Peace Corps has kept me running around lately, fulfilling the requirements for in-service education. It's been kind of strange spending so much time with other volunteers.

I feel if I'm writing home to share my experiences and the culture here, it seems worthwhile to spend a few lines on Peace Corps volunteer culture. Because we are some strange critters. During a meeting this past week, I remember stopping to think how the language we use would be completely unintelligible to outsiders. We speak in a thick pidgin mix of English, Spanish and acronyms. Probably to be expected because nobody is much used to speaking English anymore. And the personality of the group is bizarre. I think the most typical volunteer kind of straddles a line between the stereotypical expat arrogance and a type of missionary zeal and confidence (spreading the good news of compost, hand washing, and appropriate management techniques for small businesses), but maybe with some backpacker in there too. Strange critters, to be sure.

Back in site, things are different these days. The rain stopped. Now we've got wind. A hot, dry wind from the north that goes all day, knocking down plants and houses and generally making a nuisance of itself. The trees start moving up in the hills and after a slow ...1...2...3.... the wind hits Cerro Papayo. I think the dry season will be fun though. The rivers should be low enough soon for spear fishing and people start going on long walks visiting different family members in other towns and in a few months there will be a balsa, the traditional gathering to distribute the harvest and fight for the women of other families. More about that another time.

Today I've been chilling in my shack, doing my computer work on battery life left over from the city. Mostly I've been working on a series of grant applications for the artesan's group. The group exists to facilitate the production and sale of traditional crafts, and members feel that they would benefit from having a building to work together and to store equipment, material, and products. Felix drew a design of the building that they want and estimated the cost and I'm putting the application together to present to a Panamanian development agency. I'm in a hurry to get this done so I'm going to visit town one day to print the application and send the blog off into space.

Okay. Hope everyone is doing well.

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?

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

Is my blog at the stage where the writer slowly loses the motivation to keep writing and lets more and more time go between posts until updates cease altogether? It's been awhile. I have a ton of news though.

My boss sent an email awhile ago and asked if I wanted to participate in a special project, translating for US Navy medical tour. The USS Iwo Jima came to give free surgeries and medical care. It's practice for them because one of the ship's assignments is disaster relief in the Caribbean. So I went up to Bocas del Toro and translated a whole bunch of hernia examinations. I was going to write you a timely and detailed description of the visit, but I got sick. It's the normal thing to do in Bocas del Toro. I ended up in the hospital in David with the worst GI problems I've ever experienced. It was my first visit to the hospital as an adult and I learned many things. One of them is that nurses don't like it when you take out your own IV.

From there, I went home to Cerro Papayo and moved in to my house. It's still a little bit rustic. Felix and I failed to connect the water, so I have to go to the neighbors to bathe and wash clothes and the walls are completely see-through and the roof leaks and the yard is all torn up, but I love being on my own again. There was nothing wrong with any of my host families, it's just that I haven't had my own spot for these six months. I'm finally not living out of a suitcase anymore and I get to live by my own schedule and I don't have to worry about stepping on anybody's toes.

I was only able to stay in Cerro Papayo for a week or so before I had to come down to the city for the All Volunteer Conference in Chitre. Every year there's a meeting with all 200 volunteers in Panama. More gringos than any of us had seen for a long time. It was very fun. It was the first time I was able to meet many business, health, and education volunteers and I learned a lot about the different sorts of projects that volunteers are working on in Panama. It was also good to catch up with the environmental volunteers that I trained with. After three months, we all have a better idea of the role we'll fill in our communities. Talking with my friends, I learned their approaches to community integregation and project management and have new strategies I'll be able to use in Cerro Papayo. It was very encouraging.

But I'm hoping to get back to site tomorrow. Too much city time makes me nervous.

Love,

Andy

We're quickly approaching on three months in site, so next week I'll be able to move into my own house. There's still a ton of work to do and I bet I'll be pretty uncomfortable for the first couple weeks, but I'm very excited. Life won't be extremely

different, just a bunch of small frustrations that won't bother me anymore. From now on I'll be more independent, able to cook for myself, able to get away for privacy when I want to. And I'll keep busy with home improvement projects for awhile.

So, these days I bathe in a stream a ways from my house out into the jungle. A tiny creek has been

dammed to created a pool, with a spot to stand and pour water over yourself wit

h a gourd. It's actually very nice standing out in the jungle as I take my shower every day.

