...without any mental reservation

The Straight Poop

2011-04-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

The United Nations estimates that 2.5 billion people worldwide lack access to basic sanitation, and my community of Bahia Azul has around five hundred of them. That includes just about everybody if you include the families that had a latrine built by a previous Peace Corps volunteer, because all of their latrines had fallen in to disuse if they were ever completed and used in the first place.

What we have in lieu of latrines or toilets are the local quebradas, the little creeks that flow down from the hills and empty into the bay. And we have the bay itself.

Sometimes there is a little ramshackle privy set up over the water with a servicio that just amounts to a couple of boards strategically spaced above the water to allow for comfortable squatting. Or when people have their house built out over the water along the bay they may have a hole in the floor of a back room.

Or they just wade into the water... and do their business directly.

That's the grim and grotty reality of sanitation in most of the indigenous Ngäbe communities in Panama, and improving that situation is a primary goal of Peace Corps' Environmental Health project. And that means latrines. It all seemed pretty straightforward when I received my invitation to serve, and I thought it sounded great to come down here and help these people out by building latrines. Of course, it turns out to be more complicated than that on many levels. For one thing, the old Scout camp style pit latrine we're all familiar with is a no-go in this corner of the tropics. The the water table is so high that if you try to dig a pit you'll hit ground water within a few feet. The solution Peace Corps has been promoting is the "double-vault" composting latrine. It's an above ground, cement block structure that stores all the poo in two "vaults" below the floor. You mix in some organic material like dry grass and sawdust and given enough time it will all turn to compost.

There are two seats, one above each tank, but the idea is to seal one off and use just one vault for the first year, then leave it alone to continue composting for the second year while you switch over to the other seat and fill the second vault. After that second year you should be able to remove finished compost from the first vault, spread it around your farm, and start the cycle over. Sounds easy enough. And the Ngäbe fellow on the poster seems to be happy with it. So why were none of the eight families in Bahia Azul who were part of the the 2005 latrine project using their latrines when I got there in October of 2009 ? That's a really good question, and one I felt like I needed to find some good answers to before sinking a lot of resources into building more composting latrines. My community isn't unique in this respect. A follow-up study a couple of years ago found that a very low percentage of the latrines we had built in Ngäbe communities out in this region were actually being used once the volunteers left. Meanwhile, the tell-tale swollen bellies of the children suggest the density of the parasite population inside, and the Ngäbe people continue to register the highest mortality rate attributed to diarrhea in children under five in Panama. I'm still struggling to figure it out, but one element of the problem has to do with a basic culture clash : Wipers versus Washers. While we learn from our potty training days to use toilet paper to clean up after pooping, Ngäbes have always used water. If they're squatting in the creek, it's an easy thing to take a step or two up stream, squat back down and get nice and clean. Or if they're going to a privy, they'll carry a little jug of water along for their ablutions. To them, wiping with paper is cochino or filthy. Okay, to each his own. But here's the rub: the composting latrine is a dry latrine. The vault can't be all soggy or it will be a smelly, bug infested mess. You can't urinate down into it, let alone dump a lot of wash water in there. The seats of the latrine are specially designed with a urinal section in the front that allows the urine to drain off through a pipe into a soak trench in the ground outside. The challenge has been to come up with a way to accomodate the cultural difference. If these folks lived in Panama City, and if they had the money, they could go to the home center and find something like this... After a lot of head scratching, I came up with a campo version that I´ve been calling the Ngäbe Bidet, or in Spanish, El Lavanalgas. It's a little ferrocement basin that fits onto the latrine seat over on the seat that's not in use. The basin covers up the opening to the tank below and water flows down into the urinal and drains into the soak trench outside. So after a sit-down on the active side seat, one can step over to the other seat and take care of one's washing. The icing on the cake is the little garden hose sprayer we hooked up to a a tank of rainwater collected off of the roof. The early reaction has been really positive, so we´ll be retrofitting a few more of the old latrines that we're trying to get into full service, including one that will be a model latrine for people to come and try out if they want to be involved in another round of latrine building in the community. Thanks to Danny Hurtado, a former volunteer and Michigan Tech student who did his masters thesis on the sanitation situation in this region. I snagged a couple of photos from his paper.

Hooray for Visitors

2011-02-21T09:08:00.000-08:00

In the year and a half that I've been living out on Peninsula Valiente I don't think I've ever really felt lonely. I mean, I'm pretty much surrounded by people all the time. I often find myself gettting up at five in the morning just so I can savor my morning coffee in the hammock and enjoy a couple of hours of "me" time before things really spring to life and people start dropping by.

