Holidays in Site

This year I spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve in my community and let me tell you what, it was weird. I’m not saying that they are celebrated nearly the same way, or that they burn effigies of people at one of those holidays but…wait… nope that is exactly what I am about to tell you.

Christmas was definitely the more difficult of the two holidays to pass in site. Here Christmas is not celebrated quite as much as it is in the United States, and in fact Christmas Day is mostly just another day but without work and add in casual drinking all day for those that choose to. The real party is Christmas Eve. For Christmas Eve everyone got together and had a nice big party for several hours with dancing and drinking beer and all that. We all stayed up and then at midnight the music stopped, they played a few Christmas songs, and everyone went around shaking hands and saying “Feliz Navidad!” Now you may be thinking that sounds a lot like how you would celebrate New Year’s and well, you’d be right. It was a strange day to be honest and one wherein I missed being able to spend time with the family and just relax, but I was able to call Mom and Dad so talking with them was nice.

Of course one week after Christmas Eve we were ready to celebrate New Year’s Eve. For a description of how my community celebrates New Year’s please read the above paragraph but replace “beer” with “liquor” and replace “Feliz Navidad!” with “Feliz Año Nuevo!” As you probably understand New Year’s was easier than Christmas because it is not really a traditionally family oriented holiday in the states either. I also knew how the party would be going this time so I mostly just stayed home and used the all night electricity we were gifted as a time to play some computer games. It was more fun than attempting to tell everyone that no, in fact I do not want to have your 50/50 mix of Bacardi and backwash. The one thing that was particularly weird about New Year’s was that people worked all that week to create scarecrow effigies of people, and then at midnight they burned them all. Apparently this is supposed to symbolize burning away bad things or bad habits of the past year, but you make them of other people too (like the president) soooooo to me it symbolizes creepy and murder. Hey different land, different traditions. They all seemed into it and no real people were hurt so that was good. Overall the holidays were not a highlight for me personally and nothing to really write home about, but I figure some people back stateside would be curious so I thought I would let you know! To leave out this blog I will give you some nice photos of people that were constructed and burned for the holidays.

 

Gotta have those shades to block the haters

This one's even got a beard!

A humble blue collar effigy

Well that escalated quickly...

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!

Bathing hole at La Chunga

Teaching kids to chicken fight in Cemaco

Nick's Peace Corps house

Everyone being attentive to learn about brownies!

Sam (volunteer) strolling through his community of Bayamon

Playing telephone or as they call it here bochinche (gossip)

Active participation in the personal finance talk

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.