The other day I was coming back home on the tiny trail through thick forest when I met my neighbor going the other way. We both had on shorts and flipflops and were carrying soap and a towel and it was so much like going to use the communal shower in the dorm room that I laughed out loud.

But with any luck, I'll be able to connect my new house to the aqueduct and I'll be able to bathe in my own yard with a hose.

I'm finally getting a feel for the environmental issues of the area. I had read it was deforested, but disagreed at first because it seemed that every hillside was covered with trees, a scrub growth that's slowly taking over what used to be pasture. However, as I look further, I'm realizing that many areas remain deforested or are covered with low bushes, and that planting the forest tree species that have been eliminated from the area will greatly improve the ecosystem.

People here are not environmentalists, and well, neither am I. But it seems like everyone is excited about the project. Reforestation will mean more available water during the dry summers, more firewood and construction materials, more tasty critters to eat, and more fertile soil when land is cleared for farming. One of the fun things about a Ngabe community is that people want trees in the area. In other cultures, reforestation projects meet with resistance because people are afraid of the forest. Not the folks in Cerro Papayo though.

Well I don't feel like typing anymore because it's been a long weekend full of writing reports. Turns out the Peace Corps belongs to the US government and there's paperwork. But I miss you. And don't worry because I'm doing well and am in good company and I'll write again soon.

Written September 7th

Nineteen years ago, I had just turned four and I set off for school for the first time and I've started classes every September since then. It's weird not going back. The academic calendar has ruled my life for so long that a huge part of me feels that it's time to drop the pickaxe and pick up a book. So I have a small itch to get moving.

Other than that, things are going great. I've been spending my days talking mostly. There's a lull in the farm work, so people are hanging out more, talking and drinking corn beer. I feel confident enough now to drop by at houses out in the forest so I've been working at getting to know families further from town. Also, at popular request, I've started an English class for adults. But something must be wrong with my approach because of the 50+ people who asked for a course, about three have been coming. It's kind of frustrating, but overall I'm feeling optimistic about my prospects for work.

I'll be helping Felix and th Ecoclub with their nursery- producing fruit trees for around the houses and lumber species to reforest the area. I'll also be working with individual families to help with gardening, fish tanks, rice tanks, soil improvement, and especially any kind of farming that involves trees. And there's talk of a project to build stoves that use half the amount of firewood and keep smoke out of the ladies' faces. And those same ladies have asked my help getting funds for a communal building where they can get together to weave bags and sew dresses. Oh! And the school. I'll be in there a couple times a week teaching environmental education and gardening.

It looks like a lot, written down like that, and I'm excited to be able to work with that much variety. I hope that my work is steady and that there's a lot of it. In the past, I've found that I'm happier when I'm very, very busy. Without a good workload, life out here could be way too slow.

You've probably noticed that this week's blog as been focused on settling down for a long stay. A lot of my energy is towards that. Plans for work and for recreation, purchase of a few comfort

items, planting chilis, and working on my house. It's been two and a half months, so it's time to settle in. And the house needs work. It hasn't been lived in for two years, an eternity here. Termites and scorpions everywhere and all the support beams rotted out. I've enjoyed spending an occasional afternoon going to fix it up, imagining what sort of life I'll make for myself here.

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.

I’m a full-time gardener and tree guy now. The residents of Cerro Papayo stared wide-eyed as I built my composter and started to fill it. I was constantly explaining the process of compost and how it can help with gardens. Everyone in town is a farmer, but they slash and burn and don’t understand soil improvement or nutrients. It’s all new to them and interesting because they’ve noticed that the fields take longer to recover and don’t yield as much anymore. And they stared when I took a pick and hacked out garden beds from the clay, because out there no one really cultivates. But they all want to learn and are asking advice on where to put their gardens and how to start. It’s encouraging to see interest in my projects.

And to help me learn and integrate into the community, I’ve been going out to work most mornings. The rice was planted about a month and a half ago, and it’s about six inches high. All the weeds are growing up, because the ground wasn’t cultivated, so we take short machetes to hack down the grass between the rice. It’s the worst work ever. You’re bent over to reach the ground and the sun in your face and sweat in your eyes and the rice keeps going up and up the hill. But people were quite amused at how bad I was at it.