Like this crew of kids and their moms who hike the muddy finca trails through the woods to come to school. They know they're welcome, so they come up on the porch to put on their shoes and socks, and starched white uniforms before heading on to class. This was the first day of school and the moms were spritzing all the kids with cologne before sending them on. Pretty darned cute. And of course, being a cut-up, I got in line for my spritz. They love that stuff.

And after school kids are always coming by to hang out a while, usually asking me to let them read one of my books--old newspapers serve the purpose--and maybe catch me in a generous mood when I might give everyone a soda cracker.

And of course I have a lot of adult visitors to, like these guys who came over for our water committee meeting.

So, given that I have so much company, it always surprises me a little how much I relish visits with, as the Ngabes like to say, mi gente -- my people. That's usually a neighboring Peace Corps volunteer, like my friend Charles, who lives out on the other side of the peninsula. I went over a few weeks ago to visit him and help him build a rainwater tank.Until I get the chance to do it, I don't realize how much I miss having a conversation in English, and especially with someone who is sharing this same special and somewhat crazy experience as me.

So it was even more of a thrill when I walked up to my porch one day in February to find that my son Kelly had finally arrived, having made his way down on the bus from a visit back to the site of his Peace Corps service in El Salvador. It was great having him here. To those of you who know Kelly, it will be no surprise to hear that my community loved him. He fell right in, making friends, learning phrases in Ngabere, tickling little kids, and conducting office hours on the front porch.

Despite the fact that it rained almost constantly, we had no problem staying busy for the week or so he was in town. In addition to coming along and helping with aqueduct repairs we worked together to build a sixty-five gallon ferrocement rainwater storage tank. When it was time to precast the base, it was Kelly's inspiration to bring the mud up onto the porch to make the form for the dome shaped bottom plate.

The mud worked perfectly as a form, as did the rest of the project, and the finished tank is full and supplying the water for the washbasin in the latrine I wrote about in the previous blog. Everyone here loves the tanks and a lot of people want me to help them build one of their own. (more to come on this project in another blog post)

We visited just about everyone in the community at one point or other, and paddled over across the bay and up the beautiful Quebrada Sribidiri, one of my favorite places around here.

We'd gotten about as far upstream as you can go without getting out and dragging your canoe, when the calm was broken by a raucous clamoring in the distance that Kelly guessed was a pack of wild dogs, but that I recognized immediately as something much more animated than that: a junta of Ngabes hauling a dugout boat up out of the woods and down to the river. We parked our canoe and hiked in a ways to see the men struggling through the mud to drag the massive boat out.

I was glad to be able to get some photos since I´ve always been one of the people doing the hauling on these operations before. Kelly took the opportunity to jump in and pull the boat along the home stretch to the river bank. I shot a little video but i{m not sure I can get it to work on this page. if not, the youTube link is

youtube.com/watch?vX576bKDUAV0

Great stuff. It means a lot to share the experience and I feel awfully lucky to be a volunteer in this age of digital photos, internet and instant communication. Lucky indeed.

A Year in Site -- Vacation Time

2010-11-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

I'm off tomorrow to Guadalajara, Mexico for a little vacation and a long awaited reunion with family, the main event being my son Kelly's med school graduation from UAG. More on that in a follow up post, but I wanted to get something up before leaving. I realize I´ve been a very poor correspondent lately, but it hasn't been for lack of things to tell about. The truth is I´ve been staying plenty busy out in my community, and it seems when I do get back to the city where I have computer access there is never enough time to get even the essential chores done before I´m hopping back on a boat for the ride back out to the peninsula and home. But the good news for me is that it does feel like going home, and I´m always happy to leave the relative bustle of the regional capital and get back to Bahia Azul.

So what have I been up to for the last four months?

Well, more than any other one thing I´ve been working on the somewhat dilapidated aqueduct that provides water to our community. We´re gradually correcting the problems that have plagued the system for years and left the community without a reliable supply of water. I love the work, as it involves tromping around through the upper reaches of the community and beyond, figuring out what's gone wrong and then figuring out how to fix it, and training my local counterparts in the process. Sometimes it means pushing off before down in my canoe and paddling down the shoreline of the bay and up a little quebrada that flows out through the mangroves. From there it's a short steep hike up the hill where our water tank sits. We measure the flow of water coming into the tank using just a watch and a five gallon bucket, ...and given the ample flow and the early hour, we should find the tank full of water stored up overnight when no one is using water. But, did I mention our system is somewhat dilapidated?
That's the outlet tube that the water is barely covering, which means that all of the water that flowed into the tank overnight flowed right back out through the lines and presumably out through undetected leaks in the mile or so of PVC pipe that runs down in to town.
And of course, the search for leaks is anything but straightforward. It will mean machete-hacking through some pretty gnarly terrain, including the "swampo" where the tube is submerged in water and muck protected by chest high expanses of razor sharp marsh grasses. But as I head back home I'm happy. I mean, my job description includes hacking through the monte with a machete and I paddled to work through the mangroves in a dugout canoe for crying out loud. Of course I'm happy. And as I mentioned, we've been making progress lately so we've had water flowing pretty consistently. That's left me with more time for other aspects of the environmental health project. We formed a water committee to manage the aqueduct after I arrived last year but they still have a long way to go. Basic things like collecting the monthly bills (50 cents per faucet), and keeping payment records and a basic set of books are new concepts and have been a challenge to get established. We've been having some meetings on my front porch, which has helped with attendance, especially if I promise popcorn for refreshments afterwards.

