Thankgiving!

Thankgiving is my favorite holiday. I love the weather, the chance to spend time in a cozy house with your family, the food, the leftovers...the list goes on and on. Every year here in Panama, a decicated group of volunteers organizes a blowout Thanksgiving. Last year I was unable to attend, so this year I couldn't wait. There aren't many places that fell like fall here in Panama, but the celebration was held at an amazing lodge high up in the mountains called Los Quetzales. It was beautiful, crisp weather and the lodge had amazing fireplaces and lots of couches for lounging. Over 100 volunteers came and we all had a great time relaxing, eating and having improptu dance parties. While it was hard to to think of my family back home, I was so grateful to be celebrating with my Peace Corp family for the holiday.

In Spanish, Thanksgiving is translated "Accion de Gracias", or literally the action of giving thanks. Like most Spanish to English translations, it struck me as funny. I found myself repeating it over to myself.....action of thanks...somehow it just wasn't the same as the "giving thanks". The more I thought about it, I realized that during the last year, I have been actively giving thanks for something almost every week, sometime more, sometimes less. Occasionaly the thanks is given out loud to no one imparticular or sometimes just reflected in my journal. So for this day of actively giving thanks, I thought I woud create a list of some of the thinks i give thanks for almost everyday here in Panama.

1. My friends and family. Sometimes you forget who you are here, and they are there to remind you.

2. On a great day, the opportunity and privledge to be here.

3. On a really bad day, that I only have one year left!

4. My health.

5. Being an educated woman.

6. Challenges to rise above and learn from.

7. A home cooked meal.

8. Music, Music, Music

9. Clean underwear. You can be dirty, but as long as your underwear are clean, things are good.

10. My mosquito net. It is the canopy bed I always wanted as a little girl.

I hope everyone out there had a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!

The world of Peace Corp work

As most of you can imagine, the focus of Peace Corp is education. Giving people information so they can use it to make choices and improve their own lifes. Knowledge is power right? Power to run a small buisness, power to improve community health, power to be a leader...whatever the project might be, the main focus is always transferring knowledge to empower people.

Most education takes place in a very informal setting. Whether it be in small meeting with your group or one-on-one teachable moments, most of the time it doesn´t feel like you are teaching anything at all. The question of how can we as volunteers most effectively transmit the information so it makes the biggest impact is always at the forefront of what we do. Aside from the informal settings, a popular way of transmitting information here in Panama is seminars. While Peace Corp puts on large scale seminars ranging from leadership to writing a buisness plan, individual volunteers also put on smaller scale seminars in their own communities.

Several weeks ago my friend Eli called me up and asked if I would want to come out and help with a water committee training seminar they were putting on in the mountains on the pacific side. Would I be interested in giving a talk about how to interact with government agencies and write professional letters? I had yet to facilitate anything in Spanish that was outside my own community so I jumped at the chance to see another part of the country and visit some other PCV friends.

The seminar was being held about a 30 minute chiva (covered pickup truck. think of it as a rural taxi service) ride up the mountain in a community called Corotú. The participants were members of about 4 local water committees all from over the area, some of whom hiked an hour and half one way to get to the seminar. Myself and the oraganizers, fellow PCV´s Eli, Gaurav and Dave stayed about a 40 minute hike away in Gaurav´s community. The seminar itself was over a series of weekends and I was participating on the last day of the training. In an hour and a half I talked about being professional and went over different kinds of professional letters. We did activities and I even had them get together and write their own letters which they then had to read. Below are some photos from the day.

Me playing the secretary at an agency. Brave volunteers came up and had to present thenselves and try to get past me.

A group photo of the participants with their certificates. Can you tell which one is me? I stand out like a ghost.

Below, a pic of my notes on ¨How to interact with agencies¨. Main points were things like confirm appointments, be early, dress nice etc...

The seminar ended with almost all of the particpants recieving 36 hours of training on how to manage a rural water system. Topics ranged from cleaning a water tank and protecting your water source to how to manage finances and write a letter of solicitation. For me it was chance to see something new, visit some PCV friends, and gain more experience working and presenting in Spanish. I can´t wait for the next one!

