Receiving light

And then there was light!
Although you can't see it well, there is a little solar panel in this thatch roof.
My wonderful little helper Rigoberto, hauling solar lights up the hill.
Today, the shipment arrived. I walked down to the main road with a possee of 3 teenage boys to help me carry up 5 boxes of 48 solar lights. The delivery truck arrived an offered to drive us up the road to the school. From there, all the little kids put the boxes into giant chakras, strapped them to their heads and we headed up the very slippery mud hill. My favorite little helper Rigoberto insisted on taking a box up the hill.

Later in the day, after the community finished their cleaning of the cemetery which happens every Day of the Dead on November 2nd, I gave a brief introduction of how solar lights work. Everyone got so excited. I had many women say they were so excited to get light to cook with in the night. They were talking amongst themselves that if their husbands didn’t want the lights, that they themselves would have to find a way to save up their money.
So we are selling them at $11 a piece, $10 for the base cost and $1 to benefit the women's chocolate group helping me sell them.
I have begun helping to install the little solar panels on the thatch roofs. And the first night after the lights charged in the blazing sun, the look of their faces beneath the light was so precious. It was amazing. Although it is not like having full on electricity, it is something, and something sustainable. Through this, the people will not have to buy kerosene which is bad for lungs and the environment or candles which are just expensive, or as many batteries for their flashlights which then get thrown into the streams and the water sources. It is a way of getting the clean development technologies into the hands of the people that need them most.
So thanks to my grandfather and my father who helped in the research and paid for the packaging the families in my community have a little bit more light in their lives.

A very Happy 25th birthday to me!

I had a fabulous birthday party in my community, complete with popcorn, cake, lemonade, a soup with squash from my garden and my duck that we killed off my deck, pin the tail on the pig and a piñata. About 60 guests arrived, counting all the children. Thanks to my dear friends Andi, Janell, Jake, Rebecca and my brother Ben for joining me and helping so much in this extravaganza. It was quite outrageous, but a good time. It was wonderful because almost all the people who are most important to me in my community arrived to help me celebrate. So thank you to all my family and friends and my community. I love you all. I couldn’t ask for a better birthday celebration at half a century old.

Teaching english beside the coffin

There are many birth and death rites in ngobe culture. The Mago bird caws all night long from the cemetery the night before a death. After a death, no one can eat salt, unless the curendero blows on the salt.Saturday evening I attended a funeral for an elderly man in my community. The family stays up all night long every night from the night of the death until the night of the burial, somewhere in between 1 and 2 weeks. It is told that after a death, the spirit wanders the areas that he always passed in life and washes his hands in any buckets of water left out. So each house hold empties all buckets of water for 5 days after the death. You can imagine the fear I had when my neighbor told me I had to empty out all my water ( I have no running water in my house, only a 55 gallon tank of collected rainwater that I use for showering, drinking and cooking). To my relief since that is a covered tank, it is an exception.
After many nights of wake, the celebration was filled with over 200 people, staying up all night long, staving off tiredness, drinking coffee and eating bread every few hours, holding out for the rice and chicken to be served at 5:00am. There was a domino tournament held between 7 different communities attending the funeral. People came from all over to see this man off. He worked for the banana company in his younger days and many of his fellow workers attended. I spent the evening chit chatting in Spanish and ngobere with many friends from the community as well with many that I was meeting for the first time. Many older folks were so curious about the white girl speaking ngobe at the funeral, that they came to talk to me. And I suddenly found myself teaching an intro English class to an elderly ngobe crowd, at 11:30pm, on the back of an empty candle box, five feet away from the coffin. The lesson started with just one old man and within five minutes grew to ten students. And although it only lasted a short while, it was by far the most strange class I will ever teach in my life.
At 1:30am, I participated in a checkers match, with new rules, better than those we play in the US. My favorite little old man brought his own hammock and hung it under the house and fell asleep at 9:30 in the middle of the celebration. I went home to sleep for a while and came back in the morning. The funeral continued. I was the chosen photographer for the event and the telling moment came when I was told that they were going to open the coffin and that I would take a photo. At that point I realized that I would have to see the face of this dead man. I took the photo and they closed up the box and tied it to two branches to haul it to the cemetery, shooing away the chickens. The entire funeral party then walked in a line to the cemetery where all the older men in the community took turns shoveling dirt over the coffin of their dear friend. May he rest in peace.

Ngobeland

Yes, I let my neighbors comb my hair

A peaceful scene from the community of Laguna, where I recently visited to help teach how to build a mud oven.

Naguas, the traditional dress of the Ngobe women. Every woman wears her colors brightly and proudly in the Ngobe reservation. On my side of the country, the tradition has not held as strong, but here, all you see is beautiful colors and designs.

Here we are, in Laguna after constructing a fabulous mud oven. The whole family is looking forward to baking bread for the first time ever in their new creation!

