Panama has taught me...

1) 10 people can share two bedrooms and two twin beds. 

2) Just because your neighbors have electricity, doesn't mean you do. 

3) You can eat anything with a spoon, even a plate of spaghetti and rice. 

4) Children don't really need to be potty trained because they can just go to the bathroom anywhere. 

5) Just because there is a telephone in your town doesn't mean it will ever work. 

6) "A las 4 y adelante" really means 10:00pm. 

7) Being called 'gringa' can be endearing or offensive, depending on how it's said. 

8) A television can work in a town with no electricity as long as there's a old car battery and aluminum foil. 

9) Two year olds drink coffee on a daily basis. 

10) Never leave your house without a machete and sombrero. 

11) Eating a few bugs every now and then won't kill you. 

12)  Cow feet soup is actually delicious. 

13)  In the rainy season you accept your damp clothes for dry enough. 

14) You can eat plain white rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

15) Panamanian women own three pairs of shoes; flip-flops, rubber boots, and high-heels. 

16) Campesinos truly believe that getting your head wet when it's sunny outside will make you sick. 

17) You can eat birthday cake out of a cup with no eating utensil.

18) Roosters crow allllllllll dayyyy looooooong. 

19) Two people can shower with less than 5-gallons of water. 

20) You can give yourself bruises if you scratch your bug bites hard enough. 

21) There is nothing better than a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice on a hot day. 

22) Panamanians will judge you on how you dress. (and how clean your shoes are) 

23) Laying in your hammock all day is acceptable. 

24) You can survive without Internet and cell phone service. 

25) You can fall asleep anywhere. Hammock, moldy mattress, concrete floor, and public transport included. 

26) Customer service is relative. 

27) Plastic bags will be the reason for the end of the world. 

28) It is possible to get sick of fresh ripe bananas whenever every person you see gives you 10 of them. 

29) It is NOT possible to get sick of fresh oranges. 

30) You can be happy with very little possessions in your life. 

31) Panamanian women think I don't know how to wash clothes or dishes or do anything else related to housework. 

32) Eating Panamanian style tamales is not the same as eating Mexican tamales, and they make my stomach hurt. 

33) My stomach is a lot stronger than I thought. 

34) "Ahora" really means anytime but right now. 

35)The lines on my abuelas face are beautiful. 

36) Campesinos aren't poor. They just don't have money. 

37) Campo children are way more well behaved than American children. 

38) Living in close quarters with snakes, tarantulas, and scorpions really isn't that bad. 

39) Humans are very adaptable. 

40) I have learned more from Panamá than Panamá has from me. 

41) Yes, Peace Corps is tough, but it is the best decision I have ever made. 

Bloggy McBloggersons

A little known, but much speculated upon, fact is what actually goes on inside and around our mud hut in the jungle. What little is gleaned from craned-neck glimpses and overheard snippets is mysterious at best. I am pleased to publicly inform you all that Lauren and I keep a hilarious residence, which ranges in seriousness from just plain silly to thought provoking banter to ranting tirades to comfortable silence.

Unfortunately for Lauren, living in such close proximity to me puts her in close proximity to my repertoire of five jokes (roughly estimated). Sure these jokes evolve over geological timescales, but their fundamental content and, in my opinion, knee-slapping comedic genius remains perturbingly steady. In fact, little did you suspect you have already been subject to one in the title of this blog! It is the practice of taking a noun, verb, adjective or adverb (or I suppose an entire adverbial clause) and repeating it twice over. The first time round you annex an "-y" or "-ie" suffix. On the second repetition you add the prefix "Mc-" to the original word (or a slight variation thereof) and then finish off by placing the suffix "-sons" at the very end. So one may have a raucous breakfast of flap jacks referring to them all the while as "pancakey mccakersons." Or suppose some offending dog has trespassed the threshold of our inner sanctum. It may be shooed away using, "Hey! Quitate! Snoopy mcsnoopersons." Some various grammatical substitutions do apply such as in the case "stupidie mcstupersons," but I am working on a multi-volume guide to the subtleties of this timelessly classic jokey mcjokersons.

