Some Days

Some days I realize where I am. Sometimes the realization comes as I help Irenes knead the morning's hojaldras on her wooden batea, the smell of coffee drifting from inside her yellow, mud hut. Sometimes I realize where I am as I stand sweating and dirty with Anacleto, hiding from the Panamanian sun noticing how puny a 500-pound pile of sand and gravel looks in comparison with the mountain of effort it took three people, hacking through the jungle, stepping over snakes and tarantulas to dig it from the river and haul it over slippery, moss-covered rocks in plastic saccos over our shoulders to get it there. Sometimes it hits me when we are out pasearing, “Damn, I am in this random Panamanian house, listening to this guy with only a couple of visible teeth who seems older than the hills and actually understanding what he is telling me about this palm fruit that he harvested this morning.” There are times when nothing on my plate is from a package. There is hand-ground maiz from the monte that Jeronimo carried home yesterday on horseback, packed in the husk and boiled to make bollos, guineo-chinos from the tree in the bottom corner of the property, yucca pulled from the rich Panamanian tierra negra, chicha made from lemons plucked off the tree this morning, or a sweet lemon tea from the limoncina plant that grows near the shower. Oh yeah, and then there is the chicken that I saw earlier that day with feathers still on it. Sometimes as I walk by the blue tienda with its new ceramic-tile bench in the morning and hear the friendly, “Buenas,” from Maria-Eugenia as she looks up from her sombrero-making, the fibers wrapped around her toes as she tightly weaves them into a ribbon to wrap around her wooden mold I think to myself, “No one would believe what I am doing right now.” No one would believe just how loud the rain is on the zinc roof. No one would believe how everyone here knows how to put every single different natural material to use. This type of wood makes better embers in this type of stove. This preparation of mud cured my son's auto-immune disease. This plant is for headaches. That plant makes peppers hotter than habeñeros and they look exactly like those from this plant that makes the sweet peppers we use in every single dish, don't mix them up. Sometimes I realize where I am when Panamanian folks start arguing about the best phase of the moon to cut wood. It seems silly to ask which is the best phase of the moon to visit Home Depot ™, which is how I “cut” wood. The stories we hear about the lives of people in our community are often of incredible hardship, but told with a smile and a selflessness that I won't ever forget. Parents harvesting a coffee plant, drying, grinding, and packaging fifty baggies to sell six hours away on horseback at the market. “Thankfully we sold a lot so we had enough money to buy our son's school supplies for first grade.” We even start losing our grip on science and proof and fact. It seems so logical that Baukti was born with a weak right leg because he was conceived after his dad almost died from an equis snakebite on his right toe. It is pretty weird. I can just be going about my day when I get one of those feelings of realization. I live in Panama now. I speak Spanish now. I drink coffee now. I still don't like rice now. Maybe the feelings of realization mean I am a little bit more conscious of just how different life can be around the world. Maybe they mean something else. Whatever they mean, the feelings are good and I like them.

A Beautiful Day

Wake up. A beautiful day is. Is it a beautiful day? What is a beautiful day? Today was a beautiful. Here it is. All of the day and what lies therein which made it a beautiful one. There was that sense of dirty accomplishment as you dove into the cool, cleansing Rio Mula to wash the mud off. The mud came from the house and the fresh smell of wet mud was not far at all. Because do you know how the muddy walls of a freshly muddied house smells? Smells like dirt. Dirty like all our friends working with us, our friends and our teachers because here in San Juanito they are often the same people. Our teachers are actually teachers but also kids and their smiles, laughs, and games. Our teachers have boots that squish tarantulas. All this they do for us because they have that deep kindness, that kindness that wakes up with our campesino friends in the morning and goes to bed with them at night. But you had better wake up early because it takes a long time to mud a house, even just the inside, which was all we did. The kindness is also given as a drink. Cane coffee cut with machete and served with a smile. All the time watching Nena with her perico and how happy that little green bird made her and how it laid on her lap as she laid on the lap of her smiling father as he laid in the hammock held together by a thin, thin, thin cord that won't ever break... ever. But you've gotta be SO careful. Oh so careful. Should you dare someone to collect the oranges you need to be prepared and well-prepared to help them down after they have collected you more than you can carry. When oranges are eaten here, they are peeled in one swift chop, sometimes victims of machetes, and then the juice is sucked out from a pool, deftly formed atop the orange. It's good. Trust us. We won't ever go back. Just like we can never go back from what we are experiencing second to day to second that we would never trade for anything in the money world. I can never understand Baukti's accent. Love it all the same. It hit me as I was walking down the road and carrying the oranges down the hill in my sombrero and I was having a conversation with them in Spanish and they were laughing and the sun was shining and it was just one of those weird moments. Yeah it itches! Hell yeah it itches! Sometimes so much that I can't stand my skin and no matter how much alcohol I spritz upon the bites they just don't subside. And then there is the wisdom of our current Panamanian mom and her slow careful assessment of just about everything. What pain she takes to put our lives right with chica. It got ironic at that point because we listened to the “Everybody in the Club Getting Tipsy” song in the deep campo jungle. But that will fade. What remains is the beauty of the day. A beautiful day. Go sleep.

