Is it tacky to start every blog I write with, it’s been a while, as though everybody had been waiting around for a new blog post? Should I switch to starting posts with, “greetings from Panama?” Maybe the blog itself is the tacky thing. I am not too sure what the word tacky means, I’ve chosen to treat English more like Spanish now, just use words I don’t know and see if anybody calls me out on them, they never do.
It’s been a while, greetings from Panama.
I read the blogs of other PCVs on occasion, they have an ability to inform people that I lack, if I were to pursue writing it is safe to say I should probably not try for journalism.
For as long as I can remember I have been cursed with a disorder that manifests solely as a desire to save the world. The first time I remember this problem affecting me was while witnessing an act of senseless clear cutting. I cannot say for certain how old I was, but it must have been anywhere from 6 to 8 years old. I can say with certainty that it was the summer. It was an event I had witnessed many times before, but my disorder must have been dormant or even caused by this event. I was in the backyard adoring the beauty of the dandelions a field of yellow, I loved them, and my dad hated them. Why I asked, they were after all and still are much prettier than grass and when they go to seed, wow, its magic, talk about an effective form of dispersion. My dad grumbled something about weeds and neighbors and then he went to get the lawnmower, he was preparing to mutilate my sea of yellow. And why!? For food? For building materials? For cattle? No! Just because, “grumble weeds grumble grass grumble grumble neighbors.” I was in panic, I had to save the beauty of nature, if not me who else? Thoughts raced through my head, I could build a fence, but I already heard the familiar sound of the first of seven or so usual failed attempts to start the lawnmower, there was no time. I could lay in front of the lawnmower, he would just go around me surely, he would have no respect for my peaceful protest. Suddenly at that moment two things happened the lawnmower sprung to life and I sprinted to the area of the lawn most densely populated with my beloved dandelions and I began picking them as fast as I could, running to make a pile on the deck, I would save them all, it was the only answer. I would have to pick them and preserve their beauty in plastic pop bottles, pickle jars, plastic cups, anything that could hold water would need to also host dandelion refugees displaced by habitat destruction. This was the solution, and I had to do it. I cried at the dandelions we lost to the lawnmower, but I knew I had to keep working so their deaths would not be in vain, after the grass clippings had settled and, my dad had retired to the deck with iced tea, I realized all the dandelions I had saved were frying in the sun, they were dead too, and my dad said, “Just throw that over the fence when you’re done goofing around.”
Fifteen or so years later, I teach a group of Panamanian students the consequences of throwing garbage onto the ground, I teach about how trash contaminates water, about the long and sometimes infinite amount of time trash needs to decompose, and I give them garbage bags, I tell them we are going to clean up our community. The teacher lines them up and we leave to go start at the river. A young student while walking to pick up garbage, trash bag in hand, throws his lollipop on the ground. Later, the teacher asked me if we could maybe just burn all the trash we had collected on the bank of the river instead of separating it and burning it in the incinerator.
They say the disorder is chronic, there are still no known treatments, luckily the symptoms are manageable: a wave of discouragement from a lack of success is rapidly replaced again by the overwhelming desire to change the world. Behavior change is sort of like saving dandelions from a lawn mower, but I’m not sure who the dandelions represent, or the lawnmower.
