Gobble Gobble

I´ve been in Panama for a about three and a half months now, and it recently occured to me I´ve already seen so much more of the country than most of the people I´ve met in it. Three of the four siblings in my first host-house have never been farther than Changuinola, Bocas´s main city, which is about 80 minutes away from my site by bus. This is true for many adults in the community as well. Only a few have ever been to Panama City, and even fewer have been anywhere else.


Which make me grateful for the opportunities I´ve had to travel around during my short time here, and especially so because I was able to head to the mountains this week to a town called Cerro Punta, near Panama´s only volcano,Volcan Baru, and highest peak. It´s frequented quite regularly by tourists, as the hiking trails on and around Volcan Baru are the best the country has to offer. It´s also known for its strawberries, with farms lying around every bend in the winding roads, and street-side stores selling strawberry jams, breads, milkshakes, and everything in between. The area feels distinctly un-Panama-like however. The weather was cool. I wore a sweater both days. The homes, stores, and lodges are all vaguely-European looking. Many of us felt as if we´d somehow landed in some forgotten Swiss town, and had to keep reminding ourselves that we were in Panama.

It was a treat to see all of my Group 64 volunteers again, and also to meet dozens of other volunteers from other sectors and regions around the country. We ate delicious breakfasts, with yogurt, granola, fresh fruit, and strong, sweet coffee every day. I couldn´t believe what I was eating, after existing for a month on a diet that consists of little more than rice, boiled green bananas, canned sardines and the occasional legume.

Thanksgiving dinner was an incredible site, and an even more spectacular culinary experience. Trays of food just kept coming from the kitchen. Platters of turkey and ham were endlessly refilled. Pumpkin pies lined both sides of the table, with vats of freshed whipped cream standing by. Heaven-sent green-bean casserole, cranberry sauce, apple crisp, garlic mashed potatoes, squash, sinfully rich hot chocolate made from Panama cacao. You name it, I ate it. Absolutely no restraint was shown on the part of any volunteer. I ate so much that I was in considerable pain for hours after. This is not a complaint. I was the happiest I´ve been, belly protruding and largely immobile on the couch. Some other volunteers somehow had the energy to dance after dinner. The owner of the lodge cleared the floor, and a full-on dance party ensued, which I watched while I digested and thought about how often it feels like I live in two very different worlds. The restrained, and sometimes solemn Ngobe/volunteer life, and the other one, when I´m with other volunteers, feeling entirely human, normal and comfortable in this tiny S-shaped country that we all (some grudgingly) have come to love.

I slept in a bed, took hot showers, drank unlimited amounts of coffee from the lodge, relaxed, and took in the scenery. It was an idyllic two days, and was a great reminder of all there is to be thankful for, especially when many of us come from communities where there isn´t enough food for everyone.

I am returning to site this afternoon, and on Sunday, will be moving in with my second host family. The house if further from the road, and more isolated in the community, but it will be a great opportunity to get to know new neighbors, take in some killer ocean views, and take advantage of the fact that the señor of the house has tapped a nearby spring, and there is always water running through the pipes.

Shamless promotion

Darling readers,

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Gone fishing

Many of you may know that my greatest fear in life is fish. The living ones, of course. The dead ones are just tasty. It´s an irrational fear at best, but I´ve spent all my life with one foot planted firmly in a world of my imagination, and there? Fish pose a big threat.

You can imagine, then, why I was less-than-thrilled to accept an invitation to go fishing with Seña, my beloved neighbor who has already declared me her other daughter. But as my Proyecto Amistad (Project Friendship) rolls on, I try never to turn down an invitation.

You can also imagine my horror when Seña arrived at my doorstep and I saw what they fish with here: nothing more than fishing line wrapped around a discarded water bottle. While I´d never been a fan of stateside fishing, the pole always offered a comforting distance between predator and prey. What we had here seemed like a decidedly more contact-heavy endeavor.