I think I’m going to really connect with people, given some time. At first I thought that it wouldn’t really be possible, since we’re from such different backgrounds, but I changed my mind. Back home, I’m much more likely to talk about the weather or the world cup than I am about anything from my college courses. There’s no reason I can’t continue to talk about those daily subjects. It helps that I’m interested in all the nature and agriculture topics. Some of the younger guys in town seem cool too. I’ve been playing some dominoes and talking with a group from Papayo.

So this was two weeks in site. It’s been the longest period in my life I’ve gone without speaking English and been away from modernity, so I’ve had some intense cravings. The food is good, but there’s nothing with really intense flavor. I really want anything Mexican or Italian. Or anything cold. Ice cream. The lack of refrigeration really limits things. Oh! Want to know how many days I ate pork from the same slaughtered pig? But mostly cheese. The problem with that craving is that even in the cities in Panama, it’s not really possible to find it. So it goes. But I think as time goes, I'll do better and better without those things. And maybe soon I'll be able to make cheese in the jungle. And this week Didima said he'd teach me how to make bread over a fire. And in a few short months my chiles should start to bear fruit. All part of adjustment, I guess.

Well. I miss you all and I hope to be able to write again soon.

Written July 10th

One week down and a hundred and three to go.

Everything is going great. People here are welcoming and are interested in me and in US culture, I haven´t gotten sick yet, it´s been great living with Felix and Senia, I´ve been learning a lot, and am excited to start my projects. Officially, I´m not supposed to start anything because the first three months are for observation ad analysis of the town. But I worked with the 6th graders in the school to plant almond trees, cherry bushes, passion fruit, and guabo. I also broke ground on my personal garden and made myself the largest composter I´ve ever seen, then went around town collecting cow shit with all the elementary school boys. I´ve been devoting the mornings to those projects and the afternoons to language practice- formal study and attempts at conversation with the folks hanging out on the patio. I definitely still cannot get by in ngobere, but I´m hopeful. Even with the difficulty in communicating, I haven´t felt lonely with all the people around and the kids constantly following me.

But one unsettling experience:
Last night I went to a wake. In April, Felix´s sister died suddenly of a cancer and it´s the Ngobe custom to wait of a period of morning, leaving the family house unoccupied out of respect, before holding a vigil to say goodbye. It was confusing to me, a lot of contradictions. We got to the house around sundown and started a church service. A man sang hymns in Ngobere and the pastor came a spoke. They alternated back and forth all night and the guests would rotate in and out as they chose. So it seemed like a Christian service, but then there were witch traps around the house to protect it and the bitter cocoa was there to repel ghosts. And the mood was weird. Some people where weeping loudly and singing haunting traditional dirges through their sobs, while others were right next to them laughing and playing dominoes as they got drunk on yucca beer. It went on and on. Endless rounds of coffee and songs and everything in Ngobere and I was wishing it would end for a long time. But then the sun started to rise. Everyone got into a group and a woman circled us as she sang and sprinkled us with yucca beer and it was over. I´m still quite confused.

Today I'm writing from Las Lajas, from a stick and palm hut on the beach. It's about as beautiful as a place can be and it's only three hours from my site, the nearest place where I can find internet.

This past week has been hectic, preparing to enter site. I have vocabulary cards copied out of the dictionary, so I now know how to say in Ngobere that I have fleas (gwara ti kwete). I figure that the more random words that I learn, the better chances I'll have to understand a sentence every once in awhile. Actually forming my own sentences will take longer.

I've also been hunting seeds. Felix is operating a nursery to distribute trees to rural farmers, in an effort to reforest with lumber species and to bring fruit species around the houses to increase the variety of food. He uses native wood species, but he's always excited at the prospect of bringing new fruit species to the area. So in my time in the city, I went and found some tropical almonds, tropical cherry, passion fruit, and guava. I'm excited to watch the trees sprout and to go help plant them with the farmers. Also I'm going to be able to start my garden this week, so I have habanero (a perennial here), okra, cucumber, pumpkin for thanksgiving pies, basil, cabbage, onion, and leeks. A large part of my work will be to introduce the idea of soil improvement, so I'll also start a large compost pile first thing.

The other thing we did this week was to swear in. Serve and defend the constitution and all that. I don't usually go for ceremonies and speeches, but this one got me. The vice president and first lady were nice enough to come speak to us and talk about what the work of the Peace Corps had meant to Panama and did a great job of making us all feel that we were part of something important and good. After that, it was just a party for the host families, a few days in the city for some admin stuff and another round of inoculations (my veins are collapsing), and now a two day vacation. Tomorrow, I'm off to Cerro Papayo to get to work. Wish me luck. I'll tell you how it's going in three weeks when I come out to talk to the boss.

