TIGDHWMWH #1

I have decided to start a new collection of posts following the theme of TIGDHWMWH (Things I'm Glad Didn't Happen While Mom Was Here). First up.....maggot rain! (like chocolate rain but with more protein)

To start things off, one evening about 5 days before leaving site for something I went to the shower and encountered a rat. This was an awkward experience for both of us since we appeared to be equally naked. The rat ran off and I hoped he'd fled to never return. Wrong I was as I heard him scampering about two days later. I looked for him and found him on top of these boards I have that serve as a drop down ceiling over part of my house (not my design). More unnervingly I also saw that they had established a leaf-den of debauchery on said boards. I set a trap that night in the hopes of snagging one of the two before they could put on any Barry White and start doin' that do. The first night I snagged the guy! HA! Their love fest would never take off now....or so I hoped. The next two nights my trap got nothing and I heard no signs of the female rat so I assumed I scared her off and was home free. I left on my trip and thought nothing of it. When I came back into site about a week later though I smelled death at my door. Literally just at my door. Everywhere else in the house it was fine. I looked for the smell-culprit but it wasn't too bad and I couldn't find anything. After a couple days I couldn't even smell it at my door anymore so I decided to forget about it.

The next day Matt came over for a little visit, and while we were talking I noticed maggots crawling from his bag. "Gross Matt! Did you bring maggots with you?" I said, and he told me that he recently bought vegetables off a boat so maybe they were in there unfortunately. We moved his bag and swept the maggots out of the house. As we did we noticed one land on the freshly swept ground and realized with horror that they were not from Matt's bag but were falling from my drop-ceiling! We moved everything out of the way and put a bucket under where the most seemed to be falling. Over they next 30-45 min there were a few maggots falling down every minute or two. They would fall and we would sweep them out into the yard for the ants to promptly consume. They also were falling from roughly the location of the rat's debaucherous den. This led me to believe that the babies had been born before I killed the father, but then I scared off the mom and they subsequently died.

So there ya go! Aren't you glad you weren't here for that mom?!?

Current Events 3

I'm not going to lie, this is a lazy post, but still fun! I had a trainee from the new group (they just swore in as volunteers on August 27th) come to visit me. It was a lot of fun to have someone around that was getting to see everything for the first time and still so filled with the joy of discovery for a new place. In honor of seeing my site through his eyes I highly suggest reading his blog on the matter to see what his visit was like. He writes very well!

http://ruminaseans.blogspot.com/2015/07/to-darien-july-21-2015-small-waves-lap.html

Current Events 2

An Import of Important People!

So a guy named Ken Yamashita, the Peace Corps Regional Director for the Inter-american and Pacific Region (a.k.a. the boss of my boss's boss) came to see the country and visit a few communities while he was here. He did not visit Taimati, but he did visit Cemaco! For those of you that  do not remember, Cemaco is my closest neighboring village and another volunteer, Matt Simon, lives there. I got to go up there and see no less than 4 people, including Ken, from the Peace Corps Office that exercise authority over me land in a helicopter on the Cemaco soccer field and then enjoy a morning of cultural sharing in Cemaco. The people of Cemaco had a table displaying some artisan goods that they had made and then performed some cultural dances during a presentation where they also discussed what they are working on in the community and what problems they are encountering. Along with the head honchos of Peace Corps the director of MINSA, the Panamanian government agency that deals with health and sanitation issues, was there. This allowed him to invite Matt out to a meeting in Panama to discuss how they could bring an aqueduct to Cemaco. From what I hear this meeting went well and they should be sending people out very soon to inspect the situation. To round out this post here are some photos and videos of the event the day of their arrival:

Traditional dance

Current Events 1

Recent events have been, well, exciting so I thought I would give a few quick quips Over the next few days to update everyone to some interesting highlights of my life over the next few blog posts.


Pieces of Predators from SPACE!

     Ok, ok, ok, so space has nothing to do with this event at all but I needed to hook you somehow. One day I was walking along the beach in Taimati, just killing some time and relaxing. When all of the sudden I noticed a unique shape pass by in the sand. I threw my fiddle-stick on the ground (literally just a stick I was fiddling around with) and whipped around to see....a shark's tooth! It was heavily eroded but of substantial size, and upon further investigation I believe there is a good chance it is an old and small Megalodon tooth! Here are some photos for your investigation:

Shark tooth and a quarter for scale

A sampling of Megalodon teeth.

One Year In

June 18th marked one year in this country for me. One year of adventures, one year of more rice than I ever imagined, but most importantly one year of life lessons. These range from the profound to the absurd, so I think I will try and summarize the better ones in a Top 5 list!

Austin Dill's Top 5 Lessons from Year 1 in Peace Corps

1.) Simple living is complicated.
      -People in the United States are always saying they wish they could live in a simpler time when life was not so complicated. To be honest, chances are you don't. "Simple" life involves having to figure out if your water is clean, pooping in a hole that probably has a lot of mosquitoes in it, and sweating like you did not know was previously possible. Yeah, life is chill at times (in a relaxed manner, not climatically... that's for sure) but it comes with a whole different variety of challenges.

2.) A shower is possibly God's greatest gift to man.

          - You know how nice it feels to take a good shower after a long, hard day of yard work? You know nothing! Ha, well it may feel good, but living in a very sweaty land makes you appreciate getting clean that much more. Also a big shout-out to those volunteers that have to bathe in rivers in site. You never get

real clean that way, so they probably appreciate it even more than I do.