In September I worked with four other volunteers to put on a three day seminar for water committee members from a half dozen Ngabe communities out in this region. We covered a whole range of issues, from holding elections to thermoforming PVC to repair leaking tubes. It was ambitious but it went really well, and I'll probably be joining other volunteers around Panana putting on the seminar for their communities.
In October the U.S.S.. Iwo Jima, a hospital ship with an international crew of doctors and nurses pulled in to the port at Chiriqui Grande and set up a week long clinic in the local school, offering free exams and treatment to people from the surrounding villages. Unfortunately no one from Bahia Azul was able to come up with the sixteen dollars for the round trip boat ride. I went in for a few days and worked as a translator with an eye surgeon. A great experience really. The dedication and professionalism of the medical personnel as well as the soldiers and sailors of the crew really impressed me, and in a really corny way made be proud of my country.
There's more going on in site that I'll plan on posting more about when I get the chance. I'm working with the water committee on a series of charlas on potable water in the household that includes showing people a simple hand washing station they can put up at their house. Neat.
Other fun stuff, the big Independence festivities in November

...with bands marching and big community-wide feasts..
And women putting on their traditional naguas for a family portrait
and lots more, but I'll save that for later. Love to all from Panama.

The Bro' Hike

2010-07-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

When I was back home daydreaming about being a Peace Corps volunteer my thoughts tended toward exotic cultural experiences, a new world, new language, new people, new everything. And there has certainly been plenty of that. But what never occurred to me was the friendships I would develop with fellow volunteers from the good old U.S.A., and the tremendous importance these new frienships would have in keeping us all going.
With that in mind, this is just a short photo-post of a great little vacation I took with five of my best buddies in Peace Corps,Derek, Austin, Dan & Dan, Jon and yours truly.

We started from Austin´s house, a two hour boat ride up the River Manante in the village Calante, and followed a rough cut track west towards the nearest paved road. Everyone was a little vague about how far it was and how long it might take, but we were in no hurry. This was the kind of thing we came here for.The road took us through beautiful backcountry of the Comarca Ngäbe-Bugle, the semi-autonomous region of western Panama. After a long first day of hiking we were lucky enough to stumble onto a half-finished house that provided shelter for a rainy night, and enough rest for us to hike on the next day to the first village where we could catch a chiva, a pickup truck rigged out for passengers, and ride the rest of the way out to the highway.I just have a few minutes to get this posted before catching the boat for home, so I´ll leave it at that. But if you´d like to read a little more, you can check out Austin´s blog,

http://anotherpeacecorpsblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/bro-hike.html

for posts on the hike and Peace Corps life with the Ngäbes in general. His blog is full of spot-on insights and wry humor. Highly recommended.

Water Works 2

2010-07-06T10:17:00.001-07:00

I took this picture of these happy little kids who had been watching us repair the pipes in their baño, the little bathing area beside their house. Obviously, you won't be seeing this kind of style in those Modern Kitchen and Bath books at the home center, but they're basically functional, and about on par with the fit and finish of the rest of the house. People back home are always curious about what kind of work I´m doing, so I'm posting a few photos of one rather fun aspect of my work on the community´s aqueduct, thermoforming.