No matter. I sallied forth, knowing Seña would be patient and forgiving, even though we were fishing for her family´s dinner. We walked down narrow paths in the direction of the Carribean, surrounded on both sides by cacao trees. We spent an hour wading through the river, gently overturning rocks and hoping to find shrimp to use for bait. I failed greatly in this task, managing to collect only a half-dozen babies, with a net. Seña, the expert, found dozens and was able to snatch most of them before they scurried away among slimy leaves and mini-caves formed by rocks too large to move.

Carrying our bait in a bucket, we made our way upstream and got to work. Standing on the banks of the river in my rubber waders, I hopelessly cast my line into the shallow waters. I stood by helplessly as Seña jerked fish after fish out of the water. The fish she caught were small, but she caught many, digging her thumb into the gills of each one, and snapping its head back to break its spine. A slight trickle of blood would drip down its scales as she unceremoniously tossed it into the bucket.

After several hours of this, and me with several bites and no hooks, Seña thought it was time to kick it up a notch. She wanted me to see the ocean up close. Despite the many beautiful ocean views my community offers, I´d never been taken down to the shore. We waded through the putrid, sand-fly infested mangroves in the direction of the ocean.

Please note, at this time I was rather thirsty and hungry. Having not realized that fishing was a day-long endeavor, I left the house at 7a.m. without my water bottle. I tried to disguise my displeasure with the malodorous mangroves as Seña paused occasionally, dangling her hook into impossibly small pockets of water. She snatched up a black, two-to-four-inch fishes within seconds, and threw them on top of the other dead ones in her happy yellow bucket.

So on we marched until suddenly, the mangroves came to an abrupt hault and we stood with an unobstructed view of the crystalline Caribbean ocean. I wedged my machete into a tree branch, and was prepared to take a rest and enjoy the view.

"Cati, let´s go!" Seña said in Ngobere, smiling, waving her arm in the direction of the ocean.

We were standing on the edge of the mangroves. Fish were flopping in the water below, and men in dugout canoes were paddling in from their own morning of fishing. I´d recently read baracudas love the shallow waters around mangroves, and was trying to push the idea out of my mind.

"Um, where are we going?"

"We´re going fishing!"

This happens a lot. People half-answer a question without really answering it. Before I had time to rephrase, Seña, pregnant no less, was thigh-deep in the water, holding out an outstreched hand. We were going to fish in the ocean. Now this is a contact sport, I thought. And so we waded, and waded, and waded, until we were a few hundred feed from the shore, though the water never reached much past our hips. In the shallower areas, I saw a fish flirt with my bait, watched him steal it, and then vowed to think twice before I accepted a fishing invitation again. Seña caught a few more fish, bemoaned my bad luck, and we waded back to shore, where we drank some sugary coffee and ate a couple of pieces of bread that she´d been carrying in her bag.

All in all, the day turned out all right. I went fishing again this week, where I was allowed the sole responsiblity of guarding the fish we (read: Seña and two of her six children) caught. This time, she stored them on a stick, threading them through the kills and mouth and leaving them there to dangle. As I extracted a set of teeth that had become lodged in the bloody stick, and felt the weight of the carcasses hanging below, I thought perhaps I´m getting used to this. Maybe one day I´ll catch one. And until I do, I know Seña will still call to me from her kitchen, inviting me over for the surprisingly delicious fish soup she makes, or the cocount rice she serves with the catch of the day.

At the intersection of four languages

One of the things that makes Bocas so unique is its varied cultural history, which today results in the rich blend of Spanish, Caribbean, European, and indigenous influence seen throughout the province.

Language is part of that unique blend. Each day, someone tries out their limited reserve of English phrases with me, but many times I don´t even realize they´re speaking my language because the pronounciations are so garbled.

"Gerd marning, herr you!?"

Whenever someone asks me to teach them an English word or phrase, they always repeat it back to me in a strange voice, peppering it with superfluous ´r´s. I´ve yet to figure this out, as Spanish doesn´t sound like that either, but it always makes for an interesting lesson. They take little offense to my grins or giggles. They enjoy themselves just as much when I stumble over my Spanish.

