Volunteer visit- Bocas del Toro

This last week, each trainee in our group had a 4 day visit with a currently serving volunteer. I visited Catherine in Bocas del Toro providence near the shores of the Carribbean. She works in an indigenous Ngobe community of about 900 people, spread out over several square miles of subsistence farms or "fincas". If Cati is visiting houses to advertise a meeting, it takes her 4 days to get to her entire community walking around the hillsides.  Catherine's main project here has been installing pit and composting latrines. She's working with a counterpart, Lucas, a strong member of the community who moved here from a nearby town that also had a Peace Corps volunteer.  Lucas is really interested in composting latrines and reforestation. A counterpart is the PC term for a particular community member with whom the Volunteer works and who provides continuity to the efforts. Cati has been there for 2 years and is leaving at the end of the month. She may be followed up by another volunteer- one of us! She has thought deeply about her time there and has a really positive attitude despite the challenges she's encountered, and it was a pleasure to discuss her experience. She also made an effort to expose me to a wide range of her activities and I feel like I know much more about what a Volunteer's life and work is like, as a result of my visit.  Her job is one that I can see myself doing; I can also  see it'll take a lot of adaptation.

Highlights included:

Meeting her fan club of neighbor children. She enjoys them and they enjoy spending time with her- so much so, that she has to set strict boundaries and "visiting hours." They were a lot of fun.

Bathing in the creek or "quebrada" with the kids

Learning about the dysfunctional aqueduct system, and hiking to see its source.

peresozo

Seeing a sloth or "peresozo" = lazy

large rainforest tree on a farm mixed with forest

Making a concrete seat for a pit latrine in a mold.

Checking on several homes that had recently finished their latrines.

Visiting community members in their homes- connecting socially is an essential part of a volunteer's job and it was good to see how she did it.

Making a stove ("estufa") out of a clay/cement/straw mixture with Eliezer, a member of Catherine's environmental youth group. We are using a design from an American ex-patriate. Most people cook on open fires in their homes, and stoves are better for air quality and use less wood because they have more complete combustion.

stove construction

Cati has done some talks about making healthy choices and sexuality in the middle school that is in the community. This is something optional that a lot of volunteers choose to do, but I'd been intimidated by the thought. It was cool to hear her talk about it empowering the youth to make informed decisions.

Attending a Protestant church in our community on Sunday. Catherine doesn't attend regularly, but sometimes visits. The sermon was long and dry but interesting to see their style of service, and the leaders were all members of the community. These people love to sing- in morning and evening, pretty much every day. One neighbor rises at 5:30 in the morning with songs of praise!

Seeing a softball game on Sunday against a neighboring town

Eating yummy food- I really enjoyed

tropical fruit
"johnny cakes", a fresh bread made with coconut milk, baked on an open fire in a dutch oven
eating lots of veggies, American style
fresh coconut milk
hot chocolate made with cacao grown right in town.

cacao pod

Also, eating cacao right out of the pod- you can't eat the bitter beans themselves raw, but can eat the slimy, sweet jelly that surrounds the beans in the brightly colored pod. Many area families grow cacao on a small scale for export through a coop in Almirante.  Cati told me a lot of it ends up in cosmetics but some goes to a factory in Seattle.  To prepare the beans for market, families dry the beans out in special sheds. For home use, the beans are then roasted and ground up.




As a challenge, there is definitely poverty here, though some volunteers are serving in more extreme situations of sickness and hunger. Some volunteers are also serving in more remote situations, with difficult hikes and boat rides to get to their sites.

mother and son

But the main challenge is that it's a different culture.  Cati's latrine project is the first time that the community has organized to do anything. Cati worked on the latrines with only the people who were most interested and motivated to work with her, but even within that group it can be hard to keep the fires of interest going. Ngobe people don't have the same sense that Americans do that they can have control over their own lives. Life is tough, but many people don't feel they can change it- whether that's in the realm of families,  farming, employment, education or health.  Peace Corps' training is all about empowerment or "capacity building" using many tools that come out of our American way of seeing things.  So it brings up- what is contextually appropriate for these people? What do they need? How does my faith inform what I've seen?  I've seen Ngobe culture now, but a Latino culture would be different yet again- with other challenges and  opportunities.

Today we are heading back to our regular training community for more classes.

See more photos here.

Also, check out Catherine's blog.