Saturday, April 23, 2011

So you want to climb a volcano

I have been busy at work recently, but I also realize that my time in Panama will be quickly coming to an end. There is a lot of travel I still want to do, several destinations left on my Panama bucket list. I got to cross one of them off this weekend, as I climbed Panama's highest peak, Volcan Baru Thursday night with several friends.

We made it to the trailhead in Boquete and started hiking around 10p.m. I packed light, with a Camelbak holding only my water, snacks and several layers to stay warm as the temperatures dropped. I was a little nervous, as I had heard several horror stories from another PCV- involving hikers who turned around, threw up, cried, or even had trail side "bathroom accidents" as their bodies gave way to fatigue. I wondered if it was the best activity to undertake after 10 hours days of heavy construction and cement mixing. But, two hours in, although I felt the burn, I knew he'd overstated the difficulty. I'd be fine. Our headlamps guided us and conversation made the time pass quickly. Every now and then we stopped to refuel on peanuts, granola bars or fruit and keep ourselves hydrated. As we climbed higher, we covered our tanks and tees with long sleeves and sweatshirts. I love being cold in Panama.

The last hill was the most costly, I wove my way up it, feeling slightly dizzy from the altitude and/or five and a half hours of strenuous hiking. If we made a mistake, it was leaving as early as we did. We thought it might take longer to get there, but our 3:30 a.m. arrival made for a long wait until sunrise. Temperatures were in the 40s but felt much colder with blowing winds and sweaty bodies that were cooling down too fast. We huddled together trying to keep as warm as possible and looking for buildings to sneak into on a compound just below the peak.

By around quarter to six, strips of orange and green began to break along the horizon line and we sat there, above the clouds, waiting. On a clear day, you can see both the Pacific and Caribbean oceans from the summit. Our day was a little cloudy, but the view was still completely magnificent in its own way as the sun came up, casting colors into the fog, clouds and sky that we felt a part of. We stood at 11,398 feet looking down at clouds below, at the hills and the swirls of white, orange, pink and blue that surrounded us. Fatigue in our legs was forgotten, the hike down wasn't a concern because the breathtaking view trumped everything. The pictures below can't quite capture the natural beauty.

At about 8a.m., 10 hours after first starting, we began the descent. A lot of people say going down is harder, especially if you do the overnight hike. We hadn't slept, were already sore from the ascent, and the adrenaline was fading. It took us about four and a half hours to get down. The last 90 minutes were pretty brutal, with the impact of each step pounding into my knees and ankles, and the effects of pulling an all nighter while walking a total of 16 miles and climbing up to an 11,000 feet peak beginning to make themselves known.

But this trip will be one of my favorites in Panama. The combinaton of physical strain followed by a resplendent reward was the kind of experience I needed to relieve some in-site stress and remind myself that I am surrounded by natural beauty and fortunate to live once-in-a-lifetime experiences all the time in this beautiful country.







How to build a composting latrine

Construction has been underway for about three weeks in Quebrada Pastor. Here are some pictures that might give you all a better idea of how the building goes and how much work it entails. A refresher: a composting latrine is a good alternatative to the traditional pit latrine. It includes two chambers, with only one used being used at any given time. Urine is diverted through tubes out the side of the latrine to keep the contents of the box try, and after every "deposit," a dry material like saw dust or ash is thrown on top to eliminate odor and aid in the compost process. When one side fills, it is left for up to a year to convert into rich soil. Depending on how fast you work, construction takes between 3 and 5 days. Here is some of what it entails.


Step one: Throw a concrete floor.


Step 2: Make the walls and dividing wall with four levels of block. This is the day that is the most technical, and usually intimidates the workers the most. But once they get going, they really love it and always joke about all the masonry jobs they can get as a result of the new skill.
Step 3: Make wooden table to support cement floor which will be thrown on top. Tie up some rebar for support. Below, a man shaves a few inches off a too-wide board. Again, you gotta love these handy men.

Plaster the outside walls, make stairs, and plaster the seats over the holes in the cement floor. Connect tubes that lead outside for the urine,and plaster in the doors on the back wall (out of which you will eventually take the compost).

More pictures coming soon! For further reading, my friend Louis wrote an insightful post about the challenges of working with these latrines and the conflicts volunteers face in deciding whether we ought to promote them. They are not the solution for everyone, and require a lot of prep work and education before a project is pursued. The 12 families who will be receiving the composting latrine chose them over the pit latrine, and were required to meet several pre-requisites in order to demonstrate their understanding and genuine interest. Louis's retro-fitted bidet accessory is something I plan to offer as an option and will eliminate one of the biggest barriers to latrine use (wipe vs. wash).

Just because you live in the rain forest...