Then there´s Guary-Guary (I don´t know how to spell this and my half-hearted Google searching turns up nothing), a Creole-infused English, some colonial left-over with a nearly indecipherable accent. Guary-Guary is spoken choppily, lips thrust forward, and with hardly any mouth movement. Sometimes it´s easy to understand, but certain words are unrecognizable. "Cow" is pronounced more like "Go," and if you say "Cow?" they usually can´t confirm whether we´re talking about the same animal, leaving me to ask, "Vaca? Nivi?" in Spanish and Ngobere, respectively. "Yes, go!," they respond affirmatively.

Not many people in my village speak Guary-Guary, and I am still unsure of where they learned it and why. My host parents speak a bit of it, and it´s their chosen dialect when they fight because their kids don´t understand. And because they don´t understand normal English, I think they believe I am also in the dark.

"Dees es ho yoo treat me!?"

But oh, I know.

Then we have Ngobere. I yet to officially begin my lessons with my neighbor. Despite his intial enthusiasm and impromptu lessons on my site visit, he´s been dragging his feet lately. I´m eager to get started, because many people here, especially the older women, insist on speaking to me only in dialect. I can tell people my name, ask where they´re going, comment on the whether, but can say little much else. Frequently, when I pasear with a guide, I speak to the families in Spanish for 15-20 minutes, and then everyone lapses seamlessly into Ngobere, leaving me with nothing to do but sit, watch the rain, and wonder how it is that I have to wrap my mind around not one, but two languages.

Then, of course, there´s Spanish, which I navigate comfortably, more or less. I have a harder time deciphering the rapid Spanish of the Latino teachers and school principal. But I understand well and am well-understood (mostly) among my community members. It helps that I am here in the country, where people speak a brand of Spanish which could generously be assessed as imperfect. It´s as if I went to Appalachia to learn how to speak English. And whenever someone tries to speak to me in English, I respond in Spanish, partly because it´s what I believe I should be doing, but mostly because I usually can´t understand their English.

As I´ve said before, there is certainly a lot to see here in Panama. But there´s also a lot to hear.

Gringa in the finca

As I continue to introduce myself to community members, I always explain that I´m looking for activities to do each day with them, so I´m not sitting inside all day. I ask them to invite me to events, or over to their houses to learn how to cook chicha de pifa, anything at all, I say, because I still know so little about their lives. When I told my host-father that I would go with him to his finca and harvest cacao, he interrupted saying, ¨Cati, wait.¨I waited, indulging his dramatic pause. ´´If I invite you to the finca, you will come and work with us?¨ His expression said it all. He can´t believe the things this gringa says sometimes.

Two days later, I was hiking with them to their other house (por alla arriba), close to their farmland. Finca is translated as farm or field, but the idea of a finca is quite unique to Panama. No visible boundaries exist, though everyone knows exactly where their finca begins and ends, and how many hectares they have. Nothing is planted neatly, in fact, you´d never know you were hiking through farmland if you weren´t looking for it.

We spent the afternoon, harvesting through the rain and fighting with the mud. One person knocked the cacao from the trees with a large stick, with a pick attached to the end, while I and my host-sister followed behind, loading them into our chakaras (woven bags made by Ngobes). We pick up every piece, even ones that seem like they were rotted through or picked over by birds. We shook them to see if the seeds moved inside, and if they did, it meant there was still something harvestable inside. They laughed while I wrapped the handle around my head and carried the weight on my back like they do. I had been nervous at first, imagining it would put a tremendous stress on my head and neck, but indeed, it does not, and is really the only way carry a heavy weight practically through narrow trails and muck.

