Bridging the Gap

Final Months in Barrigon

2010-04-11T08:00:00.004-05:00

I am slowly wrapping up my work in Barrigon. The Healthy Homes Initiative has progressed with only minor set-backs. We’re still plucking away at the whole trash management conundrum. It’s hard to ask folks to sacrifice so much time and energy to change a behavior that they haven’t been convinced is that bad (aka burning all their trash). While I had lofty ambitions of building neighborhood landfills and instituting some sort of recycling program, I’ve satisfied myself with just giving them all the information I can about the dangers of improper trash management. We’ve looked at what toxins are released during incineration, what the alternatives are to burning (and the drawbacks to each), and we’ve visited some municipal landfills in the region. We’re also exploring recycling options. But in the end it comes down to how community members prioritize the use of their time and resources; for now trash management doesn’t seem to be a priority. It is my hope (and consolation) that my “education campaign” about trash management will spur future action when the community feels ready.

Trash aside, home gardens continue to spring up where I least expect them and the first harvest of the twenty original gardens has been bountiful. If I did anything right here, it was promoting these little home gardens. Through the Healthy Homes Initiative I’ve also had the opportunity and privilege to watch two community innovators “spread their wings” (for lack of less corny phrasing) and develop their leadership skills. One is a young man (age 15) from a less-than-supportive family that has become my partner-in-crime for all gardening and stove building schemes. One day when I was praising his tenacity and ambition, an NGO partner who helps with my project said, “that, or he’s secretly in love with you.” Whatever the motivation, I am thoroughly impressed by and proud of his quiet determination to excel.

On another front, the four tourism groups have made great strides towards attracting tourists and offering quality service. One group has a website (www.aglacelcope.com), all four have beautiful brochures, we’re working on a full business plan for the hostel/guest house (with help from the Peace Corps business sector), and for the first time I am seeing a relatively steady flow of tourists (and income) to the area. Next week we’ll finish painting a gigantic tourism map that will be posted down on the Pan-American Highway. And the development that is most dear to my heart is a simple one: the four groups are communicating with each other. This is a stark contrast from 2008 (when I arrived, envy and misunderstandings had created an environment of distrust among the groups); I couldn’t be happier. The result of their communication is “tourist sharing”: the tour guides from El Cope are promoting tours to the organic farm. The waterfall/hiking attraction people are recommending the El Cope guides for visitors who want to check out the National Park. The hostel folks are talking up the waterfall/hiking project to their guests. Someday you might see Barrigon in National Geographic Travel…

How could two years have gone by?

Although it’s difficult and sad to be leaving my work here, I am ready to make a change. My adventure in grassroots development has left me with more questions than answers. I’ve fallen far short of my colossal expectations of what I could accomplish in two years. And of course I’ve learned far more than I’ve taught (ha, understatement of the century). I’m okay with both of these things; I recognize the value of this experience for personal growth. And I am happy to acknowledge the modest successes we’ve had here in Barrigon. But for the last year I’ve had the nagging feeling that there is a better way. To be an agent of change, I guess I mean. Don’t ask me what it is… but if you happen to know the secret recipe, I’m all ears.

Holiday Fun

2009-12-23T13:37:00.012-06:00

Merry Christmas! All is well in my littl green valley. I've had a full house of friends and a full schedule with the end of the school year activities, a first communion celebration, a nutrition seminar (part of my Healthy Homes project), and all the Christmas activities at the Catholic church. Not to mention that yesterday I spent the day covered in chicken poop but managed to distribute 30 gunny sacks of the stuff to my town gardeners! Today I am running around Penonome trying to get gingerbread cookie ingredients to make with the neighborhood kids on Christmas--except that I forgot my wallet at home! Go, Kayla, go. As always, friends new and old have come to my rescue with a few dollars here, a few there in order to get the powered sugar and pay for my bus fare back up the hill.

It has been pure joy to host Emily Naftalin and Ben Lee in my house these last days. Every day I wake up and think how lucky I am to have such caring, interesting, and fun friends in my life. They left yesterday morning to hike around "the mountain" behind Barrigon and will come out for Christmas--just in time to pick up Micaela at the airport!

I'm posting some pictures of all the festivities around here:

What is a visit to Barrigon without a trip to Senor Julian's farm? Planting beans "a chuso" while Senor Julian prepares our snack:

We harvested cacao like a bunch of gringo leaf-cutter ants, leaving nothing yellow on the trees that we climbed, pulled on, and generally stipped of all their fruit. The result: SO MUCH CHOCOLATE!

Grinding up toasted cocao seeds and making chocolate patties of many varieties:

Good slackline action shots:

First communion:

A hike up to the Tuli falls:

Our own little pre-communion communion:

Ben plays god, trapping bugs in spiderwebs to watch the fight:

The gringo train on the way to my nutrition seminar. I wish I always had so much help!!Nutrition 101:Meanwhile, Emily and the gang prepare a delicious healthy snack: Everyone enjoys the curried squash, egg salad, green salad, banana goo, starfruit juice and fruit salad:

Last day of school party:Oh my god there's a baby on the line!

Do you see what is happening here? Kids are diving for candy and she's still swinging in the dark

Love to all!

The Barrigon Bridge Collapses

2009-11-16T14:18:00.003-06:00

So for all of you who've come to visit Barrigon, remember that bridge that makes so much noise as you roll into town? The old, clanky metal one? It finally collapsed on Friday afternoon. No one was injuried (Gracias a Dios). A big road crew dump truck full of dirt toppled the bridge. The four men riding in the cab were all okay, but definitely shaken up. I've attached some pictures.

Things are going to be a bit different for us now, as we won't have any public transportation until the level of the river goes down enough to make a safe crossing for trucks. For the moment the discussion about rebuilding the bridge has focused on a small pedestrian bridge (three cables!). It sounds like I'll be long gone before Barrigon's buses will be back on route.

The most affected folks have been the orange producers and transporters. There are many pick-ups full of oranges rotting outside of peoples homes right now. Just as oranges come into season...
And the secondary school students, who to cross the river to get to school in El Cope (the neighboring town). They stayed home today, as the river was too high to cross on foot. And it was pouring rain.

You might be wondering how I got out. Well, I found a muddy path that takes me to a different town. So I walked!

Other than the biggest Barrigon news since my arrival (ha ha), everything is well.

Love to all, Kayla

Update: Good hard rain. Good neighbors. A hard time. A new project.

2009-11-11T06:55:00.003-06:00

Right now we’re in the rainy season. I live on a creek and it floods all the time. Our little footbridge is tied to a big mango tree so it doesn’t float away when the creek rises. It just bobs there in the water until the water level goes down. Then the men go down with big poles and sticks to haul it back into place among the boulders.

I have the best neighbors in the world. They are my parents and my best friends. When I leave, they take care of my cat and my garden. When I am home, there is a constant flow of food, kids, and animals between my house and theirs. I spend most evenings in their kitchen sipping coffee, listening to the radio, and “echando cuentos” (telling stories). We usually don’t talk about anything of importance. The man likes to tell me about past rainy seasons and how the wind is so strong in the summer that it will take roofs off houses. The wife feeds me and talks to me about food and flowers. She grows flowers all over her yard and mine. I have confided in them twice during some rough patches in my service here and both times they have comforted me and kept my grief private. A small miracle in this community.

One of the times I confided in them was when, this last June, my closest friend in town (a young woman who lives up the hill) spread the rumor that I was having a relationship with a married friend of mine. Well, not only was his wife (who is also a good friend) furious but a lot of people in town thought that I was a home-wrecker. I was devastated. I was embarrassed that people thought horrible things about me, but mostly hurt that my closest friend and confidant would betray me like that. Sometimes in the Peace Corps we talk about people in our sites as “community members” instead of friends. Its like we hold people at an arm’s length because if they knew the “real” us they might judge us harshly (maybe because in some ways we are more liberal and liberated than our Panamanian peers). Well, I am guilty of maintaining this distance with lots of people here in town. But not with this girl, my friend. We were tight. I felt comfortable enough with her to let her in, you know? I really trusted her.
So when this happened I felt very alone. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire or propagate more rumors. That is why I thank God every day for my neighbors. One night I sat in their kitchen and told them how I’d been hiding in my house, avoiding the hailstorm. They comforted me by telling me that everyone in town has been the victim of malicious rumors, that it was just part of community life. Most importantly, they trusted that what I said was true. They trust my integrity.

But don’t get me wrong, there are many, many wonderful people here. When I feel lonely, all I have to do is wander up some trail and I’ll inevitably get invited to coffee, oranges, or conversation on someone’s front porch. If anything, the generosity and attention of my community is overwhelming. I feel like there aren’t enough days in the week to visit all those who invite me to their homes.

As far as work goes, I’ve started a new project that I am very excited about. We’re calling it the Healthy Homes Initiative. The 20 or so families that are participating will be working on four home projects to promote health in their family and for the environment: vegetable gardening, home trash management (composting and small, family landfills), grey water filtrations systems, and fuel-efficient wood-burning stoves. Now that I have been here for over a year I feel like I finally understand what makes so many projects fail (group dynamics, hand-outs, etc) and what types of projects could be successful. So I’ve designed this project to utilize and emphasize community strengths and minimize the situations that tend to hinder progress. We’re just starting, and everyone is optimistic about the progress.

I think often of my trip to the States. Thank you to everyone who made such an effort to see me while I was home. It feels so good to reconnect to that life and realize that it...exists.

Love to you all!

The Rainy Season

2009-11-11T06:25:00.006-06:00

India in the window

Barrigon Elementary Band in the El Cope Independence Day Parade

Rainy parade

Mariela carries the flag for Barrigon

Jake's house (Boqueron Arriba, Colon)

Jake at home

Halloween in Embera Puru

Embera Puru (Colon)

Gizmo loves his new spot.

My girls

Everyone loves popcorn

Fula

Laura

Helpful neighbors

School Blues

2009-11-03T06:23:00.000-06:00

They just don’t care. They don’t have the desire or the training to do anything but the absolute minimum. I encourage, plead, cajole, and bribe the teachers to diverge from the status quo, to no avail. Because they don’t care.
About three weeks ago I tried to enter the computer room; it was locked. Weird. I knock. After some time the school director (who is also the 6th grade teacher) opens the door. I walk in but immediately feel like I’ve interrupted a secret meeting between the Director (age 25), the other male teacher (age 21), and the high school exchange student from Ohio. What’s going on? Oh, nothing. The director won’t sit down and looks guilty. The exchange student smiles and says, “we’re playing Uno.” The director has hidden the cards under a stack of paper.
That was three weeks ago. Now I know that when I need to talk to the director, I’ll always find him in the computer room playing Uno. Uno or occasionally a video game. I’d bet money on it—at any given hour. Where are his students? Who knows. Who cares.

