The value of a book

One of the greatest parts of Peace Corps is the open-endedness, and the fact that we can work on any side project we see fit. A few months ago, I approached my school´s principal about creating a library for the students. I have never seen a story book in anyone´s house, and until this year, the student´s weren´t even allowed to bring their textbooks home after school. Panamanian education is still on the rote memorization mode. Children copy from the board, fill in blanks, and have little chance to be creative. Because of this, and a lack of resources, many kids read below-level. The school allocates its small funds to the bare necessities, and the children come from poor families who make big enough financial sacrifices geting their children to class each day.

Kids haven´t had the chance to love to read.

I am asking for your help, to make a small donation to my project with the International Book Project. They collect donated books, and ask us to raise only the cost of shipping. If I raise $200, a 35-pound box of Spanish-language books will be sent and we can start the library. The principal has promised me a space in a spare room and her support to keep the library going after I´m gone. When the books arrive, I will organize a work day with parents to prepare the room, and set up a schedule for book lending.

You all know me personally and know that reading is a big part of who I am, and a huge part of my Peace Corps service. I´ve started reading stories to kids in my neighborhood with some books I´ve bought, and their interest is genuine and lasting.

¨But Cati, how can Peter Pan fly? Can we fly?¨

No one´s read to them before, and most of them have never seen story books. The potential value of the library is obvious.

If 20 people make a 10-dollar donation, I´ll meet my goal. Here is how you can donate:

You may donate by sending a check to:

International Book Project
1440 Delaware Avenue
Lexington, KY 40505.

You may also donate online via credit card by going to www.internationalbookproject.org and clicking on the “Donate” banner at the top of the page. Please indicate in the memo of the check or the notes section of the online giving screen that the donation is made on behalf of Catherine Basham, Peace Corps Volunteer. All donations are tax deductible.

Thank you to everyone who donates. I´ll be sure to send pictures when the books arrive.

We Heart Seminars

In the last month, I´ve helped out with three seminars in three separate volunteer sites. We PCVs have become savvy to the fact that our community members respond better when we call something a ¨seminar¨ instead of a charla, and invite a few other volunteers along to help out over the course of a few days. I think they like the idea of a one-time commitment and a more formalized environment of a seminar or workshop . Oh, and the free food. The PCVs always get a kick out of the fact that participants LOVELOVELOVE the visiting volunteers when they seem so luke-warm about the ones in their own sites sometimes.

In mid-July, my friend Dan held a two-day health seminar for the women in his community. I came for the second day to do a charla on S.T.I.s and HIV/AIDS.

Here is a woman receiving her certificate of particpation:



More interestingly, Dan has a monkey:



This is his house:
From there, I headed straight to the Comarca, and after a 90-minute hike, arrived in Aleah´s site to help with a water seminar. They are becoming very popular activities for EH-volunteers. Over the course of a few days, we educate water committee members on virtually everything they need to know about their systems--the nuts and bolts of how the water travels through the tubes, how to clean the tanks, how to repair damages, how to decide on a quota, how to run better meetings, you name it. Aleah has a beautiful site on a ridge, and this is the view from her house (sooo jealous):

One of my favorite participants:

Another PCV Dan, leading a session on thermoforming-- a method of molding tube using hot vegetable oil. Creates tighter fits and is safer than the more popular burning-PVC-over-open-flame method.


Then, last weekend, I went to other PCV´s Myles site, close by here in Bocas, to do a PML with his junta local and water committees. Here I am talking about how to work in teams!



On my side,I have been continuing with the sex-ed and life skills charlas with the 8th and 9th graders in my school. It´s going well, and they´ve impressed me with their candor and willingness to ask questions. More on this to come.

I´ll be bringing whoever I can convince to go from my community to a water seminar in nearby Punta Peña for them and three other volunteer sites in mid-September. They are daunted by the overnight stay and the four-day length, but with my diligent persuasion techniques,I hope to wrangle in a precious few. Sigue la lucha...

One Year In

On August 12, I completed one whole year in Panama. I think back to the day I left the States, and I remember how little I knew. I agreed to come to a country for 27 months with only a vague understanding of where I would be, what I´d be doing, and under what sorts of conditions. Since then, all of those blank spaces have been filled in, but thousands of new question marks have arisen.