Our drinking water comes from this little dam on a stream up in the hills above town.
The water comes down to the houses strictly by gravity flow through a line of two inch PVC pipe. The tubes are old and a lot of them were never buried as they should have been to protect them, so on a regular basis everyone´s faucets go dry. That's usually because a cow has stepped on a pipe and broken it, or sometimes an old pipe joint has just come unglued or was never glued in the first place. Whatever it is, once we hike (or maybe paddle) up and find the problem, we have to cut out a damaged section of pipe and glue a new section in its place. You would think the only way to do that would be to buy two unions and glue the new pipe in between them, but that would require having a plumbing supply store accessible, and cash to buy parts, neither of which is the case here. The campo alternative is thermaforming. You can do a crude version of that by just holding the end of a piece of pipe over a fire until it gets soft enough to slip it over the end of another pipe to form a bell. These traditional fire-formed bells usually don´t fit very well, so they tend to leak or come completely apart eventually.
During training we learned an improved thermaforming method from a volunteer who had worked on water wells in Ghana. This guy is a magician with PVC, cutting and melting and reforming pipe to fabricate things like this check valve for a homemade water pump. I´ve been teaching aqueduct operators in my area some basic thermaforming to make pipe unions. We heat up a can of cooking oil to around 375 degrees on a stove or fire, and dunk the pipe in the oil to soften it up before using a special homemade mold to form the bells on the ends of the pipe. The resulting empate looks and works like something straight from the factory.
We´ve been using another technique to make flow reducers for the half-inch lines that go to individual homes. You start with a short section of pipe and make a cut lengthwise from top to bottom with a hacksaw. When you hold this split piece of pipe in a can of hot oil for a minute or so it gets soft enough for you to unroll it and press it flat between two boards. When it cools down and gets hard again you have a nice flat sheet of PVC plastic.
You can use a hole saw chucked into a hand drill to cut out holes... ...and end up with little discs that have a hole in the center.
If you've cut these little discs the right size, they'll fit snugly up against the shoulder of the fitting so that when you glue the next piece of pipe into it the disc is locked into place and serves to reduce the flow to a faucet. Reducing flow might sound counterproductive since the whole idea is to get water to people, but given the topography of our area we tend to wind up with homes in one part of the system that have high pressure and gush loads of water, while people on other sections of the pipeline (like my house) open their taps and just hear the sound of air sucking into the pipes. So we've been strategically installing these flow reducers on different branches of the aqueduct to assure that more people get a share of the water. And the result of water reaching more houses? Well, more happy kids obviously.

My Own Place

2010-05-09T15:39:00.001-07:00

It´s hard for me to believe, but I´ve been living in Bahia Azul for over seven months now. Since my arrival I had lived with Celia and Ricardo, as nice a host family as I could ever hope for. My room at their house was tiny, just seven feet square, but then again, it was my own room, with a plank bed and a door that shut, so it was a lot better situation than some volunteers had with host families where they slept on the floor in the middle of the house. Those guys have all long sinced moved out into their own houses, while I´ve been slowly getting around to rehabbing the old house that an earlier Peace Corps volunteer lived in here four years ago. It took a few months to get the old guy who was kind of squatting there part time to move his stuff out so I could start clearing out the termite nests and start in on the rehab work. The termites had destroyed some of the penca, the palm leaf used to thatch the roof, and I decided to build a front porch addition and also to add a little five by six foot baño addition off the back, so, what is usually a three month stay with a host family stretched to a full six months.Fixing the roof involved taking a boat up a nearby river through the mangroves to cut the huge penca leaves and haul them back to town, splitting each one into two halves, and then, with the help of some hardworking friends, tying it onto the new roof frame.

Working on the house has been fun for me. It is challenging trying to get things done without access to the tools and materials I´m used to working with. If you need some 2 x 4´s there´s no where to go and buy them. You have to contract with a woodcutter who goes out into the forest and cuts down a tree and saws it into boards. Then you have to haul that still-wet and thus incredibly heavy lumber back along steep and muddy trails to your house. Then you struggle to saw every piece to length with your ever-more-dull hand saw. You get the idea. But still fun. And I learned a lot about how the Ngäbe people work. I got a lot of help from friends and neighbors who joined in on a junta, working for hours together, tying penca for example, expecting nothing in return except for a nice meal, and the comraderie of the day´s work.

So now I´m moved in, and can for the first time since coming to Panama I´m enjoying the simple pleasures of having my own space. I can get up in the morning and make a cup of REAL coffee (as opposed to the vaguely coffee flavored sugar water Ngäbes drink), and enjoy it while listening to a little news in English on the BBC. It's not a bad little place, only ten foot square plus the porch and baño, but that's plenty of room as long as I stay organized.

I rigged up a very functional kitchen "zinc"

and various little shelves and nooks to hold stash my supplies,

a nice open-air bathroom for all the necessities, although water only arrives sporadically,

and a nice comfy bed to crawl into at the end of the day. The mosquito net is key to a good night's sleep, keeping out the variety of bugs and bats that come out at night, as well as shielding me from the light sprinkling of debris that is always falling down out of the penca.

The front porch has become a popular gathering spot and people are constantly stopping by to pasear, which translates as dropping in uninvited. As the host, I'm expected to pretty much drop whatever I might have been doing and sit down and visit a while, and probably come up with something to eat and drink or risk looking like a clod. Having visitors is often the last thing I want, especially when I've just gotten in from working for hours on the aqueduct, or some other project, but I try to go with the flow. Ngabes don't really value "alone time." They live in family groups of upwards of ten people in houses only a little bigger than mine, so they never have any time by themselves, and they can't really imagine why I would want to be in my house all by myself, even for a little while.

So we visit. I pull out books or newspapers to share (National Geographic en Español is a favorite) and make some coffee koolaid, or bring out some bread or raisins, or for a special treat, I'll make popcorn, and share my porch and my life with them. And that is one of the goals of Peace Corps that I signed on for, so I'll stop complaining now.

A birthday present

2010-04-02T17:09:00.000-07:00

Well, it wasn´t actually a present, and I got to start using it the week before my birthday, but I´m now the proud owner of my very own dugout canoe, and I´m as tickled as can be about that. You may have noticed that entries in this blog never include photos of cars, trucks, busses, etc. None of those things exist out on the peninsula. The only mode of transport other than hoofing it through the monte is to take a boat. And the boats come in all sizes, up to the occasional yacht that sails into the bay. But by far the most common is the hand hewn dugout.

Kids grow up in these things and it´s not unusual to see kids who back in the states wouldn´t be allowed to walk past the pool unsupervised to be out paddling their baby sister around the bay or up some little quebrada.

I knew from the day I arrived that I´d want to splurge and get my own ride, so when a friend told me a couple of months ago that he was going to cut down a tree in his finca, and that he could make a boat for me, I enthusiastically placed my order. Within a day, the tree was chain sawed down and a fourteen foot section of trunk was cut and rolled in to position and the rough shape started to emerge. The bulk of the work was done by our neighbor Deciderio, an absolute maestro with an axe. He used a flexible palm stalk to pencil the contours onto the log, and then he let loose with his axe--mighty overhead swings that fell exactly along the line like a sculptor´s chisel. Once the interior had been hollowed out, a razor sharp adze was used to shave it smooth. We flipped the log over and more chips flew as the hull took shape. After two long days the first stage work was done and the boat was ready to be hauled the half a mile out of the woods and down to the shore, where the final shaping would be done. We organized a junta for that formidable chore, which meant inviting about ten very stout men to come out, cut and nail some stout branches across the gunwales, and "jalar" that sucker up and out of the forest--a daunting task, since the boat still weighed a ton and was sitting at the bottom of a very steep ravine, but these guys really do excel at the seemingly impossible. So with all hands on board, and much chanting , cheering and goading in Ngäbere, we inched the hulk up the hill, along a ridge and then slid it down to the shore beside my house.

From there a couple of more days to refinar with axe and adze, and it was done. But not ready to sail away yet. Deciderio sank the boat in the waist deep water under the house for a few days--don´t ask me why--and then we dragged it up onto the shore for several weeks of drying before it was considered seaworthy.
So finally last week my bote was ready to go. I loaded up a bucket of tools and made the forty minute paddle across the bay to another little Ngäbe community for a couple of days work with a fellow volunteer building a spring box, a concrete enclosure to collect and protect the springwater source of the community´s small aquaduct. The construction went unusually well and when I was ready to head home the next day I didn´t have to hang around the dock waiting for someone I could beg a ride from to come along. The bay was calm and mirror smooth, reflecting the sunset for the leisurely paddle back across the bay--a good day to be a volunteer.

Water works

2010-01-31T15:50:00.001-08:00

2010 feels to me to be off to a flying start. In fact, I´m having trouble believing January is already past us by and we´re on to February, Presidents´ Day and Black History month, a fine combination in these historic times. I´m living in sort of a news vacuum down here which is in some ways a blessing, since I´m spared all of the venomous bleating that comes with following our national politics, but I read a reprint of Obama´s innaugaration speech in an old volunteer newsletter the other day and these lines really grabbed me:

¨To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds...

I do love that corny idealism, and although I´m stretching it a bit, keeping the clean waters flowing in my little community of Bahia Azul has been my main focus in recent weeks. Most of the homes get drinking water from our aquaduct, which is just a system of PVC pipes that brings water down through the community from a little stream up in the forested hills well above us.

At least that´s what happens when the system is working. But at least once a week it seems the taps run dry and people revert to scrounging up water from little contaminated creeks that run through town or from ¨pozos¨, shallow, hand-dug wells. Part of my job here is to work with the local water committee and the operator to improve their management of the system, and to look for ways to get water to more of the community. So I´ve been mapping the water lines, and working alongside the operator to trouble shoot and repair problems when we wake up without water.

