In these few days I've learned a lot and now understand a lot of things that had been frustrating to me. Occasionally, people would randomly refuse to come to meetings or participate in projects or even just seem unwilling to speak to me at all. It seemed random and I couldn't figure out what the problem was until someone mentioned that two men in two are arguing over land. Asking questions about that problem, I discovered that the town is split between two

factions that both claim to have the exclusive right to large tracts of land around the town. Usually people can be amiable to everyone, but there are some people who are so bitter they refuse to participate in anything together. So I've spent the week investigating the split.

It turns out that almost everyone in town is descended from one woman, who lived on the site of the school and owned all of the land of what is now Cerro Papayo. When she died, her

five children started to fight for more land. So I've been mentally tracing out family trees and figuring out who is with who and why. It's been interesting, but sad that it won't be possible to

work with everyone at once.

And Clement brought us a live armadillo in a bag. We smoked him for a long time

and then

fried the meat still on the shell. It was excellent. Remember that southerners.

Everyday, several times a day, I find myself repeating the phrase "poco a poco." It means little by little and our trainer often used it to calm us shell-shocked trainees when we were having trouble. In site, it's become important to me. I chant it when looking up at the mountain I need to climb while carrying a heavy load or down at the length of ground I need to hack out

a ditch. I think of it while studying Ngobere or trying to get someone to open up when they're shy around strangers. And it's comforting to remember "little by little" when I think about my future projects, my role in Papayo, and how my time in the community might be helpful. That all can be sorted out, but poco a poco.

Ah! I have a project. I'm very excited. Rufino and Didima want to build a rice tank, the traditional patty that we think of instead of dry rice in a field. Peace Corps advocates it because the ground doesn't lose fertility that way and it's much more concentrated than slash and burn agriculture and so is better for the environment. We went and scouted a site, hacked down all the trees, and dug a bunch of holes to test the soil. I think the site is perfect, so pretty soon we'll have some Peace Corps and the neighbors to come work on making the tank. Hopefully this will be an example that inspires other tank projects in the area.

Alright, I'm going to go back to site soon. I hope everyone is doing well and I look forward to seeing you. Remember Lisa in Honduras. She's just a little one so she might be scared. I'll write again soon.

Written August 17th

My birthday today. Thanks everybody for the messages on facebook that I'm sure you sent. It was a good day, all around. Somehow the town found out that it's my birthday so they planned a surprise party for me. It ended up being such a surprise, that I didn't find out about until hours later. I had gone down the hill a few miles to chase rodents with Clement's

hounds, so I didn't show up until later that night. We all laughed about it.

I have a camera now (Thanks mom!), so maybe you would like to be re-introduced to Cerro Papayo.

This is the town. Several houses around the big school brought in by the government. The

rest of the people in the area live in houses spread throughout the hills, up to an hours walk from the school.

This past week I moved to a new house to get to know another family in town. I'm living with Placida, her two sons Jose (23) and Domingo (16) and Carlos (14), the son of her husband's

other wife. Did I mention that the Ngobes are polygamous? It's a much quieter house because the children are mostly past the screaming stage. And it's slightly more rustic living conditions, so I've had to get used to bathing and washing in the stream. It's a good house though. The boys are very studious and we always do our homework together in the afternoons. I help them with their English and they help me with my Ngobere.

So language learning is going poorly. There's times I feel that my studying hasn

't shown any results at all. I still don't understand much when people speak. I was further discouraged to get a visit from another volunteer who after two years still doesn't understand much. So I'm going to try harder. Today I bought a bible in Ngobere and have started studying through translations to try and get vocabulary and grammatical constructions. It makes me think of the translators, learning a language, creating a writing system, and then translating the bible. Their names aren't mentioned in the book, but I wonder where they were living and what their time was like. It was probably not an easy job.

Now most of work this week has been the usual garden and field work. In the garden I've just planted ginger with field corn and green bean vines to give shade. But my most exciting day'

s work has been on my house, trying to fix it up. We removed two stick walls and replaced them with boards and roofing tin, going from a jungle hut to the classic depression-era shack. We reinforced all the walls and replaced the sticks that were too old. Next week we work on the interior, making a bed and some tables and shelves.

