In Site

Amanda, playing ball with the kids in the rain!















Oh yeah, I curiously forgot to mention that in our site all families make and burn a life-sized doll to signify the ending of the old year and the beginning of the new. Despite the dangerous mix of excessive alcohol and fire, nobody was burned (that we know of), and some of the more creative dolls were quite impressive. There was even one that was obviously made up to be like Fidel Castro!














Burn 2006, BURN!!!

Us and the Fam, in a waterfall.

The arrival of our free latrine supplies. Many people form the local community showed up to watch and help, which was great!

Not to be outdone by Amanda, I went out and found my own plague of insects to torment my skin with itchy bites! These are from these little no-see-um type fleas and, while annoying and abundant, their itch only lasts about an hour or so.

And finally...the office.

Coffee Time in the Comarca

Our backyard coffee-making was a great learning experience as we were taught by our host-family to peel, roast, prepare, grind and drink (which we already had a good handle on) the beans from fruit to smile.

After drying the red fruit in the sun for days, you soak it until you're left with only a bean, and pick out all of the sticks and bugs

You then roast the beans (in a roaster if you like, over a fire if you're living in the jungle) until their thin, crispy outer covering starts to come off like a loose paper shell.

Amanda, stirring it up like Bob Marley!

After the shell loosens, you pound the beans with a medieval jousting-looking device (this may be a westernized, non-traditional name for it, but I'm not sure) until all of the shells are loosened and flying through the air.

Once done pounding the beans, we layed them out on a tray-like device to begin seperating the good stuff from the bad (that is, the inner bean from its outer shell)

Felix, our community counter-part and host dad, using a shaking technique to sperate the light, airy outer shells from the inside bean. As you can tell by now, this process is integral to the whole coffee-making process and involves many intermediary steps to arrive at a point of completion.

Back into the fire, as the roasting of the beans, and their associated aroma, begins!

Getting warmer! (and better smelling!)

After about a half-hour of roatsing over a fire, the bean are done, and need to be cooled for about twenty minutes or so.

Amanda, grinding the beans into a "Comarca" consistency. While not as fine as an espresso grind, or any other commercial grind for that matter, it is good enough to dump into hot water for a tasty brew.

Finally, and with smiles on our faces, we enjoy what we worked so hard to make over that last two hours! Bottoms up!

Happy Valentine´s Day!

WOW! It´s been a long time since the blog was last updated, quite a bit has been going on at our site, and so we have quite a bit to share with everyone.

It seems that we last left you at our mud-fest/soccer match sometime in the middle of December. Well, shortly after this can New Year´s eve/day, which was an amazing display of drunkeness that we hope to avoid next year. Yes, the ugly side of Panama came out in full force on this day, when seemingly the entire community (and reportedly, much of Panama) began a completely unrestrained drinking binge a few days before New Year's, peaking on the actual day, and then supposedly tapering off over the next four or five days. We wouldn't know for sure, as we got out heck out of Dodge the morning of New Year's Day in order to avoid any further "complications" and made our way to the beautiful mountain hamlet named Boquete, where we met up with our friends and felow volunteers, David and Nida, fom he Cleveland area. This escape to the heart of Panama's coffee-growing region was much needed, and as it hosts quite a large population of expats, we were able to relax and eat delicious food in an atmosphere closer to what we're used to (it was also quite chilly up there, which was such a welcome change from the eternal humidity of the rest of the isthmus).

Anyway, after tearing ourselves away from our favorite part of Panama, we returned to our site a few days later to find the people sober (for the most part), safe, and happy. In contrast to everyone laying on the ground as we had left them earlier, they were now relaxing in their hammocks shaking off the residual effects of the previous week's insanity. This was a good thing, as the community latrine project that we're helping with is finally getting under way, and we needed everyone bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the work that was to follow.

