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 8th).
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.
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| The Mother's Day party set-up |
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| The queen! Isn't she...he...just lovely? |
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| 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!
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| Bathing hole at La Chunga |
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| Teaching kids to chicken fight in Cemaco |
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| Nick's Peace Corps house |
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| Everyone being attentive to learn about brownies! |
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| Sam (volunteer) strolling through his community of Bayamon |
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| Playing telephone or as they call it here bochinche (gossip) |
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| Active participation in the personal finance talk |
