Cacao and coffee harvesting season has begun!

The cacao and coffee has started ripening and the season of harvest has begun. It has been a while since I have wrote, since I have been busy with little access to internet. Lots has happened in the last month and a half, too much to describe, but here is a little taste. I have been working hard carrying bag full after bag full of cacao pods up steep muddy hills, in traditional weaved bags, slung on my back with the strap across my forhead. Coffee harvest has also begun. I have been picking coffee with families and with great little kids in the farms. I have been sewing diligently with the womens group, teaching them to make earrings from beautiful seeds we have been collecting. I recently went with my women´s group to a national celebration for the day of the rural woman. We brought all of the artisan work and it was fabulous. We all dressed up in traditional naguas, brightly colored dresses with intricate hand stitched designs. I found myself in a very amusing situation, sitting in the front seat of a panamanian bus, in a nagua, holding a tree cookie covered in moss decorated with leaves covered with glitter and plastic farm animals (a fabulously creative idea that my women´s group had to make and sell) listening to acordian music ( a favorite in panama) and I had to think to myself "how did I get here?" Quite amusing.
I also just returned from a cacao seminar which we put on in another community in another province. We brought three producers from my area to this other indigenous area to teach about mantaining a cacao farm. It went incredibly well and it was really neat to see farmers sharing information with other farmers and learning so much. Also would like to give a shout out to my dear friend Alix for coming to visit me and my community earlier this month. It was wonderful to share a part of my life with such a great friend from home. And with that, want to open it up for any friends and family interested, you are always welcome to visit. Well there is much more going on here, but until next time, I hope you are all well and thanks for reading. I have some more great photos to share for next time!
Happy Halloween everyone!

A very happy birthday!

Thank you to all of you for your birthday wishes and for all your support! It is wonderful to hear from all of you special people in my life on such a special day. Thanks for all your friendship and support in all of my 24 yearsof life! I had quite a fabulous day yesterday. I baked myself a delicious cake the night before and woke up yesterday morning to eat a piece first thing. Then I did some yoga and had a nice little breakfast. When I walked through the community, all the school kids wished me a happy birthday. I then cooked a giant pot of popcorn to share with all the kids. They got a kick out of watching the popcorn jump and fly. I spent my day talking with all the people in the community, and with my favorite little old man, the founder of the community. And then I helped the school kids transpant the tomatoes we planted into the school garden. And I concluded my day with a delicious dinner that my host family cooked me, some delicious fish and yucca! Had another piece of cake and called it a day! And now I am celebrating with some friends at a seafood fair out on the island. Thank you all again for your birthday wishes. Take care, much love,

Yes, the wild things grow here.

Only here, would a business call be interupted by a group of cows attempting to lick my shirt or by a six foot long, four inch wide, black with yellow head snake slithering 10 feet away from me while I chat about important projects with my boss. And only here would I have the experiece of waking up a six oclock in the morning, climbing out of my mosquito net and in the middle of putting on a pair of pants, see that there is a mother scorpion and 25 babies that she has just layed less than a foot away from my thermorest bed. And so only here would I chop a scorpion in half with my machete in the wee hours of the morning while standing in my underwear! And here I, still living and well. Life is good, moving quickly. There is so much work to be done and so many fun things to participate it. I have just finished my first two months in my community and so I continue on! Heres a photo of one of the intense rainstorms rolling through.

Life in General

My days are so full here. Before coming to the peace corps, I expected my first three months, if not six months to move very slowly, without much work, just a lot of time getting to know the people. Instead, time is flying by and I have so much work to do! I am helping train producers in cacao pruning and grafting techniques to increase their produciton. I am teaching in the school, both english and working with their outdoor gardening and agriculture class. I am starting a program with a government agency to help families increase the variety of their diet and improve nutrition as the cost of food keeps rising. I am helping out with HIV and Aids presentations throughout the region and helping plan a girls health camp. And so much more. There is so much work to be done. Also I am looking to help my local school get solar panels and a few computers (maybe the ¨"one labtop every child" computers?), so if any of you have any connections out there and want to help out, let me know!!! So in general life is going well here. Getting started with lots of work and getting to know the community more. Participating in anyway I can. Well, I am headed to another meeting with another agency so I will write more soon!

Man, why didnt I take a wilderness first responder course!!!

These days in the tropics are good. Full of hard work, lots of sweat, lots of boiled green bananas to eat and lots of people to meet and talk to! Lots of sun, lots of rain. Here is a photo of me and two little kids in my community (host siblings of the first family that I stayed with). The cat is my little pet here in panama, who will keep me company and eat any rats that try and enter my house throughout my two years!Yesterday I visited a beautiful farm in my community which had just about every tropical fruit I could ever think of!!! I ate bananas of at least 5 different varieties that I have never tasted before!I have moved in with a new host family who is so incredibly kind. We live up on a beautiful hill overlooking the ocean, about a 40 minute hike out of the center of town. This is the kind of commuting that I like! Instead of sitting in traffic, I hike in my rubber boots each day over 4 streams and up and down hills to get to work! Pretty steller. Havent ran into a snake yet, but that might change my view on the commute! All else is well. I finished sewing my first traditional skirt and am wearing it proudlyg today. I am learning to make the beautiful traditional bags that these people make called chakras and am learning more of the local language every day. Surprisingly I am incredibly busy with work to do every day. I have started teaching english classes in the school and working with the school garden. We are working with cacao and building new stoves and all sorts of things. Even playing in volleyball tournaments. The most exciting thing that happened this past week was when I was working hard with a group of guys, swinging our machetes to cut down the weeds growing around the cacao trees. Suddenly, ran head on to my first real first aid accident in the jungles of panama! A young guy cut into the leg of another, all the way down to the bone! We had to carry him out, the hour long hike to the highway, on a hammock hanging from a stick. And when we arrived, we had to call the ambulence. After that excilerating yet worrisome experience, I have decided that I should purchase a book on wilderness response to read in my spare time. All else is well. Thank you all for all your love and support. I think about you all so often!