3.) No matter how patient you are, you are not patient enough.
         - I have long considered myself a fairly chill personality and thought myself patient before coming to Peace Corps. Little did I know, I had no idea what patience was. I do a lot of waiting now-a-days. Waiting on the boat, waiting on the bus, waiting for a meeting, waiting for people to show up, waiting for water to boil. There has been much patience practiced out here when I don't get to control as many aspects of my life as perhaps I was used to. I feel it has made me a better person though, and now when I return to America the DMV will seem like a cake walk.

4.) Those with the least can give the most.
           - To be honest Panamanian culture can sometimes come off as very rude in public/urban areas. There is a lot of honking, theater etiquette is almost non-existent, food service is horrible, and in general people seem inconsiderate. This sounds sad, but I don't live in the city. I live in the campo. Out in the boonies there is a lot of lacking for things. People don't have electricity, sewage systems, running water, or generally much of anything, but they will go out of there way to help you in ways you wouldn't believe. You don't have to ask for assistance half the time and if you do then they will give you food off their table, and whatever else you may need to help you out! (note: this offer not always valid on project work days or meetings, please inquire at nearest location)

5.) Someone always has more than you, but someone always has less as well.
          - This is an interesting lesson. Ask my parents and they will tell you my community is quite poor. Ask me and I will tell you my community is not THAT poor, but we live with a lot less (mostly because I have seen some other, far poorer sites). Talk to my community about some other Panamanian communities and they will agree with how sad it is that the other communities have so little, and what a great abundance we have. No matter if you are in the United States of America or the middle of the Darien jungle in Panama, someone will always have more than you and someone will always have less. Be thankful for everything you have been blessed with and be generous with those who don't have what you do!



Here is to another great year in Panama! (and Happy Birthday America! You earned it!) 

A Pickle's Palace

Hello there blog readers! I know something that many people have wondered is what my living conditions are like. To help with this I took a video tour. I will not write too much in this post and let the video do the talking. To clarify one point of the video though, I have running water at the time of the filming, but it does go out pretty frequently especially in the wet season (May-November).

**Feel free to go full screen to really experience the jungle!**

What am I Doing

I imagine that for the past ohhh…10 months…many of you have been asking yourself the question “what exactly IS Austin doing out there?” and I would be lying if I said I have not asked myself that same question on an at LEAST weekly basis (sometimes daily). Peace Corps is a very unique experience and part of its uniqueness is the ability and necessity to dictate your own schedule. You kind of get dropped into a community with some ideas of things you COULD do but nothing that you really HAVE to do, so you try and figure out what the community wants, what services you can provide, and where these two intersect on the Venn Diagram of life.

My last blog, What I’m Working With, detailed the monstrosity that is my aqueduct, the problems that need to be fixed with it, and the problems with fixing those problems. In light of this some of you may be REALLY wondering what I am doing with my time here, and I too had my doubts for a bit. There are low’s all throughout Peace Corps dealing with everything from missing home, to integration in your community, to the idea of leaving. This particular low I was having dealt with the “what am I going to do to make an impact here?” question. I knew the aqueduct was difficult in its scale, and my second trip to the toma got delayed four times before we actually went (some of these delays nobody told me about until I had been waiting for people to show up for an hour and then somebody woke up, stepped outside, and said “O…I guess nobody told you?”). This set me back a little more in what I felt like I could get done with the aqueduct and decided I should look into other projects perhaps as my primary sources of work since this aqueduct seems like it will be trouble, both with the aqueduct work and the coordination with the aqueduct’s directive. That brings us to the million dollar question of what ideas do I have.

My first idea is not exactly exciting, but the community has asked for it so I will try it out, and that is English courses. Now every Thursday evening I give an hour long English course covering basic conversational English. My first course went well enough. Participation is a little difficult to encourage and people are very apprehensive of speaking it out loud just because they are quite shy about sounding wrong. Hopefully the participation can increase and people will shed their timidity to talk more, but we will see!

Another idea, and one that hold much more promise, is to build small scale incinerators. This basically involves having a metal 55-gallon drum with both ends opened rest on a rebar grate over some blocks. You make a small fire below the drum and grate to start the eventual inferno and then throw all your trash into the barrel and put a top on it. The top block a lot of the ash from escaping and forces it to burn more completely, holes in the side of the drum allow for oxygen intake and some smoke to escape, and more oxygen is pulled through the bottom of the grate to increase to intensity of the burn. The entire incinerator is fairly cheap, being built for about $20 and they can be shared between a few houses. This would be a more efficient way of burning our trash (not the IDEAL solution but definitely better than what we have currently). I have decided this would be a nice way to keep me busy. It would be a way to help the trash problem around town, which people have expressed their disapproval of, and have a physical project that I can say was accomplished during my service here in Panama. I have built a pilot incinerator for myself and it seems to work nicely. I have also started the discussion of it with community members to see if we can’t really ignite some interest in this thing (sorry, had to go for the pun). I have pretty good hopes about this project since it is something that is driven on a person-by-person basis rather than an entire community effort and can be accomplished with little cash, two things that make other large scale projects a great difficulty. As with the aqueduct and other little projects I will hopefully be able keep the blog-o-sphere up to date with the progress of the project and any new developments. Thanks for tuning in again and check back for more later!