...doesn't mean you have to be wet when you arrive at school.
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Saturday, April 16, 2011

A taste of the tranquilo

You may remember I told my brother James that he would be obligated to write a blog entry about his trip this time around. He has delivered on his promise with an interesting comparison between the Panamanian and American ways of life. My idea of happiness and fulfillment has certainly been re-framed by my time here, and he does a good job explaining how and why his ideas have changed too. Here it is:


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As I return to Panama for the second time, I am struck by how simple life is here. Life out in the country is usually a very straight-forward arrangement. People have a few acres of land with maybe a few cattle and a few banana and orange trees. It seems as though people have very little, but they get by. In fact, they really need very little. Many of them are farmers and they live in what could be described as a giant greenhouse. There is no winter. A small cinder block house with a tin roof and some bright paint seems to be enough for a lot of people. Whenever they need money they do a bit of work or sell some of their cows or bananas, just enough to get them through the week. Overall the life of a farmer in Panama seems pretty easy and idyllic. With all the rain and sun one could hardly fail as long as they put a few seeds in the ground. Life certainly seems a lot easier than back in the US.


Amazingly, even though people in Panama have almost nothing to their name, they seem not to care. In fact, they seem quite a bit happier than the average American. I think it may actually be because they all have so little that it is hard to feel poor when there is no rich person next door to compare yourself to. There are no Joneses in town to keep up with. If a person has a fully-feathered flock of chickens, they are rich. They don’t seem to want electric service to their house as badly as most Americans want, say, an iPhone 4, because no one else in Quebrada Pastor has electric service. They worry about other things, like who is going to win the next pick-up baseball game.


One of the thoughts that goes through my mind is "man, wouldn't it be great to live like this?” To be on an almost permanent vacation with a 10-hour work week. To be free of the 1000 commitments the average American has to deal with on a daily basis. To have time to spend living life instead of sitting behind a desk or watching America's Next Top Distraction. Wouldn't it be great to be in charge of your own life, even if there wasn't much to be in charge of? What would I be willing to give up? At the end of my week in Panama, staying in Catherine's house I was right at home and I felt like I could have got by indefinitely with just my toothbrush and a few changes of clothes, if for some reason my big American pile of stuff back home suddenly burnt down or disappeared. My life would different, for sure, but would it be any better or worse? That’s hard to measure.


We think we are better off in America than the average Central American because we have more stuff. In some ways we are, for example I don't plan on dying of Cholera any time soon. But in many ways, we just have a bigger sand box with more toys but no more meaning. If we are better off we ought to be healthier, happier, feel more secure, have move free time, more friendships and more meaningful experiences in our lives than Central Americans. But they seem to beat us in all these categories. Americans are more obese and have more cancer than any other country. Costa Rica actually has a longer life expectancy, even though their hospitals are not nearly as advanced. In Panama people have strong ties to their neighbors and extended family which have not existed in the US since before the depression. Here we seem to be afraid of everyone and everything, we live to work, we spend our free time on escapism and even though we are the richest nation somehow we still feel poor and rack up debt. There is no way to declare success. There is always more stuff to buy.


So it seems like the thoreauvian thing to do is to go to Panama, build yourself a little shack in the jungle and love life. Panama is the place to go, you see, because it is the home of the tranquillo lifestyle and the only place one can live a low-key life. This was my immediate thought - you have to move to Panama to live like this. But what is to stop me from living like this in the US? I could make a little cinderblock shack, buy a couple acres of forested land real cheap and live just like a Panamanian. I could even cut my lawn with a machete if I wanted to. I could do all the same things here and it should be equivalent. But what would the neighbors think? I would seem crazy. I would seem so terribly poor in comparison, without that speedboat I proudly display in my front driveway to impress my jerk neighbor even though I'll only use it twice in three years then sell it because I can't make the payments on my McMansion. People would think I was too lazy or too stupid to work. What would I do with all my free time? Shouldn't I be working at a job I don't like to buy stuff I don't need to impress people I don't care about? I would be crazy not to.


Coming to Panama and seeing a different way of life has given me a great check on reality. It has allowed me to see how loose the correlation between money and happiness is, and how important your actions and attitude toward life are. It reminds me that I don’t want to be answering emails from the office at 10pm on a Saturday on my Blackberry no matter what my salary is. Hopefully these are lessons I can take home with me so that I don't get distracted by the American dream and can be truly happy.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Losing Your English

An odd phenomenon exists among the volunteers here in Panama. We spend so much time speaking Spanish, that when we get the chance to speak English, sometimes things come out a little strange. We can´t think of the word we need, or we translate directly from how something is said in Spanish, and we end up sounding like an outsourced customer service representative. Here are some recent examples:

-When trying to say something angers me, I said, ¨It gives me rabies.¨ In Spanish, you would say me da rabia. It gives me anger.

