!!!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!