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 ^.^

Cuchi Cuchi had two kittens!

Teaching the gusanito song. "Tu eres loca, Bei..."

"Permiso Bei." Sassy children on my porch, what else is new. p.s. see the rainbow?

"We're playing monkey!"

Went to cosechar frijoles with Elsa & Marcelino in Quebrada Loro.

Studying Ngäbere with Yeya.

More Comarca-style sledding: pulling babies in whatever containers you can find

Soap-making in the rancho

Miriam selling her bracelets!

Some Comarca & Bocas women at the seminar. Notice the clear difference between Panamanian vs. American smiles, haha

Potato & lentil curry dinner & some reading in the hammock

El Gran Bautismo de la Iglesia Adventista del Séptimo Día. Pastors baptizing gente in the river.

Quick 1-day trip to Panama City for the Panama-USA World Cup qualifying soccer game!

Mi Tanque Está Llena

Ñantöre, blog readers! Can't believe it has been over a month since I last posted; January and February have been super packed and time has flown. Here is what I've been up to:

After a quick recovery from my stint with parasites, the rest of January was full of feria preparations, work days on the road in Mesa, playing volleyball, swimming in the Río Dupí with kids, guandu (a type of pea-like bean) shucking juntas, two family birthday parties, and hanging out with neighbors. I went to a friend Carl's (agriculture volunteer) site and learned how to start a coffee nursery, and I'm hoping to get a mini coffee planting project going with a few families in my community soon. The first week of February was the agro-artisan fair in Cerro Mesa, and I think it went really well! There were many visitors, speeches, lots of volleyball and soccer, tons of produce and artisan crafts for sale, an incredibly awkward baile, and I led some games for the kids, which was fun. Then after the fair I went with a few other squirrels (nickname for southern Comarca volunteers) to Boquete, a very touristy town in the Chiriquí mountains and spent two days rapidly typing out my CADP (Community Analysis and Development Plan) to turn in the Peace Corps, which ended up being a 30-page report! Then I hurried back to site for a day for English class and pasearing, then went to San Felix for meetings with the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Environment, then rushed back to site to hike three hours with my host family to sing in church in another community. I have somewhat unintentionally joined a Ngäbe Seventh Day Adventist a capella quintet with my host parents and another couple from Hato Julí. We've had two gigs so far, one in Cerro Gato and another in Cerro Piedra. Later this month is going to be the big one in Quebrada Guabo, a Comarca-wide baptism in the river that supposedly thousands of people attend. It's been quite fun so far, a capella is something I always wished I had time to pursue in college - never expected I would be singing in front of crowds in Panama!!

The day after the 6-hour hiking day I hiked out and took a bus to Coclé for a week of IST (in-service training), which was a lot of sitting in a classroom but quite helpful - learning how to apply for grants, some more technical aqueduct concepts, how to facilitate gender & development clubs and camps, etc.. and it was so nice to reconnect with all of our group and spend hours talking and playing games at night. Then we headed to Cerro Pita, site of fellow volunteer Sean, and spent a week building a bloque tank, ferrocement tanks, a toma, lock boxes, sediment cleanouts, and air release valves for their new aqueduct and practicing facilitating water committee seminars. I absolutely loved the community and my host family and learned a lot of great tech knowledge that hopefully I'll be able to apply in Gallina (should we ever build an aqueduct...we'll see) Now I'm heading back up to site, and my friends Shellee and Emily are coming with me to visit! :) Excited to have more guests.

I've been in Panama for nearly eight months now, and although I miss my family and friends (and am looking forward to some visitors from the States in the coming months! *hint hint*) I am content with life in Panama and excited to spend another year and a half here. I am surrounded daily by some of the most incredible friends (Panamanians, Peace Corps staff, fellow volunteers) I have had the privilege of knowing and all the love and support in the world. So no need to worry about me down here. After being with my fellow G79ers for the past two weeks and hearing all about their struggles and triumphs in the first five months in site, I feel inspired and I am so ready to get back to work in Gallina. We're in the dead of summer so my rainwater tank is empty but my metaphorical tank is full of new knowledge, animo, energy.

Fotos ~

Swimming with Jorge, Oscar, Walter, Carmen, and Melvin

Ñampi, egg, bodá: such a campo breakfast

God smiles on little Tito

When you go to the river...fresh-caught shrimp stir fry fo dinner!!

Checking out the plant nursery in Kuerima

Look at those products!

