much cilantro than I know what to do with.

I just got back from some early morning birding at Gamboa, near the Pipeline Road. They have a huge observatory tower, rising over 100ft from the forest floor and popping out through the canopy. It offered a great vantage point for lots of birds, including a couple species of toucans, bright blue cotingas and danaskis, spotted doves, sloths, and more. And instead of a $60 cab ride, we only paid $18 each for cab ($25), binocular rentals ($5), and entrance fee ($10 for Panamanians). I just love being a Panamanian with all the deals I get with entrance fees. hehe It was a beautiful place though, and I want to coordinate with them for my Flying WILD stuff. And I don't remember if I told you, but they (the marketing and publicity director of Flying WILD in the States) emailed me since he heard from others in the office what I was doing down here and wants to include it in their newsletter that goes out to all the educators using the program across the states. Pretty good networking for when I get back, huh? :) I wrote my boss to cover my tail and make sure Peace Corps is okay with me saying whatever. I can't imagine they'd have a problem with it though, as that's good publicity for them too. Now all I've gotta do is hold the festival in my site! hehe

Settling in again

¡Hola Hola y Buenos Días!

I’ve been much busier in my new site than I feel I ever was in Chiriquí. Well, I’ve been pasearing less and spending that time on my little laptop typing away. On a typical day, I wake up at 5am to the chickens (hens are noisy too, it’s not just the roosters!). I try to go back to sleep or at least stay hidden in my room until 6am. Then I get up, take over the bathroom for a good half hour with a shower, brushing teeth, doing my hair, and using the john depending on what delicacies have been sitting in my stomach all night long. I then emerge and eat whatever has been sitting on the kitchen table since I entered the bathroom. It’s typically a cup of coffee (now warm or cool) and a piece of bread spread with butter and usually a Kraft single or the Panamanian equivalent. I gobble it all down as graciously as I can and then return to my room to pack up what I need.

With my computer tucked away in a drybag and my cell phone charged, I head off to the school. I gingerly step down the leafy stairway and try to hop across all the rocks to the other side of Quebrada Puerto Frio. I’m usually not that successful, so I luckily have gotten in the habit of rolling up my pant legs before attempting it. The problem is that only this family uses this creek crossing due to the location of their house. None of the rocks are stable. In fact, after the last heavy rain, a couple of them in the middle got carried away. I have better luck crossing Quebrada El Congal as everyone who lives in the 20 houses of this sector has to cross it here. (When there’s been a lot of rain, all bets are off. I waited over an hour once for the water to drop about two feet. Even then it was up to my mid-thigh, so you can imagine I got wet.)

I then walk down the trail alongside the baseball field bordered by a few neighbors and a tienda. I meet the main road with a right turn and pass by the Catholic Church and another store before reaching the school. All in all, it’s only about a five minute walk. Pretty nice commute, huh? At school, I change my shoes or all my clothes depending on how high the creeks were and how wet I am.

I head into the computer lab where I’ve been spending most of my time. It’s the only air conditioned room in… well, the whole town. So in an equatorial country at 300m above sea level, AC is welcome. Plus, there’s a dehumidifier, so I feel assured that any humidity my computer or other electronics have gathered over the night will be dried out a bit. Other teachers come in throughout the day to take a break from the heat, so I’m hardly ever alone in there.

I have two classes a day of Informática, aka Computers. I make it up as I go along. What doesn’t work with one class, I try to adjust my explanation and try again with the next one. I started out with Preschool through sixth grade, but that wasn’t working. I dropped the little monsters that couldn’t keep their fingers off the power buttons and now have first through sixth grade. I think telling one of the four main parts of the computer was called a “mouse” scared some of them away, as they will barely touch it and just tap the sides with their finger to get it to move. I tell them it doesn’t bite, but I’m not sure they believe me. (Laura and any other lefties, you still use your right hand for the mouse, don’t you?)

So we’ve been working using the mouse with a couple programs I bought here in Panamá. One program calls out directions like “Put the red square to the right of the yellow circle.” It sounds easy, but when third graders have trouble with their rights and lefts, and some are still working out the differences between a square and a triangle, it gets pretty tricky. Other programs from that same company focus on science, math, and reading. I haven’t used the reading one much as fourteen computers talking at the same time with no headphones for any of the students would drive me crazy during the 40 minute period.

