Wow! A month and a half with no new blog post!

To make it up to you, I'm posting pictures for the first time since I've been here. Elsie came to my site and took pictures of my house. I'm posting them as a facebook album.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.656379388434.2131701.15305991&l=843de9c063

It turns out that posting pictures is extremely easy and it's odd that I haven't been doing it. Maybe I'll post some more sometime.

Some exciting news: the fish pond project is a success! Yesterday we released tilapia into twelve ponds, with another four more ponds still coming soon. It is very uplifting to watch the little guys swimming around a new pond after so many months of digging and begging agencies for materials. Since it worked out, I'm starting over. More producers have told me they're interested so we're doing it again.

And for a long time I've been wanted a solar panel in the community. It would be a great business opportunity because people pay a dollar per cell phone charge and it would be good for the community because right now people are walking over an hour to the nearest panel or charging their phones with D batteries like me. This morning I applied for a grant with the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas for a small solar panel for a new co-op in the community. I think they would earn about $4 a day just by having a solar panel, a 50% increase of their profits. Plus I would have a place to charge my cell phone just next door. I'm excited and hope we get the grant.

I feel like I've finally got into my stride here. Work is going well and I've been having a good time in site. It seems like every day is busy and I keep running around doing different things. Well, I've got to catch a bus. Miss you all.

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.

It´s starting to rain again. All the grass is brown, the trees have stopped growing, and water is just barely flowing from the springs, but with the rain everything should be getting better. The agricultural season is starting, everyone is going out to plant rice and the mangos and cashew fruits are ripe and delicious. I´ve been a year in Panama now. I remember my first night with a host family in Panama City when the rains were starting. I was trapped inside from a storm, scared because I had never seen rain so strong and imagining myself lost somewhere out in the jungle.

I have a puppy now. My neighbor named him Tachi, little old man. He´s really little and energetic and puppy-like and we´re still learning how to do sit. I´m worried that training might be difficult because he´s a comarca dog, and probably comes from a bloodline that hasn´t been trained for several hundred generations. We´ll try though. My community would be very impressed to see a dog sit on command. And I need to remember to pick up his shots while I´m in the city here.

And I´ve got six chickens right now, laying and taking care of chicks and tearing up my gardens. I´ve had a small lull in work, waiting out delays in my fish and stove work, so I´ve been more domestic. The dog and chickens and I started a new garden and have been cooking more. Felix had a whole crop of cabbage get damaged with by a type of caterpillar, so I made 15 pounds of sauerkraut. That´s a lot. I really, really hope it´s good.

So I figured out how to get pictures off my camera and can post them on the blog and facebook now. Sadly, I forgot my camera today. So that´s no help. Next post I´ll put up pictures.

It´s hard to type when you´re in a packed bus and they´re blasting reggaeton and there´s a baby wailing right behind you and the guy next to you in the seat is soaking wet. Not from rain, it hasn't rained in months. Maybe he had to cross a river to get to his bus stop? Well, at least I'm in the kind of country where you can have a computer out in public without being immediately stabbed to death. I'm travelling to a seminar teaching business and management skills to Panamanian project leaders who work with the Peace Corps. I'm attending mostly to learn the material to see if I want to teach similar seminars in the future. Also, I'll be meeting Florentino there, a community member who leads our aqueduct committee. Hopefully, he'll pick up some skills that will help that group run more smoothly.

As I've mentioned in the past, I've been working a lot on fish tanks. Some clarification: fish tanks are large artificial ponds to raise tilapia for food. They are not aquariums. There's been some confusion on that. I'm working with a Panamanian agency who distributes tubing and young tilapia for the tanks if community members do the manual labor. I'm working between the agency and the community members. I learned how the agency teaches a fish tank should be made and then went and dug a bunch of fish tanks with my community and now I'm going back to the agency to ask for the tubing they promised. We'll see if they do their part.

My other big thing right now is woodstoves. So everyone in Cerro Papayo cooks on wood, usually under a roof and without any sort of stove. Scarcity of firewood is a major problem and some 60% of deaths are related to smoke inhalation. So for months now I've been searching for the right stove for my community. For awhile I was thinking of a mud stove that costs only labor and community members could learn to make, but everyone who's tried one says that they're a hassle to cook with and often don't work. Then I was thinking of a brick and rebar stove that is very durable (30+ years) and gets better reviews. It's too expensive to expect community members to continue production after I leave, but I could find funds to get one in every house and people would have efficient and smoke-free cooking.

But, I came across this new stove. It's called the Bliss Burner, designed by a NGO working here in Panama. It cooks well, people like to use it, and it only costs $4 and one hour of work to make one. At that price, I won't have to look for funds. As you know, the first rule of development is to never do something for someone that they can do for themselves. So my goal is to use a business approach to distribution, teaching community members how to produce stoves and sell them to the community for $10. Right now I'm producing stoves and selling them, passing the profits on to my youth group's fund. Interest is strong and I've already got a waiting list. Soon I'm hoping to find a man here who can take over and start making stoves for profit. Or a few men. Better if there's a couple companies that can compete for business.

Alright, I'll write again soon.

It's been a long week. I was giving English class to a bunch of youngsters all week and it was good. Everybody has wanted classes since I got here and I haven't been able to do a regular course because I often have to travel for meetings. So my plan (inspired by some volunteer who lived in Chris' site way back) was do English class like a day camp. A short, intense course with singalongs. It was fun for everybody and I think the kids learned something and I plan to do it again next year, but it wore me out. I came out of every day like I had just run a marathon. I've never been in charge of so many kids at a time and never for so long. I pretty much resorted to using sweets to buy their obedience, attention, and future attendance and that worked all right.

