Muchas cosas

the neighbors in San Felix next to the regional leader house, a nice little pair of grandparents


The old regional leader house that we no longer have, since nobody wants to be regional leader


Me and my kitty relaxing in the hammock, one of our favorite activities


Guarav, the volunteer in Boca de Macho in the Comarca, proudly showing off his first-born (his first home-brewed batch of chicha fuerte)


Chicha yet to be fuerte


Guarav´s house and garden

Hey everyone, here I am again. It has been a couple weeks, and fairly eventful. I´m not sure I will be able to write it all. Well, here I go.

Tuesday Last: I gave a little lesson on values upon request of one of the teachers at the high school, which seemed to go ok, and then gave English class. Kind of. Well, a couple people showed up, but it was enough to go on (aka more than one person).

Wednesday: I wanted to go to my garden and wash my clothes, but slept in late and still needed to prepare for my classes in the afternoon, so that´s what I did. I also was coming down with an infection in my face by my ear, for which I began taking extra antibiotics. I am currently taking doxycycline daily for my chronic skin infections (without them acne goes way out of control) and as anti-malaria meds, but I hadisome minocycline that I brought from the states as emergency antibiotics and I have started taking those as well so I wouldn´t have to go to the doctor. It has succeeded in getting rid of the infection.
Anyway, that day I had English class and Elige Tu Vida, the course at the high school. The girls were still refusing to participate and attendance has dropped by 50%, but that is to be expected. Also again only two teachers showed up for the English class. I had them plan a vacation in Panama so they could explain what they would like to do and where to go, which was actually a pretty good activity for just two of them.

Thursday: The big baile for the night school. I stopped by the pastor´s house to chat before heading over to the party (they live next door). They were afraid they wouldn´t get any sleep that night, with good reason, and told me how they disapproved of so many people getting drunk and wasting so much money on booze (I am also of their opinion, that is a lot of money just to pass out in the mud). So then I headed over to the dance, where I listened to the cantadera. The cantadera is kind of an improvised song competition where three singers take turns improvising words to set music. I like the cantadera for the first round, but there are ten rounds. Consider that each round lasts for like 15 minutes, not including any breaks they take in between, and that the music is almost the exact same during the whole time, it gets old pretty quick. So I sat there listening to that as it got dark. It was drizzling too, so the whole place quickly got very muddy from everyone walking around. Anyway, I talked to some people there, mostly the professors.
By the way, I think I have a suitor in one of the professors that attends my English classes. He is not an English teacher but a science teacher, and he speaks pretty decent English. He is also the first panamanian male that is expressing interest in me that doesn´t involve telling me that I have "eyes like a doll" or "eyes like a puddle in summer" or "precious thighs" (I got that one the other day from one of the chiva drivers that reminds me of a beardless panamanian Santa Claus but is just a dirty old man). This teacher, on the other hand, appears to actually want to get to know me and is much more respectful. He is also single, 25 years old, and seems to be a pretty nice person who I would like to get to know better as well, which is another advantage he has over every other man around here. So we´ll see what happens with this.
Anyway, back to the party. After the cantadera there was yet another queen pagent, but this one was for the night school. So they danced around waving their arms some more wearing tight gaudy dresses and sang off-key for their talents. This torture lasted another two hours. By now people were getting fairly drunk and happy, one of the teachers that teaches in Cerro Cruz informed me that she was "super bien". I was getting hungry so I went in search of the food that they were selling, braving the inches of slippery mud up the hill. So I bought some sancocho (chicken soup) and rice, and carried it back down to where the was a place to sit. I am amazed I didn´t fall, and extremely grateful. So I talked some more, and finally the pageant ended and the dancing began. I was talking to Mile, my "suitor", who hates Panamanian tipico music (I am not really a fan myself) when the chiva pavo (the guy who hangs off the back of the chiva and helps people in and out and tells the driver to stop) who has a crush on me asked me to dance. I tried to get out of it by saying that I can´t dance (entirely true) but no luck. By the way, he only comes up to about my shoulder, and I can only imagine what a sight we were as he was jamming out to the salsa with me trying to keep up. I was able to avoid dancing any more that night, and soon I headed back home, halfway falling down in the process of leaving the area because of all the mud. I was amazed that the drunk people were getting around so successfully in all that muck.

Friday: I relaxed this day and just did a little visiting, including a trip back to the pastor´s wife to give her some cloth to sew me a nagwa. The party was still going strong at that point.

Saturday: Tourism meeting at the school. Only one person showed up, but we had a pretty good discussion on ideas for tourism in the area and the strengths and weaknesses of the community for developing a project.

Sunday: I went to the school to attend the meeting of the women´s group, but it happened to be the day that they were paying the bonos, which is pretty much everyone´s wellfare check. There were tons of people there, as well as selling a lot of stuff to the newly rich Ngäbes, but of course no meeting. It is amazing how everyone will line up for hours to recieve their bono, but to attend a meeting for a project that would greatly increase their economic wellfare? Why do a thing like that? So I bought a fish for lunch (I asked for one fish, and the fish vendor responded, one pound of fish? No, I just wanted un solo pescado, which is apparently crazy talk.)

Monday: Again, bonos were being paid, so there were tons of people and vendors. I, however, was in search of a phone card so I could utilize my modern communication technology. I also hung out with Reicilia, the president of the women´s group and took a look at her new house she is building. It is huge, and made out of cinder blocks with cement floor and zinc roof. It must be costing a lot of money, but I guess she and her husband are both teachers and must make a decent living. Then I went home and practiced the guitar and cleaned house. Slowly but surely, I am improving on the guitar. Not that I can really play anything much, but I am getting better nonetheless with what little I practice.

