This week I´m in Atalaya at a workshop on street theater. I´m here with four kids from my Ecoclub, an environmental youth group. Like the camp we attended in January, this is a big deal. Although all of the students have travelled outside of the community before, it’s still very exciting for them every time they get a chance to leave home. And all the other students are latinos, louder and more confident than my Ngobe kids. I invited the most extroverted ones I could find, but outside of the community and with people they don´t know, they´re too shy to participate at all. So far the students from Cerro Papayo are running to the corner to hide by themselves every chance they get. I still think they might benefit from the workshop though. We´ve done some activities teaching projection and basic self-presentation and I think my students might be learning something even when they´re passively staring off into space.

I, of course, am bored out of my mind. I don´t really have a job to do, I just needed to be here because parents wouldn´t want their kids to travel alone. Oh well though, maybe I´ll learn some street theater.

Back in Cerro Papayo, everything has completed the yearly transformation from dust into mud. So I’ve planted again. In addition to my gardens, I have two plots of monte, traditional slash-and-burn agriculture. One is a small experimental plot where I´m planting mucunu. It´s a large inedible bean that is used as a green manure and supposedly suppresses weeds while making rice or corn more productive, so much so that cleared land can be used continuously without being let fallow. All that sounds so good that I figure it must be lies. I´m going to experiment on my own before teaching it to community members. My other monte is just one day´s work clearing land, maybe a quarter acre. I planted that one traditional. After I burned it, I poked the ground with a stick and put in four corn seeds. Not the best system, but I´ll have corn in a few months.

Work has really been picking up. Some folks and I are about to apply for a grant for funds for a large project that would take up all of my time if we get it. But I´ll save that story for after I know if it´ll happen or not.