Closing an experience

I finished my Peace Corps service in Panama on June 10th 2010. The last few months of my peace corps service passed at a unimaginably fast rate. They were filled with so many emotions and happenings, that I could hardly take a moment to breath and write them down.

A few last thoughts and happenings.

Packing and the yard sale. I had a great big yard sale on my lawn of all the things in my house. Everything went at 25 cents to 50 cents, a few prized items at higher prices. Everyone came over and bought what they liked, while I served popcorn and juice. Everyone went home feeling proud about the things they worked hard to purchase instead of fighting over the items that I could have given out for free.
For the last few weeks, I had a constant stream of visitors at my house. As soon as one visitor went down the steps, another came up. We talked of how much we would miss each other and how we would all cry on my leaving day. They asked me not to forget them and who I would speak their indigenous language with when I arrive to the states.



The going away parties. I had three days of parties before my departure, filled with delicious traditional foods, long speeches, and beautiful handmade gifts. We had a big party at the school. The community members took their turns saying words of thanks. And then it was my turn and a knot grew in my throat and I started to cry. I mumbled my way through my speech that I had written, unable to calm my sobs. It was an inevitable goodbye, but that doesn´t make it any easier. A handweaved bag with a home grown cucumber was one of my favorite gifts. We had a pinata and we did a rendidtion of the traditional Ngobe dance called the Hegi or gwara.



At the goodbye party with my women´s artisan group, we ate until we couldn´t eat anymore and we watched parts of movies using a small generator. We watched the first twenty minutes of the Michael Jackson film, and the adults giggled at the pelvic thrusts on screen. The group gave me a nagwa, the traditional dress, made with the loving hands of each of the women. Now when I look at the dress, I will think of each of them. It was a motivational party because although it was goodbye, the day also served as a work party for the new artisan house where the women will sell their goods in the future. It brings a tear to my eye that I will not be here to see all of the advancements and the impacts of my time here, but it makes me feel proud to see the community take ownership and continue into the future with motivation and hope. I look forward to returning in the future and seeing all the changes.

One of the hardest goodbyes was with my sidekick Placido, my 16 year old neighbor that I could not imagine my service without. He helped me pack my bags and clean my house. On my last day, he specially cooked me a lunch of boiled green bananas and a piece of beef that was from the cow that died that morning up the hill. And he sat down with me in my house and gave me a 5 minute speech of all the reasons he wanted to say thank you to me. And then I said all my thank yous. And we stayed composed, although there were a lot of internal tears.

Guillermo and Anselma and their family. I love this entire family so dearly and they are my closest friends here. After I left to go to Panama City to finish up officially in the office, I returned to say one last goodbye. And Guillemo called out ¨aye mere tikwe¨ with the most endearing tone, as a family calls out to a family member who has been gone for some time. And it was just like that.

With all my bags packed, my dearest friends Guillermo, Anselma and Placido helped me down to the school to wait for a taxi to come. I waited with them on my either side, hugging my shoulders. Placido suddenly said, is that a grey hair that you have? I said that I had never had a grey hair before, so it couldn´t be. Not 30 seconds later, Anselma pulled two bright white hairs out of my head. I was astounded.
There are a few ways to look at this.
1. The Peace Corps has aged me, which in some ways I believe is true. Physically but also emotionally and mentally, in wisdom and maturity.
2. The way the ngobes see it is that if you are really kind to others in your life, you will live to have many a white hair.


My service was an incredible experience, one that I would not change for anything in the world. I have so many friendships and I have grown in ways that I could never imagine. I can hardly explain the love I feel for these people.

So I will miss here. But it now time for me to transition on. Thanks to all of you who have supported me throughout my time here.
For those who would like to continue to read about my experiences, head to www.cyclesofchange.wordpress.com
where you can trace my journey back to the US by bike, supporting sustainable agriculture projects along the way.
Muchas Gracias

medicinal treatments

There was a little lady,
who got bit by a sand fly,
that bit a sloth,
who had the leishmeniasis protozoa parasite,
and I don't know why she got bit by that fly,
perhaps she'll die.