[Note: There are many excellent teachers in Panama. I have met a few and have had to resist the urge to kiss their hands and feet in gratitude. They just don’t happen to work in Barrigon.]

Memory

2009-11-03T06:20:00.001-06:00

“My memory will save what is worthwhile. My memory knows more about me than I do. It doesn’t lose what deserves to be saved.” –Eduardo Galeano

Two years ago today I walked along the Arizona-Mexico border. We found backpacks, pants, and copies of birth certificates from Michoacán, Chiapas, Oaxaca. A soccer trophy neatly dissembled and boxed for the journey. A sea of water bottles. We were just picking up trash; I was overwhelmed by the story it told.

Last year on this day I was the official photographer of one-hundred and eighty beautiful, excited children marching proudly down our muddy road to the beat of the elementary school band. It rained. I was happy to belong among the parents and teachers who clapped and cheered from under umbrellas. I also ached for a close friend who had been unexpectedly removed from his Peace Corps service. I could still feel his bewilderment and loss reverberating in my bones during that November 3rd Independence Day parade. Couldn’t help but reflect on all that he would miss.

Last year on November 5th I was high on Obama’s victory. I walked on air through the stalls of Cinco de Mayo Street, in Panama City. We carried bags of fruit on our arms and papaya-peach smoothies in our hands. All of the sudden I was roughly bear-hugged by a stranger. I cowered and my friend growled something foul in English—gut reactions to fear. The prospective thief ducked away empty-handed. We were covered in papaya smoothie. We laughed, shocked, and picked up our fruit from the sidewalk while pedestrians stared at the spectacle. Later, we went to the fish market. I don’t recall fear. I remember the smell of fish and the sweetest of being shaken into consciousness.

A month ago today I enjoyed the bliss of a Crab Harbor daydream among family and close friends. It stayed sunny all day long. We lounged against logs, playing games with the tide and the rocks on the shore. The sand was cool and squeaky under my feet. It had been a long time since I had felt such comfort and release. That evening: a feast high over the dark Pacific waves. The ocean, our laughter, and the cracking of crab legs made the soundtrack to the perfect Oregon night. Now I can tell you of my culture.

Yesterday I ran screaming and stumbling into a deep river and emerged with mad wasps tangled in my hair. I was stung all over my body—as was the friend I was visiting—and it really, really hurt. We walked home in the rain feeling like survivors of war. It is good to have these experiences every now and then to keep our fears in check.

Tonight it stormed and the lights went out. I went to my neighbors to tell stories. I recounted the episode with the bees and they roared with laughter. We shucked some beans. The husband recalled memories of wet winters and Independence Day parades from his childhood.

"In the Mountain"

2009-08-25T20:32:00.000-05:00

There’s something special about starting a backpacking trip from your front porch. Last week was the school’s winter vacation so many families took advantage of the time to go to the mountain and harvest rice. I tagged along with a few families (and convinced the high school exchange student from Ohio who just landed in Barrigon to come too). We left before sunrise on Monday morning, heading through town and north to the entrance of the National Park and then straight over the continental divide into the vast territory referred to locally as “the mountain”. It was a crazy trip. Muddy as hell and weird but fun and beautiful and most definitely unforgettable. There are photos of the trip in the right hand column labeled “In the Mountain”. For my more inquisitive readers (ahem, Gramps) here’s a description of the pictures:

1. Ariel on the continental divide, with the Caribbean in the distance. This is one of five locations in the Americas from which you can see both oceans.

2. The Navas’ family home in La Rica (within the limits of the National Park)

4, 5, 6. Juan Julio creek with the Navas family in La Rica

7. The house where Anayansi (18-year-old mother-of-two and a bad-ass hiker) grew up. Middle of nowhere.

8. The “trail” to El Tife waterfalls. We got severely lost. And in keeping with Panamanian custom, we only brought a thermos of sweet coffee to sustain our bodies during the 12-hour expedition. We arrived home after dark in a huge rainstorm.

10. El Tife Waterfall: the gnarly hike was worth it. I’ve been hearing about this waterfall since I arrived in Barrigon over a year ago. Very few people have been here.

11. Our oldest and younger hikers: Tia Valentina and Jonathan

12. El Tife II

13. Tito and Anayansi’s house. Also in the middle of nowhere (a 40 minute climb from the nearest hiking trail).

14, 15. Toasting rice in Chichica with the Ortega family.

16. “New Rice” and “Chicken of the Patio Soup”.

17. Jake “studied” a lot.

18, 19, 20, 21. Chayo instructs me on the finer points of preparing pollo.

22, 23. Mario is losing his vision but everything looked clearer to him through his uncle’s “long-view”.

24. Sweet corn tamales (‘bollos’).

25, 26. Grinding sugar cane and making sugar with crazy Tio Piye.

28, 29. The Ortegas told me we were going to see the house where they’d move if war came to the world. It was a little cave inhabited by a whole bunch of creepy bats. In the middle of nowhere.

30. Harvested rice.

31. The Ortega’s place in Chichica. The only full time residents are four crazy uncles. The rest of the family comes during harvest seasons and summer vacation.

32. Tio Chavo listening to himself tell a story on my voice recorder.

Rice Harvest

2009-08-25T12:39:00.000-05:00

I’m reading In Defense of Food, the follow-up to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. In this recent book Pollan critiques the Western Diet that has led to the dramatic increase in chronic illnesses (diabetes, stroke, heart problems, obesity) in recent decades. Pollan suggests that food science and dietary studies focus too much on single nutrients as triggers for good and bad health effects and not nearly enough on the whole foods and relationships between foods. He also suggests that the majority of what we eat is not even food, but products of food science. Of course, none of this is groundbreaking. Nor are his suggestions for how to ditch the Western Diet and eat in a way that is healthy for the body, the environment, and society as a whole. But however basic his proposal, moving away from the Western Diet would radically change the way one spends their time, energy, and money. Here are some of Pollan’s suggestions on what to eat and how to eat it:

o Avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable, c) more than five in number, or that include d) high-fructose corn syrup. [This would eliminate most “food products” from your diet and leave room for more whole food.]
o Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
o Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
o Eat mostly plants, especially leaves [as opposed to seeds].
o Eat well-grown foods from healthy soils.
o Eat wild foods when you can.
o Pay more. Eat less. [Buy quality food in smaller quantities. Make purchasing good food a priority in your budget. Almost every other culture spends a larger percentage of their disposable income on food.]
o Eat meals. At a table. Not in the car.
o Try not to eat alone.
o Eat slowly.
o Cook, and if you can, plant a garden.

It is interesting for me to read In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma while living in rural Panama. The idea of eating meals in a moving car seems quite foreign to me at this point. I feel lucky to have access to grass-fed beef (on the occasion that they kill one), fresh root vegetables and fruit, and a year-round growing season. Of course, the Western Diet has arrived in Barrigon. You can tell by the products on the shelves of the little stores (refined sugar and flour, candy and chips, canned meats, corn oil) and by the rate of type two diabetes in the older generation.

This last week I spent “in the mountain” where many families from Barrigon have their rice fields. No roads permeate “the mountain”. We walked for six hours up and down muddy slopes to get to Chichica, a town of two or three thatched roof homes spread over miles of interspersed pasture and jungle. In the mountain almost all waking hours are dedicated to food production, food preparation, and food consumption. One of the uncles spent the whole week sitting on a low bench toasting recently harvested rice over a fire (literally from the time I woke up until it got dark each night). Other uncles spent the days in the rice fields harvesting. The women pounded, roasted and ground coffee beans, pounded rice out of the husk, ground sweet corn from the neighbors, boiled soup, boiled coffee, boiled rice, boiled tamales (“bollos”). There were plantains to harvest and a plethora of root vegetables to dig up—yuca, ñame, otoë. We slaughtered two chickens and a duck (saving almost everything but the intestines), fished in the creek and caught crawfish that got boiled into a broth. One uncle crushed sugar cane and boiled it down into honey and then cooled it into unrefined sugar (a process that took two men and a horse all of one day). We harvested young coconuts and slurped out the water, then harvested ripe coconuts and shredded the meat for a dessert called mercocha (in Mexico they called it jamoncillo). And at every meal we sat down on the benches and in the kitchen hut to savor fresh, whole foods with short ingredient lists and an even shorter supply chain. Okay, so the leafy greens were in short supply and the portions were nowhere near the recommended size. But eating this way offered a completely different model than the Western Diet of convenience and limited input of time, energy and money.

I know that in the States we have things like jobs and recreational activities that limit the amount of time we can dedicate to food production, preparation, and consumption. I can hardly imagine a lifestyle in the States similar to the one I witnessed “in the mountain”. But small changes in our dietary habits, such as shopping at farmers markets, seeking out farmers that raise grass-fed beef and healthy chickens, growing a vegetable garden in the summer, and even just the simple act of cooking real meals, even these small changes could have a dramatic effect not only on our health but on our quality of life.

Or maybe I’ve just been gone too long...

Gadgets.

2009-08-25T12:35:00.002-05:00

My parents brought a thermometer when they visited in March. Much to their disappointment, only the slightest movements of the needle indicated the difference between day and night. The greatest variation in temperature seemed to be about eight degrees. But on their third day here the needle exceeds its limited range, shooting up high into the nineties. We all got a little excited. Then we noticed the thermometer’s position directly above my stove and a pot of boiling soup.

To the constant amusement of the neighborhood kids, the thermometer still hangs next to the door. Almost every day they screw up their faces, look at the apparatus and ask me for the time.

This morning the needle threatened to drop below sixty degrees. I brought out my fleece jacket and shook it free of roaches and potential scorpions. My neighbor stood on my porch with his arms crossed rubbing his biceps as if to keep circulation going.

“Kayla, this must be like your country in the winter, eh?”

“Hmmm, up there it gets colder.”

“Mas frio?? No way. Like double this amount of cold?”

“Yeah, or more.”

“How can anyone live with all that cold?”

“Good question…”

The tatoos are not permanent

2009-08-16T11:57:00.004-05:00

They are made out of a palm nut called Jagua. No, tia, it didn't hurt :)

My Panamanian Mom celebrated her birthday last Saturday. They actually waited four days to celebrate so that I could be there. I felt so loved. Here are a few pictures of the event:

Following the Camino Real in Colon

2009-08-13T13:26:00.004-05:00

I recently returned from an extraordinary trip to the Colon province. I’ve created a slideshow of pictures from the trip that will tell you much more than I could express in words, so just click on the picture in the right-hand column. The idea was to visit volunteer sites in Colon and carry out health related seminars and workshops in each location. We started on a tributary of the Rio Chagres, the largest river in the Canal watershed. The first two communities we visited with were Embera indigenous groups. The warm reception that we experienced in both towns was inspiring. I was also impressed with the level of community organization. One of my favorite memories from those days was a fierce game of basketball we played with the women of Embera Puru. Us gringas thought that we might have an advantage due to height and freedom of movement (they all wore wrap skirts), but these women were skilled and rough b-ballers. By the end so many fouls had been called—and so many more had gone uncalled—that everyone was enjoying badmouthing the ref more than shooting hoops. So we all went swimming and took pictures of our jagua-nut tattoos. Don’t they make us look tough??
From the Rio Chagres we set off on a four day hike up-river and down-river across the continental divide following the original path of the Spanish conquistadores when they transported gold from the New World back to Europe. It was….intense. And intensely rewarding. Puro jungle. On the fourth day we trekked through many a cow pasture and eventually arrived-- muddy and moldy-- on the crashing Caribbean coast. Our compañeros Ashley and Brandon welcomed us with chili, cornbread, chocolate cake, and a good dose of home-sweet-home.
The cultural differences between the indigenous Embera towns and Ashley and Brandon’s Afro-Antillean community were vast. I was enchanted by the level of sassiness I witnessed from everyone. It was also incredibly intimidating. I think the most common phrases I heard were, “What is wrong with you?” and “What’s your problem?”. But all sassy, you know? Like ‘Que te pasa a TI? Eh?? Oye!’ or ‘Eh! Que pasó contigo? Oiga DIMELO.’ Despite the volume and intensity of the communication style, though, everyone I conversed with was really sweet (except the kids who were little devils, haha). So there on a gorgeous stretch of beach in a house painted a different color from each angle did our Colon adventure come to an end.

Hey so my friend Elena also wrote about our trip. She included an old map of the route as well. Check out her blog entry: http://panama.tumblr.com/

Letter to 5th Graders

2009-08-13T13:20:00.002-05:00

During the last school year the 5th graders in Barrigon (my site) and Mrs. Delgado’s 5th grade class in Silverton (Oregon) participated in a pen pal program. We all had a rewarding experience learning from each other through letters, drawings, and photos. This is the personal letter that I sent along with our last package to the U.S. My mom liked it and took the time to type it up so that I could post it on my blog. How sweet is she?

April 20, 2009

Hi class!
Thank you so much for the thoughtful letters and drawings. We were so excited to read them and look at your pictures. To the kids here your friendship and communication means so much. They feel very proud to receive letters from the U.S. and in their own names! I appreciate your efforts so much.
I’m sorry that it has taken so long for us to get back to you. The school took summer break starting in mid-December, and get this - they just returned to class last week- almost five months of summer vacation!
But don’t be jealous, the kids were getting so bored that they couldn’t wait for classes to start.
The extended summer vacation was due to a teacher’ strike in the capital city. Some public schools in the country are in very poor shape (old buildings, leaky roofs, no windows etc.) so the teachers said that they wouldn’t work until it was all fixed. And get this – instead of closing just the damaged school, though, they kept all the public schools closed until April 13th! Here’s the worst part- they haven’t even fixed the damaged buildings. (Moral of the story: Be thankful for Robert Frost School! Having a functional school means that you’re able to spend more time learning!)

I wanted to point out a few things that I noticed in the letters you are receiving today. First, how many of you have read in this letter or earlier letters that “rice with chicken” or “rice with pork” was a favorite meal? One of the things that I’ve grown to appreciate about Panama is the strong food culture here. In the U.S. we eat a huge variety of foods, but most of them wouldn’t really be considered “American”, right? Here, people eat the same thing every day (with variations in the cooking method-one day boiled, one day fried, etc). You might think this would be terribly boring. Actually, it is very comforting. Food ties Panamanians to their families, to their neighbors, to their land (since everything they eat can be grown right here) and to their identity as a Panamanian. Go to a birthday party almost anywhere in Panama and you’ll be given rice with chicken, potato salad and fresh juice. Arrive at any doorstep at three in the afternoon and you’ll receive a cup of sugary coffee. These traditions of sharing food keep Panamanians connected to each other in a way that we Americans haven’t experienced.

I’d like all of you to check out Larry’s letter from Kenia. Kenia’s letter is very different because she wrote it with the input from her family (she is at home with an awful rash all over her body while the other kids wrote theirs at school). Also, Kenia is a shy but very sincere and frank person. In her letter, Kenia speaks of being poor, of helping out in the house, and of walking long distances to school. She lives in a neighborhood that cars can’t get to, where there is no electricity, and where most of the houses are made out of dirt or ply-wood with thatched roofs. Many families in Barrigon are poor like Kenia’s family. Even some of the families that live in nice concrete houses struggle to eat three meals every day; their poverty is disguised and only now after being here a year am I discovering the depth of hardships that some families face. Most families couldn’t imagine buying a dozen eggs all at once. They have to buy them one at a time or rely on their chickens for eggs. Beef is a rare luxury for the majority. I think a nickel to most folks in Barrigon feels like fifty cents would feel to most people in Silverton (to give you a rough comparison). So read Kenia’s letter and know that the kids who wrote to you might be in a similar situation but choose not to tell you about it directly.

As for me, everything is going well. Besides working with the school on environmental education, I teach English to a wonderful group of dedicated adults, work on organic vegetable gardens with some hard-working women, and support community efforts to develop environmentally-friendly tourism projects. In my free time I work in my own garden, read lots of books, visit neighbors for sweet coffee and rice, and explore the numerous creeks and trails that criss-cross our valley. Mango season has arrived and the trees are heavy with so much fruit. I eat about 4-5 mangos per day! (I wish I could send you a box full in the mail!).

My favorite thing about living here is that life is mostly lived outside. Even in our houses the windows don’t close so the breeze comes through (and the bugs, and the rain, ha ha!). But most people only sleep inside. Life is conducted on the front porch, in the outdoor kitchen huts, on the farms, in the street, or in the neighbor’s yards. It is very liberating to be able to live outside all year round.
One thing that I miss from home (besides my family and friends, of course) is a culturally shares sense of humor. As weird as it sounds I just don’t get Panamanian humor. The things that will crack up my neighbors sound weird and sometime sad to me….NOT funny. It’s one of those things you‘d never think you would miss, but I really do miss the American style of humor. So send me some jokes!

Okay guys, I’m pretty sure you’re all asleep in your chairs by now, ha ha. I’ve written you a whole book! And believe it or not, I want to tell you so much more. I hope you have time to respond once more to our letters before your summer break, we love hearing from you all.
Thank you again for your caring attention.
Hasta luego,
Kayla

July in Barrigon

2009-07-15T09:29:00.010-05:00

(black-eyed Susan seeds sprouting in a soda bottle on my porch)

Hello All,

To fill you in, these are the most interesting things going on right now:

1. I finally bit the bullet and bought By-Gone cockroach spray (despite the fact that it comes in an aerosol can that will eventually be burned in my backyard…). We counted the roaches in my cupboard, killed every last one, and celebrated wholeheartedly with Paul Simon when the work was done.

Cockroach Graveyard:

Post-Kill:

2. The river rose. Many times. This particular day it rose about 8 feet in less than two hours.

How the creek usually looks:Where did the boulder go??

3. There is a school garden in progress! I sure hope we make it to harvest this year.

4. Beans are in season and once again shucking beans and telling stories has become my most frequent and favorite pastime.

5. I have new Peace Corps neighbors! Nikki and Dave are two fun, proactive and positive environmental conservation volunteers that have moved into the Cope area. I’m stoked to have them. This is a picture of our first "neighbor night" at my house. Nikki, Brianna, me, and Dave.

6. My buddy Emiliano came down with the worst case of leshmaniasis I’ve ever seen. “Lesh”, as PC volunteers adoringly call it, is a flesh-eating parasite that is transferred via sandfly from infected sloths. Emiliano has it in many spots on his arms and legs. Below his knee he used to have three tiny spots. Now they’ve all grown together into one big oozing scabby wound. Three days before I took this picture the wound was almost twice the size. If left untreated it spreads from one part of your body to others. I hear that eventually it will attach the roof of your mouth and the inside of your nose. Gnarly.

Love to all!
Kayla

A Year Later...

2009-06-22T10:36:00.002-05:00

A long overdue hello to my fan club! Thank you for your emails, letters, visits, and support. I miss you all like crazy.

I really want to give you fair update on my adventures, but every time I sit down to write I get distracted by all the cool features on my new computer and just end up messing around with photos until my eyes glaze over.

Fortunately I was asked to write a welcome letter for the next batch of volunteers to be invited to PC-Panama, so I thought I would share it here. Next time I promise to write somethin’ special just for you guys...

June 5, 2009

Future Peace Corps Panama Volunteers,

Congratulations! Take a moment to silently thank your placement officer because landing a position with Peace Corps Panama is like hitting the jackpot. Panama is rich in biodiversity, the many cultures of the Panamanian people are unique gems, and the Peace Corps post is brimming with dedicated and innovative staff and volunteers.

Panama has the highest per capita income in Central America, but it also has the second greatest income disparity all of Latin America (after Brazil). What does this mean for Peace Corps volunteers? In a country full of natural and human resources, our job is less about technical expertise and more about assisting poor Panamanians in utilizing their own resources more efficiently. This idea is near and dear to my heart.

I arrived to my forested, mountain community fresh out of ten weeks of intensive technical and cultural training in the Community Environmental Conservation sector. From day one I was impressed by the knowledge and expertise of my community members in areas ranging from worm composting to small business management to coffee roasting. Every day I was learning something new from my neighbors: hat weaving, chocolate processing, new composting techniques, creative ways to reutilize trash (have you ever see flowers growing out of old rubber boots?). I often questioned my ability to provide assistance.

However, sooner than later I realized that many of these skills were not being shared between community members. How is it that my counter-part is an expert in organic agriculture but no one has requested his support to combat plagues in the school garden? I also started to meet regional agencies and organizations with expertise that were not reaching those who needed their assistance in my community. Fortunately, Peace Corps training provided me with the tools necessary to connect community members to the knowledge and resources that they needed. By means of leadership and group dynamics training, interactive teaching methods, monitoring and evaluation of activities, and many cups of sweet coffee on many porches, we are all becoming more connected. Now, women who never spoke to each other before share tomato seeds, gardening techniques and composting recipes. Previously independently functioning tourism groups are working together and with the Panamanian tourism authority to promote ecotourism to a larger public. Environmental education is extending beyond the classroom to the parents and neighborhoods of the students. It is a slow process that has required persistence and patience, but I feel good about the results of our efforts.

It was only sixteen months ago that I tore open my own Peace Corps Panama welcome packet. My stomach was doing flips and I was desperately re-reading everything to try to get a glimpse of my future self in the words that were written. Now I am sitting at the table that my friends in the ecotourism group lovingly made for me out of left over plywood. My little cat is stretched out on my front porch. I just made brownies in my toaster oven to share with the neighbors who have become like family to me. At school today the third graders and I made a mural to celebrate the Day of the Environment using the bark from palm trees and colorful leaves as adornment. This evening I’ll walk up to a community farm to see if I can buy root vegetables for a stew. Engrossed in pre-Peace Corps stress and worry, I never imagined that only a year into my service I would feel so comfortable and at home in such a foreign place. You will too.

Of course the Peace Corps is not all milk and honey. There have been moments when I’ve never felt so lonely. Days when no one shows up for your big meeting, when there are cockroaches in your oatmeal, and when you watch an abandoned dog suffer on the path to town. These difficult experiences become easier to manage over time. And the lows are counter-balanced by the almost constant highs. Generous gifts of fruit and coffee from your community members, kids yelling your name as you walk into school each morning, sweet siestas on rainy afternoons, deep bonds of shared experiences in the Peace Corps Panama community, jungle hikes, brilliant lightning storms—every day here is a blessing.

You have two years.

See you soon,
Kayla Bordelon
CEC Volunteer

Campo Kitchen

2009-04-16T10:04:00.001-05:00

Smells like chickens. The faucet leaks into the big concrete sink, draining down the hillside. Black pots set on old re-bar over smoky flames. Dirt floor swept clean every morning but always accumulating chicken feathers, crumbs, ashes. Sounds like locusts. Open walls allow access to the breeze and the bugs. A view of banana leaves and the green valley below. Hooks weighted down with pots of every size, dented and dark. A mano-pilón* and machetes. Rubber boots next to a wooden bench. The rooster puffs up his coat and lifts one scaly foot off the ground. A sombrero in a bucket. A motete** in the corner. It is inhabited each night by the mama cat and her one playful baby.

*wooden mallet used to husk rice and de-shell coffee beans.
**the giant woven basket that farmers carry on their backs to their fields each day.

These were observations from the kitchen of my second host family’s home back in August. Recently I applied and received a very small grant to build a fuel-efficient wood-burning stove for a family in Barrigón. We built the stove in a “campo kitchen” very similar to the one I described above. I've posted a few pictures of the process below.

The kitchen:

My dad hard at work:

Making the base table (and our awesome técnicos from Sustainable Harvest):

Meanwhile my mom entertains the kids with origami and whistling:

"Glueing" it together with a dirt-paste:

Brick walls and brick fuel cells insulated with ash:

Finishing touches:

Check it out, we're already boiling coffee on the new stove:

Carnaval in Two Chapters

2009-02-28T12:03:00.000-06:00

In thinking back on my Carnaval experience I’ve decided that two independent chapters are involved: one that I would like to call Wet, Awake, and Still Dancing and the other A Good Ol’ (Latin) American Road Trip.

Wet, Awake, and Still Dancing starts on the first afternoon of Carnaval with the purchase of my squirt gun, a miniskirt, and a four-night VIP pass to the open-air dance club. At this point you may be asking if I’m still in the Peace Corps. The answer is yes, and I can promise you that in between soakings all of us PC volunteers carried on the tradition of stressing about our jobs and sharing difficult/hilarious stories from “site”. Some things never change.

Pananmanian Carnaval works in shifts. The queens (there are two competing queens in each city) are probably the only ones who survive all shifts—sitting high on elaborate floats in feathers and sequins shaking it through the afternoon culecos and the late night parades.

Culecos: Big tanker trucks lining the parade route with scantily clad women mounted on top holding pressure hoses pointed at large crowds of rowdy revelers. This is Carnaval’s noon-to-five shift. Each day we donned our best mesh outfits and smallest shorts to flood into the street pushing, dancing, and basking in the disorder of it all. For as long as we could manage, there was dancing and drinking to be had under a constant shower of a high-pressure hoses. As one PC volunteer said: this is the most water pressure I’ve felt since last April!

At night we had options: a gargantuan open-air night club set up at the edge of town where seco flows freely and the crowd throws ice, ice buckets, and ice water through the air whenever the DJ turns up the Carnaval song saying water! water! water!,
or the late night parade in which the Queen of uptown and the Queen of downtown cruise the streets followed by tractors pulling brass bands and crowds of their rivaling fans.

Those who know me well can attest that I am not one to give up a good dance party. So it was that each night we’d strut up to the dance club with our VIP passes and our Rakatac outfits (The first night I chose gold spandex, a black mini-skirt, a gaudy silver halter-top with a gold broach, and shiny silver heels). And each night we would walk out just shortly before the sun made its appearance on the horizon.

Our first night at Carnaval I did catch the late night parade—from my bed. Miraculously on our PC budgets we snagged a spot right downtown on the parade route with a rooftop balcony for Carnaval weekend. So that first night we decided to “take it easy” in preparation for the days that followed (…and being country bumpkins, we’re all used to going to bed at 9pm and waking up at sunrise, so we had some adjusting to do…). At two am I shot straight up and found an entire brass band in my second-story window. I was looking down the center of a blaring tuba. The perfect introduction to the sleepless craziness of the days to follow.

So the weekend was spent alternating between being sprayed by hoses, being sprayed by squirt guns, spraying other people with squirt guns, and dancing my figurative pants off. There were also a few edgy moments. These include watching the Uptown parade turn into a battle zone as they rolled out a block of firecrackers and the entire street filled with smoke and flying fire with people running in all directions with their heads covered and a long waiting line of party-goers dissolving into alleyways in fright. I also watched a fight in which a fat man did a running round-house kick into thin air and landed on the pavement only to be attacked more aggressively by his assailants. And it is the first (and hopefully only) time I’ve yelled “everybody get down!” in response to a presumed gunshot. Granny, don’t worry about me...its all about maintaining distance.

I wish I had pictures of the culecos and the discoteca but neither event is particularly suitable for expensive electronic equipment (as you can imagine). I did get some good “before” shots that you can check out on picasa. This is my first attempt at a photo album, but I think you just have to click that little icon in the left-hand column.

So after what seemed like many moons of no-sleep all-play at Carnaval I was hitting a breaking point. It could have been the fact that the city had drained its water supply in the culecos, leaving the sinks, toilets, and showers completely dry. (I would like you to all take a moment and reflect on what that means for revelers walking through currents of dirty water, getting whole ice-cold beers dumped down their backs, and on occasion not being able to wait through hour-long lines for the porta-potties…). It also could have been the 5am-7am sleep regimen I had adopted. Either way, I was ready for a change and nothing could have been more perfect than what destiny had in store for me: A Good Ol’ (Latin) American Road Trip.

As fate would have it, a good friend of mine had six buddies from his hometown visiting for Carnaval. They had rented a minivan in Panama City, picked up four wonderful girlfriends of mine on the way, and arrived at our Party Headquarters in the middle of the festivities. The following day I piled in there with them and we all headed south to the coast.

These seven hometown friends were fun, goofy American boys who reminded me of Rudy and Jesse (if you know me from home) or Locke and Travis (if you know me from school). I felt transported via minivan to any good road trip to Pacific City or the Olympics or Mount Hood. And while the boys relived their childhood in the front of the van, us five girls (rotating laps in the far back seat) swapped stories, ate cornflakes from the box and as the exhaustion set it, giggled.

We reached the coastal town of Pedasi amidst a small-town version of Carnaval, getting soaked with buckets of water, hoses and squirt guns once again. Arriving at the house that was supposedly open for us to stay in, we found that it was inhabited by extremely smelly squatters making shell and seed jewelry to sell to tourists. So with plugged noses we abandoned that idea and headed for the beach. It is there that we stayed, making a campfire, celebrating a birthday, attempting to roast ridiculous little Panamanian marshmallows, and sleeping soundly in the sand. I only woke up a few times and watched as the seven boys played a rowdy game of charades by the firelight.

The next day went by too fast and all of the sudden we were twelve sunburned gringos in a seven-person minivan bopping our heads to Wyclef Jean and heading towards the Pan-American highway. The trip ended with a bang:

Policeman (peering through dark windows to see a mass of red faces): Pull over there to the side, we need to talk. Come with me to my chair.
Gringo: OK.
(two gringos and a gringa go across the highway with the policeman)
Police: I have to give you seatbelt tickets, they are really expensive. Like, five dollars each.
Gringos: Oh no.
Police: Yes, really, but I am trying to figure out some other way to handle this. I have to give you the ticket or maybe we can work it out. But I have to give you a ticket.
Gringos: ??
Police: Either I give you the ticket or maybe you have something refreshing to drink. Or you can have the ticket.
Gringa: Wait, what? Refreshing? Like juice?
Police: Yeah, like juice. And maybe you have a magazine or something because my girlfriend is learning English.
(Gringa goes to the car, makes the nice police man a goody bag full of juice, wine, candy and the only magazine we had for his girlfriend: a Maxim. We send her back with the camera.)
Gringa: Here you go, and would you mind taking a photo with us?
(At this point from across the dark highway we watch as the policeman pulls out his baton, holds it menacingly over our friend’s head, and grins ridiculously for the camera.)
Everybody goes home happy.

The End.

2009-02-28T11:18:00.000-06:00

Even though my camera didn't get anywhere near the culecos, I wanted to give you an idea of what it was like so that you will all join me for 2010!

