Scrapbook: first five weeks

Vidal, my neighbor, crossing the sketchy bamboo bridge to Salto Dupí.

Adrián laughing at how I freaked out when they shoved their parrot in my face and it started squawking.

Second community meeting! They got really into drawing a map of the community, which was super fun to watch.

Two of my favorite muchachas. Beche, on the left, is my Ngäbe spirit animal.

 Manuel and his siblings always love posing for pictures and videos.

 Gorgeous waterfall near Cerro Piedra! Day trip with some Peace Corps pals :)

Chidäni, my neighbor, heading back along the ridgeline from Piedra to Gallina.

Things are going well in Cerro Gallina. My first community-wide meeting didn't go very well, as I invited 37 families and only seven people showed up, but the second one went much better. I had at least 20 people there! I also provided a whole cubo of cacao, which was gulped down quickly. My community wants to meet with me every three weeks, something that they suggested and I was really impressed with! Next meeting is on November 8^th. I had somewhat of a wakeup call last Saturday, when during a cacao session a bunch of people called me out on my slow progress in Ngäbere. I realized that even though I've been studying my Ngäbere manual, I haven't been putting 100% into my speaking. So now I'm working on throwing in whatever phrases I know into conversation when possible. People seem to appreciate it!

She has strange colored eyes, skin, and hair, wears weird Jesus sandals, loves dumping hot sauce on her food and drinking coffee WITHOUT sugar, and lets cats fall asleep in her lap. What kind of odd human being were we ''lucky'' enough to receive?!

I have no shortage of time to wonder what my community thinks about me...

But overall, I am feeling good. Muy buena gente here in Gallina. I've been invited to late night cacao drinking sessions, juntas (communal work days), birthday parties, and a lot of people have asked me about potential projects. It's still early to tell, but there are at least five different groups of families spread out throughout the community that have expressed interest in my help with aqueducts. So it looks like I have WORK ahead of me! Next week I suppose I am starting some official WASH work, as I volunteered Zach and I to spend a day giving handwashing seminars to the entire elementary school in Cerro Mesa. I have yet to plan it (shhh) but I love working with kids so I can't wait! 

Is Pifá a Carb?

''...Yes.''

One day last week, I was served bread for breakfast, yuca at Clemente’s house, pifá (peach palm, a starchy potato-like fruit) at Dioselina & Valentín’s house, returned to Clemente’s for a bowl of rice, and then chicheme (kind of like an oatmeal drink, but made of corn). Five different carbs/starches all before dinner! And then on October 3rd (hope you got the reference in the post title) it was 6 pm and I had eaten nothing but two bowls of plain rice all day. I was at Isaiah & Casilda’s house in a hungry, bad mood - and then they bring out a bowl of rice with onions and a piece of chicken! It was the first Gallinan chicken I had eaten in Cerro Gallina. Seeing my excitement, Isaiah exclaimed “Your first pollo de patio! A gift from God!” And indeed, it was. It was exactly what I needed.

I’ve now been in site for a little over three weeks, minus two days out for the Comarca regional meeting and a meeting with MINSA (Ministerio de Salud, or Ministry of Health). Most days, I’ve been pasearing. There are 37 households in the community, and I’ve visited each home at least once so far. I’ve been trying to get everyone’s names down and do a rough census. So far I’ve counted about 200 people, but I’m sure my estimate is on the low end. Most houses are a mixture of parents, kids, grandkids, and random relatives. There always seem to be visitors from afuera and neighbors over so it’s hard to tell who lives where. At one house, it was basically eight kids and a grandpa just staring at me while I tried to make conversation. And then someone pulled out their cameraphone and took a video of me sitting there struggling to talk to all of these blank faces. That was kind of painful. But then there are other houses where I’ve stayed for several hours chatting with the families! I’ve been read Bible passages. I’ve been given a Bible in Ngäbere and told to read it out loud. I’ve given and received a lot of impromptu English/Ngäbere lessons. People have asked me to explain everything from the differences between North and South Korea to why Jews keep Sabbath on Saturday. Countless people have asked me if I want to be set up with a Ngäbe boyfriend, upon hearing that I’m single. I’ve been fed yuca soup so delicious I wanted to cry and gluey crema so bad that tears were actually rolling down my face as I tried to gulp it down. I hiked with a family to a high school in a neighboring community for a festival and ended up judging a cooking competition. I went to a soccer tournament with my host brothers and got hit really hard in the face with a ball, which then became the local bochinche. “We heard you got hit in the face, Bei! Ha ha ha ha” I spent a morning macheteing the church yard. I went to a work junta and harvested rice. I helped a family take flow measurements for a potential ojo de agua. I’ve gotten helplessly lost in the middle of a rice field during a thunderstorm trying to hike from one house to another. I took a wrong path one day and wound up in another community on the next ridgeline…

My life is so bizarre, you guys.

The Ngäbe people are blunt. They don’t give or take any shit. People have told me that I have a huge head, that I would look much prettier if I had long hair, that my pronunciation is really bad. Learning Ngäbere has been slow going, and I get scolded multiple times a day for my lack of progress. Historically, it is an oral language. Only when missionaries came to study the population was the written language created. There’s not really any need to write Ngäbere because all official writing is done in Spanish, and the kids only speak, read, and write Spanish in schools. I am 100% a visual learner, so learning it orally has been tricky for me. But Peace Corps gave us a dictionary and basic grammar guide, which have been helpful.

Tonight I’m spending the night at the Peace Corps house in San Felix. We don’t get vacation the first three months, but we can take a couple of personal days a month to do whatever we need to do out of site. I definitely needed today to recharge: my mind and body, my electronics, my snack supply…:) Coming up, I have scheduled and invited everyone to my first community-wide meeting (!!) this Thursday, I’m going to visit the artesian group in Cerro Mesa, going to help a family with some water-level land surveying next week, hiking to my neighbor Michael’s site to help him with a handwashing charla later this month, but mostly just continuing on the pasear grind!