Well, not really die, just get her flesh eaten away slowly by those little protozoas. I recently found out that I was hit by the "bite of the vine", otherwise known as leishmaniasis in scientific terms. It comes from a little bite from a sand fly who has bit a sloth infected with leishmeniasis. It starts as just a little bug bite and begins slowing opening wider and deeper. This part is not the troubling part. Those wounds can be healed. This is a common ailment in my community, many adults have scars on their faces and children have little marks on their faces. It advances slowly and when I first began to suspect something, many community members began commenting on my little wounds. They were sure that it was leishmaniasis, but not to worry, because there are many natural cures. In my time visiting around I was offered various medicines, truly out of the hearts of my friends. Here are a few of the examples (some do not qualify as natural)

boa oil
manta ray cartilage
cacao
leaves
vines
raw cashew juice
tree sap
battery acid
Kerosine
Nail polish

I tried a few and do not doubt the healing abilities of these treatments ( maybe the battery acid) but through Peace Corps I am required to receive the western medicine treatment. At first I was opposed to the idea, wishing to cure it in my community, but as I began to read more about it, I became more convinced of the seriousness of the issue. As I said, the sores are not the worrisome part. Truly what is worrisome is that the leishmaniasis may come back in another form in the future and begin to eat the cartilage of your nose, ear or roof of your mouth. And after seeing a few people with flat noses that looked as if they had been eaten off, I was convinced.
So now I am receiving 20 days of IV treatment for 2 hours a day. It was difficult to explain my necessity to leave for three weeks to my community member and this came at a poor time, with only 2 months left in my service. But now that I am here, I am enjoying the luxuries of the world including internet, electricity, hot showers, and flushing toilets. And for the moment, it is pretty nice.
Before I left my community, my close friend and "little brother" Placido told me that they figured out why I got so many bites of the vine. It must be because I walked over a tree that had got hit by lightning without tying two banana leaves together after crossing. And then he handed me a little film canister of a botanical medicine made out of leaves and cacao to take with me for my treatment. It just goes to show, that no matter what people or place, as human beings, we will always search for a reason and a cause. Another one of those things that crosses all boundaries.

A hike across the divide

About a month ago, I went on incredible three day hike from the top of the panamanian mountains down the famous cricamola river and to the caribbean. The cricamola is the river where the majority of the ngabe people living in the province of bocas del toro retreated to when the spaniards came. Later, many ngabes migrated from the river to the rest of the Bocas del Toro province in the 1950s and 60s when the banana company sent boats up the river to look for workers.

So three girlfriends and I and a wonderful ngabe woman from Kat's community set out on this adventurous hike. We started up in the cold windy rainy mountains, hiking downward, following the river and watching it grow from little creeks to a rushing river with rapids and later to a wide meandering river. We had to cross the river walking over and over, and then later when it got to big, by pieced together bridges and by ziplines.

(daily commute to work anyone?)


We saw the culture changing from the ngabe style of living in the reservation on the pacific side (with nagwa dresses and round houses on the ground) to the ngabe bocas style (with bocas house dresses and raised square wood houses).



We stayed in schools and houses along the way. Many were curious about why we were there, some openly welcoming and others retreatingly scared. We met kind old men who yelled out to us in ngabere, pleased that we could speak their language a little. We met inventive young farmers, excited little children, and a wonderful old women who invited us to be her children for life. We even met a young ngobe boy in charge of a zipline crossing who was more like a troll in his demeanor. A few asked whether our backpacks were full of money. Unfortunately we only had dirty clothes and cans of tuna fish to show for. But it makes you think of the image of tourism and what are effective ways of supporting communities along the way. These communities are incredibly isolated. In order to get out to go to larger towns to get merchandise for their stores, some would have to walk for a day and a half and then take a long boat or truck ride. We saw families on their way out to visit other family or to buy more merchandise.

(Kat and Kate in their Ngobe hiking clothes)


(Yes that is a pig crossing the river)

I think my two favorite memories were at our first zipline crossing, watching parents send their children across in a chakra hung from the zipline and later seeing a young women in a traditional pink nagwa flying across the the beautiful turquoise river on the zipline. It was an amazing hike, challenging, a few sicknesses along the way in our group, both overall, incredible. When we arrived in Kankintu, the ngabe city in the jungle, we were amazed by the sidewalks that seemed to appear out of the no where. It is a small city 5 hours up river by boat or three days walking but has a small university, restaurants and lots of people. The night we got there, it was the day that women were in Kankintu to collect their welfare checks. At 8:30pm there were still women in line. Those that had already received their checks were with their husbands, browsing the different street vendors that set up on the side of the sidewalk with flashing lights selling everything from radios to undies and shoes. It was quite a sight. The next morning at 5:00am, we left in a big dug out canoe headed to the ocean, we even got a coffee break halfway down river. Incredible.

