1. This American Life
2. The Sporkful
3. Death, Sex, & Money
4. Modern Love
5. Presidential
6. Invisibilia
7. My Dad Wrote a Porno
8. There Goes the Neighborhood
9. What Really Happened
10. Revisionist History (probably my #1 favorite - I'm a big Malcolm Gladwell fan)
11. Wrongful Conviction
12. The Joe Rogan Experience
13. Otherhood
14. On Being
15. Freakonomics Radio
16. S-Town
17. Dirty John
18. Constitutional
19. Terrible, Thanks for Asking
20. Heaven's Gate
21. StarTalk Radio
22. Slow Burn
And a few things I've been especially grateful for lately. For gifts of mangoes and avocados (at some point a couple weeks ago I had 15 fresh avocados in my house, I shared/ate them all and it was glorious). For Dioselina who gifted me six ripe bananas not knowing it was my birthday. For Roger who is beating me in my goal of learning the flag of every country. For my new $3 knock-off Crocs so I could finally retire my old ones with holes in the bottoms to the shoe graveyard under my bed. For classical music that plays on 94.7 Radio María. For my dog-eared Spanish-English dictionary. For Planet Earth movie nights with Roderik, Walter, Pricila, Jairo, Debora, Tito, Victor, and Diana. For my host dad's delight every time he tries one of my baking creations.
Comarca Crew at regional meeting. We had our first ever chicha fuerte ("strong juice" - homemade fermented corn beverage) competition after the meeting. Zach and I prepared a chicha de maíz with cinnamon, anise, and ginger. We didn't win but it was a blast trying the four different competing chichas.
Bloquear : to block. In this case, to lay cinder blocks to make a tank.
We have finally resumed work on the aqueduct improvement. This is thanks to Julio from Cerro Mesa, who has used his brash leadership style to mobilize the gente to get the job done. I'm grateful for this because I sure was not having success myself. We finished with all the blocks and are moving on to the repello (cement-mortar mix around the blocks to seal the tank) and the roof. After months of no water in the aqueduct and countless days at the toma (alone) trying to figure out what the problem was and me losing sleep wondering if we had somehow messed up the toma and ruined the spring...Domingo walked about 15 meters and found that the transmission tube had been chopped clear open with a machete, likely by a foe of the family. A simple chopped tube caused multiple families (and one poor PCV) months of grief and hundreds of 5-gallon buckets hauled uphill... let that sink in. But there's water now, LOTS of water, so that's good.
Victor leveling blocks.
Something that has been bothering me is that I am the only female at every single workday. Sometimes wives come, but they stay in the kitchen cooking and chatting and sometimes come up to the tank, but never so much as touch a shovel or a trowel. One day Roberto arrived and told the group that a woman named Rosalia said she was going to come to work, and the men began to discuss what job she could do if she came, "because women can't lay blocks, they are too sensitive, this is not woman's work" right in front of me. A woman. Doing the exact same work the men were doing. And then, there's one guy - who I won't call out by name - that makes horribly racist, misogynistic, and even violent jokes as we work, making me angry and very uncomfortable. I have called him out a couple times, for example when he spewed a nasty stereotype about Afro-Panamanians, but I am cautious because I don't want to stir the pot too much and anger him, I just want to get the job done. Because of this I'm also cautious about trying to bring women into this environment, as much as I want to. I recently listened to a podcast about a workplace discrimination lawsuit (This American Life Episode 647: LaDonna) and it's laughable how little that applies here in the Panamanian campo. If anyone has advice for me on how to recruit women to work, I am all ears.
Relajar(se) : to relax.
So in Peace Corps during training we talked a lot about building confianza, which means trust, with our gente. But we didn't talk much about relajo, for which I can't think of a good English equivalent. It basically means to have a relationship where you can comfortably joke, relax, and make fun of each other. Both of these things are crucial for strong relationships in-site. Let me tell you, building confianza and relajo have been incredibly difficult for me! Especially with the adults. I made it worse for myself because for a long time, I was so frustrated with gente's unwillingness to work that I stopped visiting people's houses just to hang out. And that only hurt the trust and relajo that were slowly building. So now that we are working, I'm in a better place and I am trying to sit down and have more frequent conversations. That's how I found myself talking with Enrique for several hours a few weeks ago, and he told me his life story, all about his previous wives and kids. I consider it a great privilege to be trusted with his story. It's also how I ended up hanging out on a Sunday at Isaías and Casilda's. Somebody gave Hilario the nickname of "Trump" because he has more facial hair than most men in the community...more facial hair, more like white people...so, the United States...current president...Trump. Isaías thinks this is the funniest thing, so I gave all of the Hilario's relatives presidential surnames. Hilario Trump, Isaías Clinton, Rosa Obama, Manuel Washington... Without fail he goes into a laughing fit whenever I repeat these nicknames and Herlina from Cerro Mesa, who also happened to be visiting, exclaimed in surprise, "Bei you DO have relajo with the gente!" I'm surprised too, Herlina.
Equivocarse : to err / to go wrong / to make a mistake.
In preparation for my upcoming somewhat-more-professional role as Regional Leader, I have tried to ramp up my study of Spanish. Because I want to speak with the vocabulary and eloquence of a professional, a step up from my current funky campo Spanish. Shoving my vergüenza aside here, I present some hall-of-fame Spanish mistakes.
-measurement: medida. I used the made-up word medimiento for months.
-singer: cantante. I also made up an incorrect word, cantador.
-calculation: cálculo. Called it calculación for the longest time. Wonder if my gente doubt my assurance that I actually have an engineering degree...
-fiber: fibra. Once during a discussion on nutrition I accidentally called it fiebre, which means fever. "Vegetables are important to the diet because they contain a lot of fever"
-goalkeeper: portero/a. On occasion I've confused it with potrero, which means cow pasture. "I'll be the cow pasture for your team today."
-bacteria: bactéria. I was saying the right word but maybe my pronunciation was off, or Rosa's hearing is fading, but during an entire water treatment charla she thought I was saying batería, which means battery. Her daughter Meibi whispered this to me after the charla, "She was so confused why you kept saying that we have to purify our water to get rid of the bad batteries."
-years: años. This one was actually Yesi's mistake. We were playing hangman with a small group, and it wasn't until I had solved the puzzle that she realized she had forgotten the tilde over the n - ¿Cuántos años tienes, Alfredo? to ¿Cuántos anos tienes, Alfredo? "How old are you, Alfredo?" turned into "How many buttholes do you have, Alfredo?"
Oh, Spanish!
Yohany in my sombrero.
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