I never looked at the Peace Corps as a change-the-world kind of opportunity. I was realistic about what my impact could be, especially when working against a cultural inertia that one person can´t possibly turn around. But one year in, and with nearly ten months spent in site, I still feel a little disappointed. If you asked my community what I´ve done, I am unsure they´d have much to say. And as my friend Austin points out in a post more eloquent than mine, what little we have done is for people who don´t have a word for ¨thank you¨ in their native langauge.

Peace Corps is a 27-month commitment, and that is largely because development work is slow and awfully hard. I just didn´t imagine that I would spend so much time asking myself if it was even possible.

We´ve been told the one-year mark is a hard one, and it has proven so. These last few months have left me feeling frustrated and confused. There´s the ¨work¨aspect. My community is unmotivated, but they criticize me wondering why latrines haven´t appeared out of thin air yet, all expenses paid. Agency support has been limited or non-existant, despite a lot of effort on my part. This professional aspect is easier to deal with, in a way. I anticipated the difficulty.

But a larger portion of this discontent is more personal, a general tiredness with myself and my life here. All I think about is Peace Corps, my work, my community, and where I fit in that context. In this term of service which is supposed to be quite selfless, I find myself exhausted by how much I think about myself. Part of that is because there is no else. I am one person in a community of people who will always be a distance away from me. No matter how many great conversations we have, or how much I feel like I have some real, genuine friends (and I do), something always happens that reminds me of that expanse between first world and third world, between my life and theirs. How defeating and lonely it feels that there are some things I can never understand about them, and more things that they will never understand about me. In these cases, I am speechless, but it´s not the Spanish that fails me. It is an intraversable cultural, economic, and educational gap. That´s hard for one person to go through, but I get tired of thinking about it all the time. I wish I could change the channel, take a break and think about something else. But there is nothing else. This experience swallows you up.

So when times are difficult, it´s extremely unpleasant. But the other side of this coin is that this has been the fullest year of my life. I have had experiences that will affect me forever, how I view things, what I want to do, and where I want to do it. Even though some things have been difficult, I consider them all positive, a net gain. And I still have moments of euphoria when I think, I can´t believe how beautiful this is or I can´t believe this is my life.

I´ve spent a year in Panama. I expected things to be a lot clearer by now; I expected to know more, be more confident in what I was doing, and be able to summarize everything in a neat little package. I see now how impossible that will always be. It´s too big, too complex, and subject to change. I remain optimistic. I know I will leave here happy I came. I will have an impact in my community, and it would be nice if they thought so too. But if they don´t? This isn´t supposed to be about me anyway.

Political Unrest

I was leaving Changuinola on Tuesday, and I nearly got stuck there. Protestors had blocked off the only exit street with tree trunks, rocks, and fire. Banana workers were demonstrating against a new law that limited union rights and benefits. After taking six taxis, walking through protests, and crossing a bridge on foot, I arrived at a bus that could take me the rest of the way to Almirante. Good thing I got out when I did, because the next day, no one was able to leave. Road blocks had expanded and no Changuinola to David buses were running.

Thursday night as I sat with my nightly cup of coffee, I heard the roar of a chain saw, and thought it an odd time to be cutting timber. Within seconds, my question was answered as I heard the trunk crash onto the highway. Two more cracks and crashes. Men from Renacimiento, the community next to mine, were also protesting. One of their family members had been killed by riot police in Changuinola the day before.

By Friday afternoon, I received a message from Peace Corps that said Bocas and No Kribo (Bocas comarca) volunteers were in STANDFAST mode, prohibiting us from travel out of site, and for those that were already out of site, to stay where they are. We were asked to check in with Regional Leaders immediately to confirm our whereabouts. Things had escalated in Changuinola, and travel along the highway that runs through the province was unsafe due to multiple protest and roadblocks. This STANDFAST mode meant little to me, as I couldn´t have left anyway since the highway was blocked and bus transport was impossible. That afternoon, as I exited the bathroom after bathtime, I was shocked to see dozens of armed policeman with big-boy war guns marching down the street, followed by more piled into the back of government trucks. (I have some arresting photos of this, but Panama Internet, like every service in this country, is being slow and uncooperative. You will have to wait.) As I went up to my balcony to get a better look, I noticed helicopters circling my community, and soon heard the chainsaws of the police start up to remove the roadblocks. They moved on peacefully, but continued their daily marches every 12 hours to make sure protesters were keeping the road open.

