Rainy day turkey day

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. I am thankful to my friends and family and all that support me. Without all of you, my life outlook would be a bit gloomier.
The last month has been a little hard due to some issues within my community, a few health problems and now the current situation. It has been raining in the province for the past two weeks. All of this rain has led to intensive flooding, landslides, crop loss and more. My community did not flood, since we are on the side of a hill, but many people lost the cacao that they were drying to sell, as well as all of their bananas and platanos fell over in the mudslides.I, just by coincidence, left the province the day before the roads closed to attend a seminar on the other side of the country. We as volunteers will be helping out with relief efforts for the upcoming week and much longer depending on the status of communities. This has been the worst flooding in 40 years in the country. Only certain communities were badly damaged, but many were left without food due the closing of the roads. Looking at all the work to be done here, I can only imagine how hard it must be in countries were hurricanes and floods hit hard every year. But we will work through this. We are looking at how we can help our communities be more prepared for the next natural disaster as well as how we can take this experience to help empower our communities to help themselves not only in times of disaster, but through all challenges.
Beyond these hard times, other things have been going well. I have been helping a new group of community members make chocolate to sell and although they have a lot more to learn, it is a fun process. In order to make the chocolate, we harvest the cacao pods and then open them and take the beans out to ferment. We then dry them in the sun ( which becomes much harder when there is no sun, only rain). We then toast the beans in a giant pot over a fire. After pealing them by hand, we grind them up with a hand grinder and add in sugar, vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. And my oh my does it smell good. I have also been teaching how to make organic fertilizers and helping teach english in the school. Every saturday I work with the women's group to sew beautiful geometric designs to create traditional dresses called naguas. I just finished my second skirt. And we are working on selling these cultural beauties.
Before the rains started, we had some beautiful evenings with the full moon. It is quite lovely to live a life where you know the cycle of the moon and the exact time the sun rises. My favorite new panamanian Ngobe story is the superstition that if you point at the moon, a gigantic blister will grow on your finger, the size of the moon (ok well, not quite). So of course I pointed at the beautiful full moon and all the children shrieked in response. In order to avoid the growth of the blister, you must tap your finger on a rock 5 times (somewhat equivalent of knocking on wood). So luckily I don't have a blister growing on my finger, but instead I do have a few worms in my tummy. Asi es la vida.
Despite the tummy, I did have a fabulous thanksgiving in which I got to celebrate with many friends to a feast of turkey, mash potatoes, cranberries! And although I miss friends and family at home, I also have a home here with friends to share these experiences. So I am thankful to all of you at home and all of my wonderful friends here too.

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!