First, a bit of background information on the project: as of now 92% of the population of Cerro Brisa (our pueblo=site) craps in the woods or in the streams. Now, normally this wouldn't be much of a problem, and is actually quite an attractive option for many as crapping in rivers is supposed to be refreshing beyond words. But the vast majority of our community also has no access to potable water beyond tat which is drawn from the streams and rivers; yes, the same streams and rivers which they use for their "personal refreshment." As such, the people realized that something should be done.

The outside world kept telling them that they were savages for doing this, even though they had done it as long as can be remembered, and they kept on contracting debilitating intestinal illnesses, which they had also been contracting for as long as can be remembered. So, bucking the romantically technicolor notions that many of us in the states have of indigenous life before western contact, the community decided to approach the Peace Corps and propose a few very western-style projects for the protection of their long-term health, the pit latrine, an aqueduct system, and anything else that can be collectively dreamed up. This is basically where we come in.

Anyway, the local MINSA branch (local=two hours away), which is an acronym that basically means the national ministry of health, was offering area projects 10 combined cubic meters of sand and rock, two items that are essential to the 50 latrines that we hoped to build. After some wrangling and negotiating with one of the local "Chinos" to help deliver the materials (a "Chino" is the popular term here for convenience store. As can be guessed, "Chino" means Chinese and, true to many American stereotypes about Asians, they seem to own almost all of the convenience stores in Panama too...someone should write a dissertation on this), everything came up to our site and we now have two piles, one of rock and one of sand, laying in front of our house. While the actual materials are also essential to the project's completion, it is their arrival as a symbol of progress that means the most to the community. In an area often severely neglected by the rest of Panamanian society, tangible evidence that a project started by themselves and for their collective health is commencing, is a cause for celebration.

However projects in Panama take time, and projects in the Panamanian countryside take forever, so the rock and sand is still sitting in our front yard. But the project is still advancing, and after meeting nearly everyone in the community individually over the last month and reinforcing their roles in this endeavor, we´ve typed, refined, and typed again until we finally submitted a grant proposal for just under $6,000 to complete the project. All we do now is wait and see if we'll receive the funding we're looking for, and as soon as we have the money, we'll finish the project and everyone will be happy! As most types of grants through the Peace Corps (including ours) must also be open to participation by the general public, you too can donate to our project. Simply go to:
http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.volproj
and click on the project next to our name under "Panama." If you do not see our name there, don't worry, it should probably appear within three weeks so if you return periodically to the above link, you'll have your chance and we'll be closer to having our latrines.

Well, aside from our latrine-building project, we were able to get away for the last few days to Panama City, which has been really nice. We mainly came in to take care of some infected bites from God-knows-what on my body at a Peace Corps affiliated doctor, but decided to stick around a bit to enjoy ourselves as well.

While there is no hiding the fact that Panama City is a work in progress, it does boast some great restaurants and fun places to visit and play. One jewel that we discovered this trip in Panama's only legit bagel cafe, which we (we=almost 20 of us volunteers) soaked in for a good 3 hours on Saturday morning; Bill=$5 for the whole 3 hours of giddy fullness. Then at night, we found a fantastic vegetarian "restaurant and chocolateria" at which we asked them to prove their claims and left with flavanoid-induced smiles on our faces and a mental note to return the next time we're in the city; Bill=$25 for the top-end dining experience. Obviously, while Panama City dining is not the pocket-change bargain that one'll find out in the country-side, it still comes in at an attractive 20-30% discount over similar experiences in the US, which is much appreciated by Peace Corps Volunteers surviving on appallingly-low daily stipends (however, which will make for great FAFSA forms when the time for Graduate School financial aid needs arise!).

Well, that's all for now. It looks like we'll be back in our site for a while as the latrine project revs up, and that'll keep us busy. We may come out for a day or two to celebrate my 28th birthday (on February 22nd), but we'll see. If we can stand being completely shut out from almost any contact with the outside world, then we may just stay in the jungle until we turn into banana trees. But hopefully that won't happen, because that would make it quite difficult to update the blog when the next opportunity arises. Either way, until then, Peace & God Bless!