Happenstance

2009-02-12T12:15:00.000-06:00

(or Lessons in Cool)

I met freedom this week. He came as a tourist, a German trumpet player with penetrating eyes and a crooked smile. He radiated peace; he walked as if on air. His voice was deep and the things he said felt at once weighty and light. He spoke English with a rough German tone, but his limited Spanish was a dancing Italian.

The first time I saw him I was with thirty soaking wet teenagers on top of a mountain in the middle of a week-long storm. We were running from the rain, seeking shelter under the awning of the National Park cabin. We all carried shovels and had garbage bags wrapped around our shoulders. As we ran through thick mist we heard a jazz trumpet and he appeared as if from nowhere, sitting on a folding chair, a striped blanket across his lap, his toe tapping out the rhythm. All thirty kids were silenced. A deep smile, play us a song.

He laughed at regular intervals, took pictures of everyone’s feet and hands, sang and played the trumpet in the bus, thought that I was the crazy one, listened with his entire body, and said all the nice things that no one remembers to say.

I cannot express how his presence has affected me. He made real to me Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech words:

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence
automatically liberates others.

He left the mountain before the rest of us, and I figured that I wouldn’t see him again. When it was possible, however, I splashed my way out of winter and down to the coast where the sun was still shining on hot sand. I went back to Playa Palmar where I have so many cherished memories of Peace Corps friends, of Katherine Ketter, of Judi, Diego, Bryan and Erika. This time I was accompanied by a few other Peace Corps volunteers that had been with me through the stormy youth camp. And there was freedom walking towards us with an umbrella and a big crooked smile….

Knowing him felt like a long journey.

And now that the journey has ended I crave what he has: a connection with everyone and everything around him, an absence of fear, deep and seemingly eternal happiness, wonder. The beautifully thing is that I’ve returned home from this trip knowing that what he has is open to all of us if we’re willing to surrender to it.

Lessons From Summer Camp:

2009-02-07T12:10:00.000-06:00

1. Plan for rain. Did I say rain? Plan for a storm that will rip the roof right off the cabin and hurl it down into the steadily growing lake of mud. Plan for mud.

2. What do you do with twenty-five teenagers in one little cabin for three days? DANCE PARTY! And never underestimate the seductive power of a fifth grade girl in a mini skirt.

3. Wanna win their hearts? Fart and poop jokes are the ticket.

4. When planning, ask all the questions you never thought you’d have to ask: Um, is the only room in the park that fits thirty people going to be under construction the week that we are hosting thirty people in the park? Um, when you say that there is electricity in the cabin do you mean that there is electricity but we can’t use it unless we bring copious amounts of gasoline to run the generator?

5. Planning is for punks.

6. Did I say summer camp? There is no summer here; just wet and even wetter is gusty spurts.

7. Every camp needs a little fat kid to say stupid stuff and make everyone else look relatively grown up.

8. Make sure to limit talent show acts to one hour each unless you want to watch marathon versions of improv soap operas.

9. Yes, this is camp and it is cold and the water is like ice, but every Panamanian kid present is going to take two showers a day (minimum) and they will get up at 4:30am to make it happen. So schedule in showers.

10. Schedules are for suckers.

11. Nobody’s going to talk to you about “liability risk” around here. So let the kids hang from the rafters if they want to! Create mile-high human pyramids! Toss ‘em around a bit! Relish in the risky ‘cause back in the U.S. even Red-Rover has been deemed too dangerous.

12. When all else fails, put in your earplugs and let the dance party roll on.

...Well, I've been drenched in rain for the last week, but will have just enough time to dry off before getting all wet again: Carnaval starts on February 20th and Panamanians boast the biggest party outside of Rio de Janeiro. !Ajue!

Love, K

2009-01-21T09:25:00.000-06:00

I’ve been in Barrigon for seven months now. I can sing-song greet almost everyone by name when I pass them in the street: “!Chan-O!’ “!Tio MAC!” “Meleeeesa”. I have mastered the skill of avoiding direct responses to awkward questions like, “do you want to marry my son?” and “aren’t you lonely living all by yourself? Why don’t you come live at our house?” and “you’re catholic, right? NO? But you’re at least baptized catholic, right?” Yep, I’ve got answers for all of them. And those who have been down to visit won’t believe this, but yesterday I even peeled myself an orange the Panamanian carve-away-from-you squeezy-cup style! I expected a victory parade to march through my back patio, but only little Toni the neighbor was there to witness the historic event.

Despite these advances, I am often reminded of my newcomer and outsider status. Take today as an example. An older man and my closest work partner absolutely could not believe that I know how to wash my own clothes. When I told him that I had to hurry home to take advantage of the sunny morning to wash, he stared at me incredulously and asked me who was going to wash my clothes? He was adamant that I must get help from somebody. No, I can do it, I swear.
And then later I ran into a guy in the street who just moved back to Barrigon after a decade in Tennessee or Kentucky or something. He refuses to address me in Spanish. Not only that, but he is unwilling to accept that I speak Spanish at all. Even when I respond to everything he says in his native tongue! To top it off, he refers to me exclusively as “Hon”. As in, “hey Hon, how’s it going?” and “catch you later, Hon.” Yeah, see you around, Honkey.

But, really, it’s all good. These occasions remind me that I’ve still got a lot of learning to do, that I don’t have it all figured out quite yet. And I’m definitely game for more exploration of this place, these people, this culture. Sometimes I feel like I’ve only yet scratched the surface and that two years will never be enough time to understand all that I seek to know.

Well, this is a brief update and relatively devoid of any insight into the current state of affairs on my mental island. But I’ve gotta ease back into this blog-writing thing slowly…it’s been a while.
In the meantime, know that summer has arrived in Panama and all is bright. My tomatoes have finally ripened, I have big cucumbers on the vines, and my worms have produced a substantial amount of dark, fluffy compost!

Love to you all!

Chocolate

2009-01-21T09:11:00.000-06:00

Theobrama cacao: theo (god), brama (food). The food of the gods.

Cacao trees, outlandish in appearance and deceivingly unchocolatey, grow in the understory here: unimposing trees with play-football like pods seemingly nailed on the skinny trunks. The first time I saw a cacao tree it was early in the morning and I was on my way to a neighbor’s farm. We were crossing in the dark understory of her uncle’s land. What is that? Of all the weird trees that grow in this environment (the giant spiny bread fruit tree with leaves that could cover my whole body, the funky “potato tree” (as I call it…) that looks like its got spuds hanging off its limbs only the “potatoes” are red inside and taste like pure sugar, the pifá palm with parallel rows of long spikes ringing the tall trunk) of ALL the weird trees in the cloud forest, cacao would take the prize.

The cacao tree in no way screams chocolate. First you must get through the hard, inch thick pod to where the seeds are buried in sweet, tangy goo. I love the description of the pulp around the seed in an article from the New Yorker: The inside was creamy wet. It smelled of honey and orange and perfume. This was the pulp surrounding the giant seeds. The seeds looked like wet white maggots.. …[The seeds]had a slimy, sweet zing, more liquid than substance, and as I rubbed them against the roof of my mouth the pulp disintegrated. I was left with four seeds—still a mouthful. I bit one gently. It was bitter, awful. I spit it out.

In Barrigon nobody sells chocolate, but many harvest the seeds and work them into drinking chocolate for consumption in their homes. I’ve been able to help on a few occasions and have even started doing it on my own.

Once the pecan-size seeds are removed from their enticing pulp, they are set out to dry for many days. At this point they are thrown in a big caldron and roasted for about 20 minutes. This serves to crack the thin shell so you can peel it off. When the shells are beginning to crack, the seeds are removed from the flame, set to cool, and then de-shelled one by one. The seed without a shell is very dark with almost a purple hue.

(picture below: toasted cacao seeds)

(picture above: removing toasted seeds from the caldron. Ready to be shelled.)

The next step is to grind the seeds as if they were coffee beans. They are very oily. In fact, the “butter” created by boiling the seeds is very expensive and used as skin cream. Once ground, the seeds are a black blob of delicious, chocolate-smelling mush. Mmmm.

(picture below: Deya and Geraldo start to grind up the seeds.)

(picture: attaching the grinder to the table, shells on wooden plate, seeds in ice cream tin)

Ground, the cacao is still very bitter and even though it smells like chocolate, it tastes disgusting. Nevertheless, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve opened the tub of ground cacao in my cupboard, smelled it and been tricked by the smell into taking a small bite. You’d think that someday I’d learn…

Here in Barrigon, to turn the mush into drinking chocolate they add the ground cacao, condensed milk, LOTS of sugar, and water to a big pan and let it boil. I’ve also experimented with making chocolate-banana bread with cacao (the first attempt was gross, but its getting better) and I’ve made some killer chocolate chip cookies with cacao-chips. Most recently I made a cinnamon-chocolate cake with my cacao paste and it was delicious!

(pictures above: Lily, Deya, and Señor Francisco enjoy rich, steaming hot chocolate)

In the Bocas de Toro province, where cacao is bought by foreign chocolate manufactures and such, I am sure that they have a more refined process for roasting and preparing the cacao seeds.

The beautiful thing is that cacao doesn’t seem to have a season, so whenever you decide to come visit me, we will prepare a delicious chocolate cake and dine on the food of the gods.

2008-10-16T17:11:00.000-05:00

Here's a few pictures, mostly of school activities. I am pretty sure that if you click on the picture it pops up a lot bigger.

Protect the animals! These are my fifth grade girls at the school parade I threw together for animal week:

The fourth grade making a map of the school to highlight areas with lots of garbage:The first graders at the parade with a pet parrot.

Just another day in the school garden...with deadly snakes.So they decided to chop it up. I don't know what this snake is called in english, but here it is an X snake because it has the design of an X on its back.
My little water contamination skit:

A hike to the hill that looks over Barrigón and neighboring towns with my host brothers and dad (and Mark) last month.

Never Have I Ever

2008-10-16T17:03:00.000-05:00

Last winter when I accepted my invitation to Peace Corps Panama from a public phone on Lake Potzcuaro in Mexico, I could already anticipate many of the changes, challenges, and beautiful moments that I’d experience. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about: blunders in language (“¡estoy embarazada!” instead of “I’m so embarrassed!”), long nights spent in the outhouse with amebas, unexpected little miracles of nature, offerings of weird food (“I don’t know...I tend to steer clear of feet and faces...”), long waits for unreliable transportation, etc. That’s traveling, right?