Rules of the house also require some explanation. Our in-home security program involves various spheres and levels. In our immediate perimeter, namely the space we typically visually observe from the inner sanctum or patio, we permit just about anyone or anything. I say "just about" because peeing male dogs and venomous snakes are not permitted in our immediate perimeter. I claim our patio is a wrap-around veranda because if you balance carefully on the foot-wide piece of cement plancha that extends the foundation of our house inspecting the side wall for scorpions and garden section for snakes, you can easily make it to the back without mortal injury. Dogs deemed friendly are permitted in all patio areas, but your security clearance is revoked if you begin to fight or roll in the flowers and a harsh, "Hey! Quitate! Dañary mcdañarisons" is inevitably coming your way. (If you didn't get that last little bit, not to worry, more on that later). Children are permitted to pass the patio and enter the inner sanctum. Should you fail to take off your shoes or begin touching and handling everything (toothbrushes especially) with your dirty hands later announcing you have a fever, you risk being excluded from any forthcoming presentation of juice, popcorn or other snack. Dogs are rarely permitted in the inner sanctum. Our Lordess Empress Princess Ruler, Goma the Cat, is of course permitted in the inner sanctum and patio, but strongly discouraged under penalty of Lauren carrying her back inside to broach the immediate perimeter. Lauren is developing a motion to create another secure zone called simply "the bed inside our mosquitero" and proposes excluding me from it because it turns out my side is toxically foul-smelling. Gosh, I guess I am just a sweaty mcsweatersons in the jungle heat! Our Lordess Empress Princess Ruler, Goma the Cat, will of course be permitted in this future zone.

The official language of our home is Spanglish in all its beauty and affront to both respectable tongues of English and Spanish. We conjugate Spanish verbs in English; a prime example of this being "regalaring" as in, "I heard he is regalaring yuca." We inexplicably terminate English sentences in Spanish; for instance, "The pipe route had to be changed to the other side of the rock porque, bueno... hay que hacerlo." This practice affords excellent communication among the two of us, but I fear will affect our transition back to the states dearly.

I don't think there is a topic Lauren and I haven't talked about. Sure there are comfort topics like our future Vanagon/toaster van plans and how Lauren is, "gonna get a German Shepard puppy and feed it raw meat," but as the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons you are gonna have to talk about 'em! World hunger, water rights, speculation on sexual habits of our campesino neighbors, theories on kindness and justice and progress, rants about environmental degradation and overpopulation, plans for haircuts, tragedies of child soldiering and trafficking, drug movement through South and Central America, stochastic programming, gender roles, religion, minimalism, pop culture and freedom float through the conversation in the inner sanctum and on the patio. Those walls have seen our best joys and our worst attitudes. Inside we have changed and stayed the same, reflecting on both prospects. Cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes and then cooking, washing dishes and rewashing the same clothes. Rarely can we decide what to eat for breakfast in less than twenty minutes. We listen to, play and write music. We sing and dance and dodge the widows naked after showering because everyone can see in! Our campo home is one of the happiest places on earth for me and I think Lauren likes it too...as long as it is swept and organized.

Although it has its secrets which you may never know (such as the high level of accuracy to which I impersonate Marc Antony's performance on the music video for "Vivir Mi Vida"), after reading this blog, you kind of get the gisty mcgistersons.

Love,

Alex

Dark days

Date this one back to December 21!

"¡El diablo, ese bicho nunca se duerme!" -Herminio Guerrel, Regidor, San Juanito

December 21 is the shortest day, the darkest day. I certainly feel it this year. It seems as though I am always running up against the far edge of the day recently. Arriving to my house in the dark or cooking in the dark or reading by headlamp. As a disclaimer, this blog is a bit of a downer today. It ends on a positive note and we continue doing great and thriving despite the dark days.

San Juanito has had a crime rate of about 0.0001%. The campo is perhaps the safest place to be. All one needs to do is watch their feet for snakes and one can enjoy a vibrant, safe life. Friends and family abound in the campo and folks are too poor to rob anyway. With the construction of the road two yeare ago the seeds of crime were sown. More travel means more temptation to accost someone and make a quick buck. It means more strangers around. In early November, a group of three masked men built a rock roadblock and robbed a fish truck outside of town that enters San Juanito to bring some delicious protein and assorted veggies. They succeeded in taking $300 and significantly scaring the poor pueblo. In a possibly related incident, three masked men robbed an elderly man, his wife and daughter in mid-December after a "día de pago" where the government distributes $100 to those above 70 years old. This 78 year-old tried to defend himself with his walking stick only to be thrown to the ground suffering a knock to the head that took four stitches to fix up. The daughter was pushed down and suffered a severely sprained ankle. Don't get me wrong, we are talking about very minor incidents in the face of the violences perpetrated worldwide every day, but I think it is affecting me because everyone around is so shocked and frustrated. We love these people so much and when harm comes their way it feels like an attack on all of us as a community. People are mad, sad and embarrassed that San Juanito is getting a bad reputation, frustrated as the culture of fear touches them in their tranquil campo.

My view on the issue...pardon the French here, #$!* people who rob people! The worthless and morally void folks who prey upon the weak and vulnerable are behaving like the scum of the earth to lazy and weak to pick up a &@>%#+<?! coa and earn a living like the rest of us. Get help and stop making good people fear the road where they once tread in peace. That aside, the whirling suspicion is that the suspects are youth, which cries out "at-risk" in my mind and makes me sad.