Guandu guandu guanduuuuu

Pricila exploring an abandoned house on the way to Cerro Gato

This week in English class: Team Pig edges out Team Big Head in flashcards

Nido brings a dead squirrel to English class...

Quintet rehearsal with Emilia

So windy on top of Cerro Vaca

Meligön and Lisandra at field IST

Frolicking on top of the world :)

Trying to do the semi-smile and not succeeding...this was also taken before 7 AM...host dad Alfredo and I in Cerro Pita

Christian, little host bro (at least he looks cute)

I have no idea what he was painted with

Building the bloque tank in Cerro Pita

Ferrocement tank building with the kids

Look at dat Chaco tan... swimming in the river!

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!

Checkpoint: Passed

We made it!!! Our three-month integration period has officially ended. Do I feel completely integrated? No way. But it's a continual process, and I definitely feel like I am at a good place with my community. Obviously there have been high and low points - picture me on good days frolicking in my nagua along a mountaintop path and on bad days hiding in my bedroom furiously shoving cookies into my mouth. But my mental state is good overall, and somehow I've managed to stay remarkably healthy so far in site.

Remember my last few days in Santa Rita, when my host mom gave birth and I had to help with a lot of the cooking in the house? So my last week with my host fam in Gallina was somewhat similar. My host mom went out of town and decided to trust the gringa in the kitchen, leaving me with food to cook for my host dad and brothers. I ended up cooking two breakfasts, three lunches and a dinner over the course of the last week. The first meal I made - rice and red beans - took 3.5 hours and it didn't even taste good! I felt embarrassed giving it to my host dad. It's a tough life, cooking here in the Comarca with a fogón. Generally fathers find logs, carry them to the house, and chop em up into firewood. Then the mothers are responsible for starting the fire (which I absolutely suck at) with the limited materials in the house, usually getting it going by burning plastic bags, preparing all the food, cooking, and doing the dishes. And my host family has to carry all of the water used for cooking and washing in jugs and buckets from the creek down a steep hill from the house. By the end of cooking that first meal, my eyes were stinging from all of the smoke, and I was exhausted and dirty. But I was glad I had the experience. I have so much respect for all of the hard work my community goes through daily to eat, and I have a better understanding of why some families only eat two giant meals a day instead of the three meals typical in our culture. It takes tremendous effort to cook, why do it more than you have to?

I had my final community meeting before my jefa from the Peace Corps office visits Gallina in a few weeks for a community presentation. I had the attendees work together to create and present to me a list of their top priorities for the next two years: on what projects do they want to work with Peace Corps? One of them was getting the water committee up and running again -woohoo! That's what I like to hear. Another was seminars on organic composting, which is also awesome, not really in my realm of knowledge but I have lots of agriculture volunteer friends who can hopefully help. The third was my help in planning community-wide events and holiday celebrations. Since the churches, school, bigger tiendas, sports teams, etc are all next door in Mesa, my community members have to go there for all of the meetings and holiday events put on by the school. Nothing really happens here in Gallina. So I am super stoked that they have the desire to bring the community together and do some much-needed Gallina pride-building - I had been hoping to work on same thing!

This past Tuesday I dumped all of my stuff into my new house, then left site for two days of Ngäbere training in San Felix, which was very helpful. Then I headed to Cerro Punta in the Chiriquí highlands and spent two nights at an eco-lodge with 140-some other PC Panama volunteers, catching up with friends, playing trivia and volleyball, biking, dancing, cooking, laughing, and eating the largest and best Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year's dinner I could have ever dreamed of. I'm heading back to site tomorrow and can't wait to spend my first night in the volunteer house! Then in less than a week, a group of Comarca friends are visiting me in Gallina to celebrate Christmas. I hope that you are all having a wonderful holiday season back in the US!

Fotos Aleatorias

 Vidal and Yeya with the tail and hoof of the cow my host family slaughtered

 Waiting...and waiting...for people to show up to my meetings in the rancho

More kids on rooftops

Roderik "Chong" and Pedro "Tito" eating lunch we cooked, the chickens and dogs constantly hang around hoping for a bite or two

Pumpkin soup over rice that I made for lunch! Plus a very interested hen. Definitely the tastiest meal I've cooked

Host sister Pricila (on the right) and her cousin on the way to school

I hardly took any photos at the holiday party :( but I had to snap a photo of my friends being typical PC volunteers by bringing tupperware to Thanksgiving dinner for leftovers

Cerro Punta from our morning bike ride! It was hard to capture the beauty of this place.