Sometimes I would find myself grumbling, that I was soaked to the bone, had fallen at least 150 times in the mud, or pricked myself on one of the many spiny trees that are oh-so-tempting to grab when you´re trying to climb up an impossibly slippery slope. I would rack my brain wondering how they never fall, and do all of this in bare feet and skirts. And then I would notice a giant, towering tree, left over from what used to be primary forest. Or a neon-green and black frog would dart out from under a log. It´s easy to get frustrated sometimes, thinking about how there might not be water to bathe with when I get home, or that I feel sick from eating a strange food, but I never let myself stay that way for long. There are too many things to appreciate. I hope I never stop seeing how beautiful it is here.

We piled all of the day´s harvest among a bunch of logs, where they would be left until the next day, when they would be peeled, dried, and eventually brought to Almirante, a nearby port city, and sold. In the 80s, my host father was earning close to $2.50 per pound, but now he only earns about 50 cents. An incredible amount of work goes into each piece harvested; it´s unbelieveable to me that that´s all it´s worth.

So, how´s Panama?

I think I spent most of my first week in site in a semi-conscious daze. I have kept surprisingly busy, with something to do each day, if not all day, and have so far had good experiences interacting with the people here. Still, my mind wanders easily. I can block out background Spanish with remarkable efficiency, and I get lost thinking about how I got here, how impossible a task my work seems sometimes, and what all my friends and family are doing back home. It has been surreal for sure.

I am slowly re-adjusting to life with another host family. I have been met by incredibly generous people and families in my (almost!) three months in Panama, and the family I live with now is no exception. My 10-year-old host brother Caesar has the most contagious smile, and will sit with me for hours asking about what life is like ¨por alla¨in the U.S. He fancies himself my chaperone whenever I leave the house, escorting me two minutes to the public telephone, and waiting patiently while I babble away in English, grinning up at me all the while. My family gets endless enjoyment out of watching me fall in the mud, which happens several times a day, but they usually stop laughing long enough to ask if I´m okay.

Being under the miscroscope for all this time though has its frustrations. Ngobes in particular have a habit of staring long past what would be considered appropriate in the United States. I have to keep myself from snapping at my 16-year-old host brother when he arrives at my window to silently observe what I´d hoped would be my only 15 minutes of alone time.

My biggest obstacle has been the sanitation situation. No one washes their hands, dishes are only rinsed, and flies crawl all over food, utensils, and bowls, depositing who-knows-what and possibly laying eggs as well. When the 1-year-old has diarrhea, it gets rubbed over the concrete floor with a wet mop, without soap or bleach. My host mother absentmindedly cleans it up and goes right back to cooking.

I am trying to strike a balance between brainstorming household education techniques and also ignoring certain things in order to keep the fecal-oral transmission charts from haunting my every vacant thought.

I´ve already made a point about washing my hands as much as possible, or risinging dishes when I´ve seen flies on them. But the solutions to these problems aren´t as easy as you´d think. At home, you fill up a five-gallon bucket with water, pour in some cleaner, and mop your floor. (Better yet, your one-year-old wears diapers!) At home, you know your dishes are clean because you take them out of the dish washer yourself and put them safely into a clean cabinet. Here, without running water in the house, implementing sanitation efforts is much more challenging. Studies have shown that having more water available is more effective in reducing diarrhea and disease than water treatment itself, for example. Usually the first solution should be more water, not better water.

So you can see how sometimes life here seems surreal. For those of you who are as panicked about my health as my mother was when she heard all of this, don´t be. I chose to live in three separate houses during my first three months, and I visited my second house the other day. I was delighted to find out they have a latrine, an ocean view, and what appears to be an approved standard of cleanliness. And when you are an environmental health volunteer who works with water and latrines, it goes without saying that where you´ll be living might be without one or both.

There are so many things to think about here each day. I fall asleep every night watching TV with my family. (A lot of famlies have small, black-and-white TVs, powered by car batteries or solar panels.) Dinner is usualy served around 8:45, and I am collapsing gratefully into the floor by nine.

Leave any questions in the comments section. I know I leave a lot out in these quick updates. I´ll fill in the blanks as I can.