Photos From the Holiday Months - 2016

Photos 

A game I will only partake of once a year 

Panamanian day of independence

Day of the dead

Haloween 

Morning stretches with the gente 

Maddening meandering mandarin madness man

Waiting for the work day to start with Kempish

2.5 km of trenches. 1.5 ft deep

The muchachas make the trenches a place to sit-rus

Kempish's dream coffee! 3 spoonfuls of sugar for every cup!

The Bruces' really dug their time in Pita!

3 guys (men?) 

Kemper acts as Kyle's arms - to the delight of all 

Waiting out Hurricane Otto 

Unknown beautiful flower 

MiAmbiente meeting 

Laundry day.... 

The washing machine was especially flooded after hurricane Otto 

Carl's pals from the states came and visited! Carl made amazing tom kha soup 

Lots of rice 

Nolberto restin'

Sharing some tobacco with the gente

The three actual wise men 

Kids carrying tubes 

A pipeline I'm in favor of! 

Babies, and working on an updated census

Great great grandmother and great great grand daughter 

Wilson's first big kill!

Tita y Titachiquita's

September 26-

Tita had kittens three evenings ago... during the day, while I made dinner. I tried to be considerate and focus on dicing my onion, but couldn’t help but being fascinated and peeking over. Bets had floated around the community about how many Titachiquitas were growing in her bloated stomach, and news of the babies spread quickly, with the kids coming over the following day to see if they had been right. The five kittens make a constant chorus of premature meows that sound like seagulls in the distance. I am surely more preoccupied about their well being then Tita, who seems relatively ambivalent towards her blind pups.

October 1-

I left for four days for a one year celebration with the 30 other volunteers. I left the kittens in the neighbor's house, a 90+ year old lady, who has no children to mess with the kittens. My host family assured me that Tita would feed them. The other volunteers and I went to an all inclusive resort and ate plate after plate of delicious food, and threw our scraps in the mouths of garbage cans instead of starving dogs. I returned exhausted, stomach aching, feeling unsettled about having left, but excited to see the kittens. I made it to Pita and poked my head into my host family's house, and similar to the time my dog died the first thing I was told was that Tita had died. She had been tied up by a string and the string had tightened around her neck, killing her and subsequently all her kittens were eaten by a dog. Whenever I came home, she would accompany me to my house, walking behind me, pretending not to care. The death of animals is not unusual here, but as I have joked many times, she was my bosi, my gal, my only companera who I lived with, and I felt her absence immediately. My house was quiet, no seagulls in the distance, or gentle meow as Tita rubbed up against my ankles.

October 22 -

Wilson, the newest addition to la casa de Tikan, was recently carried up from Kuirima in the rain. He is a muchacho, but still likes to rock a fresh purple nagua.

Water Committee Seminars

“It’s a group of old jolly men,” I tell the volunteers that arrive each Tuesday to help me with Seminars for Cerro Pita’s Water Committee. Seven men and two women make up Cerro Pita’s Water Committee, with a mean age around 55. They are all cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, or nephews and act like they have known each other, and lived together their whole lives (which they have).

We have interactive class every Tuesday where we play games, learn about sanitation, leadership, conflict resolution, working in groups, collaborating with governmental agencies, professionalism, and technical information with regards to aqueducts. They’re not much different than college students, in that a few really want to learn, some sleep through class, and others are there just to scrape by. The seminar is written for a literate committee, and much of the committee is illiterate, so each Monday evening we modify the lesson plan to assure it is friendly for the whole committee.

Every member of the committee, along with the volunteers, brings something to contribute to a post seminar lunch or coffee break, which is prepared by a cook from the community. We have a coffee break in the middle and eat after five hours of seminar.

The Seminars are accompanied by lots of laughter, people breaking out of their shell (myself included as I open every seminar with a self composed guitar piece about the committee) and a few breakthrough moments for the participants that confirms the value of the whole seminar.

It's just a phase

When the degrees of separation reaches it's boiling point,

bonds break. Steam disconnects from water.

Is it just a phase, or is it a phase change?