The ferocious tale of Chino Rojos

So we are all familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel and the witch who eats children in her oven as she attracts them with her candy house. Well, not all of us. Here, no one is familiar with this person-eating witch. Instead of a haunted witch who lives deep in the woods, here there are Chino Rojos, translated to Red Chinese (Communist or Sunburned?). The Chino Rojos live under the sea and eat Ngobe people, of all ages, no one is safe from the danger (can you imagine them under this caribbean ocean?). They like the flavor of Ngobes because they have strong blood since they eat mostly organic food from their farms and rarely eat greasy fried things. I have been told various stories, many told with real fear, in which these Chino Rojos live under the ocean in glass houses or wooden houses on stilts, or some in submarines. In one very detailed story I was recently told, there is a city the size of the regional capital Changuinola of Chino Rojos that live in the Chiriqui Grande Bay. They have figured out everything, from hooking up electricity to growing bananas under the water. The story goes that there was a Latino man who contracted Ngobes to cut and carry wood for him from their farms. The Latino had all the wood taken down to the water and loaded into a boat, but no one ever knew where the wood disappeared to. They would watch it go out into the bay and in a blink of an eye it would be gone. A few ngobes went missing, those who had been carrying wood for the Latino man. One very curious wood carrier cornered the Latino and asked him where he took all the wood. The man told him that if he could keep a secret, he could see.
Later that evening, the Ngobe hid himself in the boat and they left the dock. They went out into the bay and suddenly submerged under, and there before him lay a city full of lights. The Latino took the boatful of wood to the Chino Rojo who was the main house constructor of the city. As they were taking the wood out of the boat, the chino rojo caught site of the Ngobe hidden there and immediately demanded how much the Latino was charging because he was very hungry. Oh, I forgot to mention that the Chino Rojos are millionaires and buy ngobes to eat. The Latino told him that this ngobe was not for sale, but the Chino Rojo lunged with hunger to grab the ngobe. The ngobe took one of the boards and swung, wiping out the Chino Rojo and the Latino in one fell swoop. In that moment of distraction he escaped, swimming frantically home. The latino escaped too, and picked the ngobe up and took him back to shore on the boat, pleading with him never to say a word about what he saw. But when the Ngobe returned home, he reported the latino to the local authorities and the man was condemded to life in Prison on Coiba, an island off the Pacific shore that was used as a prison until a few years back.

It turns out that this story may have originated from a submarine spotting in the mouth of the Krikamola river in the 1940s. All cultures have stories, and all stories have origins.

So I asked if I eat the same things that the Ngobes eat, will the Chino Rojos eat me too? The answer is yes.

Celebration of papas

Fathers’ day 2009 was a rockin party. About 70 people attended my neighbor’s gathering, from little babies to old grandmothers and grandfathers. They cooked up a storm on the open fires and gave the fathers a huge meal of thanks. The celebration started at 5:30, the women cooking breakfast of bread and fish for all the fathers and continuing on to lunch. The biggest bowls they could find (anything from large tupperwares to small buckets) were overflowing with boiled green bananas, chicken, rice, spagetti, and even a little bit of cabbage and carrot salad, and the biggest cups they could find (mostly pitchers) filled to the brim with juice made from cornflakes and powdered milk ( the father’s day specialty). I held down the kids station with cards and books to read. Everyone was there to enjoy themselves. It was a fabulous day to spend together as family with the dads in the spotlight. So Happy fathers day to all the dads in my community and to my dad!

half way and thinking

I have now been in my community for one year. It is quite a feeling. Of accomplishment, of disbelief of how the time moved so fast, of fear of how fast the time will move, of appreciation, of thought on how effective and sustainable my work here is and so on.
This experience is incredible, and although challenging every day, it is amazing and I am very happy and would never change my decision to come here for anything in the world.

There are many ways of measuring success. After a year here, I pause and think whether me being here is successful, otherwise, is there good coming of my time here? For my community and for me? And my answer is yes, although there is still much room for more good to come of my time here. I see success in so many different ways. After one year, I can carry a decent conversation in the local language of ngabere, I can make the string from the pita plant to make the traditional artisan bag Kra, or sew the traditional nagua dress. I can carry a Kra on my head full of anything from cacao pods, to rocks to a propane tank, up incredibly steep hills. The men and women I work with now feel comfortable enough to have meaningful conversations with me about anything from love and relationships, to family planning and so on. We are in the middle of building 22 fish tanks to increase family protein consumption. Families have recently gifted me squash and tomatoes that we have planted telling me that they are thankful that for the first time, their children will learn what these vegetables are.
I enjoy drinking watered down and sugared up coffee, and eating boiled green bananas. I can swiftly kill a scorpian hiding behind a Tupperware and literally said “ hey look there’s a tarantula on my porch” and watched it crawl by. I am trying to work hard, find the innovators that will carry this work forward into the future, make these projects sustainable. In my time here I have experiment in my garden, with my house, with all sorts of things, making rain collection showering systems, making my own bricks from clay (since you can’t buy bricks here). I have been fortunate to travel around the country and see other volunteer’s sites, helping with HIV AIDS education programs, nutrition seminars and cacao improvement training projects. I get to sit on my porch and enjoy the view and more importantly am enjoying myself in this process, through all it’s challenges and rewards.

These are many accomplishments, and through these there have been just as many failures, but little by little, we are making it.