So, everybody have a good fourth. I'll think of you all, ok?

Just got back from my visit to Cerro Papayo. I loved it. And I was misinformed. Everyone told me that the Ngobe are really closed-off and that people would be too shy to talk to me for the first few months, but they had a big crowd and a welcome sign when I pulled in. They immediately decided by committee to name me Chiti. And I was told the food would be horrible and monotonous, but it was flavorful and included vegetables and spices from everyone´s gardens along with homegrown rice and beans. I don't think I ate a single thing that wasn't from right there. And I was told that people where lazy and dirty and disinterested. It might just be an initial glow from meeting everybody, but I feel these folks have been slandered.

I'm living the first month with Felix, his wife Senia, and their kids Clementina, Felix, Elvis, and Elixelis (13, 8, 6, and little). The house is right across the road from the school, built of roughsawn mahogany with a tin roof and a dirt floor. Felix built a little room off the side for me. In the morning the window opens out to a sunrise out over the mountains. My garden plot has been picked out and I'll be carrying seeds when I go back. I haven´t decided yet, but I think I'm going to build my house next door.

And I did some walking. To go see people, to visit someone's farm, or to go to another town, you need to be prepared to hike over the worst trails ever through deep mud, up and down steep little hills. And you´ll probably be expected to haul firewood, since you´re heading that way. I'm going to come back in the best backpacking shape ever.

I need to learn ngobere right now. Everyone speaks Spanish well, but they only do so when directly addressing me. Which was awkward in the meetings explaining why I was there. Felix would switch to Spanish to ask me if I had anything to add.

I've got a better idea of my work now. I'll mostly be working on established projects, and I'm excited that the community has already demostrated their interest and willingness to work. There's a tree nursery supplying fruit and lumber trees to community to help reforest the region. And there is a large school garden run by the PTA. And the ecoclub is interested in setting a better waste management system. So my work will be somewhere in these areas. I´ll have to wait and see what seems best in a couple of months.

Well, I hope everyone's doing alright and I hope to hear from you soon.

So Cerro Papayo.

I haven't been there, but I can explain what I've been told. It's a town of about 300 people, spread out over a large area in the mountains. The town is about a three hours drive from the Panamerican Highway, which means it's remote. Somebody recommended that I buy a horse because buses seldom bother coming all the way up that road. There's no electricity or potable water, and the road has only arrived recently. The community is unusually organized and motivated. There's a group interested in reforestation of watersheds to reduce soil erosion and the loss of water sources, a one-room school, and a women's group that sells artesania. The people there are farmers, raising cattle and growing a mix of yuca, otöe, and corn for personal consumption. They are in the process of installing basic latrines.

That's all I know about my actual town, but it's easier to find information about the region, which is the poorest area in Panama. In the Ngöbe-Buglé Comarca, literacy is around 50%, the infant mortality rate is about 1 in 12, and there are often food shortages. Even when food is plentiful, there are nutrition problems because the food is so plain. People mostly eat boiled plantain and tubers. I will be planting chiles first thing. Permanent villages are relatively recent to the indigenous community and the houses are still made of bamboo and palm leaves. Ngäbere, the language, is beautiful and I'm excited to continue studying. The only frustrating part is the five sounds that are impossible to make and are absolutely essential to be understood. So it goes.

On Tuesday I'll meet my counterpart and go with him to visit the town for the week. I'm kind of nervous. I'll have to meet a bunch of new people and be really friendly, not knowing the language at all almost. I hope I get along with everybody.

I'll be sure to write again next week with my first impressions of Cerro Papayo.

Rough week, physically. I've been constantly knocked about, bitten, kept awake, and worked to exhaustion, and my body is still suffering for it. But I'll get to that. First let me tell you about Sunday. We had nothing scheduled for the whole day and we found a white sand beach without another person on it. I can't describe how beautiful it was. The water was perfect and I swam for hours, just letting the surf pick me up and carry me. In the evening, there was a fire on the beach and tropical fruit for dessert. I'm beginning to feel very close to the group here and it was wonderful to be able to sit and relax for a minute.

