Regional Meeting in Chiriquí

Buenos dias my fine friends, it hasn´t been that long since I posted last time. But I will do so again anyway.

First of all, apparently I was supposed to stay in David and get an H1N1 flu shot but I did not realize this and headed on over to the Lost and Found Hostel in the mountains in Chiriquí. Therefore, I missed the regional meeting because they decided to have it in David and then everyone was going to head on up to Lost and Found afterwards. So I went hiking instead of sitting in a meeting and getting a vaccine. Ha ha, in your face! However, I am supposed to get the shot sooner or later. I guess I may go in and do it in a couple weeks while I am already in Panama.

So anyway, while I was waiting I hiked up to the overlook where you can see the Pacific Ocean and Costa Rica. It was very windy. As I was walking through the woods a lot of the trees were swaying and even lifting their roots around in the soil. It added an interesting dynamism to the whole experience. While waiting some more, I took a little IQ test that they had sitting around, which says I have an IQ of 132 if anyone is interested. Then some volunteers actually started showing up so I talked with them for a while. I ate some of the chili that the hostel prepared, and while it was expensive ($4) it was tasty, I have been wanting some real chili for quite some time now. It was really quite cold up there, the wind was blowing like crazy and with the wind chill it felt like about 40 degrees at least, which is quite cold after being in 90 to 100 degrees all the time.

I went to bed around 11 while everyone else stayed up drinking until all hours, which gave me the advantage of having my choice of showers and plenty of hot water in the morning. Then I went on a tour to a small organic coffee plantation, owned by this guy name Cune. He is the guy in the hat in the picture. Anyway, everyone calls him crazy because he has been experimenting with organic farming for about 20 years now and is now fully certified organic, which is quite rare in Panama. Included in the tour was a breakfast and lunch that was made entirely from things produced on his farm. For breakfast we had cheese, blackberries, oranges, pineapple, and of course coffee. Cune was really excited because we all spoke spanish (except for this British couple that happened to be there with us, so they needed translations by ex-PCV Nico who has decided to stay in Panama and work at the Lost and Found) and as a result we got a more indepth tour because he explained more to us apparently than he ever has before, says Nico. We crushed some sugarcane and made lemonade with the juice, it was pretty tasty. Where else are you going to get fresher lemonade than cutting down the sugarcane and picking and squeezing some "limones" in the monte (I´ve decided that everyone in Panama doesn´t know the difference between lemons and limes, if it is really sour then everything is a lemon, even though this particular lemon was a blood orange, my favorite for chicha). Then we climbed up a giant strangler fig, which was growing almost horizontally. Lunch was rice and kidney beans, spaghetti (doubling up on carbs of course), salad of lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and onion, and spicy chicken. He made it picante for us gringos. I´ve been shown several coffee farms before, but I always learn something new every time I see one.

The rest of the day I kind of just hung out reading. The Bocas del Toro group came up last night for their regional meeting, and they are much more of a partying group than the Comarca people so I preferred to relax in the dorm room. The beds were triple decker bunks, but you could almost stand up in the beds so the top bunk was like a story and a half tall, and I was on the top. It was kind of cool, but a little dizzying if you look down. Nobody can even see if you are up there so I just hung out there until I got too sleepy to read, which again was 11:00. These days I just can´t handle late nights, even with electricity.

This morning I came back to David, but since it is Carnival I think I will have a hard time finding a place to stay. We´ll see. More updates after the Teaching English as a Foreign Language Seminar in Changinola, Bocas del Toro. ¡Chao!