The best use of the chiquita banana logo

We all know the logo. We are all very familiar with the stickers on the bananas. The region I live in is home to Panama's major Chiquita banana plantations. From my house I can see the flat lands filled with bananas and the big Chiquita banana boat come in every friday to pick up a shipment of bananas. When I ride the bus to the regional capital I see fields and fields of bananas covered with blue bags. When I stay in Changuinola, I can hear the crop duster planes flying over. Occasionally a bus is stopped by the cables of bananas crossing the road.
The majority of these bananas are exported. People here eat bananas too, but mostly just the ones they grow in their farms. They say their own bananas taste better than the company bananas because they are organic. Here families survive eating bananas as the main carbohydrate source. The Ngobe word for banana, Mrö, also means food. But not ripe bananas. Boiled green bananas. Mmmmmm. Some times they even make banana balls, which are made by boiling green bananas, mashing them together into a meatloaf shape and wrapping them in banana leaves to take as a snack. Later you can slice the loaf like bread. Being here, I have grown to appreciate and love all the different types of boiled bananas. Often time in the states, we only know one type of banana. But there are so many different flavors and textures of banana.
Recently, Chiquita has had extra bananas, so they drive them around in a truck to the rural communities, trying to sell them at a low price. The truck arrives and the driver yells "banano, Banano, Banano".
When families have no bananas to harvest from their farm, they scrounge up whatever money they can find and buy a sack of bananas. Can you imagine buying a sack full of bananas? So lately we have had a plethora of chiquita banana stickers.
A few days ago, I saw a homemade kite, out of sticks and a plastic bag, held together with about 20 chiquita stickers.
The next day, my neighbor came over to tell me that his little brother had a bott fly in his head (this is a nasty little grub that grows in your skin after a fly lays its egg in your skin). I asked how they were going to get it out. He told me they were going to use a chiquita. I said "chiquita what" (chiquita also meaning something little in spanish). He said, no silly chiquita, you don't know what chiquita is? You know, the thing stuck to the banana? OOOOOOh. Then I understood, since often what is recommended is to put duck tape over the bite so the grub cant breath and dies and comes out of the skin. But I still was in amazement of the creative use of a chiquita banana.

Tomatoes and notebooks for all!

Isn't that what we want for everyone in the world? In my two years here, never have I been able to say that our school garden is successful. But right now, we have tomatoes for everyone! A success! From January to March is summer break here in Panama and all the kids are out causing mischeif with their slingshots (at least they ate the poor parrot), or sitting around lazily in the house. So I looked at the kids and I looked at the school garden, both in disaray ( i no longer know how to spell well in any language, english, spanish, or ngobere). And so I said to myself, now is the time.
So I bought a fence for the garden, because without it there is no hope as long as the pigs, chickens and cows are still around. And I bought some school supplies. And I rounded up those hardworking kids early on a saturday morning and told them that they could work to earn their school supplies. So we weeded and planted and cleared the grass and trellised the tomatoes. And now every saturday I have 15 to 20 students ages 6 to 17 working in the garden and saving up points to earn notebooks, pencils, erasers, rulers, and toothbrushes. And although the project is currently not sustainable as I am the one buying the school supplies, at least the students are learning that they can make a future possible, that their work is worth something and best of all, that they can grow delicious vegetables. Three have already started their own gardens. So for now I am taking the kids off the trails and putting them in the garden and in school!

Chocolate's path

My community is made up of families who grow and harvest cacao (cocoa), then sell their dried and fermented beans to the local cooperative. The cooperative then sells the beans to many international chocolate companies. One of these companies, Theo Chocolate, happens to be located in Seattle, where I went to university . Theo chocolate buys cacao from the cooperative and makes delicious fair trade and organic bean to bar chocolates. When I visited home over the holidays, I had the opportunity to visit the Theo Chocolate Factory for a tour. I got to take all sorts of photos and brought chocolate back to Panama. Since I returned, I have able to share the photos and chocolate with producers, letting them see a little more of what happens to their product after it leaves the farm.
Also during my visit to the states, I brought chocolate and photos of cacao production here in Panama, explaining and sharing the background of cacao with many friends and family, to show where chocolate comes from. Connecting all the dots, we can raise consumer awareness, increasing support for organic and fair-trade chocolate and helping to improve the lives of small producers in developing countries.
We are currently working on sending photos and stories from the Ngobe culture and cacao to Theo Chocolate to share with their consumers. In addition, I am working on creating a lesson plan on chocolate to share with schools in the states so that kids can understand part of the path those little snickers bars took to make it into their lunch boxes!
Little by little, I am sharing with all parts of the chain, from producers to consumers to make us all a little more aware!