Unfortunately, we got swept up into the fear frenzy too. All over a six-by-eight, blue tarp. It is common for volunteers struggle with little things here and there being taken around their homes. For us it has been a piece of wood one time, a bag of avocados another and most recently in late November a plastic tarp I use to make small mixes of concrete and such. When the tarp showed up at our neighbor's house with the back-story that some kids had sold it to this 80-something year-old, I thought to myself, in this growing local atmosphere of unpunished crimes and loose ends, justice should be pursued. Long story short, after much and much deliberation between Lauren and I we went with a local option and called on the local sheriff to help us get to the bottom of it. The suspect kids only stood to make $2 off the sale and I would have honestly prefered my old neighbor to keep the stupid thing, but hey. We confronted the kids and their parents. They denied everything and said, in fact, the old man had offered to sell it to them for $2. Awkwardly, the kids, their dad, the sheriff, Lauren and I all marched to the old man's house, but he barely understood what was going on and when asked directly about the tarp, did not accuse the kid at all, instead claiming the kid had stolen $20 from him. It was all too jumbled and direct in a world that revolves around indirect communication. The sheriff ruled we should take tge taro back, no harm, no foul style. The whole hassle leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It stinks of agism and bent truth. Should we have left well enough alone? Was there a different strategy that would have solved it better?

"El unico requisito de morir es vivir" - Raul Guerrel Hijo, San Juanito

If god is up there, he sure worked a mystery on Christmas Eve in taking our friend, mentor and leader Brandon Valentine from our world. Brandon was Peace Corps Panama's young, vibrant training manager, a father and expecting another he was friend to all. His presence will be missed very dearly in the Peace Corps community. He welcomed me to Panamá, taught me to salomar and bark like a dog. He introduced me to pasear emphasizing how its better done on an empty stomach and made me think about using my radar. He said, "don't reinvent the wheel, just pimp it out" and me animó to listen to people around me. He never failed to give me a pat on the back and shake my hand when we crossed paths in the office or in Penonomé. One time he made me put on pants when it was only clean shorts left, a friendly reminder of the value of professionalism. Brandon's gone and its up to the rest of us to tread the waves looking for reason in this. It should be easier with such a brilliant torch to carry and though I expect to falter, I also expect to get back up because Brandon would have liked that way better than just sitting on my butt. Brandon man, you live on in my heart!

"No es el sol que mueve en los cielos, es la Tierra dando vuelta así." - Teodora Gonzalez, San Juanito

So there you have it. Dark, heavy events for short, dark days. How tempting it is to close up shop and hang up the sign. Retracing our steps to the comfy, safe middle class that holds its door open for us would be straightforward and the light has been left on. Wouldn't you? How easy it is to let the dark in and start to spiral. The little complaints get amplified on you: slow projects and slower transport, thinking you got through to someone only to watch them back-track, spiders and all those eye-rolling cousins of inconvenience out there. We are bothered morally too. After all, we are confronted with the barbarity of humanity in general on a daily basis. Our crimes against Mother Earth are many. Our money-lust leads us to kill our soils, push animals to extinction and hurt one another making daily wastefulness our religion. Hypocrisy can rule if you let, but she is a harsh queen. We don't persevere trying to believe in the positive here in Panama because its a goal or contract. We are here because this is our camino to walk right now as hard to explain as it feels. Adventure is about feeling all feelings and stamping out the numbness of ignoring something nasty. We stand for adventure. You will find methere  and for all it makes my heart hurt sometimes, it makes my heart full too.

Abuela came up to our porch on December 21, the darkest day of the year. She asked me to explain how the seasons change in Colorado. We talked about how it gets really dark in the extreme north and south of the planet. She said come June and July the days are very long again, which is something to look forward to.

Stay strong and follow your dreams,

Alex

Dear Panamanian Politico,

Lets go ahead and preface this one by reinforcing that the views in this blog reflect my own opinions and not those of the U.S. government, Peace Corps or any of its affiliates. I pose a struggle here between the rich and poor everywhere. The first world and the third world mix and meet often, but don't tend to average so well. There is some underlying reason why the lexicon ignores "second world," "first and a half world" and "second and three-quarters world." I don't understand the divide because we all seem to be human, of one image. Feel free to agree and disagree with this. Fearless? Fearless. Ahead.

Dear Panamanian Politico,

Let my first words be to wish you an overly wonderful morning with angels shining down upon your featherbed and hope everything you touch is turning to gold as you deserve. I say these things because I know greasing your ears is a necessary practice to get you to lend a fraction of your attention here. To me. Your people. Our issue is a general lack of respect and it is two-fold: (1) we tire of the apathy you demonstrate towards the content of your own progress-promising speeches and (2) we laugh, not so much WITH you as AT you, as we run your gauntlet, standing in line for our so called freedoms.