Tuesday: I got a call from one of the English teachers telling me that it would be better if I didn´t show up for class because they were all going to be too busy preparing for English week. I decided to go on up anyway because otherwise I would have nothing to do, so I found the would-be busy teachers playing bingo at the school. So I joined the game and won three dollars. After bingo a basketball game ensued, so I joined that as well. Fortunately nobody plays basketball well here, so we were all bad together and it was really fun, but I had to leave because it was getting dark and I still had to walk home. So much for English, guess I´ll just hang out for the next year messing around like this!

Wednesday: I was invited to lead some games for the closing ceremony of English Week at the high school, and I also was asked to say the opening prayer (fortunately in English, I suck at praying in Spanish) and also to be the sole judge for the English week queen (what is with all these queens?) So I got to listen to the responses to the question, What would you do to save the planet? The first girl gave a short, simple, correct response. The second girl was so nervous that she forgot what she was going to say for about 30 seconds before finally remembering what she was going to say. The third girl gave a longer, more developed response. The fourth girl couldn´t remember anything and pulled out a piece of paper and read her response, poorly I might add (this same girl, a couple days earlier, came up to me and lied that she needed to interview someone in English with the question What would you do to save the planet? I knew that they were planning on using this question, so I told her "not throw trash" which she didn´t understand and would have been utterly useless as a response. Ha ha!) They handed out a bunch of prizes for the winners of the various English competitions, which included dictation, short answers, and writing sentences. The teachers choose their favorite students to compete and give them a certain text to study. It really is a pathetic affair, seeing how little English the students really can handle, even the supposed best students who have been studying English for years. Then I lead two rounds of bingo in English while they served food.
After that was Elige Tu Vida, and only four girls showed up this time. I think I scared them off by trying to get them to participate, but the boys were all pretty enthusiastic still. This lesson was about choosing a career. Unfortunately it is difficult making everyone understand the activities, because they only seem to get it when I explain things one on one as opposed to in front of the whole class, and if there are 20 students then we spend the whole time with me going from student to student explaining things that they don´t end up really understanding anyway. From what I can see they don´t generally get the main point of the lessons much of the time, but at least it gets the idea out there and they are having fun.
It was raining hard when I got out of that class, and English class was implicitly canceled, but Mile and Raul were sitting outside so I talked to them for a while waiting for the rain to lessen.

Thursday: Other tourism meeting, this time with the government tourism agency coming to begin working with us. Fortunately we had some people actually show up this time. So we have established relations with them anyway and have set up another meeting to get an action plan and a money solicitation ready. I hope that people will actually show up to the next one, and the ones that want to work if there is any such person in the entire region. I have drafted a training plan in general tourism practices and projects that we will need to do to prepare for tourism, in conjunction with English classes. I just hope I will be able to use it.

Friday: I left Chichica around 7:00 to go give a sex ed charla in Boca de Macho, where another volunteer named Guarav lives. As I was on the chiva heading to Tolé, a mute man jumped on. He communicated by laughing and by hand gestures, and held animated conversations with a couple people with pure hand motions all while hanging off the back of the truck. I am not sure if he was deaf as well, but nobody said a word to him. He changed the whole mood of the chiva though, everyone was smiling while watching him and he just radiated happiness.
Then while waiting for the chiva to Guarav´s site this young woman struck up a conversation with me. She explained how much she wanted to learn English and how she always got good grades in English in school, and she wanted to see something I had written in English. I asked her if she understood it, and told me that she did, more or less. Then I asked her in English what her name was, and she had no idea what I was saying. So she asked me to come to her house in San Juan so I could teach her English, and I asked her in English for her phone number so I could contact her, but she didn´t understand that either. Of course I don´t intend to call her, but I just wanted to appease her. She was kind of what you would call "impertinente" anyway.
So I get to Guarav´s site and we spent the afternoon making chicha fuerte because he wanted to learn how to do it. It was a rather boring activity, but we talked between ourselves and with other passing people as we did it. First you have to soak the corn and let it sprout, then you grind it up, add water, and boil for a couple hours. Then you add more water and sugar, and let it ferment a couple days. He was so excited to be making his first batch of chicha, and wants to make it when he goes home (which is is due to go in about 5 weeks). We are also planning on hiking Baru volcano in a couple weeks, and I might go with him to a festival in Los Santos the weekend after. Also there for the charla was Meredith and Dave, who explained to us the many challenges of said volcano hike and gave us much advice.

Saturday: Guarav had told the people that the charla would be at 8:00 a.m., so hopefully they would arrive by around 10:00. So we got up and ate and prepared ourselves until around 9:00, and then we started waiting around for people to show up. 10:00 came and went and still no people. Meredith seemed to have contracted pink eye sometime during the night (poor girl, she has had horrible luck with her health and always has something or other) so since people weren´t showing up she left to go to the doctor and get some antibiotics. Just as she was leaving, a few people showed up so we waited a little longer to see what happened. When there were about 7 people we began the charla, and once we began people kept stopping by until we had around 20-25 people there. So we actually ended up having the charla and it went pretty well. Dave left after we ate, but I ended up staying another night there because I needed to use the computer in Tolé and there wouldn´t have been enough time that same day. So we just went visiting around the community during the afternoon and talked for a while. Guarav is a nice guy, but he is one of the dirtiest people I have ever met. Just because you live in a house with a dirt floor and thatch roof doesn´t mean that you should never clean anything you own. He had never once cleaned his stove (yikes) and has been using the same sponge to wash his dishes for a year now, which has diminished to the size of a gumball. Ewww.

Sunday (Today): I left Boca de Macho, checked my e-mail, and wrote this! Whew, lots of stuff to say, poco tiempo para decirlo. Until next time!