I’ve now started them on a typing program from Typing Tux. It’s a free program from the internet and still has some bugs. Just getting the kids to use two hands is my goal. Like the mouse, they hit what they need to and then put their hands back under the table. I feel like bringing in a roll of duct tape to ensure they keep their hands in position. Muhuhaha.

In my off time before and between classes, the principal has been keeping me busy with digitizing forms. I don’t mind recreating the tables in Excel that much. There is a lot of information that I’ve wanted to find out, like the correct spelling of teachers’ names, the number of boys and girls in each class, etc. However, when he asked me today to type the names, birthdays, parents’ names, and social security numbers of all 244 students, I told him he could use the same form I made for the preschool student census. He wasn’t too happy with my response and after half an hour had two names inputted. We’ll see if I cave in. I don’t know the kids’ names and want that info eventually. I’m just busy with some other stuff right now.

I’m typing up a lot on environmental education, especially from Project WILD and friends. Since my four main guides are in English, I’ve been translating to Spanish which takes longer than just typing word for word. My goal is to have a guide on how to complete our Peace Corps goals, from teaching lessons in the schools to implementing environmental action plans. All the info is already there in my guides, I’ve just got to compile it all, adapt it to Panamá, and of course get it into Spanish so community members can use it after I’m gone. That’s the plan at least!

I spend my Tuesday and Friday afternoons with the tourism group. I’ll usually catch the tourist on their way out of the school and then pasear with the group at their marcadito (little market of handicrafts) while the American AARP members waddle through town with their walkers to eat lunch with families. They come back to peruse the local wares, and then we have a meeting. I’ve got a friend down at the granja (organic farm) where I go about once a week. Depending on the week, I might have a meeting with the leadership of the town, the PTA of the elementary school or middle school, the woman’s baking group, or the aqueduct committee. As you can imagine, the woman’s group is one of my favorites. This weekend I hiked to the toma de agua which is gorgeous despite our intermittent water supply. So that’s what I’m up to!

I’ll be home over the Forth of July whether my bosses like it or not: technically I’m not allowed to go, but I already bought my ticket! All my other friends here are getting together the same week for an adventure on Coiba Island and to celebrate our one year anniversary of being sworn in as volunteers. One way or another I’d be out of site. Can’t wait to see ya’ll!

La Vaina

So I'm still in the office waiting for an article to pop into our magazine, La Vaina, and be done with it. :) It's a comfy office though with internet, couches, and everything I could need. I think we have to spend another night in the city since the country director needs to sign off on the final product. I was going to meet with some other volunteers in Penenome about environmental education tonight and was planning on teaching four classes tomorrow in the school tomorrow. So those plans are off. But heck, a free hotel room with cabel tv and a hot shower are hard to pass up! :) Plus, I'm happy with the changes I've been able to impliment thus far. Lee, who was the editor before, has been a little resistant to our ideas. He really is into the status quo, even though there are things he doesn't like about La Vaina. (He hates the pink boxes on the top of the pages which were left over from the previous editors over a year ago. He hadn't taken the time to change them and didn't feel the need to do it this time either.) I really wanted the pictures that are put in each article to make a little more sense and match the content of the article. And I won! But we hardly got any picture submissions, so a lot of the pics are from the three of us which I feel is kinda weird. (Lee picked one of mine for the front cover. Jay picked another for the inside cover. And I put one on the next page. In all I have at least ten photos in there. But, you gotta admit, I am good! jk)

The next round in September, Jay and I are going to be changing EVERYTHING. We'll use Adobe InDesign instead of a ghetto old version of Adobe Pagemaker. That will make the layout a lot faster and much cleaner. (Lee likes eyeballing things.) We'll be picking a theme to carry through the mag to make it more cohesive. And we also want a group of writers and photographers that we can call on for some quality work, like I had on Semester at Sea. Basically we want to shift the whole focus to the volunteers more instead of having the staff scramble to write something at the last minute and fill up half the La Vaina with things they've already emailed us. It's going to be good though!!! And I hope it will be something to be proud of.

If nothing else, it has been and will continue to be a great experience to draw on once I get back to the States and am looking for a job. I'm working closely with the senior staff to get their articles and plan for future editions. I'm doing lots of editing which is good experience for any job. (Plus all the best people to write me letters of recommendation or netword to find me jobs are seeing all my work first hand.) Putting together the newsletter is something I could see myself doing in an environmental education center or national park depending on what I end up doing down the road.