But there are definitely some things that I never expected to do, to feel, or to say despite all my preparations for the Peace Corps. Here’s a few of them:

Never did I ever expect to:

Fall in love with accordion music.
Find myself at 2am under a tree of sleeping chickens waving a broomstick around frantically, trying to knock a loud-mouth rooster off his branch so I could finally get some sleep, damn it.
Lick my fingers and declare “¡que delicioso!” after chewing up a hard piece of endangered species (saíno).
Enthusiastically agreeing to go hunting for an endangered species...but not following through.
Feel perfectly comfortable walking through the jungle with ground cover so dense that I can’t see my feet. In Teva sandals and capri pants. (uh, aren’t there like vipers around here?)
Pee in an ice cream bucket in my kitchen almost every afternoon because I don’t want to get drenched on my way to the latrine.
Be ecstatic about the potential of finally getting my hands on a truck load of chicken poop.
Find so many uses for burned motor oil: pouring it down the latrine and lighting the whole thing on fire (if you don’t singe your eyelashes you sure as hell kill off the mosquito colony), rubbing it all over the dog to cure it of the “itchies,” making greasy little moats around the legs of tables so the ants don’t crawl up and eat everything (particularly the worms I’ve got growing on a table in the backyard), or using it in a demo about water contamination at school then having nowhere to pour out the water than in a hole that will eventually seep into the creek (woops...).
Willingly travel my bus/chiva/foot over four hours one-way to spend fifteen minutes looking at small town dump that only kinda functions but could potentially serve as a model for trash management in Barrigón.
Suck the juice off the boiled chicken toenails.

So I’ll celebrate the six-month-in-country mark tomorrow. Time is flying by...I can hardly believe it.

In other news, a 2^nd grader gave me the sweetest little kitten in the world. He named her Sultan but I call her India. She sleeps in my hair and welcomes me home every evening.

I hope you are all preparing to vote. Wherever I travel I am reminded that Election Day in the U.S. is Election Day for the whole world…we’re just the only ones who get to vote. What a privilege! So go to the polls knowing that the decisions we make in Gringo-landia DO have an effect on the daily lives of millions of people outside of our borders…even my neighbors here in Barrigón.

Sending love and the rolling melody of an accordion to all,
K

Juliette's Photos and Art

2008-10-06T15:17:00.000-05:00

I don't know how my friend Juliette feels about this (and I probably should have asked her...) but she has posted her photos and sketches from Panama on a website and they are incredible. I wish I could capture our days with such vibrance, but I'm not much of a photographer and my camera is always dead (woops). Juliette entered PC Panama in the same training group as I did and works in the providence of Colón. It is really worth checking out her photo album here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/juliettesaysyo/
Hope this will suffice as an update because I've got to run!
Love to all,
Kayla

Tough Decisions

2008-09-10T11:50:00.000-05:00

I went to a funeral yesterday. It was for a thirteen year old boy who died suddenly of dengue fever. I had never met him and so went out of solidarity for my community, not realizing that I’d be affected. When I arrived at the church there they were: my four host families, all of my fifth graders, my friends, the teachers, the little kids and babies that I’ve grown to love so quickly. And there was his family, alternating between stoicism and hysterics. Everyone was crying, praying, touching the glass that covered his face. I was struck by the harsh reality of death. Even in a place where death comes more often and funerals are a part of life, death is death. A mother still suffers unfathomable pain when she loses a child. His sisters and brothers still miss his presence in a stabbing way. His community still burns with his absence from the school, the street, the swimming hole.

I wanted to run from the church. It took all my willpower to stay amidst all this suffering. Tears streamed down my cheeks. And it was not over after the mass. The community walked to the graveyard overlooking our river valley where the men dug the hole and the women and family stood around the coffin crying and comforting each other. Again, I struggled against my desire to run. After only two months in Barrigón I still don’t know my place (I think it takes a generation to finally belong) so I stood around awkwardly, crying for this boy I’d never even met. I almost left a thousand times during the long morning.

Despite my desire to escape, I had this nagging feeling that by leaving I’d be making a poor choice about my place in Barrigón. At this moment, just as at others, I was torn between accepting these people’s pain as if it were my own—and just by being in their presence I was overflowing with their loss—or walking away. I could go back to my house and live beside but not among my neighbors; an outsider moved by foreign forces. Sometimes I chose between accompanying my community and keeping my distance without even noticing, but other times it is a very conscious choice. I don’t always make the right decision.

But yesterday I stayed. I stayed even though I had to watch his fifteen year old sister melt as she threw a handful of dirt over the coffin. My head was screaming, this doesn’t have to be your pain! Why are you torturing yourself over someone you don’t know? Quit standing here, quit watching this! But I stayed. I stayed and all the sorrow of my four host families, my friends and neighbors, and those who I’ve never met, all of their sorrow hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like I was getting the shit kicked out of me with my hands tied behind my back. I went home afterwards and slept through the afternoon. Then I called my mom and cried.

Mi Casa

2008-09-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

Pictures of my house (yes, my very own house!):

The front:

View from the bedroom window:

Looking towards the river from the front porch:

The neighbor's a gardener!

The back yard and side entrance. They are putting a cement floor in the rancho:

The latrine and shower rooms (that's a papaya tree):

(P.S. I really lucked out on this house...most PC housing isn't this cute. Rent is $30/mo)

Workin' Girl

2008-09-05T13:51:00.000-05:00

This "job" is all-encompassing—I live, breathe, eat, walk, and obsess over my "work". I put it in quotations because at this stage my assimilation into my community IS my work. It’s the relationships I’m building with community members, the hours of conversation on patios over cups of sweet coffee, the miles of walking I’ve done up and down through Barrigón, the shared meals, the evenings and mornings with my three host families, the canceled meetings and the meetings that never end, the harvesting and shelling of innumerable pounds of beans. It is rainy afternoons in my hammock attempting to rest while my mind wanders to neighbors I’ve yet to visit, technical skills I want to learn, ideas I should be writing down.
This intensity is good for me. It keeps my head in the game and it keeps my objectives at the forefront of my mind. I’ve struggled, though, with a lot of guilt about not working more effectively. Often I feel overwhelmed by how much I think about work in less-than-constructive ways. I’ve come to realize that this is a common affliction among Peace Corps volunteers—especially brand new ones like myself. I’ve been trying to strike a balance so that I can enjoy some personal time and take an emotional break from thinking about the challenges and logistics of my role here. Then I will have more positive energy to put into my projects and my community.
Speaking of my projects, I realize that I’ve posted a lot more about food and scenery than my projects here. This may be an enduring trend, but today I want to tell you what I’ve got cooking in terms of project development:

1. Teaching environmental education to 4th-6th graders (we’re learning about the 3 “R’s” right now). Teaching has turned out to be way more rewarding and fun than I expected. The kids, who have been always been taught to copy and repeat instead of think, are enthusiastic and appreciate my efforts to make learning an interactive experience.

2. Developing a trash management plan for the community. This is still in the earliest stages but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be dedicating a large chunk of the next two years to designing a cleaner, safer way for this rural Panamanian town to dispose of their solid waste and waste water.

2b. ...But in order to get the community to support a waste management program (or any community-wide program, for that matter!), I’ll also be undertaking a lot of conflict resolution and group facilitation activities to try to foster cooperation; there are some very stark divisions in Barrigon that have hindered community-wide projects.

3. Supporting a small (but relatively functional) ecotourism group in Barrigon that rents out two little cabins to tourists who come to the National Park. They’ve asked for help with publicity, trail and sign maintenance, and English classes (in order to give guided tours of their nature trail). I’m also scheming to start developing a business plan with them in order to prioritize their needs and get a little more organized.

So there’s the brief overview of the projects I spend countless hours obsessing over. Any suggestions or ideas are bienvenidas. Thanks, as always, for sending love in the form of emails, messages, chocolate hearts and snail mail. What a fan club!

Sweet Corn and Other Wonders

2008-08-15T09:29:00.000-05:00

A couple of days ago I harvested beans with an old dude named Señor Julian. His fields are a steep climb out of the river valley where we live. Although the trail was no more than the farmers’ walk to work, I was struck once again by the beauty of where I am. I kept stopping to ask him about new flowers, fruit, ferns. There were orchids everywhere. Señor Julian’s crops are grown on a plot carved out of the hillside. He laughed because I kept slipping backwards on the steep slope, grabbing at corn stocks to steady me. Sweet corn is just coming into season and the whole town is waiting for the harvest. After we filled his huge basket with red, green, brown, white and purple beans, Señor Julian went through the corn and hacked off about twenty ears for me to take with me for dinner. Later, as I struggled home with my huge sack of the first “new corn” (as opposed to dry corn, I think) of the year, people kept peeking in my bag and asking, “New corn! Who’s harvesting?” I felt like a celebrity; expect for once it wasn’t my blue eyes and “blond” hair on parade!

Anyway, the morning I was out with Señor Julian I started a serious reflection on these first six weeks in site. I don’t know why…Perhaps it was that this beautiful morning had been preceded by one of those days in which I feel like I will never fit in, I will never stop feeling lonely, and I will never make any change—because I do have those tough days.

Or maybe I was moved to reflection because we lost the first volunteer from our training group this week. She’s back in the States now, figuring out her next move.

It was also something that Julian said: “When you’re 40 you’ll say ‘remember those two years I worked in Panama when I was so young?’ and it will make you happy.” Maybe it was just that the moment that he said it—we were sitting in a shady grove that he called “God’s airconditioning”—but his comment brought tears to my eyes. This precious experience is inevitably going to end too soon.

Well, whatever the reason, I’ve spent a good chuck of time since then thinking about what has happened in the last weeks and what this all means to me. I thought I’d share with you guys my top ten favorite things about Panama.
Keep in mind that this list is in no way exhaustive and it changes every day.

What I love about Panama:

1. The fruit. It’s everywhere. There is so much fruit that “it gets lost,” (as they say). Oranges, mangos, star fruit, coconuts (ok ok it’s not a fruit), bananas, mini-bananas, a little berry called nance, ahhh…Mmm.

2. Sehila: my fun, funny, bubbly friend here in Barrigón. She’s always game for an adventure, loves siestas even more than me, fills awkward silences on old peoples front porches, and indulges my occasional need to gossip like a twelve-year-old.