A lot of times people here will leave the area for days at at time, either to work distant farmed lands up in the hills, or to take short-term paying jobs, or to visit family elsewhere in the area, or it seems, they just disappear for a while. And so it was with our aquaduct operator, who left town for a couple of weeks without prior notice. So when the water predictably went out several times during his absence, I was hailed by expectant townsfolk with a plaintive, ¨Tolichi, no hay aqua!¨So I´d pack up some tools and hike up the lines looking for the breakdown, which usually turned out to be where a wandering cow had stepped on the pipe and broken it or kicked open an unglued joint. I´ve always kind of enjoyed plumbing, and I´ve learned a few neat campo pipe fitting tricks, like how to make a coupling by softening the end of a scrap of old pipe over a fire and then jamming it onto another pipe to form a bell. The result tends to be ugly, and you don´t want to inhale while doing it, but if done carefully, it can work as well as the store-bought version. Although being the village plumber is not my intended role here, and not the kind of sustainable development Peace Corps tries to promote, I do feel like I´ve gained credibility and some political capital by being able to restore the water supply. Not to mention it just feels good to come sloshing back into town, soaked with mud and sweat, and have kids and old women happily call out from their windows,¨Ya hay agua. Grácias Tolichi!¨

An Isthmus Christmas

2009-12-27T11:59:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to send out my Holiday greetings to all of you that I didn´t get to get in touch with. I hope you all are having great times with friends and family. I for one, can´t complain. I was up before dawn on Christmas Eve, waiting on my dock out on the Carribean for the boat back to the mainland, and then a couple of truck and bus rides up and over the mountains and down to a beach on the Pacific coast for a reunion with a group of volunteers from my training group. The surf was crashing, the weather was balmy, and we had the beach virtually to ourselves.

I felt slightly guilty about leaving for the holiday rather than staying in site, but the Ngäbes don't really have a long-running Christmas tradition--either secular or religious--and the impression I´d been getting was that it was going to be a day not that much different than any other in Bahía Azul. But reconnecting with the crew from training on the other hand turned out to be just perfect. We had lots of stories to share, moral support to offer, and laughter to make your face hurt. Christmas morning even included a white elephant gift exchange, from which I came away with a nice plastic tarp--an excellent campo gift.

It was a great get-away, and felt perfectly timed to keep at bay any possibility of the holiday blues. Now I'm feeling fully recharged and anxious to get back to site tomorrow and and get back to work. Happy New Year all.

One month down...

2009-12-04T16:18:00.000-08:00

I´ve been living in Bahia Azul for five weeks now and all is well. This morning I took the three hour boat ride back to the mainland and then bussed across the continental divide to the provincial capital of David for a little R & R and to take advantage of availability of shopping, phone service, internet, etc. So, here´s a partial update on what I´ve been up to. My long term goals in the community are to help improve systems of potable water and sanitation. There´s a gravity flow aquaduct that brings water down from a stream up in the hills above town down to the community, but breakdowns in the system are a regular occurance, so I´ve had several chances to hike the waterlines, searching for problems and repairing pipe. I was really surpised the first time we hiked up to the source, climbing through the densely forested and gnarly stream bed to encounter a huge dugout canoe that is being hand hewn by a local boat builder.

They tell me that getting the boat down to the sea will require a ¨junta¨or communal work day that will involve twenty or thirty men. That´s something I want to see. A more tame and more common junta, and one I regularly join in on, involves mowing the grass panamanian style--which is to say, a row of men with machetes hacking away at the bush for several hours. As impossibly inefficient as it sounds, these guys are really good with their machetes and make surprisingly fast work of it. By comparison, my machete skills are pretty weak, but gradually getting better.

I spent several days last week working with a local wood cutter. We paddled his canoe down the bay to an opening in the mangroves and up a creek that flows down through the forest. Another hour of hiking and bushwhacking through swamp and jungle led us to the finca where an immense laurel tree had been felled. He cut a twelve foot section from the trunk and we muscled it into position and snapped lines on it with a roll of string blackened in a can of burnt motor oil and crushed charcoal. Then with a sharp eye and steady hand on the chain saw, he milled out the nicest 1 x 12 tablas, 4 x 4´ beams and 2 x 4 studs you´d ever want to see. Hauling these dense timbers back through the forest is another job in itself, and one for someone more sure on their feet in this setting than me.

Lunch on on these days in the woods was provided by the finca owner, who is having the wood cut to rebuild his house. His wife and daughter were along working on their plantings of yucca, Otoy, dacheen and nyame--the staple root crops, that along with boiled green bananas and planatains make up the bulk of the Ngäbe diet. They steamed up heaping banana leaves full of yucca for each of us. All of these starchy roots share a taste and texture similar to potatoes and the people here eat loads of it. Adding a little more interest to the menu were steaming cups of cacao, the sugary crude chocolate drink made from the fermented and ground seeds from the fruit of the cacao tree. Even better on a hot day in the forest is cracking open a ripe cacao and sucking the sweet gooey pulp that surrounds the seeds inside.

