Ka Ñüre (The Rainy Season)

It's now "Ka Ñüre," or The Rainy Season, for sure (say that "Kaw Nyoo-ray.") A thunderstorm rolls in about every day between 11 am and 3 pm, meaning that no events can be planned for the afternoon. The height of the rainy season lasts from October through mid-December. But October is also a time for seasonal celebrations: Bible Month, the annual rice harvest, and a big marching drum band fest at the end of the month. It's also the time when I'm wrapping up a round of meetings related to my upcoming latrine project and getting ready for the next stage of writing the proposal for the project.

Very cute and gentle, but her mother says "when she was younger she liked to throw live chicks into the cooking fire!"

My church organized a parade/walk down the main street of town to celebrate Bible Month or "Mes de la Biblia", September. Here we are, walking and singing with several other churches. It was fun! A handful of members from the local Independent drum band beat out the rhythm. (They're just warming up for a big drum-band event October 28th.)

The women are holding aloft their Bibles: "Quien vive? Cristo!" or "Who lives? Christ!"  

 

 

Teens share some tunes after the event

It is rice harvesting season in October. Many families plant a dry, upland rice on the steep slopes of our community. I had the chance to help out some friends in their field. The amount of weeds is pretty typical- after a few rounds of cutting weeds with the machete when the rice is young, the weeds or "monte" just grow up some. The heads of grain are cut with a small hand-held knife and gathered up in sacks. Later, the family will separate the grain from the stalks, dry it in the sun, toast it over a fire, and pound it to de-hull it before being able to eat it. Rice is a lot of work!

Here are some portraits to share with you. Some people, when they ask me to take their picture, succumb to fits of the giggles at this unfamiliar opportunity. It makes me smile. I try to convince them that they have nice teeth, not to cover their mouths, and that they look better smiling than serious. Ngabes generally prefer very serious portraits that look like those of our great-grandparents who had to stay still for a long time and couldn't smile. Bella and Miriam, pictured below, took several tries to compose themselves but it worked out nicely in the end. I am taking more portraits now that I've decided to do it, charging a small fee to cover the cost of printing.

Here's a portrait with a nervous bull. Stop tossing your head, you, and look at the camera!

We have continued with the latrine meetings; tomorrow is the last of a series of 5 meetings, that consist of an educational talk and some organizing details. There has been enthusiastic interest from the community, and as the meetings finish up, families are turning in paperwork and a small deposit to participate in the project. In this photo, participants take a look at a mock-up of formwork to pour concrete.


On October 20, I'll be celebrating my one year anniversary of swearing in as a Peace Corps volunteer. I've got one more year to go: halfway through my time here, I feel like I'm just getting started. And in a way I am, as far as projects and educational efforts go. I'll be celebrating with the other volunteers in my "group"- the 15 other Environmental Health volunteers that swore in on October 20, 2011.

Snapshots of September

I'd like to share some photos, briefly captioned, from the last few weeks. 

Visiting some neighbors and trying out a new tropical fruit!

 As usual, I do a lot of visiting "paseando" in Spanish to keep up with the neighbors and keep them updated on what I'm doing. One day, under a heavy rainstorm, I visited a house I hadn't been to often before. Raquel and her mother Otelia showed me some antiques they dug out of a pit: a beautiful stone mill and a clay cooking pot. I don't know how old they are: 50 years or more... or perhaps really old!! At any rate before hand cranked mills and metal cooking pots took over the scene. That was probably back in the days when people wore tree-bark loincloths, too...

Otelia shows off her antique cookpot. Note the charred sides from cookfires past.

Raquel and her aunt hold the mill: the grinding stone and the slab, a shallow basin with 3 sturdy feet (an unusual feature). Corn or chocolate would be placed on the slab and crushed with the grinding stone.

It's time to harvest corn! The beautifully colored "Indian corn" reminds me of fall in the States. Most of it is left to dry on the stalks before it is harvested.

My neighbor Federico loads up a rented horse to take grain down to the house.

After the corn is dried in the sun for several days, it needs to be taken off the cob for storage.

 

The horse mentioned above provided some nice compost to throw in my garden, shown here with my neighbor Romelio and my cat supervising from the window.

We have been continuing to hold meetings planning for latrines. I am expecting 40-50 families to participate. They need to put down a $5 deposit to hold their place and attend the meetings/health talks we are holding at the school. About 60 people have been participating each time.

Community members act out a skit about how disease is spread  In this story, the mother didn't wash her hands after cleaning up the baby's soiled pants and then continued cooking- making the rest of the family "sick." The skits were the favorite part of the meeting.

I also took Mechi, my cat, to an event with Spay Panama, a Panamanian non-profit with US ties that held a "Spay Day" in San Felix, a nearby town.  The operation took about 20 minutes and another 40 minutes to come out of anesthesia.   My friends and neighbors wonder why I would want to do such a thing when I could sell the kittens, but I'm pleased and Mechi seems fine.

Mechi baby, isn't this fun?! She just got the anesthesia shot.

Panamanian girl holds a kitten

Lindsey, another volunteer, strokes her dog while Mechi lies zonked out after the operation