By Saturday afternoon, the STANDFAST alert was issued for all PCVs country-wide. We received text messages daily offering vague information about nationwide protest and potential dangers of which we should steer clear. I listened to the radio to get as much information as possible, but those reports also gave an incomplete picture. I yearned for NPR. Brother James kindly did some Web searches and filled me on President Martinelli´s latest inflammatory statements and the latest word from the strikers.

On Tuesday, nation-wide strikes were supposed to start at midnight. In Renacimiento, I´d heard they had plans to block off the road again, and from snippets of gossip I heard, it sounded like things could get uglier between them and police. But by the time Tuesday rolled around, things had calmed in Bocas, and as far as I know, there were few incidents nationwide. The President agreed to revise a few articles of the law, and given that concession, strikers declared their efforts a success. Unfortunately that ¨success¨came at the cost of lives lost and hundreds injured. Thankfully it ended somewhat sooner than initially expected, and on a more peaceful note than it began.

By Wednesday morning, Peace Corps gave us all the all-clear and we were free to travel and leave site. I breathed a sigh of relief, and headed to David, to get some computer work done and enjoy the comforts of AC and cable TV.

Note: For those who worry about my safety, please be advised that Peace Corps takes the safety of volunteers very seriously. There is a full-time Safety and Security Coordinator who is responsible for monitoring conditions of the country and issuing alerts and/or taking action in the event that a volunteer is unsafe. She is a tiny, feisty Panamanian woman who takes no BS from anyone. We also have a Duty Officer, who is on call 24-7 to respond to our concerns. (OK, Mom?)

Snippets

Here are some collected moments that don´t warrant a blogpost themselves, but together, give you an idea of how some of my daily interactions play out.

Ennui: Milexi is seven-years-old. She´s my neighbor, and one of my biggest fans and most frequent visitors. She´s kid-sized of course, with the missing front teeth so common among second-graders everywhere, but sometimes I forget she´s so young. She respects the boundaries I set better than anyone, and sometimes responds to my comments with the knowingness and maturity of someone a lot older than seven. We recently had this exchange:

C: How do you feel about missing so much class because of the strike?
M: Good. I´m done with school.
C: What do you mean? You don´t want to go anymore?
She sighs.
M: Look. I went to pre-K. I went to kindergarten. After that, I went to first grade. What grade am I in now? Second! It´s enough, I´m tired, OK?

The Photo Album Experience: Sharing pictures of my family and friends from home is one of my favorite things to do with visitors. The people here in QP are endlessly curious about my family (bordering on obsessive when it comes to my mom) and life in general in the U.S. I have a nice assembly of photos of everyone and-- even better--some of snow and ice. The word incredulous is best defined by a Ngobe trying to understand snow. I will walk you through some of the snapshots that get the most comments.

Picture 1: Me, Dad, Millie, and James cutting a birthday cake. Millie is centered in the middle with her arms around James and Dad, rendering them invisible. The conversation is this:

Ngobe: Your grandmother doesn´t have arms.
Cati: Yes, she does.
Ngobe: Where are they then? I don´t see them.

Picture 2: The Charles River in the fall. Dozens of geese at the river´s edge.
Ngobe: WHAT ARE THOSE?! DUCKS?
Cati: They are called geese.
Ngobe: You must bring some to me. I want to raise those.

Picture 3: Any picture with snow or ice in it.
Response: What is that? How do you grow things? Is there finca? How do dogs/people/trees survive? Why would people live there anyway? Cati, I don´t think their meant to. Hey, can you suck on the ice?

Picture 4: Me, at some point in college, looking noticeably more gordita.
My neighbor Rosita points to the photo, and says, ¨Ok, now here in this picture, Cati, you look healthy. You were in good shape! Now? Now... you need to eat more bananas.¨

That night she sent me a soup full of more yucca than I could possibly eat. Her intentions are obvious.

