Friendsgiving

Every year the Peace Corps Panama Volunteer Advisory Council (VAC) holds a Thanksgiving event for volunteers all over the country to come together and share a delicious meal in a beautiful location. This year I was not allowed to go, not me specifically but our entire G75 group because it was technically within our first 3 months. Your first three months you are not allowed to take vacation so we could not take the vacation days to go to Thanksgiving. This was obviously disappointing. We decided to do our own thing though, and make up for missing Thanksgiving with having a Friendsgiving a few days afterwards.

We all met in the city and spent the first day greeting each other and catching up. The second day was the delicious day. We cooked two turkeys and had everyone from our group responsible for bringing a different item, pot luck style. The food was delicious! What was nicer was getting to see everyone, hang out, and catch up with each other to see how life is going out in our communities. In honor of Thanksgiving and Friendsgiving I have decided to have a short post about things I am thankful for.

Thanksgiving List

• God: I am thankful for my salvation through Jesus Christ. I am thankful for the chance I have at life because of the sacrifice made through Him to atone for my sins, and for the chance I have everyday to glorify Him and live in a manner that may bring others to Him as well.
• My Parents and Family: I am thankful for the support they give me and how many opportunities they have provided me within life. I am thankful that even though I am hundreds of miles away they are still there for me anytime I need them.
• Peace Corps: It may not be perfect all the time, but the opportunity given to me here by the Peace Corps is unlike any other in the world. To be able to come into a community and share my life and my culture with them while absorbing everything of theirs that I can makes everyday a beautiful gift no matter how good or bad it may go.
• Friends Back Home: I am thankful for all my friends back home that can keep me updated on life in the states and seem interested in my stories from here. I could probably post a blog page about each friend and all the things they have done but I promised this would be a short post.
• Fellow PCVs: The network here of PCVs is pretty great and I doubt I could survive without their support. Their hilarious stories are always great for brightening a dreary day as well.
• The United States of America: Seriously, that place is great.
• Panama: Panama is a beautiful country and although many things are a bit wonky socioeconomically, the generosity of the people is sensational. They would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it.

I have a million more things I  could write up in here, but I just wanted to hit some of the main ones real quick. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and have no fear I gorged plenty on turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce in Friendsgiving.



Psalm 95:2-3 -- Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song.  For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods.

Upon Further Inspection...

This story begins with one peaceful night in a sleepy little town called Taimati. I was relaxing in the mosquito net on my bed, having enjoyed a double feature at the local cinema (yeah, we set up a projector in the school and had a comedy and an action movie that day, both dubbed over in Spanish, for only 25 cents each, it was great) and reflecting on my life here. All of the sudden I heard a splat on the floor. I assumed that one of the two bats that is presently plaguing the kitchen at night in search of plantains had decided to relieve himself mid-flight within my room, so I slowly found my hand lamp and shined it onto my floor in search of the noise's source.

That is when I took note that indeed NOPE, NOT BAT POOP. BIG SPIDER. As it so happened a large black tarantula had fallen off something or otherwise leapt onto my floor. He froze when I shined the light on him and so I turned it off for a few minutes to listen for his movements. When I heard him creeping along the floor I turned the light back on and saw that he had relocated himself to the base of the wall. This put me in a predicament. You see I should take a moment here to explain the sanctity of a volunteer’s mosquito net. It is the only space that is truly yours. Your host family gives you a room, and when you are living alone you have your own small house, but even those areas are intruded by nature. Nothing enters my mosquito net, and if it does I swiftly hand out justice in the form of a merciless death sentence as soon as the creature appears for trial. So there I find myself, in my happy place, trying to decide if I would exit the safety of the net in order to wage half-naked war on this new-found conquistador or if I would let him go and deal with the paranoia of not knowing where he is in the morning. As you can tell this is no easy decision, so I took my time and would check back on him every minute or so in the hopes that he would raise a white flag and passively leave or set himself on fire . Either way I just wanted him gone. No, these options weren’t good enough for the tarantula as he chose to slowly creep towards my defenseless shoes. Now there is a difference between waking up the next day and not knowing whether the tarantula is in the house or outside and waking up the next day knowing the tarantula is likely within my belongings. I could NOT stand for this. I MUST defend the shoes. 

