When Panama kicks your butt

Something I appreciate about Peace Corps is that there is always an element of surprise - waking up in the morning, even on the rare occasion I already have a day's worth of activities planned, I never know exactly how my day is going to go. I certainly didn't expect this week to turn out how it did. Remember in my last post, less than a week ago, I wrote about how the summer breeze, and you probably thought "Oh how cute, sometimes it blows her clothes off the line." Well on Monday, the breeze turned to super gusty winds, and I came home that afternoon to find that the wind had collapsed my rancho.

Now I don't use this rancho daily, but when my friends came for Christmas it slept six people in hammocks. I'm just thankful no one was under it when it collapsed!! I'm going to talk to the guy who built it with my previous volunteer to see if he wants to help me find new palos to rebuild. This srong wind hasn't let up all week and according to my neighbors will continue until March or April. It's a pain! When it comes at night the door creaks, the roof shakes and my whole little wooden house rattles, keeping me awake for hours. It comes through the cracks between the wall boards, blowing posters down and nearly extinguishing the flame on the stovetop. When I do dishes on the porch, my tupperware and even aluminum pans go flying if I'm not holding them. I went to fill up water at the spring, which is right next to a group of four-story high bamboos. They were creaking and swaying like mad and I was thinking "I really don't want to get crushed by a bamboo reed right now, I just wanna fill up my dang Nalgenes..." So when the wind is that intense I'll use the other spring. I do realize that all of these issues are truly first-world problems of the third world, if that makes sense. None of them affect my well-being, they're simply annoyances that I'll get used to soon. But my gente use open fires in ranchos to cook all of their food and many live in poorer-constructed homes than mine, and they must make huge adjustments during the summer just to be able to live normally. I'm sure I'll be seeing lots of creative solutions from them, as I always do!

On Tuesday morning, I came down with the nastiest bout of diarrhea and extreme gas I've ever experienced that had me running to the nearest latrine whenever the urge struck. I managed to prep for my meeting and give my weekly English class and downed three liters of oral rehydration salts. On Wednesday Jess arrived, and thanks to our work on the camino she was able to make it all the way down into Gallina in the 4-wheel drive Peace Corps truck! I met her at the entrada and as we were driving down we passed a two families who said they'd come to my meeting leaving the community...we stopped and asked where they were going, and turns out the government had announced a few days before they'd be giving out free household supplies like mattresses in two nearby communities. On top of that, the Panamanian president was visiting a community in our district to inaugurate a bridge. On top of THAT, there had been a fair in another nearby community the day before, meaning a baile and drinking the night before, meaning that one entire neighborhood of Gallina was hungover. Despite all that, I still had eleven people come to my meeting (by these standards, not bad!) and it went well. Jess was able to set the community straight on a couple things I had been trying to transmit to them, and she gave me some great new ideas to go about getting the community motivated to work. Before I had this singular idea that we needed one legalized water committee for the whole community. I presented at the meeting a new idea of working with different neighborhoods individually with possibly smaller and less formal committees, and it seemed to go over pretty well. My gente enjoyed meeting Jess a lot and we all had some Bocas cacao (no sugar) and chocolate (sweetened hot cocoa mix PLUS a whole 2-lb bag of sugar, it's all or nothing here haha) after the meeting as they gossiped and I tried to decipher some Ngäbere, which has become sort of a Gallina Peace Corps meeting tradition. I bolted to the bathroom as soon as the meeting was over...

On Thursday, my diarrhea was just as bad so I called the PC doctors, who prescribed me antiparasitic medicine. So I went to David and got the medicine and took a night to relax. Whew. Hopefully these meds kick in soon.

Photo Time!

 My first morning in my house back in December. I was thinking, "Hmm, what should my inaugural house breakfast be?!" (important questions) when Pricila came to my porch with a freshly-cooked bollo :) Thanks host fam. So I fried it up with some tomato. Cuchi Cuchi was interested.

Post toma-cleaning with Domingo and Eduardo. Look at that clean spring water!

Came home from Elsa's with a baby celery plant, jiraca, limes, bodá, culantro, and a bag or organic compost. I love visits to Elsa's.

Burning some monte in front of neighbor Zach's newly built house with host dad Narciso.

Comarca fam on Christmas! Sophia, Destry, Jenna Kate, Zach, Matt, Cody, Kevin, Michael, Jake, me. What a good time.

 First double paila baking success: pumpkin chocolate bread!

 Climbing Patena on New Year's.

 Mmmmmmm ya

"Do you mind if I take a picture of your parrot eating a potato?"

The Ngäbes make these terrifically creepy muñecas to burn on NYE.

Merry Christmas Eve from the tropics :P

Final 2016 sunset.

Patena crew

I spy a Peace Corps volunteer doubling as a ladder. Played some volleyball in Mesa last week!

Neighbor kids

"I suppose I'll tolerate this for the photo"

New Season New You?