Back in the swing

After a fabulous trip home to the states, I made it back to my community and am here in full swing again. And there were lots of smiles from the candy canes that I brought back for all the little children.
Since being back, I have been having dreams of delicious food. I awoke this morning after having dreams about apples and about cheese. I went straight to the grocery store when I got to town today.
My trip home gave me a chance to think and reflect. And one of the things it made me think on is to renew my sense of wonder and ask more questions. To pretend like I am new again and ask all the questions that I don't know the answers to.
This week I learned new medicinal uses of cacao. That when a person has bad dreams the first born of the family crushes up a dried cacao bean in water, and after straining the water, applies it to the one cursed with bad dreams. The same medicinal treatment is given to women who get sick during their pregnancy. This was used in the past and is still practiced today.
It makes me so happy to learn more and more about the cultural importance of cacao. That it is not just a cash crop exported for the developed world, but that it is used here and has been traditionally used in the culture. More to come on chocolate soon. So eat up and get your good antioxidants in and now you know what to do when you have bad dreams!

!!!Feliz Navidad!!

Merry Christmas to all! After a lovely time preparing for christmas in Panama, with paper snowflakes, solar powered christmas lights and stockings, we were ready to celebrate. I taught the ladies to make stockings with traditional ngobe designs and we sold them to other volunteers. They loved the tale of the stocking, especially the part about the children who don't behave themselves and only receive lumps of coal for christmas. The day before I was headed out on a plane to celebrate Christmas at home, we had 17 stockings to finish sewing. So we had our own little Santa's workshop. They asked me to sing Christmas songs to lift their spirits up. So I sang every song that I could remember ( lots of forgotten lyrics, but it doesn't really matter, you just get to make them up). They loved hearing about the man made of snow who melted away one day in the hot sun.
Now I am home, visiting the my family in the US, for my first trip home in a year and nine months. And it feels great to be with family and friends and see the beauty of the northwest again.
Merry Christmas to all my friends and family, wherever you may be in the world!

If you want to help support in the festive spirit!

Happy Holidays. Here we are, entering into the season of giving. And we all want to give what we can and help in every way we can. Many people at home ask me how they could help the people that I work with. And now there are a few opportunities to support the people here, giving them opportunities to improve their lives.


In February of 2010, various volunteers and I in the province of Bocas del Toro will be gathering together to put on an Agro-Business Seminar to give small farmers in our region the knowledge and skills to improve their farming and marketing opportunities, in turn helping their families climb out of poverty. In order to fund resources, food and travel to bring farmers from their communities to this seminar, we will need help from friends and family members back home. If you would like to donate, click on
https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=525-130

Another opportunity is to donate to a youth development conference we will be facilitating in february, focusing on self-image, sex ed, and the prevention of STIs and HIV/AIDS. Last year, I participated as a facilitator and brought two teenagers from my community, Placido and Angelica. The kids still talk about their experiences, remembering all the fun games, their friends and the amazing experiences they had. Donations will help pay for the travel, accomodations and food and resources for this amazing conference this year.

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail& projdesc=525-132 (If unable to view hyperlink, visit www.peacecorps.gov click on Donate Now and search by project number 525-132)

Also, if you are feeling excited about giving in a different way and sending a package to my community, we can always use kids books in spanish, or old yarn for my women's knitting group!

Another idea is to purchase a 2010 Panama Calendar

Each year, the Volunteer Action Council (VAC) in Panama creates a Panama Calendar using photos submitted by volunteers. Photos here are from the new 2010 calendar. The proceeds go to small grants awarded to volunteers and their communities for small projects.

Last year, PCPF sold 250 calendars and sent $3,000 to VAC. We want to sell 300 calendars this year.

Price is $17 per calendar, with free shipping to U.S. addresses. (Shipping to overseas addresses

is at cost.)

Please help us meet our goal of selling 300 calendars this year. Order calendars for yourself and for gifts:

1. Order On-line:

Click to Order On-line.

Use "Buy Now" button to pay by credit card

or PayPal. It's fast, free and safe!

2. Order by Mail:

Click for Calendar Order Form.

Mail completed form and check to address

on form.

Questions? Email panamacalendars@panamapcv.net or call Steve Spangler, 703-536-5457, or Jerry Lutes, 301-881-3407.

Hope you are all having festive holidays. I had a fabulous thanksgiving full of turkey, stuffing, pie and good cheer, with all the other volunteers of the country. Here we are in Cerro Punta, a community up in the mountains where we actually felt cold! It was a lovely weekend, staying in cabins, drinking coffee in the place where it was grown, wearing our jackets and pants and using my long underware for the 2nd time ever (1st time when I climbed the volcano). So refreshing. Happy thanksgiving and enjoy the holiday season.

little faces

My friend Elena, hauling bananas back to her house for supper in her chakra on her head. Even the children have strong necks.

Bijen, who always has a smile on her face when I see her
A glamour shots photo, posing with the dog. ( she has a little knit hat on her head that her mother made in my knitting class)
And now the dog is wearing the knitted hat.

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.

A little rest at the beach