Sierra en Panamá: We Thought It Would Turn Purple..

Once again (I sense a trend forming here) I can’t believe it has been over a month since my last post. Looking at the March calendar hanging on my kitchen wall, on which I jot down what I did each day, I only see one day in which I didn’t have compromisos. And of course, you occasionally need days without obligations - when else are you going to try cooking or baking something complicated, clean your house, spend a whole morning down at the quebrada slapping the dirt out of clothes you’ve let pile up for way too long? After IST I came back with a let’s-get-to-business mindset instead of a just-try-to-make-my-gente-like-me mindset (but let’s be real, I still do too much of that) and so in March I feel like I finally, you know, did stuff. We’re already well over a quarter of the way through two years in our communities (how'd that happen?!) and time is accelerating the longer we’re here and the more comfortable and normal life in Panama becomes. So, a March recap:

It was very fun to have Emily and Shellee visit. We swam in the river, got very lost on the hike back from the river (sorry guys), made good food including tacos and Bocas cacao brownies, pasear’d, checked each others’ backs for muscular parasites (ya know, typical sleepover activities…), and my community, as always, enjoyed meeting my visitors. I finally went to an evangelical church service - only about four houses attend, the vast majority of my community is Adventist - they want to build a latrine for the church because they don’t have one yet. I gave the president, Israel, a list of necessary materials and he said they would buy them, so hopefully we get going with that soon. Eduardo and I continue to survey for a potential Estados Unidos neighborhood aqueduct system. Hopefully we get that done soon so we can see if it'll be feasible. The China neighborhood [[ side note for readers: my community is split into five neighborhoods nicknamed China, Michigan, Bajo Conejo, Estados Unidos & Pedregal ]] still wants my help with a water system, but they are working to secure legal rights to use a spring source - so that is on hold right now. I've also helped the Michigan neighborhood thermoform tubes and fix a couple of holes in the aqueduct they built. I helped the Bajo Conejo neighborhood elect a new water committee directiva! I'm quite happy about this, we will be applying for legal status soon. My host family got an oven and gas tank, and they are eager to learn recipes that use the oven, because they've never cooked with one before. So far I've taught them how to bake a plain bread and a sweet carrot & beet bread. Next up, I want to have a pizza-making day! My second-closest volunteer Michael came to Gallina to help with a soap-making seminar. I taught about the importance of using soap, not just water, to wash your hands, and attempted to explain with some illustrations on how soap works at the molecular level to remove dirt. Then we mixed the water, oil, and lye to make the soap, and I brought a bunch of things: tea bags, spices, coffee grounds, flowers, etc for my gente to put in the soaps to make them smell nice. They definitely had a blast with that, most of them went way overboard and put literally everything I brought in their bars of soap "It would have been really pretty with the purple flowers had they not dumped a load of coffee and cinnamon into it too..." Here the gente make tea from lemongrass, ginger, and other plants; I'm not sure they had ever used a tea bag before. My host mom kept adding more and more berry-flavor tea to her soap, because the package was bright purple "We thought it was going to make the soap purple," she said with a laugh while mixing the now murky brown-colored soap :)

I took a community member, Miriam, to a Peace Corps Women's Biodiversity & Empowerment seminar at the Center for Sustainable Development in Coclé, where we learned about all kinds of things: vertical gardens, nutrition, organic compost, climate change, seed saving, plant nurseries, recycled crafts...I didn't know Miriam super well before the conference so it was nice to get to know her & spend time with someone around my age (she's 21) and we both really enjoyed meeting women and volunteers from nearly every province in Panama. Miriam is part of the Mesa/Gallina artisan group and she brought a bunch of beautiful naguas, naguitas, diented shirts, and chakras to sell. It was cool to see her in her element selling her work to the other women.

Back in September I had met Alvaro, from a small community about a 45-minute walk from Gallina at an event in Dupí. I went to visit his home and he took me on a mini tour of his incredibly impressive organic finca. His neighborhood is only 11 houses, in between two larger communities and without running water. He's incredibly smart and has drawn up a plan for an aqueduct, we walked the potential transmission & distribution line and saw the spring source. Alvaro & I then scheduled a meeting with the community and they have decided to self-fund the whole system, building it little by little (a Peace Corps volunteer's dream right here!) I suggested starting by building a toma to protect the spring source, so next week we have a work day to clean the area around the toma, then we can see what we're working with, know how much sand & cement to buy, and start constructing as soon as they get the materials. I'm really excited to work with this group!

Sorry, this post was a lot of rambling.

Photos ^.^