Dressing the Cow

At the time I was reading All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. The classic western had me thinking about the expanse of the U.S. West: creosote, the desert, horses and cattle. I had grown up in the Southwest, where ranches cover the desert's expanse but I had passed most of my youth in the steep mountains or the city and had very little experience with cattle and horses.

I now live in what would not typically be considered cattle country, but my host family cares for a small herd of livestock. One day, as I ate my breakfast, I was summoned by my host brother to help dress a cow that had unexpectedly died in the jungle. The other men were at a community work day at the school, my host brother told me. He basically gave me no choice,  and told me that I needed to sharpen my grandfather's steel knife, put on my rubber boots, and follow him to where the cow had died, or the meat would spoil. We found the cow about 20 minutes from my house, rigamortis and cold. Earlier in the year I had watched the men hang a cow, and skin it in the early morning, but the cold and stiff cow was different. The skin was thick, and the beast was heavy and difficult to manipulate. My fourteen year old host brother led me through the process, and my host grandmother made a fire to keep the flies off the meat.  We worked until the early afternoon, removing cuts of meat until the bloated stomach and ribs remained. My clothes were covered in blood and sweat. I walked back to the house with a horse loaded with bags of meat. We made a few trips and I left my host grandma and brother to gut the cow and went home to rest. 

I showered in the creek and returned to my hammock. Then, similar to how I had been summoned in the morning, my younger host brother appeared and informed me that I was needed again. I put my boots back on and hiked down to where the cow had died. My host brother sat looking sour with my host grandma. "A bull also died," he said. I didn't believe it, but my mind began racing, thinking maybe some disease had hit the herd. He motioned to where we had skinned the cow. An undeveloped calf laid where the cow had been, the birth-sack having been cut open. My host brother said he didn't want to eat the unborn calf, my host grandmother argued the necessity of eating the meat. They seemed to have summoned me to settle the dispute. I sided with grandma, and skinned the calf, as my host brother refused to touch the baby bull. It's hard to think of an experience that would more readily inspire vegetarianism. When the work was done, I walked home, exhausted and having adopted the sour look of my host brother. 

I showered in the creek and returned to my hammock. The sun was setting now, and my mind was running with the images of the day. My host sister appears this time. She has a bowl of fresh beef and rice from the Comarca in her hand, and gives it to me. I have been in this situation before, receiving food that I am conflicted about accepting from my host sister. But this time, my hunger wins, the meat is tender and fresh and the classic western doesn't seem as far away as I open up it's pages after the sun has set. 

Rain. Water.

It was the perfect storm. The hill on the other side of the valley grew more and more opaque as the rain moved towards Pita. A cement tank I had made to store rain water sat elevated on a wooden table behind my house. A PVC gutter system would soon direct all the rainwater that fell on my zinc roof to fill its thirsty 60 gallon interior. My pants were caked in hardened cement, fingers sticky from PVC glue, my host brothers hands cracked and dry from helping me finish plastering the inside layer of cement a few days before. We sat on the porch, the thunder creating a drum roll that added to the excitement and anticipation. 

Patrick, a PCV friend had helped me create the table for the rainwater catchment system, carrying thick lumber to my house and helping me put it in the ground, and leveling the oddly shaped pieces of wood. Days later, I had carried sand and cement up to Pita on horse back with a friend from the community. On the trip, the horse had slipped on the loose mud, it's square pupils seeming to dilate in fear as I kept the rope in tension that wrapped around its muzzle, so it would not roll back down the hill. The form for the tank had been sewn by a dear grandma who lived up the hill. I had filled the cloth form with sawdust from a recently felled tree, and young men from around the community had helped me apply the ferrocement to the form. The tank had begun to take shape, and the kids would hide in its space, and butterfly's for some odd reason seemed to be attracted to its surface. With a group of four men we had moved the tank to the table, and finally on the morning of the perfect storm I had cut all the PVC, angling the cut so the rainwater would fall into the tank and not into my front yard. It had been a long morning, but the prospect of not having to carry water until the dry season kept my motivation high. 