-In Spanish, the word for ¨to train¨is capacitar, and we use it all the time. I caught a friend of mine referencing how many people we have ¨capacitated,¨and interjected that it sounded like an awkward use of the word in English. She indignantly insisted that it is the only way to say it, and demanded to see my dictionary. When she didn´t find what she was looking for, she agressively responded, ¨WELL THAN HOW DO YOU SAY IT?!¨¨
¨I guess it´s more common to say trained,¨ I said.
¨Oh.¨ She looked confused and disappointed. When we describe our PC service on future cover letters, we better be sure to get them proofread. Volunteers?

- A lot of words I just don´t know in English, or I used them so rarely in the U.S. that I forgot how to say them. All my experience with them has been in Spanish. This happens mostly with technical words like spring box, or a tool which I know only as a koa, but is a pick used to break up earth. What´s that thing called anyway? Similarly, I can never remember the word in English for to plaster because that´s a word I used sparingly until I became a part-time mason here in Panama. I try to tell my English-speaking friends about how the repellando went and they remain quiet waiting for me to elaborate. I fail to realize I need to.

-When discussing options about how to keep my lice shampoo in over night (don´t ask), my friend suggested I wrap my head in a plastic bag. I responded, ¨But that will give me so much heat during the night.¨She paused and waited to see if I would notice what I said. I did not. A few more months here and I will start introducing myself by saying, ¨I am called Catherine. I have 23 years. It is pleasing to me to meet new people.¨

-Volunteers speak Spanglish when we are around each other. There are some ideas or sentiments which we only ever express in Spanish. One of them is cumplir con su compromiso, which means to fulfill your commitments. In English, I never had to remind anyone to follow through with what they say they will do. But that idea is a theme I return to over and over when I am busy capacitating the people. An example of what we might say, ¨Pancho really understands what Peace Corps is about and is motivated, but he has a real problem cumplir´ing with his compromisos.¨

- Double negatives. A friend was recently complaining about a hamburger she ordered that came with little in the way of condiments or french fries. She said, ¨It came WITHOUT NOTHING!¨ Una hamburguesa sin nada is correct. The former is not.

Spanish also changes the way you look at things because it is such a passive langauge. In English, if something breaks while you´re using it, you might say ¨I broke it.¨ In Spanish, you say it was damaged to me. Se me dañó. If you forget your keys, you might say you left them behind or forgot them. But in Spanish? Nothing is ever your fault. They stayed behind to you. Se te quedaron. The keys just decided not to come with you today. Your absentmindedness has nothing to do with it. Similarly, if your are sick, you don´t get better of your own volition. The sickenss removes itself from you. Se te quitó. This isn´t just campesino Spanish either. Doctors say it exactly the same way, which makes you wonder if they believe in the efficacy of the medicines they prescribe, or if they are just biding time until your scabies descides to resolve itself.

It is always a shock when a word you used to know escapes you, and it happens to me now more than ever. Sometimes I hear myself put accents on the wrong words, or phrase something completely awkwardly. When I was home over Christmas, I played Bananagrams with my friends, a fast-paced version of Scrabble. I sat there bewildered with all of the tiles in front of me. The words that used to bounce around in my head and form themselves in front of me weren´t coming. I used to play so competitively that my friends had to gently remind me that my pace and agressiveness were frightening to new players, and maybe I should stop being such an intimidating shrew. Now I can´t even keep up.

Communication issues can be frustrating, but at least I have a new way of looking at it. The words have removed themselves from me, temporarily at least. But I am sure when they are ready, they will come back.

Supermen

PCV Michelle recently wrote a funny post about how unrealistic her expectations for men will be after living here in Panama. The men we live with are freakishly strong, can work all day in hot sun without water or food, and are ridiculously handy at fixing everything with literally no tools at their disposal. It´s been a while, but I don´t remember men in the U.S. being able to do anything but play fantasy football and flirt with women on facebook instead of in real life. I am going to be so disappointed when I go back. What do you mean you can´t cut perfect 2x4´s with just a chain saw? And I don´t understand why you need a lawn mower. A machete works just as well, and it makes your arms look amazing.


Last week we began construction on the first composting latrine. We had ordered wooden floats to use on the cement floors, but the hardware store didn´t have any. My host-dad Angel saw my face knitting itself into fretful worry, and he said ¨Oh, it´s fine, Cati. I´ll just make some.¨ He sat down in the shade of a tree, grabbed some wood scraps and the essential Panama multi-tool, his machete. Within half an hour, he produced two of these: