no time for titles

I typed this really good blog post about the end of training and the challenges I foresee in service, I mean I really articulated myself beautifully and conveyed my emotions perfectly, I read it over and I was moved to tears not just by the content by my amazing use of language it was like a symphony in type. Unfortunately the power went out as I was typing and when my tablet told me it was running low on battery I went to save my masterpiece and as I was typing “blog 4,” my tablet decided it was not meant for this world any longer and it took the beauty of my words with it. Such is Panama.
So this is the less beautifully articulated slightly annoyed version of that post.
I had to write an essay about whether or not I am ready to spend the next two years of my life serving in The Peace Corps here in Panama. I didn’t write the essay. Instead I scribbled pictures with really vague descriptions, which I determined to be fitting as the style of The Peace Corps is to be as vague as possible for as long as possible and also the particular essay asked very specific not fun questions about training materials, but it did get me thinking about what I have gotten myself into and if I am ready and how I am ready. So without further ado and for the second time what the essay I was supposed to write would have sounded like if I wrote it without having to answer silly overly specific prompts.
It’s safe to say Panama is a lot different than the United States even though at times it’s really similar, sometimes when I am in the city I all but forget where I am. And where I am going to be spending the next two years is incredibly different than where I am now, in fact really the only similarity between Santa Clara and Pueblo Nuevo is that they both happen to be in Panama. In the US the power goes out and I’m frustrated because there is no WiFi, in Santa Clara the water goes out and I’m frustrated because I have to buy water and I can’t wash my sweat off, in Pueblo Nuevo there is no electricity, a solar panel just strong enough to charge phones and run a single light at my house families house, and the water there is not always safe to drink and not always available.
I’m thrilled about my site, but at the same time estoy nerviosa more than I have ever been about anything in my entire life. But before I get too far into where I am going I should talk about where I have been.
Training is seventy long days, twenty malaria pills, roughly 100 heaping bowls of rice; probably more, more than a few sleepless nights, a few moments of questioning myself, a lot of dancing, endless hours of classes, a lot of sweat; a lot a lot, a constant rotation of rashes, bug bites, and mystery scrapes, and of course, countless new and exciting experiences.
Training is frustration, but a good frustration at times. I have learned a lot from my formal technical and language classes here in Panama but I think the things I have learned outside of classes solely through existing here in Panama are equally if not more important.
For example in Panama a bus is never really full, yes all the seats have people in them the aisle is jammed with standing people, and people are hanging out the door, but there is always room for one or four more, this is especially true of diablo rojos. Or that with a little skill a lot of luck and quick hands it is possible to sneak a portion of your rice mountain to a nearby hungry dog while saving the feelings of whoever provided said mountain. Or that there is a huge difference between telling someone “Yo voy a bañar en el rio” and “yo voy a el rio.” And beyond these silly things I’ve actually learned about the culture here.
In Panama family isn’t everything but it’s really really fuckin close. When I run out of things to say I take comfort in knowing that all I have to do is ask about family and not only will I not have to say anything for a while, I will learn that they are related to half the town and where they all live and then in the future while Pasearing I can tell them how I’ve met their family before and then they can tell me all about their family and the cycle continues. And beyond the importance of the literal family there’s the way everyone is treated like family here in Panama.
Another important part of the culture here in Panama is Pasearing a word I know I’ve used a lot already with no explanation. The verb pasear literally translates as to pass, it’s a bit of a modismo here in Panama but it is essentially used in the same way to pasear is to visit with neighbors, its stopping by to shoot the breeze, catch up on the latest bochinch, and share a cup of sugar with a splash of coffee. What was going to be swinging by someone’s house to remind them of a meeting turns into a two hour tour of the neighborhood with multiple dinners. It’s a beautiful amazing norm that makes my job of getting to know the community exponentially easier, even if I still have a lot of pena about it.
And finally the last thing I believe is essential to know about Panamanian culture is the role of seasons here in Panama. There are two rainy and dry season or winter and summer. Right now in Panama it is the dawn of the rainy season. During the rainy season the country is green fruit bearing trees begin to share their goodness and crops are planted. Kids go to school in the rainy season, laundry is a bit harder and Pasearing isn’t as frequent, because nobody likes walking around in the rain and it’s impossible to hear with rain pounding down on a tin roof, I’m not planning on letting that stop me though . The dry season is like a vacation. Days are spent at the rio, kids don’t have school, some people visit far away family. But in dry season there isn’t much growing and it’s really just hot as fuck and carnival.
And that is a spark note version of Peace Corps training mas o menos.
And let me just say the first time I did this it was a lot more poetic and emotionally touching, but I guess this will have to do for now, I also ranted about waste management last time, and I’m not sure how to fit that in this time. I guess I could just do it right here. Condensed. Waste management here in Panama is all but non existent for the most part trash is burnt or thrown into rivers, lakes, forests, ditches, streets, wherever. They way I understand it, and I could be wrong, I often am, is that at one time it was chill to just throw things on the ground because all that was being thrown out was just food scraps and when food scraps are thrown out they decompose or are eaten by animas, the circle of life, decomposition, beautiful, cycles. Then one day packages came to Panama and with packages did not come the infrastructure for removing the packages when they were empty. The people did what they knew, what worked, and threw it outside or they burnt it, and it was fine, nothing happened and then one day everything happened. Water quality was lower and people were getting sick from smoke and there was just trash everywhere, but still the infrastructure did not exist. In places with time it came but there are still places that are unlikely to see waste management services for a very long time if ever. And it is culturally acceptable here in Panama to throw trash on to the ground, because what else are we going to do with it.
“Hola soy Angie, soy una voluntaria de El Cuerpo de Paz. Yo quiero ayudar con manejo de basura.”
And finally I will end it with what I am feeling about the future, my next two years, being the only gringa in an isolated town with no electricity, readiness to serve or whatever.
Am I ready?
Fuckkkkkkk no, what kind of question even is that? Am I ready for the next two years? What? Ready for two years? That is literally LITERALLY impossible.
I would say I am ready for the first day and I am feeling good about the first week.
And I’m a little terrified but a lot excited. I’m worried about language. I’m worried about feeling isolated. I’m worried about the intense evangelical religion of the majority of my community. I’m worried I don’t have the knowledge they’re expecting me to have or the ability to convey it. And I’m terrified I’m going to fail.
I’m stoked about my site; it’s gorgeous, I’m stoked to work with kids. I’m stoked to improve my language in order to better teach and learn. I’m stoked about helping with the tourism groups.
I may not be ready for the next two years or the next two months for that matter. But I am ready to learn from each new day in order to prepare myself for the next day. Life after all is a fluid process it’s a river carving out its banks, changing as the sediment around it changes, always adjusting, always flowing. I don’t feel like these next two years are going to be any different, they will be a process, and I’m sure they are going to be incredibly difficult, but it is going to be an awesome and amazing kind of difficult. It’s life, it’s my life, and it’s what I’ve always said I would do and I’m doing. And yeah I’m not 100% ready but dang it’s about time. I
’m going to take a moment to say that I make paragraphs when I type these blogs up in Word but then Blogger gets rid of them and that isn’t my fault at all, and I just had to get that out because it was bothering me and this is a safe space. Also I don’t know if I used those semi colons right, but I don’t give a fuck.
 Also last minute addition to this already unbearably long blog post, yesterday I went to a bull fight, well I guess mot really a bull fight more of like people doing stuff with bulls, a Panamanian bull fight. Honestly I don’t even know. Let me set the scene, it’s raining everyone is crowded under this rickety ass tent near this hastily built fenced in circle where this bull is just relentlessly slamming its face into the walls. All of a sudden it just busts through the fence. I have never seen so many Panamanians run so quickly and I couldn’t even enjoy it because I was too busy running for my life. Everyone runs into the casa communal and the bull follows luckily the backdoor was open and nobody got hurt and the bull was caught the fence was repaired and the games continued and so did the rain. And for the rest of the time I stood ready to run.
Anything can happen.

Into the jungle

Today is day fifty four in panama but tomorrow when I post this it will be day fifty five. Damn.
I have these moments here when I’m on the bus crammed with people, that hasn’t moved more than twenty feet in the last 37 minutes, pinned against a women that smells like eggs and the window in the seat right above the wheel, knees to my chest, soaking wet with sweat, backpack wedged between my legs, starving, with a really full bladder, just coming to the realization that I forgot my malaria pills, with a weird rash all over my forearms, after a week in my future site, holding god knows whose baby when I realize that I am really really happy.
My future site. Pueblo Nuevo. It is the site I dreamed of when I got my invitation to serve minus the ocean, but hey, they tell me I have to be flexible.
It’s a bus and a boat out of the city, I’ll say four hours to be safe depending on when a lancha is heading to town. It’s a small town with 152 people and 63 houses, spread out over a pretty good distance. The town has four parts Pueblo, Nuevo York, Barrio, and Isla. The highest concentration of people is in Pueblo and I live between pueblo and Isla. The church, comador, tienda, and school are all in pueblo. Barrio is mostly people not in the church and it has another tienda and a cantina. I didn’t visit Nuevo York but I hear there’s about six houses up there and Isla as well. My site is in the jungle, fruit and monkeys galore. There’s a couple rivers and alligators which I’m pretty sure are actually crocodiles but that’s one of those battles I’m not sure I want to tackle. There is not electricity but there are solar panels and some peoples are better than others. My host family’s home is on stilts, made of wood, and has a zinc roof, the shower is a spigot and a bucket surrounded by tarps, the bathroom is a latrine. I love it. The people are perfect, beyond nice and I have a really good feeling about integration.
There’re a lot of projects I can’t wait to try and tackle from forming an ultimate team at the school to pushing for a new aqueduct, from home gardens to eco stoves. And without electricity there will be time for me to paint my house, hammock appreciate, master the guitar, run, learn how to handstand and whatever else I decide is an essential skill. Maybe I’ll write a best-selling novel.
Day one in site, I get off the lancha to the whole school on the beach there to greet me. I met my host family who I will be living with for the next three months, Mirrian and her daughter Mani minus my host dad, Ovidrio, who was out logging. We bonded over sharing a last name. And then I swam in khakis and a button down shirt with my host sister in the rio, got some mango, tripped over a barbed wire fence and cut the shit out of my leg, and settled in for the most part.
On another day I went and helped mas o menos cook for a birthday party in barrio, a different part of the town.
There was a day I met the teachers at the school who are amazing and have a lot of great energy and ideas, helped to make a map of the town, taught a little English, swam some more, paseared, rode in the back of a pickup that was the first car to cross the river on the newly cut dirt road.
On a different day I went for a run on the new road got some avocados, got some eggs, saw some rivers, farms, and cliffs, bushwhacked to a large tree, got a weird forearm rash, and ate a couple breakfasts.
Another day started with a tour of the caves by some kids in the town which were beautiful, minus a well justified snake murder, a drowning bat, and a bit of trash. Later in the day there was a trip to the Darien for an evangelical church service involving a little speaking in tongues and a lot of clapping, an empanada, a police checkpoint, and a late night/early morning boat ride.
There was a day in there when a boat of tourists sank on their way out of town and had to swim to an island formerly occupied by a Columbian drug trafficker, and I stood on the porch unable to do anything to help, until we decided it would be good to get a better look.
On another day I visited barrio again to help make sancocha I think mas o menos to celebrate the new camino and I also helped to collect a lot of guava, got called out on only sort of understanding what was going on, and went to an ecotourism meeting where we all struggled to fill out my site locater form and I was given a cup of sugar with a splash off coffee while I learned the goings ons of the eco-tourism group that I really look forward to working with.
I’m worried about feeling isolated and how I will deal with such a large intense religious presence. I’m excited about literally every other aspect. Literally.

Empezar

Blogging is literally, LITERALLY so hard for me to find time to do, I only have time at night in the dark when my screen beckons all the unseen insects in the darkest corners of my room to show themselves by repeatedly dive bombing not only the illuminated screen of my tablet but my face as well. It’s possible that this blog is increasing my risk of dengue by 30 percent, possible. Yet here I am selflessly blogging in order to keep the ones I love informed about the goings on in Panama.
What is crazy is that after an eventful and tiring week in vallerriquito for tech week, today while returning from language class I found myself saying to myself it will be good to have a few normal days of class and routine to relax a bit. If you didn’t catch the subtle message in that, it is that today I considered living in panama to be not only normal but a little mundane as well.
Panama is starting to feel like home halfway into training. Novelties are becoming commonplace and I find myself getting upset when a bus costs over 45 cents or when I was charged 1.50 for a beer on the beach.
Things have happened since the last blog. Probably most notably was tech week but there were other things as well.
A couple of days after that blog we spent a day in Panama city learning how the metro buses work and where important things are in the city like a grocery store with American food, a medical center, a couple of hotels, a fish market with dollar beers and a brewery that charged five.
Then there were days when we worked in the school in Santa Clara and I helped to teach a group of kids where their food comes from and what their food needs to grow in Spanish to the best of my ability.
There was also a day we took a long walk to a river jumped off some different cliffs and played tag like small children while listening to Ryan Seacrest tell us the top 40 songs in America on a portable radio.
And then there was a busy and stressful and amazing and truly beneficial week in Los Santos in the town of Vallerriquito. A town containing the most wonderful and kind people I have ever met. It was in Vallerriquito that I realized that no matter where they tell me I will be living and working for the next two years in Panama, I am going to be really really happy. The first night of tech week set the tone, I told my family how much I loved fresh coconut water and coconut in general and my host brother hunted down and opened a coconut for me with a machete, finding the coconut was easy but opening one with a machete is no easy task. He managed to hack into it in just a couple of minutes when a few weeks prior I tried without success for much much longer. It’s true that I am here to teach and help the people of panama but it is more than obvious that there is just as much for me to learn from them. From there the week continued with a lot of teaching not only in the schools with kids but also to other community members about waste management, recycling, and how to have an organic garden. I was at first intimidated and really stressed about needing to facilitate so much in a language I’m only just beginning to comprehend but the experiences were truly great and helped immensely to boost my confidence and shrink the peña I have about speaking in Spanish. In fact every day in Panama my confidence in myself and my ability to communicate grows.
For the entire time I have been in Panama the office has been telling me that flexibility is key and I think I kind of have just been shrugging it off up until now my future in Panama has seemed so unknown and foreign but tech week gave me a real taste of what it is like to be in site and how common it is for things to change and how often they do change. I think more so then technical skills, the main thing I learned during tech week is that it is important to choose battles, one, and more importantly, most importantly take pride and find joy and fulfillment in the smallest of victories because in the peace corps a butterflies wings truly is enough to cause a hurricane. A good hurricane a hurricane of sustainable development.
I am not here to build a million stoves or dig a gazillion latrines, or even reforest a watershed, I am here to empower and give the local people the skills they need to help themselves.
My site for the next two years in Panama, the town I will be devoting two years of my life to is Pueblo Nuevo de Bayano in Panama Este.