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.