In the end we are smug, smirking outside and inside because the chokehold you thrill yourself in claiming upon the poor is actually not so incredibly uncomfortable. Sure we'd like the worms out of our bellies, but I think the black-lung of your cancers is not such a grand improvement as you might think. I live outside. I live with Mother Earth, God and the gods where their blessings are as evident as they are breathtaking. You fear the sun. You fear the cold. From the climate-controlled halls of your homes and institutions you have constructed a universe full of themes and objects with which no god is familiar.

Our interactions are increasingly awkward. We are invited into your world to earn the money that is only useful to buy your goods and perpetuate our bondage to make more of this evil capital. Money has started robbery in our village and for what? I can trade it for the chips, cookies and stale bread you offer but they leave me obese, with rotting teeth and missing the fresh bread of my grandmother's hearth. Yes, you built my road, but we begin to feel the motivation was to rob the working hours of our men to make you even richer. Toss them just enough bone to keep their teeth busy while we quietly open their jugulars. Your charity often barely values the trepidation we have to show to tolerate your presence. So little do you understand about our environment, both human and natural, that your attempts to help often precipitate more work for us and even conflict within our communities. And yet your jelly rolls continually spill out into our lives pushing false agendas and expecting a photo-op gratitude that we oblige with equal falseness.

You choose to laugh loud, but we choose to laugh long. After you've poisoned your water sources, corrupted your babies and cooked your eyeballs on the pocket-sized, hot skillet screens that supposedly respresent the pride of our civilization, I will fight for the old ways. I will remember the names of the plants and the motion of the planet. I will struggle to defend culture, tradition and teach my children to feed themselves from the earth's bounty.

Let me close with a brief thanks for stopping the practice of murdering us outright for speaking against you, but preface the gratitude with the observation that it was not all that long ago you perpetrated this as well. The parents and grandparents remember those days.

From,

El Campo

Spay Panamá Project

Finally! After almost 1 year of organizing and planning, The Spay Panamà vets made their way to San Juanito. On April 4th and 5th five veterinarians from the non-profit organization successfully spayed and neutered 86 dogs and cats.

One of the first dogs to get spayed

  

One of the vets hard at work

The clinic was equal parts crazy and cool.

As you all know, Panamá has taught me to roll with the punches. The period leading up to the clinic was a great example of this... 

As if to set the perfect stage, the dog that follows us around everywhere, Carmencita was in heat in the days before the clinic. She was attracting 8+ male dogs at a time that would fight, growl, pee on everything and destroy our gardens day and night. To add tragedy to inconvenience and frustration, Carmencita lead the pack of male dogs to the main road outside my community, where a car struck and killed my neighbors dog as he was fighting in the asphalt.  (R.I.P. Tuto) Another punch was at the last minute we had to change the location of the clinic from the school to the casa communal because we didn't have correct permission from the ministry of education. In the hustle to make the casa communal an appropriate place to hold the clinic I arranged to run electricity from a near by house to the casa communal and spent the morning cleaning the muddy floors with my helper Maria. I waited for the veterinarians to arrive and when they didn't show I hiked up the cell phone hill and called. I learned they had been delayed and would be arriving the following day. 

My kettle reached a boiling point when I arrived back to my house to find the pack of male dogs on my porch. An especially scary male dog made a lunge at Goma ( my cat) and in her attempt to flee climbed my face as if it were a tree. Luckily it was just a small scratch and bruise but it felt like she had scratched my eye out. 

I was tired from chasing off male dogs, tired of the difficulties of scheduling anything on time, and just about ready to give up on the whole project. But when the vets arrived the next day I was glad I didn't. 

They arrived at noon and by 12:30 they had already set up everything and had 4 dogs operated and waiting to wake up from the anesthesia. That set the standard for the speed and efficiency for the rest of the afternoon and following day. 

Alex and I helped the owners push, pull, drag or carry their dogs or cats to the clinic. We used wheel barrows, sacks, baskets, ropes and anything we could find. Upon their arrival to the clinic, one of the vets would eyeball it's weight to the pound and give it the appropriate dose of anesthesia. The animal would then gently fall to sleep and the vets would get busy.

Abuelo bringing his puppy to the clinic

The "recovery room" was a 10x10 sheet of plastic where they would place the finished dogs and cats down to wake up. 

This whole process was completely new to my community members and many of them were sure the sleeping animals were dead. Once the animal showed signs of recovering the owner was free to carry it back to their house.

The dogs and cats recovering from anesthesia 

Abuelo carrying back his sleeping dog in a "motete"

A warm heartfelt thank you to everyone that donated and made this possible! After the clinic 6 year old Mitzuri told me she wants to be a veterinarian. Like they say "Rome wasn't built in a day!" Here's to a bright pet caring future! :)