La Vaina

So I'm still in the office waiting for an article to pop into our magazine, La Vaina, and be done with it. :) It's a comfy office though with internet, couches, and everything I could need. I think we have to spend another night in the city since the country director needs to sign off on the final product. I was going to meet with some other volunteers in Penenome about environmental education tonight and was planning on teaching four classes tomorrow in the school tomorrow. So those plans are off. But heck, a free hotel room with cabel tv and a hot shower are hard to pass up! :) Plus, I'm happy with the changes I've been able to impliment thus far. Lee, who was the editor before, has been a little resistant to our ideas. He really is into the status quo, even though there are things he doesn't like about La Vaina. (He hates the pink boxes on the top of the pages which were left over from the previous editors over a year ago. He hadn't taken the time to change them and didn't feel the need to do it this time either.) I really wanted the pictures that are put in each article to make a little more sense and match the content of the article. And I won! But we hardly got any picture submissions, so a lot of the pics are from the three of us which I feel is kinda weird. (Lee picked one of mine for the front cover. Jay picked another for the inside cover. And I put one on the next page. In all I have at least ten photos in there. But, you gotta admit, I am good! jk)

The next round in September, Jay and I are going to be changing EVERYTHING. We'll use Adobe InDesign instead of a ghetto old version of Adobe Pagemaker. That will make the layout a lot faster and much cleaner. (Lee likes eyeballing things.) We'll be picking a theme to carry through the mag to make it more cohesive. And we also want a group of writers and photographers that we can call on for some quality work, like I had on Semester at Sea. Basically we want to shift the whole focus to the volunteers more instead of having the staff scramble to write something at the last minute and fill up half the La Vaina with things they've already emailed us. It's going to be good though!!! And I hope it will be something to be proud of.

If nothing else, it has been and will continue to be a great experience to draw on once I get back to the States and am looking for a job. I'm working closely with the senior staff to get their articles and plan for future editions. I'm doing lots of editing which is good experience for any job. (Plus all the best people to write me letters of recommendation or netword to find me jobs are seeing all my work first hand.) Putting together the newsletter is something I could see myself doing in an environmental education center or national park depending on what I end up doing down the road.

New village, new digs

Boy has it been a crazy month! As much as it was nice to get out and about in Panama, I really did miss having some stability. Heck, one of my reasons for joining Peace Corps was to settle down in a place for two years after all the craziness of seasonal jobs from northern Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina. So much for that!

So much was left up in the air. I didn’t have answers to where, when, or how until it happened. When we first came to Panama, we knew ahead of time when we would be moving from one place to another during training. By the fifth week, we received a packet of information about our new communities. By the ninth week, we were met by a member of our new community at a Community Entry Conference and then preceded to our sites for a week long visit where we figured out where we would be living for the next few months and beyond. Then after the eleventh week and conclusion of training, we moved to our new homes.

I was told the names of three potential sites almost two weeks after I decided to change sites. Then I visited one of them (which had become the only option) two weeks later for about two hours. And two weeks after that I finally moved to my new site in Coclé. However, not until I arrived last night did I know where I would be staying and parking my stuff. I must say I’ve got a really nice place to live. It is the first house I’ve stepped into, much less stayed in that has painted walls, tiled floors, and screened windows. It’s just like home! (Okay, maybe Edenton is a little nicer… hehe But this is as good as it gets here!) I’m staying with an older couple who are related to the one of my community guides. She does a lot of crocheting and he fixes tv’s as a hobby. And they even have a lady come cook and clean for them! I’m livin’ the high life now!

My room is just being finished, as they moved here three years ago and complete the house poco a poco. So I have a curtain for a door and lack a place to hang or stack my clothes. But hey, I sewed my door-curtains in Chiriqui and have got my own room. I’ve certainly had worse! Ohhh, plus I have not one, not two, but three electrical outlets! Oh the luxury!!! I certainly have enough electronics to fill all of them, but I’ll try not to suck all of their electricity.