I spent the week before Thanksgiving working with another volunteer over on the Carribean side of the Peninsula build a composting latrine on the gorgeous beach that´s pictured at the top of this post. The project was a good learning experience in many ways, full of challenges with the rainy November days, the need for improvising to overcome shortages of tools and materials, and just the unique task of mobilizing the local work force. Nonetheless, the latrine base is finished and ready for the privy or casita to be added above. I plan to do a lot of work with latrines, as there are almost none in my community, but I´ll save all that for another day.

Site visit

2009-10-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

I´m just back in the capital after a week visiting Bahia Azul, the community that I´ll be calling home for the next two years and it was just great. All of the Environmental Health trainees from our group went to a town a few hours west of here to meet with our ¨counterparts,¨ or sponsors from our communities. After an evening and morning of sessions to get them aquainted with us and the ways Peace Corps a group of us headed out together across the country to the Bocas Del Toro region. The bus ride across the Cordillera Central always provides magnificent views which the guys from the communities seemed to enjoy as much as we did. At Chiriqui Grande my counterpart and I split from the rest of the group and caught a boat for the two hour ride out to Bahia Azul. As required by tradition I´d been given a Ngäbe nickname, so as we approaced and the men gathered at the dock hollered out to me, "Mä ka ño?" (What´s your name?), my response "Tolichi" brought huge smiles and echos of "Tolichi ! Tolichi !" Variations on this were repeated throughout the week as I went about the town meeting people and visiting their homes. Everyone in the community is Ngäbe, and they speak Ngäbere almost all the time among themselves, but nearly everyone seemed to easily switch to Spanish to talk to me or to include me in a conversation. Their was a meeting Sunday where I was formally presented to the community and so I gave the short speech in Ngäbere that I´d been practicing, and then talked for a while in Spanish about Peace Corps, my idea of my role in the community and some general ideas about water and sanitation projects. Everyone was very receptive and they have already have some ideas for what they want to accomplish, some that are definitely more realistic than others, but I´ll share more about all of that in a later post as I settle in and start the work of community analysis and "Proyecto Amistad."

Overall it was just a great week. The setting is really remarkably beautiful. Bahía Azul is a deep and narrow bay at the end of a long peninsula that juts out into the Carribean Sea. The steep hills rising from the crysalline waters of the bay are covered in dense and lush tropical forest. The community of sixty or so houses is built around a central community area that includes the school and ball field, a health center and the town´s one tiny store. The small wooden house I´ll be living in for the next few months is built on a dock extending out from the shore and is the home of a delightful couple who made me feel immediately at home. I shot a few photos from the kitchen windows one morning, including the one that shows the clever reuse of a section of an old canoe for the kitchen sink. Aside from visiting around the community I got involved in some group work days, and learned to tie penca, the palm leaf that is used to thatch roofs here. There is no electric power in town so when the sun goes down everything gets very tranquilo, lit only by kerosene lantern, and it was easy for me to turn in early and fall asleep to the sound of the waves lapping up on the shore literally under my room. I definitely felt like I could get use to living there.

Two weeks back in the training site to finish things up and then Swear-in, and the final move to site. More details to come.

Culture Week

2009-09-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

I´ve been out in Bocas Del Toro for the past week with the ten other "aspirantes" who will be moving out to that area of Panama for their service. Team Bocas!

We stayed with local families in a little Ngäbe village on Isla San Cristobal for a week of language and cultural training. Really a very beautiful place and beautiful people. I loved it and found it to be very much the kind of place where a Peace Corps volunteer could feel welcomed and needed. Especially environmental health volunteers like my group specializing in potable water and sanitation. In the community of several hundred people there is one composting latrine. Aside from that there are some "servicios" perched over the bay or little creeks running through the community. There is a gravity fed aquaduct that brings water from the hills above, but many of the homes aren´t connected, so we bathed and got water from a pair of community "quebradas" where a pipe from a stream above the village emptied out into a little creek (see picture above). We treated the water with chlorine or iodine before drinking it in case you were concerned.

Also in pic´s above are a shot of a woman crushing some seeds to make a dye for the fiber they use to make woven bags, a small money-making artisanry endeavor. Another shot of local kids and a couple of my PC colleagues out on a hike.

We´re all heading on to another Ngäbe town up in the hills of central Panama this week for "Tech Week" to work on latrine and aquaduct projects. I think that the rest of training is going to fly by. ´We´re back in our home base at the end of next week, but then out to our own sites for a five day visit before swear-in on October 22. I´ll hope to be able to post another update sometime soon.