I carefully exited my mosquito net and tried to decide whether I should whack him with a Chaco, or my hiking shoes. As I weighed the two options in my hands the spider made a quick side step to show that he noticed me noticing him. That is when I decided that this was no ordinary foe. I decided to forgo the shoe and instead picked up a metal rod I had laying around for reasons such as this. I carefully lifted the rod to the heavens and lined up my shot. I delivered swift justice on the intruder and smote him in the helm which gave way to a simultaneously satisfying and unnerving crunch/squish. I had won a victory worthy of the fables! All I was missing was a distressed princess. Now for the matter of body disposal, it was far too late to have a proper funeral pyre so I figured I would sweep him out of the house so the ants would not invade next, but as I pushed him out of my room the two bats in the kitchen started swooping down at my headlamp! I decided this was quite enough and I would just leave the tarantula’s remains in the kitchen as a sacrifice to satiate the blood thirst of the bats. (Notably we did finish sweeping him out in the morning). I returned to the safety of my bed and rested the night away.

You may be wondering why this blog post continues here, but it does. I woke up the next morning and had breakfast all business as usual. I relaxed a little while before deciding that I would try to go visit Matt in Cemaco. I was leaving the house when I thought “I should get my camera to take some photos of Cemaco and maybe some butterflies or something along the way,” so I returned to grab that and then was on my way. As I started down the trail I saw about 2’ of a 4’ snake laying across the trail. I recognized the pattern as a type of rat snake they have down here so I was not too afraid, but he had apparently heard of my recent vanquishing of the mighty black tarantula because he slithered off into the bush fairly quickly, never looking back.

I continued on the path and everything was status quo, a little muddy in parts but otherwise normal. I had come to a tiny concrete bridge that is within 10 minutes of Cemaco when I looked up ahead on the trail and saw a dog walking around. I was hoping he wouldn’t try to get angry as I passed him but I did notice that he was a little strange looking from a distance. “Mange?” I wondered as I looked up to inspect him still from a safe distance. NOPE, NOT A DOG. LEOPARD! Holy Moly! There I was on the trail between our two little towns all alone and probably 25 yards away is a leopard. That is when I learned that the jungle may be hot, and it may be humid, but it is still very possible to get goose bumps. I ran through every survival show that I had ever seen in my head to think of what to do, but luckily it had not noticed me. I quietly took out my camera (SO happy I decided to take it that time) and snapped a photo from far away.

It is kind of far away in the photo.

 

This zoom version you can see his spots on his shoulders!

The photo may not be the best quality, but you come across a leopard in the jungle alone with only a camera and your clothes and see how close you get. From his relaxed disposition I decided to act under the presumption that this leopard had not heard of my victory against the tarantula or that if he had it left him unimpressed, so I took care to quietly back away without being noticed and get back to Taimati. There I shared the story with people who mostly did not believe it until I showed them the photo. So the moral of this story kids is that you should always double check things! That bat poop might actually be a terrifying tarantula, and the dog…well most likely it would still be a dog just statistically speaking….but it could be leopard! 

   

P.S. Thank you God for both delivering me safely back to Taimati and for giving me the opportunity to see such an incredibly beautiful and rare animal in its natural habitat.

Visitors!

I had my first site visitors! Their name's were Aja and Alex, both girls that live in other areas of the Darien. Aja lives in Meteti (the regoinal "hub" if you choose to call it that) and teaches English while Alex is a Sustainable Agriculture Systems volunteer that lives in a small community of roughly 80 people.

We met up at the bus terminal in Meteti around 6 a.m. to take a chiva (small van thing in this case) to Puerto Quimba. I should just mention in advance that arriving into Taimati almost never goes smoothly. We were to wait in Puerto Quimba for the boat which I hoped would just show up on time and smoothly take us straight to site, but as we waited some people that worked around there found us and said "Are you the gringos going to Taimati?" (in Spanish of course) which we confirmed for them. They let us know that the boat would not be coming here today and that they were in Las Palmas waiting for us because they had some motor trouble...of course. We took the next boat out to Las Palmas which was simple enough and went smoothly. Once there we came across some of the Taimati people, not particularly tricky since there is only one road in Las Palmas, and they informed us that we would be leaving around 2 p.m. This gave us about 6 hours to ponder the deeper mysteries of life for instance: how do so many taxi drivers make a living in a town with only one road...seriously there are several taxis there and it doesn't take that long to walk anywhere on the single road. Luckily waits are always nicer when you have friends around to pass the time with.

