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