3. Every day between 6am-7am and 6pm-7pm: the sky is changing, the birds are singing their little hearts out, the temperature is cool, the mountains are covered in sheets of mist…a girl could live for nothing more than these two hours each day.

4. The baby animals: to the constant amusement of everyone in town, I actually touch the baby animals, and even the full grown ones! Having a puppy on my lap makes long conversations about the weather almost pleasant (“It’s hot, no? But the rain is coming. Yesterday the rain didn’t come, no, but today it is coming. Good thing because it is hot,” "ah, hmmm.").

5. Señor Pastor: no, he’s not a preacher, that’s just his name. He is my counterpart, community guide, a “wise old fox” (as I heard him referred to yesterday), my closest thing to a father here, the person I trust most in the community, and funny as hell. But you gotta crack his shell because like most old campesinos, he’s all kinds of shy.

6. The color. Panama is GREEN.

7. The kids. They call me Kae–LA like its two words and La is the more important one. They also call me Teacha although I’ve yet to give a class. But whatever they call me, they say it with a goofy grin then get all shy and hide behind their moms—expect Crystal. Which brings me to…

8.
Crystal: She’s the sort-of-adopted niña of a woman I greatly admire. Crystal comes from a really rough family in the city, talks like a sailor, and the only dance move she knows is “al piso!” (to the floor!). Needless to say, this five-year-old is a bit of an outsider here in the campo. Just like someone else you know…haha. But Crystal gives me so much love and is always making me laugh.

9. The language: I’m adopting the weird sing-song Spanish of the Panamanian interior in which “buenas” is a three syllable word. Many English words have worked their way back into my vocabulary, too. Like ‘pretty’, spelled ‘prity’ but meaning something way closer to ‘cool’ than ‘good-looking’. And my other favorite: watchi-mon, a throwback to when the US controlled the canal. Any security guard now has the honor of being called watchi-mon. Cute, huh?

10. El café: could I really make a top ten list and leave out coffee? Fresh roasted right here on the kitchen fire, ground up before my eyes, strained through an old sock, and pure heaven. especially between 6-7am.

One more:
11. Stories from other Peace Corps Volunteers: I had the pleasure of sharing a few golden days with some of my PC buddies last week. Our collective stories could fill volumes. I haven’t laughed so hard in a long while. Here’s the link to one of my closest friend’s blogs. She is living on the indigenous reservation and has some crazy times. http://andiinpanama.blogspot.com/

Well, I'll leave you with a few pictures. Besides the first (a pic of my mini-vacation last week), the rest are from a trip I took with a great family in my community up to a teeny town thats inside the boundry of the National Park. Talk about green...this place was like the emerald valley from Wizard of Oz.

Neighbors of mine and their uncle's house where we stayed up in the mountains:

The hike out to the mountains Yes, that is their pet parrot on the walking stick. They didn't want to leave him at home all week so they took him along:

The kids down at the river:
Send me a sign if you're reading this...its good to know you all are still out there, and it helps motivate me to write.

One life.

Típica

2008-07-23T12:42:00.000-05:00

A few photos from a presentation last weekend of Barrigón's kids dance group:

A windy day for dancing:

Sombreros Pinta'os (the traditional hat of Panamá, made by women in Barrigón):

Los muchachitos:

Role Models:

Contact Info

2008-07-09T15:28:00.000-05:00

Here's my new address in Coclé:

Kayla Bordelon
Entrega General - 0229
Correo de Penonomé
Panamá, Republica de Panamá

My cell phone number:

011 507 6705 6115

I know it is weird but I get cell phone service in my site. I even get text messages.

Goodbyes, Swear-In, New Beginning

2008-06-30T14:34:00.000-05:00

So here is the bullet point list of what has happened since last time I posted:
1. Week-long site visit to our future communities. (yikes! that was nerve-wracking!)
2. Return to our training community for a week and a goodbye party with host families.
3. Four days in Panama City (on an old US military base...) to finish off training.
4. Last Thursday: Swear-In Ceremony!
5. Weekend at the beach with all of us the brand spankin' new volunteers
6. Arrival at my community: Barrigón, Coclé.

Satisfied? Just kidding. I've been getting emails asking why I haven't written in so long. Truth is that I'm having trouble processing it all. And maybe it's also because I feel like these last three months have been so focused on Me the Trainee and I am ready to focus on my community and my service there, so writing more about Me the Trainee seemed frivolous...

A friend from UPS sent me a facebook message from Africa. He's been in the Peace Corps for about a year now and I wrote asking him for advice. He said "training is training. the peace corps is something entirely different." Very true. So I want you all to know that thus far, you have been reading the blog of a Peace Corps Trainee. it has been an exciting and challenging experience all on its own, but now I am beginning my new adventure as a volunteer. I am looking forward very much to filling you in on the progression of my projects and of my personal journey.

And for now I'd just like to share a few pictures from the last weeks of my training period.

Piñata at the Goobye Fiesta for our host families in Santa Clara. Yes, they put flour in with the candy...and cough drops:
Rice-Saco Races:

Our last ride on Santa Clara's Red Devil:
This is me freaking out right before my speech at the Swear-In ceremony. Andi and I were trying to figure out how to use a microphone...

Me and the World Director of Peace Corps. It is very unusual to get the chance to meet him, but lucky for Panama's Group 61 (us!), he was here to celebrate the 45th aniversary of Peace Corp's arrival in Panama:

A beautiful day on the Pacific last weekend:
This is the Peace Corps??

We started training as professional development workers. We leave training as campesinos:

Saying goodbye to friends that I've lived and worked with for the past three months was very emotional. A big, fat sob-fest. We've shared a lot and are heading out on our own now, but I know we'll continue to support each other through the years that are coming.

This is the view from my room in my new host family's home in Barrigón, Coclé:

Alright, my eyes are crossing after sitting at this computer for so long! Thanks for sending so much love my way.

Besos, Kayla

Gringos go to the Farm

2008-06-03T15:37:00.001-05:00

Hello my spirited and faithful blog readers. Thanks for all of your emails and messages--I really cannot convey how much it means to me to have you all behind me.

One day, two weeks ago, our group of eight Peace Corps trainees that were visiting a volunteer in a mountainous site went to "work" on a community farm. Here is how our day went:

7 am- Breakfast of fried flour patties and fried hot dogs (yum, right? you get used to it.) with our sweet, quiet host families.

8am- The beginning of a steep but gorgeous climb up to the farm.

9am- Arrival at the farm. A round of handshakes and hellos ensue.

9:15am- All of the cooperative members thank us profusely for coming to see their work. They serve us sweet coffee and boiled yucca root with sardine sauce on top.

10am- We start "working". this means that a few of us are digging beds for a garden while the others relax in the shade and learn all kinds of great info from these old farmers.

12pm- Wow! after 2 hours of "work" we are taken by the farmers to see the hive of a leaf-cutter ants. It was one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time! I wish I had time to explain the organization of a colony of leaf-cutter ants. If only our own social organization was so highly developed! The farmers are using the food waste of the ants (yes, the ants actually have a public dump where they discard all of their waste) as fertilizer in their vegetable gardens.

1pm- We are served a delicious chicken, rice, and yucca soup for lunch back up at the farm. This is followed by more sweet coffee.

1:30pm- The farmers thank us again for coming and working for them. We all shake hands with everyone and some of their kids prepare to lead us on a hike to this crazy jungle waterfall. Before we take off an old man starts handing out "square" bananas to all of us. This is the best banana I have ever tasted, and also the first banana I've ever eaten that has its big, black seeds intact. The man has carried them all the way from his farm in a big rice sack.

(this is my buddy Mark on the way to the waterfalls. He'll be my closest PC neighbor in Panama)
We spend the rest of the afternoon crawling upstream to the waterfalls, swimming in deep pools, exploring caves, and eating bananas.

On our way back from the hike a family that had seen us walk by their house called us all over for sweet coffee. As we left they gave us each a hand of bananas and an avocado.

This was supposed to be a work day. Instead, we were showered with kindness, thank yous, and generosity. Our entire week out in this rural community followed the same pattern. At the end of the week I left knowing with all my heart that I will never be able to give back as much as I receive in these next two years. But as I recognize this, I am also inspired to invest my whole self to the work I'm doing here.

This is my host family, sharing lunch with us on their farm where we're planting rice.

This is the house of the volunteer we visited. Her community built it for her.

This is our new Coclé Province crew, a great group of folks.

Alright, thats all I got! Love to you all, Kayla

Más Fotos

2008-05-15T15:59:00.000-05:00

Site placements! Yesterday was the big day when we all found out where we would be living for the next two years. I wrote about my new site in the post below this one. They put up a map of Panamá with all of our happy little faces on it. Can you find me?

This is the group of volunteers who were placed in the Coclé region with me. The other two women are married (to the guys in plaid shirts). The dude in the bright blue shirt is our regional leader. Mark, on the far right, is a good buddy of mine (he's the one that did NW Youth Corps) and will be living right down the road from me in Coclé.

This is the waterfall right outside of our training community, Santa Clara. It has a great swimming hole below it. Sometimes I'll run out there in the morning then cool off in the water.

First rains of the season! We have lots of chickens and they were all trying to take cover in the living room. My host mom usually shoes them out right away but it was pouring so hard that she must have felt bad and let them stay inside for a while.

This was a great day. Some relatives came to town and brought all this seafood. These crabs were so beautiful--really bright purple backs, orange legs, and white pinchers. Afterwards I went to a soccer game with two of my closest PC friends (Mike on the left, Jonathan on the right, below). We tried pigeon eggs smothered in thousand island dressing...yum. The soccer game turned into a block party that lasted through the evening. I wish I had some pictures of the pimped out minivans that acted as portable sound systems for the party.

This is my buddy Jonathan eating my new favorite fruit. I know you can't see it well, but each little fruit has a fiberous shell that you peel off. Then you just suck the inside out. I wish I knew what they were called...
A few weekends ago my host family decided to make tamales to sell. More relatives came over and we ground up the corn then added chicken, onions, and olives, wrapping them in these great big banana leaves from the yard. Mom, you would have loved this! I was trying to help wrap them up but mine were so ugly that they pretty much said we couldn't sell them. We put them in a special pile to eat for lunch. Each tamal had a different chicken part in it and I tied a bow on the weirdest ones (the feet, the neck, the head) so that I wouldn't pick it out of the pile when we sat down to eat.