The storm arrived, and the sound of the rain on the zinc almost drowned out the thunder. The rain fell on the corrugated roof, slid down the angled zinc to the PVC, and then proceeded to slide down the PVC... surprisingly and extremely unfortunately not into the tank but rather into my front yard. I was dumbfounded. I checked the angle of the cut on the PVC, the water should flow towards the tank, but for some odd reason was flowing up-hill and soaking my front yard instead of filling my sweet new tank.  The kids washed their hands in the stream of water that splashed on the mud. They smiled and laughed and showered in the water, and it seemed to be a brilliant success to them. The rain passed and I climbed up to the roof, placed a level on the steel, and confirmed that the roof was angled downhill, away from the tank. A level roof, predictability, and any typical assumptions simply cannot be made in the campo, yet another lesson, and a new gutter system would have to be imagined. 

Panaversary

Panaversary

June 17, 2016

One year has officially passed within the boarders of the isthmus between the Americas. In many ways, I still span between my two lives, one being my family and friends back in the United states and the other, my Panamanian family of volunteers, my host family, community members and other Panamanians. 

I am in Boquete, the comfortable mountain town which provides the internet, power, and amenities that I need to finish the design of Cerro Pita's aqueduct. I extract information from my dirt caked journal, and input  it into Excel and struggle with incompatible operating systems. The design is unfolding, and weeks of studies with the gente are producing valuable information.

As I reflect on my reflection of the last year, I notice myself wanting to use cliches you often hear from PCV's or Returned PCV's: "the Peace Corps will change you", "high highs, and low lows", "the most valuable and cherished memories are within your community", "two years is a long time, but it will be have passed before you know it".

The previous five years I had spent with young students with bright eyes looking towards an comfortable future. The world was a microcosm of privilege and health and support. That has changed. Now I feel like an uncle to a large family,  the grandson of aging indigenous grandparents, and a co-worker with various idealistic old men who are trying to navigate a world full of unfamiliar influences. My house is filled with chalk drawings made by giggling children and visitors are often the age of my parents or older. I interact with the many stages of life on a daily basis. I see the youthful blissfulness in the kids who flop on my wood floor, the tension in the eyes of young men who realize the uphill battle to fit unto the outside world, the suspicion in the expressions of adults who are being told some of their habits are causing illness, and the surprise in the smile of an ancient lady who speaks ngabere to a gringo for presumably the first time. What they see in me are unusual blue eyes, likely sparkling with support and privilage, but also pupils dilating to absorb a wider picture of humanity. Wrinkles form around my eyes, some from the endless smiles and laughter inspired by the kids and jubilant conversations by firelight, and others from the intensity of the Panamanian sun, that brightens and warms the world but also finds a way to illuminate the shadows. 

An anaversary is welcome, and I'm happy to have passed a year in Panama, but look forward to the unpredictable memories to be made in the year to come. 

Recent happenings include: learning to dress a cow (very hands on), salting and smoking beef, helping develop a climbing area in the comarca, and finishing up with the design of the aqueduct 

...

With my speedy internet I included a few photos from the last few months!

 Tita, la gatita, with her cat door cut with a leatherman into the wooden board. 

RnB

Work day. Sitting around, talking about the work to be done

Ricardo- the prez and the first lady Elena

 Pita's premier swimming hole

 Dried badger?

 Abran, smiles as long as he is awake... Maybe longer

 Fishin'

 One year old already running errands 

Tita sleeps with an invisible pillow

Onorio jamming out 

 Meat for sale

 The killing of a cow is a community event. Free range, grass-fed beef, cheaper than the Kroger stuff in Safeway

Smoking corned beef 

 Fancy smoke bed

Edjo

 Ricardo looking fly at the PC leadership workshop

 Comarca Volunteers

Map of Pita

Dinner

Lucy, a new addition to the family

Chaco, Abuela, Chich, and floating veggies

House of children

No need to wait until 16 to drive the family car

Bone broth soup

Fishin'

Waterfalls on our arduous hike to Pita

Comarca Capital in the back!

First bolt in the Comarca!

Climbing potential