Leadership

Today the sun came out. Today I pulled off my socks. I removed my fleece jacket and my fleece pants. I did a little happy dance. I danced my way out to my latrine. I brought in my dry clothes after four days of it not drying. Then I took advantage of the first transport in four days and made a bee line for the clinic to sort out the serious mischief that has been brewing in my intestines. A couple more solid weeks of rain have hit Bocas during this supposed dry season. I have surrendered my quest to understand the Bocas definition of dry, but I have not and will not surrender to those mischievous little amoebas that are apparently quite fond of dwelling in my intestines.

Despite the will of my one-celled friends and the rainy cold front stationed over my province, it has been a very productive few weeks. Last week my counterpart Jorge and I gave a two day leadership and project management seminar that covered topics from goal setting, scheduling, budgeting, and group structuring, facilitating, and advertising to formal letter writing, public speaking, and interacting with agencies. In an effort to make the material as interesting as possible, I recruited a group of community members to be actors in skits performed at the start of each session and inserted quick games into the schedule as necessary.

The results surpassed my greatest hopes. Twenty-two participants arrived on the first day, and attendance actually increased for the second day. Better still, I left the seminar with tangible results: two thank you letters for the Ministry of Agriculture’s Department of Rural Development director, a letter of request addressed to me by a young women’s group that formed during the seminar, and a dozen potential logos for my farmers group, which will soon be a formal association! The young women had requested that I facilitate their group’s formation and help them start a project. Yesterday in our first meeting, we decided to pursue native artisan work: baskets, carvings, and jewelry. We all ready have a teacher, and our first work days set for this weekend.

I am quite at a loss for how it happened. Despite my amoeba-sponsored races to latrines, sporadic mud slip-and-slide antics, and language mishaps where things like ‘create children’ rather than ‘raise children’ leave my mouth, I have become a role model. I have a collection of teenage girls that show up at my house to hang out, and now they even seek my guidance. Unfortunately I have started a silly fashion trend of pink handkerchiefs. I seem to sweat a lot, especially here, and in my vain attempt to retain a bit of femininity I thought that a pink hanky would be a good solution. And now they are apparently all the rage among young women in my community. Neck scarves, bandannas, pony tail holders... all in the form of bright pink hankies.

The bridge I cross to enter my site

Kind of scary, but atleast it is being repaired

From the leadership seminar

Leadership seminar

Jorge, starring as the devil in a skit. I, of course, played an angel.

The "dry" season

Jorge, my neighbor/Naso teacher, told my dripping wet sister upon her arrival to my community that according to the Naso legend visitors to the pueblo Naso are welcomed and sent off by the rain. True to form, her visit coincided with three days of rain. The rain clouds’ generosity towards my sister was matched only with that of my community. Despite the recent hardships, Tammy was showered in delicious food offerings: palm heart, baby bananas, cacao, softball size mandarin oranges, and freshly peeled rice, and she left bedazzled in jewelry adorned with a peccary’s tooth, seeds, and a turtle carved from a palm seed. She was trooper; her ankles became worn raw from the rubber boots and she became exhausted to the point sickness from battling with super-suction-ous mud in the rain. And I was uber excited to share my peace corps community and life with my sister, which is why I probably failed to notice that I made her sick in my efforts to show her everything. Sigh.

After bidding goodbye to Tammy, I raced back to Bocas to be trained as a facilitator of cacao farmers’ groups. The two week seminar was coordinated by the World Cacao Foundation, the local cacao cooperative COCABO, and the ministry of agriculture MIDA. In addition to being coached and led through example in facilitation skills, we were trained in cacao pruning, grafting, integrated pest management, tree nurseries, and post-harvest processing. The training is part of the Proyecto Cacao Centroamérica, an initiative to boost cacao production in Central America. I am lucky to have been involved in the project and currently am forming a cacao farmers’ group which I will co-facilitate in my community. If I can ever get back...

Despite this month marking the beginning of the “dry” season, rain keeps falling on Bocas. Landslides last Wednesday along the highway from David to Changuinola forced the closing of the highway for the forth time since late November. Consequently, I was stranded with my community counterpart in David late last week as we attempted to return to our homes after a PC conference near Panama City. We passed when the road temporarily reopened on Friday morning, but it remains in very bad shape (see picture below). Although I am back into the province, high rivers and flooding have kept me from returning to my community. Yesterday the volunteer closest to my site was evacuated from his community via news helicopter, and I remain in Changuinola waiting for the rain to stop.

The ministry of agriculture recently sent aid to my community in response to the damage assessment surveys I submitted for the community in December. Each family in the community received ten pounds of rice seeds, a hybrid that can be harvested in only 3 months. I was hoping for bean seeds as well, but it was still a greater response than expected.

On a personal note, my health is back to good! No parasites and no mosquito born diseases! Just the normal residual fungi that have colonized my apparently delicate leg skin. The wife of my community promoter has urged me to kill the squatters with battery acid. Normally I will give rural remedies a try, but not this time.