The people

So I have been in my community for a month now. Little by little I have been getting to know the community. I visit peoples houses and introduce myself to those that I havnt met yet. I try and remember all of the names. I have been learning so much about the community, so I think that it is time that I share a little bit with all of you back home about these people and the community (and here is a photo of the view!). I work in a community located in the Province of Bocas del Toro. In this community live approximately 500 idigenous peoples from the large indigenous group called Ngabe. This group previously live in an area south of here up a big river. About 30 to 50 years ago (maybe more, quite difficult to get dates from some of the older people in my community who have a very different sense of time and dont subscribe to keeping track of years such as how old you are or when an event happened) people started to migrate out to this region to work in the banana company as well as to work on cacao farms own by the afro antillians. They then began to stake out land, which at that point as long a it was unoccupied, it was free to move onto and plant on. And from there communities began forming. There is one very little old man here who was the founder of this community and then his family came and then friends came and so on and so on. These people traditionally speak their own language, Ngabere, which is an oral language and has only been written down in the past 20 years or so. Now, most people speak both spanish and Ngabere, although there are older community members who only speak ngabere and some children in the community who have not learned to speak their indiginous language and only speak spanish. Every family has land where they commonly have cacao, mango, banana, platano, lime, and root vegetables planted. Most families have chickens and ducks. Today, the majority of the diet here consists of rice and boiled green bananas and chicken, although in the past most of the food was that which was collected from the wild, including some delicious fruits and vegetables. People still make traditional food and it varies from family to family. The men work in the farms maintaining and harvesting fruits, vegetables, cacao and wood to sell, while the women split their time between harvesting and cooking. Both the women and men here are very strong. Women in my community tell me that in the past, the women worked harder in the farms than they do today. Women also traditionally make beautiful bags out of a natural plant while the men weave hammocks. This community is a mix of the old traditional past and the new modern world. You may walk into a house made of wood with a thatched roof, raised on stilts and see the grandmother is weaving a bag and the kids are watching rambo 4 on a small television run on a car battery! It is a mix of everything. No electricity, sometimes the water comes from the aquaduct and when it doesnt you either walk to a little stream nearby or you wait for the rain to fill your buckets!

So there is a little description of what life is like here. And now I am off to practice to play in a volleyball tournament with my community this saturday!

A great little thing that happens in my community, the people love to ask me to sing in english, so I sing my heart out, and it doesnt even matter if I remember the words because no one understands anyways! I just make them up! Quite entertaining! They really like to hear the " Jeremiah was a bullfrog" song!

A taste of what is to come

The first few weeks in my site have been wonderful. Yes there have been ups and downs, some hard times, but luckily many many good times. I have just completed the first three weeks in my community. And through that time, I have started to get to know my community by hiking up vigorous trails to visit their houses, by working side by side with them swinging my machete and pruning their cacao farms, by teaching english classes as well as how to make piñatas (lots of celebrations here), by helping a few kids start their own gardens, by sewing traditional dresses with a women´s group, by starting to learn this new indigenous language and more! I am living with a family that lives in a wooden house raised off the ground on stilts with a part thatched roof and part zinc roof. It reminds me of swiss family robinson. I live in an incredibly beautiful place where there are those times where I look around me at all tropical trees, parrot, hummingbirds, mangos falling from trees like rain, the beautiful view of the caribbean and I think ¨wow, I live here now¨. It is pretty amazing. Ups and downs though. My first real day in my community, I woke up bright and early, eager to head out with my rubber boots and machete for my first day pruning cacao. I tromped tromped down the trail behind eight other old Ngobe men ready to try and keep up with the day and pretend that I too have been weilding a machete all my life. But alas. I haven´t. And not more than one hour in, I sliced open my finger while filing my machete and made my best attempt at doing some emergency first aid and then hiding it. I threw together a peice of paper, a leaf, a stick splint and held it all together with a piece of duct tape that was previously holding my bag together. And then I proceeded, pretending like nothing happened and luckily no one saw. But a break time, it proved to be incredibly difficult to manuver on a very muddy and slick 40 degree hill while holding my machete and drinking a cup of juice while keeping my wounded hand hidden in my pocket. Quite awkward. but funny. and of course they got a kick out of it. But hey, at least I kept on working! After that experience, I have learned to carefully sharpen my machete and have started taking notes from small children who can control the machete better than I as we tromp through the jungle. One day in specific, a very happy afternoon, I found myself being guided down a trail by a group of four boys, ages 5 to 10, no shoes but so much energy. They led me everywhere, showing me what every plant was, cutting down mangos and oranges and having a grand old time. They even helped me collect seedlings to plant and now I have coffee, cacao, mango and lime trees growing! These people have amazing amounts of knowledge about this area and everyday I am learning so much. Lets see a few other notes. I have been eating lots of boiled bananas and rice, and now lots of this new amazing fruit called pifa or pixbae. Think of a fruit the size of a tomato, growing on a palm tree with spikes up the whole trunk, that tastes like a mix between butternut squash and popcorn and has the nutritional content of an egg! Also, I got bit by a giant ant called a Golofa while harvesting coffee! Man it hurt like crazy. I still can´t feel my pinky! So much has happened and so much more to come. Over all, this community is beautiful and I am excited to be here.