As fate would have it 2 p.m. came and went and we were still in Las Palmas. The motor had been fixed but from what I could pick up we were waiting around now because the sun was hot. Albeit the sun WAS hot, but in a site where arrival depends strongly on the tides the temperature should not be causing delay. Closer to 3 p.m. was our actual leave time. We had a small motor and were burdened with many goods so it took a decent amount of time to get into site, and when we finally got there....well we didn't quite get there... instead we hit ground about a quarter mile out. This had happened before but the other time we were on the incoming tide so we waited and came in with the tide. This time we were on an outgoing tide, so the best option was to abandon ship and walk ourselves and luggage into town through the mud. We made it and in high enough spirits just in time to watch a beautiful sunset from the beach.

We spent the next two days hanging out in Taimati and Matt's neighbor site of Cemaco just passing time, talking with the people, and having fun. We had a rousing game of PIG on the basketball court wherein I held a commanding lead until the girls realized they could take easy shots and just incorporate short dance moves just before the shot to force me to mimic them. This made me lose both the game, and probably a small amount of respect in the passing men's eyes.

The final night we all spent in Cemaco with Matt and his host family and the girls left early that morning to go to another site to attend the anniversary of the Comarca Embera-Woonan (Embera-Woonan being the names of two indigenous peoples and Comarca denoting a large parcel of land like a reservation). That is what brought them through our sites in the first place, a desire to visit a few sites on their way to this anniversary. Matt and I also wanted to attend this anniversary as a cultural event, but the main office sent us a message to say that we were not allowed and would "receive a stern talking to" if we did go. Trying to stay off the office-trouble-radar we of course stayed home.

It was a lot of fun to have visitors. I look forward to whoever may get the chance to visit me in the future and to the other sites I will get the chance to explore.

Picture Time

I thought since most of my blog posts are all words I like to sit back and let the pictures do the talking sometimes, well...the pictures and their captions.

An anteater that came to visit out of the jungle (the defensive posture is because the teen boys were being exceptionally mean).

Can you spot the blue morpho? Hint: it's on the tree! The blue is on the top side of it's wings. They are really beautiful as they flutter through the jungle.

Some type of freakishly large moth that had a weird ridge on its back.

The snake from the last post. It crawled from the candy shelves down into a bag before we took it outside.

The host family bird. We had a shaky relationship at first but we are best friends now, no more biting!

Really cool lizards we have running around town.

Kuka-Leka that were mentioned in a previous post.

Leaf cutter ants with a local house in the background.

Little beach crab building his home.

Pickle in Peligro

For those of you non-Spanish speakers, peligro means danger.

There was one morning when I was eating breakfast and everything was business as usual until a Senafront police guy came in (he was staying with us at the time because he is family) saying that they had a dead guy and they needed help. He changed from his street clothes into his camo, grabbed his guns and ran back out of the house. I finished my breakfast and decided to see what all this hullabaloo was about. As I stepped outside there was a helicopter coming in to land on our soccer field and a lot of other Seanfront police agents running up to the field. The helicopter filled with the police and immediately took off before a second one showed up to take the remaining Senafront guys.

Start the engines of the bochinche (gossip) train! There were many varying stories of what exactly happened, but from what I can gather a local family owns a farm a few hours distance out into the mountains. This family had a distant family member hanging out in the farm and was in coherts with some Columbians that were not selling sugar or salt. The Senafront guys got word of this and raided this farm. Some shooting happened and some bad guys died. Later that evening I called the duty phone to let them know what was going on, but that I was totally OK and everything in Taimati was pretty chill besides the evacuation of the Senafront guys to go help the raid. It was an interesting reminder that I am definitely not in Kansas anymore. Well, that and the snakes and spiders... they remind me too.

Snake we found inside the house once!

A beautiful butterfly, to remember that not everything is scary down here.

PACA Pickled Peppers

Here in Peace Corps we have these Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) tools. Basically it is a way to have the community figure out how they could better their own community. You use tools such as having different demographics make community maps to see what areas the men and women like and where they spend the majority of their time, have them make daily schedules to see how their time is spent (if someone has to spend 2 hours a day going to get water, maybe we could make an aqueduct to fix that problem), and make annual calendars to see when would be good times for project work days. I decided to do these tools by having a community meeting where we could get together, break into groups, and do these on large pieces of paper.