Another triumph. One of my hens has started to lay. The hippies always said that homegrown eggs are yellower and have a better yolk and they were right. The eggs are also delicious, except the ones that I didn't get to eat because the hen happens to be insane and starts pecking at her eggs shorting after laying them. Anybody know what to do for that? You could offer ideas in the poor neglected comment box.

In a couple weeks, before I'll be able to write again, I'll be going on a long walk. A group of volunteers are going from my site, across the continental divide, and to the Caribbean. It's only a four day trip, but the route goes from dry, hilly savannah to cloud forest to lowland jungle. And it is extremely rough trails and rather remote. Don't worry though. If one of us so much as sprains an ankle the navy will be sending a helicopter to get us. And plus, it's a small country. It's hard to get more than a few days walk from a road or the beach.
I'll write to tell you how it went when I'm in the city again.

Written January 19

I wrote that last blog after being down for more than a week. I had been lonely and couldn't find anything to do and then the camp didn't go well. But then I got back to site and immediately found out that everyone was excited to get back to work and quickly had my schedule booked for the rest of the month. A lot of that work was requests for help designing and building fish ponds, a project that development workers push to increase food security. So I spent the week digging and teaching technique for building and maintaining the ponds. It was good to have so much interest and I've been in a better mood these days.

It was also encouraging to find out that the camp wasn't so bad of a failure after all. If you remember, my kids didn't seem to have engaged at all and looked miserable the whole time. But back in Papayo at our first Ecoclub meeting, they brought themselves to the front and excitedly demonstrated the same songs and games that they had refused to participate in at the camp. I think the meeting went well. We mostly played around, but I also kind of tried to explain the idea of a youth group in general and how an Ecoclub would have an environmental focus. They'll come again because we had a good time and I can gradually introduce the educational and service parts of the organization. Bingo was a huge hit.

So work is going well at the moment. Hopefully this energy will carry into March when school starts up again and I'll be busy working with the kids.

Oh! Another triumph I've been wanting to tell you about. I learned how to wash clothes. After months and months of struggles, I realized recently that I have learned to do my laundry by hand and produce clothing that doesn't smell terrible right away. I use the little bars of soap from hotels, soak the cloths in a bucket for awhile, beat them on rocks for a really long time, rinse, and then hang them out to dry. The secret is to beat them more than you would expect to be necessary. Of my achievements so far in life, this is one of my proudest.

I thought you might want to know that for breakfast this morning, I had green bananas. Peeled, quartered lengthwise, and fried until golden brown. Lunch was fried potatoes. Those don't grow here, but somebody's uncle works up in the highlands where it's cold and sent down a sack. I don't usually eat so much fried stuff, it's just that I'm travelling tomorrow and I need to use up all the produce that people have been giving me. So for dinner (and probably tomorrow's breakfast) I made rice and pigeon peas. Pigeon peas supposedly grow in Florida. If you can, you should find them because they're delicious.

I'm all wired up these days. Even as I type now, I'm listening to some hippies lament about how they're going to quit their rambling ways (one of these days). And there are electronic books on a Kindle, and pretty quick I'm going to figure out how to charge those guys and the computer and cell phone while I'm in site. Thanks, Mom. After six months I still wasn't getting used to the lack of media. It's really nice to be able to listen to a little bit of music and to get new things to read without begging my fellow volunteers.

The other day I was getting ready to settle down into my shack for dinner when I got a call from an agency worker that I know. She had an urgent message for a guy down the valley and asked if I couldn't go deliver it. It takes an hour to get down there and the sun was setting, so I grabbed a flashlight and started walking. On the way back, it was very nice. Completely dark forest paths and my little beam of light crossing through, but my flashlight failed halfway up. The slow stumble home gave me some time for thought. What most impressed me was how naturally I navigated the web of rocky cow trails in complete darkness. I've gotten to know my way around enough that all the curves in the path are stored in some part of my mind. It's strange to think of how many miles I've walked over the same trails and how much I've invested into this one tiny place. I bet when I'm all old and grey, still some smell or feeling will take me right back to Cerro Papayo.

But right now I'm not in site at all, I'm on the most terrifying adventure. You see, I live in one of the poorest parts of Central America. The kids around here have never seen a paved road, two story building, or anything that can't be jammed into the back of a four wheel drive. They are not street smart. And I took three thirteen year old girls out into the big, scary world to attend a weeklong camp in the city. More experienced volunteers warned me, remember to tell them specifically to bring absolutely everything they'll need, remember to teach them how to flush a toilet, but wow. I took them to see a supermarket and they stared for roughly two hours while deciding on a snack. The bus scared them and the buildings and all the latinos who have a different communication style (yelling). They washed their clothes in a sink instead of the washing machines and they missed their mothers terribly.
It wasn't all amusing cultural moments though. I took them to an Ecoclubs camp to learn about the environment and meet kids that aren't Ngobe, but it didn't work out. The culture shock and all the new things were too much, and they ended up mostly staring at the floor the whole time. I'm pretty sure it was a horrible experience for the poor things. Maybe next time though.

Morale is low at the moment. The camp was discouraging and I've been lonely again. For awhile, I was used to being on my own, but Christmas was too nice. Mom and Dad and Lisa were here for a long time and I think I kind of got used to it. Then, they left and I was in town with some good friends from Peace Corps for New Years. So these couple weeks I've felt down. But tomorrow, I'll be back to work and I bet I'll feel better soon.

Happy New Year, folks. Love, you.

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?