Site Visit in Chichica

My site visit went very well. I am excited to go back and get going on stuff, but I won´t be able to do stuff for three months really. I don´t know how this got into italics, but oh well. Stupid keyboards anyway. But everything went about as smoothly as it could. It is about a 6 hour trip from Panama City to get to my site, and it is relatively easy to access. I have about a 10 minute walk to my host family´s house from the road, and that is about it. I am going to have legs of steel after living in Chichica, there are tons of hills. But it is really a beautiful location. My family is great, and already they want me to live with them for the whole two years. . . ha ha, that´s not going to happen. I can´t wait to have my own house and be able to cook my own sanitary food. They are really nice though, and they are active in the community. Orlando is already a leader in his community, and Ana is involved with the the co-op that she founded with other women in the family. They have three children, Orlando (Orlandito), Edgardo (Lito), and Orlianis (Loli). The kids and their cousins love me, and I have about 6 billion photos of them because they like to have their picture taken A LOT. Good thing it´s a digital camera and I can delete a bunch.

Anyway, the house I will be living in the first month is pretty nice, it has cement floors and is good and tight and I didn´t even need my mosquito net, although I plan on putting it up next week. However, the kitchen in the rancho right next to the house where everyone hangs out during the day is not so sanitary. The chickens are running around pooping everywhere and jumping on the table and stealing food off people´s plates and generally flapping chicken germs everywhere. Plus although I´ve tried to treat my drinking water as much as possible, it is going to be impossible to avoid eating contaminated food and drink that is given to me. It is a huge part of the culture to give something to eat or drink to visitors, which is what I will be doing for 2 years. So I am expecting to deworm myself once in a while, sounds like fun!

But other than that, I feel really good about the community and I think they are excited to learn English and improve their businesses. They also want tourists, but I don´t think they know how much work it is going to take to actually get tourists to come. I´m sure I will be discussing work in later posts and I am running out of time, so I won´t go into the work aspects right now.

Hey, italics are gone. Whoa. Anyway, the town is really quite large and non-traditional, which may make things a little bit more difficult for my work and also for learning the language. Let´s put it this way, I was teaching Ngabere words to my host family because I know more than they do. Pretty ironic. Orlando also asked me to teach him to play chess, but it was hard for him to strategize and think ahead because critical thinking is just something that is not taught here.

I also got my new Ngabere name. It is Mechi, which is pronounce sort of like wedgie but with an M and the ch is soft like dg. I think that is how you would spell it anyway, I'm not really sure with all the funky pronounciation rules. But I'm going with it. The people in the tourism group gave me my name while we were climbing to the top of Cerro Plata, one of the hills that overlooks Chichica. It was a pretty nice view, and apparently Chichica is really really spread out, unfortunately for me. I wasn't really dressed for the occasion of hiking-- I was wearing a skirt and everything but they kind of sprung it on me after the tourism meeting. I'm really impressed that we had three actual organized meetings, that is really a rare occurance for the comarca. I think that these guys are going to be pretty serious about doing what they need to do to improve their town.

Pictures still aren't working now on this computer, will try again later. Until then, cheerio!