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