It was a good day off, which was lucky because technical week turned out not to be a vacation. It was intense work in tree nurseries and reforestation projects with a couple government agencies, some environmental education and organic gardening in the schools, along with general lessons in Panamanian hick life from the host families. For instance, I've begun learning how to milk a cow. I went out every morning with Sabino and milked one cow. It took forever, my hands hurt like hell every day, and the chiggers and ticks chewed my feet into bloody masses, but I successfully milked the cow. A gentle cebu/brahma cow with vampire bat bites. Also, I started to learn how to throw ropes,but less successfully. It went badly when I tried to rope a calf. I'm used to horses that don't obey commands, so it didn't occur to me that this one might. I dropped the reins to focus on the rope, the horse took off and terrified my campesino buddies by almost throwing me into a fence. I got some riding lessons after that and on several occasions rode a horse without it bolting, bucking, or refusing to walk. It was new for me. And I'm practicing my grito, a Tarzan yodel thing that the men do. And coconuts! It's possible to peel one with a machete so that all of the shell is removed, leaving a ball of white meat with the water inside. I'll get there. I learned profesionally useful stuff too.

And today we had a meeting. I'm excited to tell you that I'll be spending the next couple of years in a town called Cerro Papayo in the Comarca Ngöbe. It only has 300 people, but you could maybe find it on a map if you looked on the road between Vigui and Llano Ñopo. I´ll be working with an Ecoclub, helping primarily with reforestation projects and organic gardening. I´ll also teach environmental education in the school and help a woman´s group organize to sell handmade stuff. They´re great, you should come buy.
It´s an indigenous community, which means I need to learn a new language and culture. They live on subsistence farming and occasional wage work. And it´s supposed to be beautiful. I know a lot more about the town and culture, but can´t think of what would be interesting to you. Ask some questions in the comentarios section and I can explain more.

I guess summer is starting back home. I suppose the college kids are all graduated and scrambling for employment, so good luck. I miss everybody.

I have a few minutes in an internet cafe before the bus comes and I thought I would quickly write something.

I've been thinking about coming home, what it will be like. If all goes well, I'll step off a plane in June 2012 and go into Seattle. I imagine the air hitting me and feeling really dry and cold, even in summer. And maybe on the porch later that evening, the relative quiet in the street will unnerve me. And the next morning, how will I know when to get up without roosters? The people will be weird, and the food will be just a little different. All the things that seem strange to me now will have become normal. Coming back is always hard, I guess.

I'm going to Veraguas with the group, for a week devoted to technical training. Gardens and trees. We don't really know what we're going to study, but it's at the beach so we've been looking forward to it as if it were a vacation. It would be needed. This past week has been hard work, gathering information about Nuevo Emperador to put a presentation together, and I think the accumulated fatigue from being here is starting to get at people.
So here's hoping we spend the next week in the sand, sipping margaritas.

So we’re just beginning our fourth week of training here, so I thought maybe it would be a decent time to start publishing something. Any earlier than this and I would have only been capable of vague, shell-shocked impressions, but now with my greater experience I’m able to offer a clear and concise observation about where I’ve been this past month, and that is that Panama is not Mexico. It’s wet and jungly and people grow plantains and yucca and taro in their backyards. Oranges too, but they’re prone to molding before they’re ripe. And people dress different and the food is not at all spicy and the local version of Spanish is remarkably less strict about pronouncing all the syllables of words. And there are machetes all over the place.
So that’s Panama.

My project is Community Environmental Conservation. I haven’t received my actual assignment yet, but I’ll probably be working in a small town, cooperating with local groups on an environmental project, probably reforestation and low-impact grazing management. I’ll teach environmental education with the schools, either formally in a class room or through after-school activities. I’m also supposed to advocate and teach organic gardening to improve nutrition and knowledge of the nutrient cycle. And I should teach about AIDS. And about more efficient wood stoves and homemade composting latrines. Most of my technical training is connected to these topics and is very interesting. But, after years of being mocked, my education major friends should be happy to hear that I’ve also been subjected to several hours of educational theory and that more is on the way. My APCD has said I’ll most likely go to cowboy country in Los Santos or to the Ngobe comarca (Indian reservation). I’m pulling for the Ngobe site, but if I’m in Los Santos I’ll buy a pony and name her Yegua and feed her with my front lawn.

Everything is fine with Peace Corps. The trainers are all good and us trainees seem to be getting along all right, which is to be expected because the people who join up tend to be awesome. And I know that the organization has a reputation for being godless hippies, but actually our group of 55 has 3 Republicans and 6 Christians. Diversity.