domingo, 14 de noviembre de 2010

Big news in Papayo this week!


Sorry. That's a lie. But no news is good news, I've been told.

I bought two hens. Sadly, one of them was already eaten by a tigrillo. I don't know how it's called in English, but it's a bobcat-like critter. So I'm taking the untraditional move of building a henhouse to prevent further casaulties. I'm hoping to get up to five or six total hens with a mix of the local heritage breed and egg-laying hybrids from the city. If this goes well, it would be about my only source of protein, although yesterday somebody gave me some beef that had been killed the week before and hung up over the cooking fire, but that seldom happens and it tasted like burnt plastic anyway.

I've probably been spending too much time working on getting myself comfortable. There's the henhouse and I'm also replanting my garden after the first harvest, this time with a lot of compost. And I'm working on finding a source of electricity so that I'm able to recharge my cell phone and computer. Good thing is that it's working. Lately, I've felt much more comfortable chilling in my hut, spending time with the neighbors, and going to work in the rice fields. It's gotten to be seldom that I feel lonely anymore.

Did you get a chance to check out my analysis of the community? This is a project that the Peace Corps assigns to volunteers in the first months to help motivate integration and to guide future projects. I mostly wrote assuming the reader would know the basics of Ngobe culture, but people might home still might find it interesting. My favorite part is the environmental analysis at the bottom, mostly because I'm very proud of the detective work I had to do to learn the information. No one had a clear idea of how the local environment was changing, so it took a lot of investigating to figure it out.

So today I'm in San Felix on the internet, but I'm just passing through. When I finish up on the computer I'm heading back up into the highlands in the comarca to a town to the west of Papayo. I'll be meeting up with eight other volunteers for a week of intense Ngobere training with Rolando, a Peace Corps language instructor. I'm very excited because he's the only person I've met who understands Ngobere grammar and I've accumulated some questions in these few months. Hopefully I'll be able to let you know how the week went when I pass back through town.

Alright. A better kid would get some pictures for you all. But I´m feeling lazy and having technical trouble. Later?

lunes, 1 de noviembre de 2010

I confess, I'm worn out. Usually I try to write my blog in when I'm in a good mood and have lots of energy, but I've been away from my village for three days now and I'm tired. Life in the city is draining when you're not used to it.

There's been a lot of city time lately. My first three months it seemed like I only spent two nights in town every three weeks or so, but lately I've been running around Panama doing various things. This weekend, I went to Cocle to hear a presentation by Lazy John of the Finca Perezoza, an organic farm run by an ex-Peace Corps volunteer. And later today I'll be meeting with my contact in Panama's environmental agency to see if we can better coordinate our work together. In two weeks I get five days of language training from the Peace Corps and a week later is Thanksgiving and our five month training seminar. By that time we're into December. Stuff just comes up like that.

Oh, Lazy John though. Maybe not extremely innovative, but I think I'll steal some of what I learned. He has a cool technique, planting a leguminous tree in the same hole as his fruit trees. They grow together and he periodically cuts limbs off the leguminous tree and drops them on the ground, preventing competition and fertilizing the fruit tree. It's a lot simpler than making enough compost for a whole orchard.

I've just passed another important milestone in my service. For the first three months, my job was to work mostly on integrating to the community and to put together an analysis of the culture, school, environmental state of the region, and history of the community. This past week, my director Francisco visited and I gave a presentation of what I've learned. I was stressed out about it, but it turned out to be much more relaxed than I expected and I think the visit went well. So now I should be completely integrated, understand the community completely and be ready to go kick ass and change the world.

But specific jobs on my schedule? Few at the moment.

On Thursdays I teach English to the sixth grade. I bring the mandolin and we sing American folk songs. They know Yankee Doodle. It might be my favorite day. Soon I'll start teaching Environmental Education as well.

I work with the agricultural agency when they come, about once a week. We make compost and terraces and talk about how cool it would be to put a biodigestor in here. And one of their extension agents recently asked me to help on a fish tank project, to raise tilapia and catfish. I'm going to go scout out locations and talk to people to see who is interested and he will bring the necessary materials and help teach the best process for tanks. I'm excited about this because fish are much cheaper to raise than chickens so there will be more meat and any concentrated agriculture will help the environment in the area.

We're in the process of soliciting a grant for a artesans' workshop, so the ladies in town can get together to do their sewing.

And I'm asking around, seeing if I can find community leadership for a project to bring efficient woodstoves to reduce the amount of firewood needed. It would be easier just to do it, but my trainers repeated endlessly that it's better if community members take charge, so I'm trying it like this.

So those are my jobs right now. Well, I'll be writing again soon. Maybe I can send you an update in two weeks when I'm on my way to language training. Miss you, everybody.

Andy