We were to have our meeting on Saturday, October 11th and the people I had talked to seemed to be cool with the idea, so I had a guy announce it Friday night that the next day at 3 p.m. we would have our meeting. To announce it he is basically the town crier, he just walks around town and loudly announces what you want. It is pretty awesome to have. Anywho, I woke up the next day and was mentally preparing for the meeting during breakfast when my host mom says "Hey, so the town representante (representative) wants to be there and can't today so your meeting should be tomorrow. Also it was announced that it is tomorrow." This obviously caused some concern since now I don't know what was actually announced for my meeting. I eventually found the town crier guy, Jesu, and talked with him to find out what actually happened (my host mom seemed iffy on the validity of her tale). Jesu said that he started announcing that it would be today at 3 but then after talking to the representante, Carlito, he wasn't sure what I would want so he stopped announcing to wait a decision. I told him this was fine (I have a REALLY flexible schedule nowadays) and that we could push it to Sunday at 3. He told me he would announce this (I never heard him do it....don't think it happened). Even still I had a decent number show up to the meeting.

Sunday at 3 I went down to the community meeting center, a white building with a big pavilion thing that has a couple small rooms off it we were to meet under the pavilion half, and started setting up chairs and such. You may be thinking "Austin why would you set up at three if your meeting was to start at three?" well that is simple enough, this is Latin America our meeting really started at 4. This one hour delay is pretty normal and not too bad all things considered. I just will schedule things an hour earlier than I intend to start them...as long as I don't carry that habit back to the states. By 4 o'clock I had 20 people in attendance, including Matt visiting to help out and observe, so we kicked things off. I took down a list of things they thought could be fixed in town to be used in a later meeting and then we broke into groups to make a map, a daily schedule, and an annual calendar. It ran about an hour and a half and went quite well. Everyone participated for the most part and seemed to have fun. I hope to have another meeting here in November to go over what we did and continue our discussion of priorities for the town. I wanted to have the second half of this meeting October 19th but I could not for reasons explained in a later blog! I am happy with how the meeting went (by the end we had about 30 adults in attendance) and I look forward to continuing the work with Taimati and eventually getting some projects rolling!

Status update

So, it has been a while since I have made an appearance around here I realize. First, I would of course like to apologize for those of you that have been checking here without seeing any updates, hang in there stuff is coming soon! The good news is that I have finally met the computer sciences teacher at the school in my town and he gave me the password for the schools wifi, so I can access it when I desire. Now for the bad news, it is a spotty signal and doesn’t seem to be that great so I’m not sure whether I will be able to upload photos or videos on it, but hey something is better than nothing!

In related news I am looking into getting data on my cell phone as well so if you have a smart phone, enjoy talking with me, and well…I guess that is about all the requirements…..then download Whatsapp. It is free, and uses the internet to send text messages, photos, and videos so if I have data then we can be best buddies even from separate countries!

This past month in site has been pretty wonderful. I am definitely starting to feel more at home now and really embracing Taimati as my community. The work is still slow, mostly just going around to chat with people and get to know them, but the first few months of Peace Corps service really have an emphasis on integrating to your community to become a part of it. In all honesty some days it is a little boring/hard to find the motivation to go around to chat with people but that is a part of life and I try to push through as best as I can. There has been a lot that has happened in the past few weeks though and I hope to get to share that in some blogs. I have had my first community meeting, I found/decided on which house I will be renting in to live solo starting in December, and I had my first incident  of calling the duty phone (the number you call when security things are amiss). I am in the city right now because I start a week of language training tomorrow so I hope to get a few blogs scheduled to go out and maybe a few photos uploaded. We will see what I can accomplish, but for now I am just livin' the life out here in Panama and everything is going well.

P.S. A huge thank you to the people that have sent me some care packages recently, I love them and everything I have received.

P.P.S. My friend Matt runs a blog over at  http://mattspanamapeacecorpsblog.blogspot.com/ you should read it and check out the stuff he posts. He is in Cemaco, a community of the indigenous Wounaan people and only lives 25 minutes away by hiking so we make guest appearances in each others lives pretty frequently!