What is Pasear

Once upon a time there was a particularly great man with a particularly great fondness of tweed jackets and loafers. He greeted each new day with song. He would sing, “It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, it's a beautiful day for a neighbor, would you be miiiinnneee?” Unbeknownst to Mr. Rodgers his song would ring true for two particular voluntarios del Cuerpo de Paz in the interior of Panama as they too awoke to greet each new day. In order to be particularly great voluntarios and shoulder the grand pursuit of “giving voice to the voiceless” and/or “becoming an agent advocating positive change in the eyes and faces of a community” and/or “facilitating change by empowering the people themselves” said voluntarios must first know the voices, eyes, faces, and people. We must first, in the face of many bugs, much mud, and countless awkward silences, fly Mr. Rodgers' shimmering banner of friendliness and pasear.

Let us first place some caveats on Mr. Rodgers' famous sing-song to transition into some of the challenges our two particular voluntarios face on the road of pasear. Take “a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” for instance. If we carefully tweak this first stanza to read, “a muddy, wet day in a neighborhood that values clean dress and orderly appearance,” then we better capture pasear. To emerge onto someone's doorstep in a presentable state is a large portion of the overall battle. Proper footwear choice is paramount as are slow measured steps. During pasear one must avoid, at all costs, the sickening slide of sandals, which can change a lovely pair of khakis into a significantly less lovely pair of khakis. Jeans, while durable and fingernail-cleanable, can choke sweat from the very pores of one's body resulting in a similar disaster.

Considering “a beautiful day for a neighbor” we must empathize with the gracious hosts of our pasear visits and ask: for them, is it really a beautiful day for these particular neighbors to come calling? Is now a great time to stop whatever work you have and receive guests who speak an odd form of your language that you barely recognize? Do they like to sit or stand? Are they going to want a drink? Why are their khakis always so dirty? Sometimes these particular voluntarios jokingly hum the theme song to the critically-acclaimed, shark horror film Jaws as they walk up the path to an unsuspecting house. However, the cultural reality seems to be that these supposed fears are our own projections onto our hosts because we see through the lens of our locked door and window society where each unknown person to pasear is coming to sell us vacuum cleaners and/or convert us to their religion. After all, here in the campo, it really is a beautiful day for a neighbor and the result is a pretty great feeling for everyone involved in pasear. Visiting someone's home is very special here and whatever there is to share—be it bread, coffee, a great view, seeds, words of wisdom, gardening lessons, stories, or silence—will be shared with a smile and a genuine “gracias por su visita” as you part ways.

This graciousness introduces the tiny asterisk these particular volunteers wish to add to Mr. Rodgers' words “would you be miiiinnneee?” Making a new friend involves a name, a face, an experience, and a place. These “new friend qualifiers” seemingly so simple and innocuous, morph into significant challenges in the campo for these particular voluntarios. For the following, fictional names have been substituted, but the situations are all to real. Parents often press their children to say their own names. To our untrained ears, the first time around sounds like, “Hard in mania de (mumble) have landed,” which we repeat diligently, yet punctuated with that pathetic question mark of validation, “Hard in mania de de de have landed?” After a couple rounds of pardon-me and otra-vez the response elucidates to “Yariminia de Santos Hernández” or a similar name that moves the tongues of these particular voluntarios in new, gymnastic-like ways. From there the name is either immediately lost from memory, written down hurriedly somewhere to be lost later, or tried later only to learn that everyone actually calls her “Lila.” Faces are usually our best bet, but when someone gets a haircut or is wearing a different sombrero or sunglasses this becomes a pitfall. This pit is further deepened by the triplets named “Juan Edwin” (who goes by Jorge), “Jorge Edwin,” and “Edwin Jorge.” Experiences are perhaps the most valuable tool; they bring friends together on a daily basis. A wide spectrum of experiences will populate the typical afternoon of pasear from an unlucky kid with a broken leg to wild monkeys in the yard to a special gift of some delicious food to a tarantula on your boot. These are great for the memory because stories are the glue that hold people together. Pasear is also about places. Our neighborhood stretches over hills across rivers and through the jungle so these particular voluntarios never lack a beautiful view or a new type of tree or a path less traveled. The path twists and turns often so much so that hours are spent aggregating a reference community map. Discussions are heated and belabored as we argue switchbacks, river crossings, and which junctions go to which houses; this environment is far from suburbia with its cute shoebox Clinton Courts and 6^th Avenues. Names, faces, experiences, and places help these particular voluntarios get out on the beat and ask, “Would you be miiiinnneee?”

There it is. Plain as muddy waters. Pasear. Take that Mr. Rodgers.