Janell in the Jungle: Peace Corps Panama: Timber

Despite waking up daily with garlic breath, the past couple weeks have treated me very well. Munching raw garlic has become more of a treat than a chore. I would describe it as instant digestive gratification, if such a thing existed. Digestive troubles are much less frequent these days and can mostly be linked to sampling an intriguing new fruit or consumption of food with a high sugar or oil content.

I am finally realizing how much produce rots on my community’s soils. We have passed through the season of rotting mangoes and avocados into rotting guava and orange season. Due to high transport costs, high labor inputs, and low prices offered by intermediaries, too often it isn’t worth bringing certain produce to market. As a consequence, I now bring a sack with me when I leave the house to collect what others leave behind. This gives great laughter to my host family. Also, much to their delight, palm heart (the tender top of a palm tree) has recently worked its way up to my second favorite dish (just behind pifá, a fruit which is also fed to the pigs). Apparently for the majority of the community eating palm heart is act of desperate hunger. My host family described the flavor as bland as they devoured tasteless boiled green bananas, white rice, and yucca. When I asked how much a palm heart sells for, I was laughed at (a pretty common occurrence) and told they are free, a waste product. They are left behind when palm trees are cut down and harvested for their fruit. Apparently I have varying views on what constitutes local delicacies.

Work for my house has begun, and it looks like I have one more project to work on in my next two years: reforestation. Seven trees were cut down on the first work day. And while watching each great tree fall filled me with excitement and awe, I was left with remorse for the subsequent gap in the canopy. But my inquiry into possible interest in a reforestation project was answered affirmatively, ebbing my remorse. An estimated two more days of cutting remain, and several weeks’ worth of work will follow: pulling the wood to my house’s proposed site, burying the posts, constructing the frame, laying the floor, raising the walls, weaving the roof’s thatch, and finally raising the roof. A dozen or so incredibly generous community members have vowed donate their wood and labor to the task through the coming months in exchange for breakfast and lunch on work days. And the generosity doesn’t end there. Tuesday when I went to the school for the teacher’s weekly English class, the director’s husband gave me a bundle of twine string for weaving my house’s roof. A nine dollar donation, a large sum on a Peace Corps budget.

Friday, for the first time in a month, I hiked up to one of the hill tops in the skirts of my community to the house of one of my farmers, Ismael. From the mountain there is a magnificent view above the fog all the way out to the Caribbean Sea, which is decidedly worth the burning I am feeling in my legs. Once in the house, I had ate my way through two-thirds of breakfast when I heard a ruckus behind me in the trees. A group of about 15-20 white-faced monkeys were passing through, but not without first cleaning a balsa tree of all of its fruit. I jumped up, climbed down from the house, and headed down a path toward the balsa tree to get a better look as they passed by not unmenacingly overhead. Meanwhile my host dad barley turned his head to look. He had seen them plenty of times before.

Eeks, monkeys in the backyard! One more sign that I live in the jungle. Now if only it wasn’t so darn rainy. ;)

the view from Ismael´s farm