Pickle in Panama: Pickle Visits Sambu

I would firstly like to apologize to those readers that, this last month, have been…well…not reading due to a lack of posts. I found myself strangely busy at times with the holidays, a report that I have been writing up for the office, moving into my new house, hunting iguana, and a short jaunt I took over to the Comarca Embera-Wounan Sambu. Now now now, you may be saying “How were the holidays in your community?,” “You wrote a report!?,” “You did WHAT to an iguana?!?,” or even “YOU HAVE A HOUSE NOW!?!?!?” and don’t worry I hear you and we will journey into those blog posts in the future, sooner rather than later. However, we need to start with the beginning of the month, my visit to the Sambu.

To kick things off I had another visitor come through Taimati, this time a girl named Abby that was coming to visit the Darien and give some agribusiness seminars in various communities. (Abby writes a really excellent blog that can be found over at abbyexplores.blogspot.com). We spent a couple days hanging out together in my community and Matt’s community next door, and then she continued on to the Comarca Embera-Wounan Sambu (understandably shortened by everyone to “the Sambu”) to visit some other Peace Corps Volunteers. Near the last minute I decided that I should tag along too and help with some of these talks she was going to give. Now I could try and tell all the details of this trip but that would start to create a very long blog, so I think I will try to hit some of the highlights and give more of a synopsis of the storyline.

For starters the days in Taimati and Cemaco were pretty fun. We taught some kids in Cemaco how to chicken fight in the river and celebrated Mother’s Day in Taimati (Mother’s Day here is a BIG deal and is December 8^th). The main event of Mother’s Day was a party at the town representative’s house where we received a lot of food and even crowned a Mother’s Day queen. I had been told that they stopped crowning a Mother’s Day queen a few years ago but people were talking like they were going to bring it back, so I was interested to see who it would be and how the people reacted. To me it would seem like maybe some moms would be sad if one mom was named “Queen of All Moms of Taimati,” so I wanted to see how it went over. When the queen was unveiled we were all thoroughly surprised by the selection committee’s decision. It was…*drum roll*… the aqueduct committee’s plumber!! Wait…what? Yup. The aqueduct committee plumber and HE is very much a man. He came out with a wig, lipstick, a low cut shirt, and a skirt and everyone died laughing. They had the queen’s dance where another male Taimati citizen came out of the crowd to dance with the queen and then they had a parade where she danced around town to the beats of a 5-gallon bucket drum.

The Mother's Day party set-up

The queen! Isn't she...he...just lovely?

The queen's parade! What an entourage!

After these days of fun we hiked from Cemaco to a community called La Chunga which was a pretty terrible hike. It was two hours long and shin deep in mud half the time and it poured on us, but we survived the hike and made it to La Chunga. La Chunga has had a Peace Corps Volunteer but the current one was moved for medical reasons to another site so they are waiting a new one from a later group. We got to spend the evening there and got to know some of the locals who were all really nice to us. The next morning we got on a boat and made our way to Puerto Indio which is the site of the first volunteer we visited, Nick. We used Nick’s site as our hub for the next couple days because the next two days we (really Abby) were to do talks in two different communities that were each a two hour walk away from Puerto Indio. Nick’s site is strange because it is pretty well developed yet entirely indigenous. His neighbor is a bakery. That alone makes it strange. He also has electricity 24/7 and an info-plaza within his community. Hanging out with him was a lot of fun and getting to see someone else’s site as a visitor was a cool experience.

The next day we hiked to Day Puru (pronounced Die Poo Roo) to visit yet another volunteer and Abby gave a great talk on cacao production and how to make brownies from raw cacao. The people were all really excited to have the guest speaker and it was fun to see their enthusiasm. They were so excited in fact that when we left before making the second batch of brownies they took the ingredients and said they wanted to try and make the brownies themselves as we made our way back to Puerto Indio. The day after this first talk we went to another community called Bayamon to give a personal finance talk. This talk I actually got to help with by playing a character in a personal finance socio-drama. I drove a taxi in the skit and gave an award-worthy performance. It was great. The final day we just spent in Puerto Indio hanging out and relaxing after having wrapped up our talks with the people of its neighboring communities and educating them on the important things of life (a.k.a. how to cook brownies). I snapped a few photos along the way and the trip was a blast. Check back in the hopefully near future though for more exciting posts about iguanas, my house, and even aqueduct information!