Hello friends! Happy March! For those who remembered me on my 29th birthday with emails and cards, thank you! I spent the day with community members- at a church Bible study where I brought some stovetop banana-oat cookies, and later making popcorn with my neighbors.
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| Neighbor Federico and his puppy Lobita "little wolf" |
Thank you to all of you who’ve been praying for the protests and unrest in Panama. Negotiations about mining and hydroelectric continue, and the atmosphere is watchful and waiting. Since that first week-long protest things have been much calmer. But the threat of protests, and police response to them, is still present. Groups of indigenous Ngabe are standing by the side of the highway keeping watch, ready to block the road if called upon to do so.
March is springtime in the States but in Panama it’s the height of “summer”, the dry season. It feels a lot more like August with scorched grass and blazing sunshine (in Ngabere, that’s “ñana nire”, hot sun). Summer is also the time of school vacation but now kids are heading back to school in their freshly pressed blue and white uniforms and government assigned backpacks. The teachers are back, after several months’ absence for vacation, commuting to and from our neighboring town’s school in the back of a covered pickup truck that serves as our bus.
The groundwater continues to dry up in summer. In the last 3 months the quantity coming from our principal spring has halved each month. I measure it every month with a group of kids as willing helpers. Knowing how much water is flowing in summer is essential information should we want to do an aqueduct, a piping system, in the future. And now is the time of the year to get the most helpful data. We assume according to WHO guidelines and Panamanian’s water use that 30 gallons a day is needed per capita.
March is also significant for me for a couple other reasons: my boyfriend Ken is visiting me here in the second week of March for his spring break. We’ll be spending some time at my site and also at a tourist resort/hostel. After months of talking on the phone as our main communication, we’re really looking forward to this visit!
Once he leaves, I’ll be joining the other volunteers in my training group, those that started with me in August, for a week of classes near Panama City. We’ll be sharing our community analyses with each other and learning how to plan projects and write grants. In the process of preparing my analysis including my health surveys, I’ve learned some interesting things about my community:
There are around 190 residents in 28 houses, plus me! This is more than I’d realized.
7 of those houses, or 25% have constructed and use their own latrines. The rest go in the bushes.
The median number of children for mothers to have is 5.5. Family planning is rarely used though it is readily available at the health center.
Out of 190 people, fully half are under age 15, and only 6 are older than age 60. Life in the Comarca is hard on the body.
The most common illnesses are
Intestinal worms (everyone has them always, though some times are worse than others)
Colds and flu
Diarrhea
Headaches and migraines.
Most people visit the traditional healer first when they get sick, and the doctor second. They take pride in their culture including the traditional medicine.
The worms and diarrhea are problems based on unclean water and poor sanitation- in short, when we ingest poop it makes us sick. This means that the job the PC has trained me to do, is very relevant for my community.
In April, when I get back from my training, I’m going to share the results with the community in a general meeting. We’ll talk about their needs and priorities and decide what programs and projects we want to tackle first. The community puts a lot of trust in me, assuming that I know what I’m doing! I am learning a lot and hope to be worthy of that trust. Often the Peace Corps will send several volunteers in a row to a location- not just 2 years in a site but 4 or 6 years of PC presence.
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| Man makes a traditional hat like the one he is wearing. First he makes a braid then sews it together in a coil. |
I’ll end with some stories and photos from February (more on my Picasa to the right).
I had the chance to visit a model organic farm in another town. Regina, a friend and elementary school teacher from the neighboring town of Cerro Iglesias, took her family and me on an hour and a half hike to reach Finca Esperanza, Hope Farm. Owner Leandro is an enthusiastic proponent of all things organic. He gave us a tour of his medicinal and edible wild plant garden, fish ponds, okra, forest, and compost. He even cultivates a beneficial fungus in a barrel: he sprays a solution of fungus and water on crops like cacao and coffee that are prone to fungal infections. He says the one fungus combats the others. This is new to me! Winston, a nearby agriculture volunteer in Cerro Iglesias, will be doing some work with him in the future. After the farm tour we cooled off with Leandro’s kids by jumping in a beautiful nearby river and hunting crayfish (we only caught some tiny ones).
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| Leandro and his daughter show off their okra. They use the seeds to make a delicious "coffee." |
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| beneficial fungus |
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| hunting crayfish |
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| Cooling off! I swam in my clothes as did everyone else... |
I also visited volunteer Kayla in another Comarca town to help out with some latrines she’s constructing. I learned a lot from how she’d organized her community in work groups to accomplish a large project of 50 latrines! After spending 1 day working with her, I hiked back down the steep hill with Kayla’s friend Eusebio and horse Jaguar, who was carrying a metal mold to make a concrete latrine seat. Kayla didn’t need it anymore and another volunteer did, so we were helping courier it to another location.
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| A scaffolding of wood, bamboo, and plastic is laid directly over the pit in order to pour the concrete in place. |
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| The horse prefers to ford the stream rather than cross on the bridge, where I'm standing |
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| Eusebio let me hold Jaguar's reins for a photo |
Some final photos represent the harvest of guandu, or pigeon peas, a delicious bean that can be harvested green or allowed to dry on the stalk before harvesting. They lay out the dried beans on some plastic and stomp and sort them- the beans themselves fall to the bottom and the pods can be thrown out.