Aren't they pretty??

PS that't our dog Mancha under the table. Mancha is like the Spanish equivilant to Spot the Dog. I really like her and keep begging my host family to make her have a baby for me to take with me to my site.

So thats it. I hope you enjoyed them!

Site Announcements!

2008-05-15T15:56:00.000-05:00

It’s official! My home for the next two years will be a small town in the mountains of the Coclé province, at the entrance to the Omar Torrijos National Park. I can’t think of a better fit for my interests and experience. I’ll be working with some environmental youth groups that are hypothetically already functioning in the town, teaching environmental education, and working with an ecotourism group and the managers of the National Park on a tourism plan for the area. Along with all that, it sounds like I’ll have ample opportunity to get up in the Park and dig some trail!

I have heard so many positive things about this community. It is supposed to be absolutely beautiful, to begin with. There are many waterfalls and various streams and rivers that intersect right around there. In the National Park they say you can hike for days and not see anyone. And when you get to a high point you’re able to see both the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans at once. The park still has a lot of primary forest in it, which is getting more and more rare in a country where deforestation is by far the most pervasive environmental concern. I can tell by the reports that I’ve received about the area that there is a lot of work to do in the field of environmental awareness and education. It won’t be until I move up there in about six weeks that I will really come to understand the depths of the environmental problems that exist. I’ll keep y’all posted…

Although I’m super stoked that I ended up with such a special site, I am already feeling sad about leaving our training community of Santa Clara and all of the friends I’ve made here. While one of my good buddies will be right down the road from me, all of my other close friends received posts very far away. I keep telling myself that training (these first 10 weeks in country) are just a tiny portion of what will be a long process of creating my own personal community and creating change (both in myself and in my site). And in some ways I think I’m just weary from so many transitions in the last year. I will probably feel a lot better once I’m settled in my community.

As for the rest of training, on Sunday I’m heading out to another site in this general area (about 2 hours from here) for “culture week”. I’ll be with a group of about eight other volunteers (as opposed to the 35 that live here in Santa Clara with us!) and we’ll all stay with host families and do cultural stuff (whatever that means…). It should be a relaxing week in many ways. After that I will head directly to the Azuero Peninsula (the big bulge that shoots south into the Pacific) for a week of specific technical training related to environmental education in the schools, working with environmental youth groups, and doing learning basic reforestation techniques. After that we’ll all re-convene here in Santa Clara for one week, then spend one week up in our future sites getting to know people and learning about the work we’ll be doing. Then we’re back in Santa Clara for a final week and a big party before the Swearing-In ceremony that will take place in Panama City on June 26th. So the next six weeks are filled with more movement and new adventures….the Peace Corps has proven to be quite a ride.

Keep sending me your love and updates, okay? I can’t tell you often enough how much I appreciate all the support.

Abrazos, Kayla

Garden Party

2008-05-10T14:09:00.001-05:00

Hi guys,

I am in town buying seeds for our garden and medicine for a friend who got some knarly foot fungus and can barely walk--mmmm. I intended (again!) to post pictures but I forgot my little camera card with most of my pictures on it! So here are a few shots of the garden party we had this morning. All these beautiful folks are in the Environmental Conservation group with me. We're making this garden using various kinds of soil and composting techniques, and learning about the native species that grow around here.

Peace, K

Photos

2008-05-07T11:27:00.001-05:00

I just spent an hour trying to upload photos, then the internet cut out. So there you go...maybe next week. Peace, Kayla

The Rainy Season

2008-05-07T10:17:00.000-05:00

The rainy season has begun! Our little training town of Santa Clara is even greener than before, the mangos are finally ripe, and the clay roads are turning into red mud. Every afternoon we have a downpour. All of the roofs are tin so sometimes its so loud we can't hear each other. Usually it clears up as fast as it starts and by night time there are stars out. This morning as I was riding the bus into town it started to rain pretty hard and everyone closed the windows. All of the buses down here are called Red Devils and they are old US school buses that couldn't pass safety inspections anymore. We sit three to a seat (just like in kindergarden except that we're all a lot bigger now!) and there is always a line of people standing in the middle. Anyway, there were so many people crammed on the bus, and with the windows up it literally became a sauna. The lady next to me (squished between me on the outside and a man with a four year old on this lap on this inside) and said "we're all going to suffocate." My thoughts exactly. But we made it safe and sound into town and here I am in an airconditioned internet cafe!

Everything is going really well. I went out to the mountains this weekend to visit a current volunteer who has been in-site for about two years. It was soooo beautiful up there! And her community was warm and welcoming to me. Every day we went out "pasearing" (visiting neighbors) and would come home with bags and buckets of fruit and food. The first night we went to two houses and came back with a bag of oranges, ten warm eggs, a bag of mangos, a bunch of bananas (two new kinds!), and a pail of steaming rice and beans ("so we wouldn't have to bother with dinner"). How sweet, right?? The communities really take care of their volunteers.

In one week we will be given our site announcements (this is when they will tell us where we will be living for the next two years). I am impaciently awaiting the news. It is also unnerving because I am making good friends with the other PC trainees in my group and I know that it is going to be hard to be scattered all over the country. Last night we gathered a small group to celebrate one of our compañera's birthdays and sat up in my backyard where my family has some hammocks stung in the trees. We had a few guitars and spent the evening making up little songs and listening to them play. It's such a great group of folks that I'll hate to be far away from them. I have heard from current volunteers that the first three months in your site are very difficult because you go from being right down the street from all your buddies to ¡boom! ALONE. I'm nervous about it, for sure. But I'm also fairly confident that we can all ride it out and end up happy and adjusted in our communities.

Okay, my real mission was to post some more pictures so I will leaving the update at that. Thank you all for your emails and messages, I can't tell you how nice it is to hear from each of you! Please keep sending them.

Abrazos,
Kayla

Photos

2008-04-25T17:46:00.000-05:00

My host brother with the parakeet. our house is neon green and its in the background.

I love how the pineapples grow on a pedastool like this! on the right side is my host sister (4 years old) and her little friend7neighbor7cousin. arent they cute?!!

Whoops. I dont know how to make it not sideways. But this is my host brother and sister in the yard.

My first Machete (the first thing any of us bought in Panama) this is my first attempt at opening the coconuts in our yard. my 12 year old host brother was cringing.

Primeras Semanas (First Weeks)

2008-04-25T17:13:00.000-05:00

Our program director came out to the small town where our group of 46 are training for three months and said that we'd been in country for nine days. Nine days? It feels like decades...in the best way possible.
I feel so comfortable here. It feels so right that I chose to come to Panama at this time to do this job. Every day there is a moment when I think to myself: There is no place in the world that I would rather be in this moment.
Of course sometimes the task we face is overwhelming. I read this quote on the wall during our initial 3-day staging in Miami last week:

Go to the people.
Live with them. Learn from them.
Love them.
Start with what they know.

Build with what they have.

And with the best of leaders,
when the work is done, the task
completed, the people will stay,
'we have done it ourselves.'
-Lao Tsu (700 BC)

Its a tall order, I know. But from my vantage point (as naive trainee...), with only a few weeks (and lots of rice!) under my belt, it seems possible. Especially since the technical training that we´re receiving (4 hours/day) is great and there are plenty of current volunteers around who can attest to the atainability of our goals.

Our goals. In case you´re wondering exactly what it is the Peace Corps is trying to do out there in the "developing" world, here are the three goals in a nutshell:
1. Promoting a deeper understanding of Americans and American culture to others.
2. Promoting a deeper understanding of foreign cultures to the American people.
3. Helping interested countries meet their need for trained men and women (this is where our projects come in...)

I´d like to give you guys more info about my specific project in Environmental Education, but I think I will save that for a day that I´m in an internet cafe that isn´t blasting old TLC and SaltN'Pepper classics...

As far as my personal experience is going, I've experienced a lot of great "firsts" since arriving:
1. I saw my first sloth the other day! It had a baby with it and they were both eating. It moved a lot faster than I imagined in 2nd grade.
2. My first volunteer site visit was to a mangrove forest that is being over-harvested for making charcoal. The volunteer there is working on a very sucessful reforestation project. There were little crabs out there even though the ocean was nowhere in sight.
3. The first fruit I ate off the tree here was what is called a mariñon (i bet i butchered the spelling). I´ve been in fruit heaven. Mangos, coconut, maracuyá, lots of things I dont know the name of, and of course so many BANANAS and PLATANOS (diego, you are going to LOVE all my new banana adventures). My host family have a plethora of fruit growing all around there house. They also have 60+ chickens, two rad dogs, a mean parakeet, doves that walk on the tin roof at 5am every day, and some brand new chicks that hatched the day I arrived. (by the way..I´m pretty sure I got the most amazing host family there is in the history of host families).
4. My first, but definitely not last, Double-fried Hot Dog for Breakfast experience was...just as good as it sounds.

So I had the opportunity to see Bethany, my beloved adventure buddy from Tucson and Mexico, when I arrived in Miami two Sundays back. She mentioned that a good blog entry is often short and sweet. I made a silent vow to follow that advice. But sure enough I´ve failed on my first try!! Sorry that this is so long. I have so much more that I want to share, but it will come with time, I´m sure.

Meanwhile, write me emails! I love hearing from all of you. I´ll be in Panama City on Sunday so I will be able to get any emails you've sent then.

Sending my love,
Kayla

Bienvenidos to my blog

2008-04-10T22:24:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone!

Thanks for checking in while I'm down in Panama! Your support and love means the world to me. I'm two days (and one birthday!) away from taking off and my To-Do list seems to be growing by the minute. Despite the mess that I've created in almost every room of my parent's house (packing=spreading), I'm confident that the important stuff will all get done and the details will work themselves out when I arrive in Panama on Wednesday.

A few notes:

The bridge on the top of this page is called "The Bridge of the Americas" (la puente de las americas)and it crosses the Panama Canal on the Pacific side. It is the most spectacular of the few bridges that connect North America to the rest of Panama and the whole of South America.

I don't know how often I will be able to post, but I will try to send out a mass email when I've updated my blog.

Oh, if you have any blogging tips, I am all ears.

And you are just going to have to forgive my spelling errors...its hereditary.

I'll be leaving for staging in Miami on Sunday morning (if American Airlines gets their act together...). After Saturday I will not have a cell phone, but I should have access to email until I leave the States on Wednesday.

Sending my love to you all,
Kayla