Hi Everybody!
We hope you all are doing well in whatever it is you are up to in good ole 'Merica Norte. We are down here in 'Merica Central still and thought we write about what kind of trouble we are getting' up to. Right now we are huddled under our mosquito net on our wooden plank bed listening to Bright Eyes and the rain falling. Apparently it is going to start raining a lot here as invierno approaches, which has some up-sides and down-sides. On the up-side, the nights are cool and fresh and when it rains all day we get to rest a bit from the physical labor side of this job. On the down-side, our clothes will likely not dry from now until January. The work will be replaced with playing guitar, reading, and drinking coffee, which isn't all that bad. Speaking of which, Alex got his hands on a halfway decent guitar for free so that is pretty good. Our regional leader Aaron's house has a guitar that sort of just lives there, but since he is a banjo player it was sitting in the corner with a broken string. Alex went out and bought a new string, tuned it up, and Aaron just gave it to him for two years! An extremely nice gesture from an extremely nice person.
Lauren's Spanish is rockin' along nicely. Lauren of four months ago wouldn't believe the Lauren of today can communicate so well here. Lauren says she has learned more Spanish in four months here than in four years of high school. Alex is feeling good too and has moments where Spanish feels super natural. We are going to come out of this whole thing speaking a pretty backwoods, campo version of Spanish. It's kind of like Alabaman English, no offense to any Alabaman reading this. In some respects it is easier because the emphasis is more on getting your point across than being flowery or grammatically correct. On the other hand, some of the stuff that gets said around here is nonsensical in any language. Abuela Chola told the dog to, “git outta here with your dirty beard.”
Continuing on the topic of our cultural integration, we seem to be pretty hungry quite a lot of the time. We kinda feel bad about this because we are getting three meals a day and everyone is always careful to give us the biggest, best portion of whatever is being served. We chalk it up to our gringo metabolisms. The amount of hiking and pick-axing and sweating we do makes our bodies crave vegetables, whole grains, and substance; we just aren't used to living this type of lifestyle on rice, boiled bananas, and yuca. As a result Lauren is feeling like the saggy, baggy elephant cuz none of her pants fit and Alex's cheetah metabolism can't be kept up with. In a short month we will be on our own and can do our best to get the food that makes our bodies work the best so we can come through for our community.
Speaking of moving out on our own, we have undertaken a pretty significant annexation of our future house. Panamanians like to go big and we barely know what we are doing so the new part of the house pretty much doubles our livable space. Panamanian campo construction techniques are borderline insane. Anacleto felled a tree that he was in, climbing around and hacking away at it with his machete. Abuelo Cholo climbed around the rafters wrestling 16-foot sheets of razor-sharp zinc barefoot. He'd yell down to Lauren every now and then to bring more nails or make him some coffee. As we were closing up the day he told us we owed him a thousand bucks... we bought him an ice cream today, hope that works instead. Everyone is not only donating their time and expertize to the remodel, but also all kinds of wood. It makes us really revved up to pay them back over these next two years by doing our best for their community and working our Peace Corps volunteer tails off for them.
In the work arena, we have elected to do a thorough job of the community analysis. During Pre-service training we were trained pretty extensively in something called PACA tools. PACA stands for Participatory Analysis for Community Action, and is used as a world wide Peace Corps tool for getting to know the community in a way that sets the stage for project work. We've cooked up a scheme of 4 meetings in which we talk about the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the community. They are called “Una tarde divertia con Alejandro y Lorena” and we try to have fun and be really friendly and open and laugh. We have gone through two meetings so far and the reception has been pretty great! Counting men, women, kids, and babies we had 74 people packed into the Casa Comunal for the first meeting. Popcorn is a big hit and people really seem to dig talking about their town and what it means to live it up in the campo. It is A LOT of work for us because we are hand-making invitations and prizes, carrying benches and tables every Sunday meeting morning, but the idea is if we climb a big hill at the beginning, we will get to build up a lot of steam on our way down with projects and stuff. We explain at the meetings that this work is with our mind and our hearts so we can know what we are working for when it comes time for cement, shovels, pick-axes, and machetes.
Life is good! We are enjoying ourselves and feeling good about where we are at both geographically and Peace Corps wise. Take care everybody! Keep being awesome!
Lots of love,
Alejendro and Lorena