Writing here today from the Purple House Hostel in the city of David. It's strange coming into town, everything is so different. There's a bunch of shiny artificial surfaces, and artificial temperatures, and information coming at me from all directions. In a way it's a relief because it's what I grew up with, but it's also overwhelming. I've never been one for cities though.

Have I told you about my house? I'm very excited. After I finish up my homestay with the three different families here, I'll be renting a house from the teacher Melida. It's right next to the school, next door to Felix and Senia's house. It's made of arm-thick sticks placed upright to make the walls, one room. The roof is made of tin and extends out to cover an outdoor porch. The floor is hard clay. I think I'm going to divide it to make a bedroom, put up bookshelves, and figure out a good place to store clothes, and another good place to store food and do my cooking. There's a table carved out of a stump that I'll paint a checkers board on. And I'm going to pipe water into the yard for washing and showering. There's a lot of work. I have more plans for the yard though. It's big and full of trees. I'm cutting down the less useful ones to open space for the mango, avocado, breadfruit, and lemon trees that are already growing. And I've planted bell pepper and chile bushes that will hopefully grow up happy. And I have passion fruit vines just sprouting that I hope can be convinced to wrap themselves all around the yard. And I'm going to build a little corral or just let my chickens have the run of the place. I've never had a house before. It's exciting.

A few days ago I was visiting Ofelina and Rufino and their family. Ofelina asked me suddenly if I'm a Christian and then if I could pray for a sick child. So she led me into a room where her niece was nursing a tiny baby, too young to have a name yet. He was very sick, labored breath and weak-looking. Ofelina placed a cup of cloudy liquid in my hand and told me to bless it and then place a little bit on the baby's lips. Some sort of homemade medicine. They told me that they had been to the doctor, but preferred not to use commercially-available medicines because they don't work on the local curses. I'm worried about the baby. He looked really, really sick and won't be receiving much medical care. I'll be sure to let you know how he does.

There's some hard, sad things here and those are probably easy to explain. I just wish it were easier for me to describe the beautiful and joyful things that balance it out. Even if you could just hear the people laugh, the way they make fun of me, the way they teach me things like a child. Did I tell you that my name means "little one"? They tease me on and on for not knowing some obscure detail to country life and are still laughing as they show me how. And they take care of me to make sure I'm not in over my head, cause I'm just a little one.

I've been thinking of you, homesick at times. It comes out in old folk ballads I sing when it's raining and the kids say I'm ulire, sad. But it's alright because I'll see you all soon.

Hope everyone is healthy and happy.

Written June 30th

Most days the rain starts around two and keeps up until sometime in the night. Today though, it started pouring at ten this morning and hasn't let up. We all came back in from the fields. People stay home when it's raining here. All the footpaths turn into little streams, the clay sticks to your feet, and it gets cold. So I've been tucked in the house here, just flipping through my ngobere flash cards and playing a bunch of checkers. I drew some squares on a board and found old bottle caps to teach the kids and now they're always here to play. Just now I took a checkers break from writing.

It's been a nice day, but I worry about all of the rain days in my future. The wet season peaks in October and doesn't end until December. That'll be a lot of time in house arrest. I think I'll need a good indoors project. Maybe I could learn to weave the traditional straw hats like the old men do. Or become a virtuoso bluegrass picker on my mandolin. Or learn ngobere well and translate something into it. Read a lot or just stare blankly off into the rain. Any other ideas?

You'll probably want an update for this week as well, I suppose. Mostly rice these days, rows and rows of rice to be weeded. It's been excellent for getting to know the area and the different families. I'm getting to the point where I can find my way out off from the town to go and visit with families I don't know. In the afternoon, I go to a house and have a cup of coffee and offer to go work for them the next day. We work from the early morning until the rain and then go to the house to eat. By the time I leave, the family and I know each other fairly well. I'm trying to go work with with all the sixty families.

But the big news in Papayo these days is new corn, which is starting to trickle in. New corn is like sweet corn, but a regular grain variety. It's a bit drier and meatier and less sweet and it fills you up. We eat it raw, roasted on coals, boiled, cooked into a cream, and ground into a paste and fried. I highly recommend that you try tortoron. Drain a can of sweet corn, put in a food processor with some corn meal or breadcrumbs or something to thicken it, and then deep fry it. Senia is currently cooking a batch in the next room and I can't wait. People say that pretty soon there'll be so much new corn that I can't eat anymore. And next is new rice, which has everybody really excited. July is almost over.