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Coming back to Gallina after the holiday party, I felt as though I was coming back to an entirely different community. In the less than a week that I was out, the season officially changed from winter to summer. I had been skeptical when everyone described how wonderful the summer was - when there's no temperature change between summer and winter, how different can the seasons really be? But trust me, it's very different. There's no more rain, and it's sunny most of the day. Afternoons and nights are breezy, sometimes downright windy, sending my drying clothes on the clothesline flying. The mud has turned to cracked dirt. All of the streams fed by runoff have dried up, and creeks fed by springs have gotten much narrower. Leaves are falling from the trees, giving a slight sense of autumn in the midwest. It's officially corn harvest season, so I have been eating more than my fair share of sweet corn chicha, chicheme, and bollos! Guandu plants are almost ready to harvest, there are bastante oranges, even the avocado trees are flowering (which means that the actual fruits won't be ready for another five months, what a cruel temptation of nature). Almost every house in my community has moved their fogón and hammocks from their ranchos outside. So yes, everything looks, smells, and feels different. The best change is that I am living in my own house! It has been amazing. I wake up every morning not worrying about whether my host family is going to serve breakfast or not, but excited to cook breakfast and brew my two cups of unsugared, pure Duran café con leche (imagine drinking super sugary unfiltered lukewarm "coffee" that's actually a mixture of a litte bit of coffee and a lot of burnt corn for three months - ahh the first sip of coffee now is a wonderful feeling!!!) I spend all day with people and the neighbor kids always visit in the evenings and hang out on my porch, bombarding me with questions as I cook dinner, so I haven't felt lonely at all. Summer is also a time for work days! I've helped out with quite a few juntas improving the roads to Mesa and Gallina (wooo pickaxing!) and prepping Mesa for the agricultural-artisan fair coming up in February. Of course, summer does mean that there is no water in my rainwater tank so I have to bathe in the river and haul all of my water for drinking, cooking, cleaning etc to my house up a steep slope from the spring in 5-gallon cubos, but I feel myself getting much stronger and the beautiful sunsets over the mountain each afternoon as I carry water make up for it. I've been waking up with achey limbs some days from all the physical work - it's a good ache, but I think I really need to start doing yoga... Overall, the past few weeks I have definitely felt a renewed sense of energy for my work here in Gallina.

When constucting a toma (spring source water catchment structure), it is considered a best practice to install three PVC pipes: one to carry the water to the storage tank and distribution system, an overflow tube for when the toma fills up during times of peak rainfall to prevent back pressure on the concrete structure, and finally a cleanout tube where the water will flow during periodic toma

cleanings. When you clean the toma, you stir up all of the sediment, sand, curious toads, whatever gunk has accumulated on the bottom. You temporarily shut the transmission line and open the cleanout tube until all of the murky water has passed through so that you don’t have toads’ legs plopping out of someone’s faucet. It has occurred to me that I may be the person, both literally and figuratively, who is shaking up all of the sediment in Cerro Gallina-for better or for worse. Literally : I finally got my gente to take me to see two tomas. Both were relatively disgusting (especially knowing I have been drinking the water directly from these sources for 3.5 months) so we cleaned 'em out. Figuratively : as I have probably mentioned before there is a huge, longstanding family conflict in Gallina that has gotten worse recently as the two sides are in a legal battle over water sources. I have gotten close to both sides of the family, and they constantly are gossiping to me about all of the bad things members on the other side have done and said, even trying to get me to take their side of the conflict, even though I've tried to make it clear that I cannot take sides. Because land rights and therefore water rights are big points of contention and because I am supposedly here to help more families get water in their homes, just my presence has seemingly shaken up this conflict. I'm not here to solve family problems but I do really want to help my gente, who have become my friends and my Panamanian family, better their lives, and if there's anything I can do that will help them I'm all for it. TBD on how it goes.

This Wednesday (finally!) my boss from the Peace Corps office in the city is visiting Gallina for a meeting about the community analysis I've been preparing and our work plan for the next two years. I personally visited each house to deliver an invitation, so hopefully people show and I get the motivation up so we can get going with our first priority, elections for a new water committee.

We managed to get the entire Comarca G79 crew together for Christmas, and had a fantastic bash at my house in Gallina! Everyone was in charge of cooking a meal, and we had some delicious campo-style pizza, chicken empanadas, beef stew, omelets...mmm. We sang carols and all that and set off fireworks at midnight, a Panama tradition. For New Year's, I hiked with a group of 14 volunteers to the top of a nearby (well, 6 hour hike for me) mountain and feasted up top, again fireworks at midnight, and slept up there. The view was incredible - imagine you're a famous singer and you've just come on stage and the cameras go wild, but you're also on top of a mountain and the flashes go on continuously for a half hour. Crazy.

I have so many photos I want to share but no wifi at this moment, my apologies :( I have to go to David to get a flu shot this weekend so I will post photos then!