Krene nibi tie - Tengo pereza - Ich bin faul

My neighbors´ cows in the monte behind my house


pretty flowers






My neighbor´s hammock strung up in the mango tree


My sea shell mobile that I made on my day at home


Blind art!




A close-up of the weave of my hat


The church in Tolé


Ñantori ja mräkä, Greetings to all my friends and family from here in the Comarca! Let´s see, what have I done this week? Good question, let me consult my handy dandy agenda. According to my agenda, I have learned some German from Mile. Ich heisse Jenny. Ich spreche Englisch, Spanisch, und Ngäbere. Ich lerne Deutsch. Ich lebe in Panama. Null eins zwei drei vier fünf sechs sieben acht neun zehn elf zwölf dreizehn vierzehn fünfzehn sechzehn siebenzehn achtzehn neunzehn zwanzig einundzwanzig etc. Was bedeutet das?

It was also Valentines Day, which is the first year that I have had a boyfriend on this day but unfortunately was unable to be with him. I pretended that we were going to go eat pizza and then go to the beach, that was my imaginary Valentines date.

Due to the numerous protests about the mine that the canadians want to open up in the comarca, I have been restricted in my travel. Not that I was going to travel anyway, but I was restricted by Peace Corps because the protests closed the highway. Actually today I was going to go to Cerro Punta and climb the mountain but Mile wussed out on me! He says that he has meetings on Friday and Saturday. . . so much for climbing the cerro. But I will be going to David on Tuesday for his birthday so I will see him then.

English classes have officially died. I have pulled the plug after maintaining the poor things on life support virtually from birth, and they are expiring without a struggle. And I am never going to waste any more time on them again here! If anyone wants anything to do with English, they can come to me but I am not going to make any more wasted efforts on my part. I can tell that I am beginning to get a case of senioritis. I would still have a ton of enthusisam if my community would work with me, but as it is, I don´t care anymore either and I feel really lazy. So I will do what work presents itself but I want to enjoy the rest of my time here and not worry about working on stuff that will never fly anyway.

The last few days I went to the colegio to try and finish painting the panama map mural that has ended up taking a long time because I never have time to get around to it. So I spent like 12 hours on it this week, and it is getting closer but I decided to write the names of all the towns on it and that is going to take FOREVER! Thanks to my padres for the paint markers, they are working smashingly. I still want to do the world map too, but I need to get on it soon and make it more of a priority than I have made of this mural.

While I was painting there were some Ngäbe kids that came up to me and were bothering me, really bratty snots. They were making fun of me, looking in my bags and asking me to give them money and markers and water and basically anything that I had. It ends up that one of them stole a couple of my lovely paint markers, and it is likely that they won´t know how to get it working and will throw them away. Oh well. Anyway, they asked me if they could help paint. All day I had been trying to get someone to help me paint because the people around here will stand around all day watching someone do something rather than offer to help, and I had asked several people if they wanted to help but said no. So when I got an offer, even if it was from the brats, I said yes. I figured they couldn´t mess up painting triangles too much, so I let them help because maybe it would be good for them and they would be less bratty. They did ok at first and then just got too messy so I had to go back behind them and fix what they did, so it really saved me no time at all. And then they stole my markers. Brats.

The other day I was waiting for a meeting with the tourism group that I had been told about the night before, so I walked reluctantly up the hill and waited for about a half hour before Lilia sent her kid over to tell me that the meeting would be next monday. Heavy sigh. As I was walking back toward my house, Jess called and invited me to lunch at Recilia´s house where she is living still (due to the fact that they have not gotten her house built, or even started for that matter, I would be pissed if I were her). So I walk over and as I come to the door Tatiana, Efigenio, and Jess apparently they were talking about me and Mile, and Efigenio got embarrassed when he was caught in the act! But then I got grilled about it, when we are getting married, where will we live, what will my firstborn child´s name be, etc. This is why I have been avoiding mentioning that I have a boyfriend in my town, thank you very much! Oh well again. So Tatiana invited us to go to the river the next day, which neither Jess nor I felt like going but accepted anyway. So on our way down to the river we stopped at a supposed birthday party that really hadn´t even started yet, they were still just starting making the food. And Jess decided that she didn´t want to go to the river until she got food, but by that time it was late and I am sure that they were mad at us for not going. Ugh, oh well once more.

Also during this week I sat around at home doing abosulutely nothing for two days in a row, other than occasionally doing a few chores. It was wonderful! I made a mobile out of the seashells I have collected at the beach. Loli told me that I had better keep it in the house because everyone was going to want it because it was so great and would steal it. I thought that was funny, but I decided that it probably was better to keep it inside due to the wind that would break it, rather than all the seashell mobile thieves out there. I also have plans to experiment with making clay pots like they used to do around here. I want to find out if anyone still knows how or even what kind of clay they used.

Well, that is the gist of my last ten days or so. Hope that you found it worth the while to read about, otherwise you have just wasted ten minutes of your life that you could have otherwise wasted watching youtube.

Aufwiedersehn!