Picture 5: A Habitat for Humanity trip in college. We are on the beach, and one girl is wearing a t-shirt and bathing suit bottoms.

Ngobe: Why is she in panties?!?! She´s not embarassed? Did you bathe in that ocean?

How to Name Your Baby:

Everyone has a real name, a Christian name, if you will. It´s the Spanish name by which they´re registered (if they´re registered), and is what they will use in school, and for all professional and official purposes thereafter.

But you´ll almost never hear their parents call kids by their real names; there are at least two other names to choose from. One is the name they use in the house, and the other is a second nickname, often in Ngobere.

The household names suffer from a devastating lack of creativity. There are about 5-10 that make up 90 percent of nicknames. They are: Niño/a, Bonito/a, Mami, Papi, Bebé, Chino/a, and Chuey (for light-skinned kids. Chuey means gringo/foreigner in Ngobere). The youngest kid is always called Chi or Chi-Chi.

Are you confused? Let me offer some examples. My host-brother´s name is Kaicer, but his immediate family calls him Bebé, and other close family and friends call him Lalo. Rosibel is my four-year-old best bud, but she is most often called Obaldina or, by close family, Amoi. Her brother, Abdiel, the oldest, is also called Bebé and Pachikon. Milexi, the middle of the three, is called Niña and Mamita. I still laugh when I see her siblings yell for her. Mamita!

You can imagine how things get confusing. The upside is that you can call any kid niño, niña, or chi, and they will respond right away.




Milexi/Mamita/Niña and her sister, Rosibel/Obaldina/Amoi

All Dogs...

On Thursday, I left Walter with the vet in Changuinola. He had parasites and hadn´t been eating well. The doctor wanted to ¨admit¨ him for a few days, which was OK with me because I didn´t want to leave the sick pup in the rather incapable hands of my community. On Monday, when I was returning from the beach, I called the vet to see if I could come to Changuinola to pick up my baby boy. He told me Walter died the day before. My Walter died.

The Ambassador and I only had a month together, but that was enough time to fall completely in love with him. In fact, I was in love before I even took him home. Right from that first time he slung his paws over my shoulder and rested his head there like a human, it was game over. When I called to tell my Mom what happened, I think that´s the only time I´ve ever called her crying.

Everyone thinks their dog is extra special, and the rest of the world thinks they´re nuts. You can call me nuts; the Ambassador was one-of-a-kind. And sure, maybe this whole gringa-in-the-jungle gig I´ve got going made me vulnerable to form intense emotional attachments too quickly. How could I not? Love is love, and sometimes it can happen fast between an American girl and a Panamanian mut. The intensity of my sadness over this was more than I expected, but it was not helped by most of my community blaming me for his death because of sardines that I fed him, and subsequently explaining all my failures in ten-minute tirades until I was nearly reduced to tears on several separate occasions (Ngobe past-time: clinging to theories that have no factual basis in medicine).

So this will be the last post about Ambassador Caballero-Lopez Santos Santos. Is it possible his sad eyes knew he only had two months to the day? We won´t entertain the thought. Because now he has moved on elsewhere, past the cruel conditions of Panama that are not welcoming to baby dogs. He lived a short life, but he was a great Ambassador.

Saving sloths: an illustrated tale

A couple of weeks ago, we went up into the monte to re-start our water-level survey (the previous day, the tank had broken after a fall, and we had to post-pone until I could fix it). We were about to cross a small creek, when the two young men I was working with noticed this:
That is a sloth. It must have fallen from up high, landed between the two trees and gotten good and stuck. It was not moving and appeared to be dead. But my cohorts and I decided we had to be sure, so they got a couple of large sticks and started poking.
Eventually, they knocked him loose and he thudded to the ground. He was not exactly the picture of health. We figured he probably wouldn´t make it, but at least he could drink from the creek and maybe make a recovery.


When we passed back down there again a few hours later, he had climbed back up into another nearby tree and appeared to be very much among the living.

The next day, the two boys, who are also members of my Panama Verde group, were happy to tell the story with some gentle prodding from me. All in a day´s work.

The two animal rescuers, at the water reserve tanks, with the water level.