Photos and Stories

The intent of this post is to give a small collection of photos, hopefully with a short story on each one to give some background to my life in Taimati (note: SMALL collection of photos, the internet has been slow so it has been plenty difficult to get these few pictures out here). So let's get started!

 First off we have the day I went to clean the mountain paths with my host mom and another kid. This is a picture of one of the paths and the dog. We spend most of the time spraying pesticide, chopping plants with a machete, and waging war against the jungle which chose a full frontal assault of humongous mosquitoes and spiders.

Next up is a collection of photos from a day of harvesting a shellfish known as piangua. I was eating breakfast this day when I heard Matt yell "Austin! Come out and play!" so I promptly went out to see what was up. He and a collection of ladies/girls from his village were going to get these shellfish, so of course I joined for the adventure. We walked far far far, to the ends of the earth...or at least the end of the beach...and then delved into a mangrove swamp. The harvest involved getting on all fours and drudging through the mud and the muck to put your hand down coin-sized holes and pull out ping-pong ball sized shells. The day was filled with fun, laughter, and plenty of mud!

 Entering the mangroves in the beginning

 Matt with our harvest of piangua in a bag

 Like I said, a plenty of mud!

 

 Our harvest (the two large shells are called Kuka Leka and were from a different day of harvesting on some mud flats)

You may recognize this next photo. A helicopter! It was quite the spectacle landing in Taimati. There is a project going on here to give people gardening equipment and chickens in an attempt to provide sustainable food. On this day they distributed all the equipment and had a little speech shindig with some politicians from the nearby regional capital of Las Palmas.

Last but certainly not least is a photo of the sunset. Most evenings are pretty cloudy on the horizon so you don't get much of a sunset, but every once in a while you get something really photo-worthy.

 

Psalm 27:4 - One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and seek Him in His temple.

Taimati Life

So I am a few weeks into my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I will say that it is definitely an adventure. My first day here was difficult. I started off the morning great, but after I made it through my list of things to do that day I hit a wave of homesickness that was affiliated with being a bit tired as well as the realization of not having a set schedule or a given list of things to do. Since then I have adapted to Peace Corps life seemingly well. I wake up each day with a vague idea of what I plan on doing in the spaces of my day and then see where the day takes me. More often than not someone suggests doing something that ends up being an adventure. So far I have visited Cemaco (the site of Mateo, my closest volunteer) with my host mom as she basically sold lottery numbers, I also accompanied her to clean jungle paths in the mountains to her farm (HUGE mosquitoes and spiders), and I have gone twice to search for shellfish on the coast with Mateo and some people from his village (once for piangua and once for kuka leka, both fun to search for and pronounce). Basically I have no idea what I am doing tomorrow, ever. I live very much so in the present, and I have learned to be OK wit that. Of course I still have my meetings and such as hard calendar dates to attend to, but Peace Corps for me so far seems to be all about relaxing, enjoying the ride, and learning what I can while I go.

Taimati Arrival

At the writing of my last post I was waiting in Meteti to finally be able to catch a boat to my site of Taimati. Well, the day finally arrived when I would be able to show up at my new home. The boat was to arrive at 10:00 am so I got to Puerto Quimba at 8:45 am.  10 o' clock came and went without a boat, so I made friends with the local Senafront guys (Senafront is basically Panamanian boarder/drug control). My boat finally showed up at 12:15 and we grabbed some food then left by 12:45. We stopped in Las Palmas and docked there for a bit waiting for the tide to rise, although it was obviously going down demonstrated by the water line being distanced from where we layed our anchor on the shore. We waited until 2 when we went to Punta Alegre. Here the tide was noticably too low to enter Taimati anymore so we waited for the tide to go all the way out and start coming back in. This did not happen until about 7:30 pm. We finally got out of there with a rising tide... but I said rising, not high. The tide served us well until about one mile out from Taimati where we hit bottom. We sat in our boat, chatted, I played a little music from my iPod, and we waited. Our motor was up but every 15-20 minutes or so we had enough tide to push our boat an extra couple hundred feet. This led to the four of us all standing outside the boat and pulling it ashore as we could. Once we got within a stone's throw of the shore some awaiting people came out to help us pull it in. I had arrived, finally around 10:00 pm, I had arrived to my new home of Taimati.