Tammy crossing a bridge

Tammy getting some help walking

Me, attacking a broken open cacao pod. the seeds are covered is a delicious white slime. trust me, it is really exciting

Tammy with Naso king Valentín and his wife Ausencia

English class

My host family and some silly gringa

A dredging ship going through the canal at Miraflores Locks

El Chorillo, Panama City

Cute ice cream shop in Casco Viejo... looked too expensive to go in though

Cacao seminar: cleaning seeds with sawdust for germination

Grafted cacao seedlings

Cacao seminar: my groups mini cacao solar dryer

Super sketchy section of road/apparent waterfall that we crossed

The swollen Changuinola River

A ‘Chilly’ Christmas

Christmas in the tropics hardly felt like Christmas. My wish for snow resulted in a ‘chilly’ and rainy Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. My community complained it was really cold (we may have dropped into the low to mid seventies) and said that such weather could have only come from my country. I tried bringing the Christmas spirit into my ‘hut.’ (By the way, my house is finished and I have moved in!) I loaded my ipod with Christmas music and made paper red and green construction paper chains and paper snowflakes. My hut now looks like a second grade classroom. My neighbors tell me that they like my ‘flowers’ (the paper snow flakes). Because I’ve had several failed attempts at describing snow, I now just accept that compliment and say, ‘Thanks, I think the flowers are pretty, too.’

Christmas in my community was almost like any other day. While celebrations there normally are much simpler than in the U.S. (Christianization was a relatively recent happening among the Naso and expendable income normally is little to null), most families have fallen on hard times due to crop losses in the recent storm and high commodity prices. I saw no gifts exchanged and only some families celebrated with special meals (ones which include meat) with the immediate family. I celebrated the holiday by stringing up popcorn and introducing my neighbors to the magical corn.

Since my post-flood return to my community in early December, I have been going house-to-house doing damage assessments for various Panamanian government agencies. It’s tiring work (my community is very spread out over muddy hills and valleys), but I am really enjoying getting to know my community so thoroughly. The really out of the way houses have some of the nicest people who have nothing to give a visitor, but offer something anyway. After two and a half weeks of surveying, I am still only visited about half of the homes in my community. Damages range from homes forever buried in landslides, entire fields carried away by the once-raging river or by mud cascading down the mountain side, to cacao harvests lost to mold during the two weeks of rain.

While I surveyed the damage and took pictures, Soberanda, the kindergarten teacher in my community, showed out the remnants of her home: scattered thatch from her roof and splintered beams protruding from the mud. She and her neighboring extended family fled their homes for the mountain when they felt the ground move up higher on the mountainside; later that night a series of landslides buried their homes. In reviewing the losses, Soberanda smiled when she showed me the one personal possession she had recovered: a worn muddy t-shirt slung over the fragment of a tree trunk.

Thanks for the Christmas cards, thoughts, emails, and phone calls. They brightened my rainy, ‘chilly’ holiday. I wish you all a very happy new year. I will ring in 2009 in Panama City with my sister Tammy who will be spending a couple weeks getting to know Panama. Ciao!

One of the newest editions to the hood: Pinto

I love baby goats

this is Tibi. she is hanging out on my porch

my cat, Cuko

my favorite snowflake on the right

my porch turn second grade classroom

inside my hut

scrubbing my floors the traditional way: with coconut shells

Christmas Eve: popcorn stringing and hot chocolate drinking

pig butchering by the river

making bread to sell

Soberanda points to her husband´s t-shirt amidst her displaced roof

Hello, mud

The Flood - a picture narrative

the rain

swollen river - day 4 of rain

same spot - day 6 of flooding

The path for vehicles (and pedestrians in their absence) leading to my site. Water was knee deep when I got out Sunday. It rose to chest level that evening.

unloading a Columbian plane lent to Panama to help fly in aid, at Changuinola airport

highway into the province

open to general traffic (?!)

a landslide in my community. take a close look at the house.

where I used to cross the river

a landslide near my host family´s house

but still almost business as normal for the host fam ... posing with piglets

Pilgrims and Refugees

Happy belated Thanksgiving! Thank you for all of your comments, emails, and phone calls that brightened my holiday. Even in the midst of a natural disaster, I had the opportunity to celebrate in good company. Wednesday night when returning from serving up food at a temporary shelter, I arrived at the Bocas regional leader’s house to find it full of Peace Corps volunteers from all over the province. We had been consolidated to Changuinola for an air evacuation from the province set for the following day. Despite the somber mood in Changuinola, we had a premature Thanksgiving celebration complete with mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, and … bean soup.

Since Thursday I have been in David with the other evacuated volunteers, where we have been visiting agencies, helping sort and pack clothes, and preparing and organizing ourselves for returning to our damaged homes. I have been in contact with several of my community members. On Wednesday, the flood waters subsided and the landslides lay still, the devastation was made visible, and the sadness of my community members rang clear in their voices. Their backs were against the wall. Several aqueducts laid in ruins with five broken spring boxes and thousands of feet of PVC tubing splintered and missing. Three houses were destroyed, and they had a near complete crop loss. Filled with guilt of my impending community abandonment (i.e., evacuation) I spent a frantic Thursday morning at the government agency coordinating disaster relief trying to arrange aid delivery to my community, which flood waters had cut off from the outside world. I boarded my plane out of the province with remorse; that evening I received a call from my community counterpart. His voice was firmer, lighter. A helicopter had arrived in the afternoon to deliver food aid.

I am sad to think of the work we put into planting fields that no longer exist and am scared when I think about the food shortages we will see in the coming months. I know my community is hard working and will pull through. The rebuilding has even already started without me. Friday I will arrive to contribute my hands to the effort.