A man, a plan, a canal...Panama

2009-09-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

I have to admit off the top that the title of this post is not original, or especially meaningful, but look at it for a bit and see if you can discover something neat about it. I´ll tell you at the end of the post.

Well I´m here. After a couple of days of sightseeing in Washington D.C., I met with the other 35 new trainees of Group 64 Panama, and we flew down here August 12th. We`re actually two sub groups, Community Economic Development and my group, Environmental Health. We had a few days of initial orientation, innoculation and adaptation in the capital, staying at a former U.S. military compound right beside the Miraflores locks at the Pacific entrance of the canal. I was awakened that first humid morning in Panama to the most outrageous squawking from the birds roosting in a palm tree outside our window, and was delighted when I got a good look at them flying off in the dawn´s early light and discovered they were a flock of brilliant green parrots. A great welcome to Panama.

We were all soon moved out to the small town of Santa Clara, an hour and a half west of the capital to our homes for the first few months during our training. A fairly stark contrast to the gleaming skyline of Panama City. I´ve been living with a nice local family and thoroughly enjoying the training regimen--basically four hours of language classes every day, followed by four hours of techical training. The latter has been largely in so-called "soft skills," learning the Peace Corps approach to development, which has everything to do with building capacity in a local community to conceive, plan, fund and follow through with projects with a volunteer acting more in the role of facilitator. It sounds pretty dull on paper, but has actually been excellent so far. We´ve also gotten to do some hands-on work with campo concrete projects and whacking away at the monte with our new machetes. As for the language training, I was placed in the advanced group after initial interviews, so we had Spanish classes for a couple of weeks and then started receiving instruction in the language of the Ngabe, the largest indigenous tribe in the country. This has proved to be a huge and humbling challenge. I´m coming to believe there´s something to that age/brain plasticity theory because I am definitely not able to catch on to this entirely new language with anywhere near the facility of my young classmates. Ngabere is a pre-columbian language that bears no relation to English or Spanish in terms of word roots, phonetics, syntax or anything at all that I can recognize. It is kind of cool though, and I think with patience and persistence, I´ll eventually get it. I´m pretty inspired to learn it too, as I just found out this week that I´m being sent to a Ngabe village for the next two years. Most of the people in the area do speak Spanish as a second language though, so I´m not sweating that aspect.

So my assignment is to a village of around 800 called Bahia Azul on the Kusapin peninsula. It´s a site accessible only by sea from the town of Chiriqui Grande, which you might find on a map of Panama. It´s in the Bocas del Toro area of northwest Panama. I was out there a couple of weeks ago visiting a volunteer who lives an hour´s boat ride up the Chaminola river, and it is indeed a beautiful area and a facinating culture from what I´ve seen. I hear nothing but rave reviews of the peninsula itself, so I´m just completely stoked. There are two other volunteers elsewhere on the peninsula, maybe one to two hours away by canoe. I´ve heard you can get a nice locally made dugout model for around $40. And, by the way, I hear there´s good surfing potential on the Carribean side of the Peninsula.

I´m off tomorrow for the Bocas area for a week of more specialized cultural training, followed by another week in western Panama for tech week training, building composting latrines and the like. Should be great.

The pictures above are the Panama City skyline and the mouth of the Chaminola river--definitely a tale of two countries. Also a shot of a Ngobe friend out west, and yours truly at the site announcement event from the other day pointing to my picture pasted onto the map at the site of my future home. Can you tell I´m feeling good?

And by the way, since you´ve read to the end, the title of this post is a palindrome.

"Life is Calling...

2009-07-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Apologies for being probably the umpteenth person to use that line as the title of their first blog post, but I've just always liked that Peace Corps ad campaign. In those lines, someone captured well the sense of yearning that we probably all feel, at least from time to time, for a really big and challenging adventure. More often than not though someone else rings in, so we put that call on hold until Life gets tired of holding and hangs up. But here's a hopeful note, even if you're a procrastinator like me and you keep putting off getting back to that call, Life may still be holding. Who'd have thought?
Starting in the 1970's I watched with considerable envy as my best high school pal, then my brother, then my sister, and then even my son accepted the Peace Corps invitation to serve, packed their bags and flew off to wonderful far away lands. I didn't have that much trouble convincing myself that I was having my own brand of adventures and making my own unique contribution to this or to that, or maybe even that my own time was still coming. I'm not sure how much I really believed it, but you know, it really does look like it's going to happen. In a few short weeks my turn will be here--flying off to Panama to begin a two year stint as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
My plan is to use this blog to tell you all about it, and I promise not to use corny metaphors like this every time. But I needed to post something so I could experiment with the formatting and stuff, so it was between this and a reproduction of my complete packing list.
Wish me luck!