Adventuring Susan: 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.