I visited a potential house to rent. Ummmm, hmmmm. How do I describe it? It is certainly nicer than some of my friend’s mud huts. It has wooden slab walls and a thatched roof. It does have electricity, though just enough to run a light bulb. I doubt my energy-star refrigerator would work on the homemade electrical job. It does have running water, though it’s about twenty feet outside of the house from a spigot. And I’d need to put in a new latrine, not to mention other repairs to the house which has been abandoned for the past three years. There is a rancho with a zinc roof in front of the house, which they want enclose and make into the living quarters and leave the original house as a kitchen. It is has a leak in the roof and dirt floor, so there’s some work to do before it’s livable to Caribean slope raininess. So it’s not exactly at the top of my list, as it needs work and I don’t get the same amount of money to fix it up had I moved here right after training. We’ll see. If it turns out to be the only option (I still haven’t seen inside of it as it was locked), you can bet I’ll trick it out and make it into a home. I might dig into my stateside bank accounts to do it, or perhaps save up by eating just rice and beans for a while. Hehe I’ll sure miss my refrigerator though! Crazy how you get attached to things…

I visited the school again today, and as I expected, the community doesn’t quite get the difference between my sector and that of the previous volunteer. I just don’t know a whole lot about agriculture, as my specialty is conservation and animals, not plants. I corrected the director of the school when he told all the parents at the PTA meeting that I would be doing the same thing as the previous volunteer. We’ll see, it might just turn out that way! I want to teach computers though and environmental ed instead of just working in the garden. And I’ll even teach the colegio kids English as she did, if for no other reason than one of the teachers for those kids is really nice and I wouldn’t mind working with her.

I’ve got a mountain of names to learn and a maze of a community to decipher. With houses tucked into the trees and down footpaths that cross innumerable streams, it is the picturesque tropical community. But it doesn’t help trying to figure out where I am and where others live. The typical response of “over there” is no less helpful here than “up the hill” was in my last town.

Speaking of which, I had a marathon of a day yesterday. Heck, it already seems like ages ago! I woke up at 5:30am to pack up the last of my things. Then I waited until Franklin came and tried to back his car up to my front door. Mind you, I live up an embankment. I cringed as I watched him first practically flip the car as only half the wheels made it onto the highroad and then hit into a small tree before he gave up. Thank goodness! We loaded up the car and headed up to catch the ladies at church. We made it there just as the service started. I attended Catholic mass while Franklin took a stick to beat the dent out of the bumper.

We then had a little meeting explaining that I was leaving the community and relocating to Coclé. They didn’t get the full story, but it’s just as well. I started crying before finishing my first sentence, thanking all of the women in the community who stepped in as my mothers. I proceeded to give out all the reports, certificates, and money I was holding for the groups as more people in the church teared up. Then came the hugs which as you can imagine weren’t any easier. My little host sisters and Girl Scouts were there and gave me big hugs as well as all the kindergarteners. (They are awaiting their first and second communions and thus got out of school to attend.) Ladies who I never even worked with thanked me for what I had done in the community, and neighbors who never invited me into their homes cried at my departure. It was a tough departure.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to complete two years in Cabecera, but could I really do it all over again in a new place? I was having major second thoughts on things which were only made worse by my boss calling and telling me that he would keep to the rule that I can’t leave my new community for three months. I had specifically asked him about that on several occasions as things came up and he reassured me that he wanted me to come out to help train the new group and again to work on the Peace Corps newsletter. So much for that! I was thinking about quitting altogether because of it, and I still don’t know if they will be okay with me going home in July. (Don’t worry, I’ll come home one way or another!)

After dropping off my fridge, kitchen stuff, and bedding in Penenome, Brandon, Franklin, and I headed on up to Vaquilla. Brandon asked me a couple of times how I was doing, and I think I didn’t respond on at least one occasion because I didn’t want to burst into tears again. The lack of sleep was definitely catching up with me. And that’s about when I settled into my lovely abode here. J

Here’s a description of the next town over called Chiguirí Arriba, about a 4 mile walk away…

“Directly to the north of El Valle is Chiguiri Arriba, a five hour hike away. It is an area rich in history because the nearby Cerro La Vieja was the hiding place of the romantic guerrilla-hero of the campesinos, Victoriano Lorenzo. He fought for the poor at the turn of the century, long before it became fashionable, in the tumultuous days of pre-independent Panama. It is a lush, tranquil area where frogs sing you to sleep and songbirds awaken you. Every hill has its own stream with cool, refreshing pools and idyllic waterfalls. This is truly an area to commune with nature in a tropical rainforest wonderland.”

I think I can get used to it!