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!