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.