Cooking in the Campo

Food is a big topic of conversation among volunteers. Whether it is talking about food we miss from home, where to get pizza or how we never imagined there were so many uses for a banana....food is always on everyone's mind it seems. At home, we have all stared into a fridge and thought..."I have nothing to eat." Here most of us live without refridgeration and modern conveniences, so when I am staring at my shelf of food that question seems to pop into my brain at every meal.

While sometimes, I give up and just eat cereal or pasta, I can say I have enjoyed the challenge of trying to come up with inventive things to cook. Some home runs to date have been curried black bean veggie burgers, crepes with carmelized apples, curried chicken soup and homemade pasta sauce with sardines. One of my favorite things is baking in my MacGyver style oven, which consists of a pot with a tuna can in the bottom on which you place a pie tin. The tuna can allows the tin to sit off the bottom and with a lid on the warm air circulates around and just like that you have an oven. I make a lot of banana bread, cacao (chocolate) brownies, and pumpkin bread...which turned out more like a bread pudding.

Last week my campo cooking genius moved up a level and I hit a cooking grand slam. It was pouring outside and I was sick of reading so I stared at the stuff in my kitchen and looked for inspiration. I wanted something desserty and was into the carmelized apples I had made for crepes the day before. I really wanted some apple pie but certainly didn't need to make a whole pie,
because I would have ended up eating most of it...plus I only had two green apples. The wheels started turning...what could be a single serving pie tin? I had a tin from powdered millk but was to tall. Then in a moment of of brillance I thought...a tuna can! Why not?! I cut up an apple and layered the slices in the (really clean) can and sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on top. Then I made a small amount of dough with some flour, salt, sugar and a spoon of crisco. I rolled it out and put it over the mound a apples. I sealed the edges and poked some holes in the top, put it in the "oven" and waited.

Pretty soon it smelled like amazingness. I peaked under the lid and I saw perfectly browned crusty perfection...and it tasted as good as it looked. Apple pie in a tuna can. Amazing.

So what exactly are you doing out there anyways?!

This is one question that I am sure most PCV´s spend their time trying to answer. The longer I am in my community, the more I realize that the answer to this question only becomes more complex instead of clear, harder to answer instead of easier. The culture, history, my relationship to the people, their relationships to each other...navagating through all of these things my biggest job of all...the actual ¨work¨becomes secondary.But, now that I have been living and working in San Cristóbal for almost seven months, I feel I can try to give a better explaination of what I do day-to-day and what my overall role had become there.

Officially, I am a community ecomonic development volunteer working for the Peace Corp. Peace Corp is a grassroots development agency, meaning it takes a bottom up approach to development as opposed to top down. We are considered grassroots because our focus is people, process over a product whereas other topdown approaches work on a much larger scale bringing lots of money and big projects. While these top down approaches have good intentions, they sometimes fail because time isn´t taken to get to know the people and what they actually want. We live in our communities for two years in order to build relationships, gain trust and through those relationships work together to transfer knowledge and accomplish goals the community themselves have identified as projects they want to make happen.

My primary project is helping my community tourism group with all aspects of running a sucessful tourism business. We work on things like accounting, basic record keeping, marketing, putting together tour packages, building a hostel and working with outside tour operators who visit the community. I have also become a link between outside agencies, such as USAID and other NGO´s, helping my community to navagate things like paperwork and excel documents. I also spend a big chunk of time doing physical working with them, whether we are hauling wood, cleaning our nature trail, cooking food, or making artisanry. When and how we work on these things depend on them. They have lives, families and responsibilities so I also try to keep things on track to help us complete important paperwork. Obviously, I don´t work on this project all day everyday. I have also started some secondary work which includes starting a girl scout group (yup, just like in the states minus the yummy cookies) and working with the english teacher who works in the school.

I consider San Cristóbal my home, so I do normal stuff like laundry, hang out with my neighbors, color with the kids, sew, read in my hammock and gossip with my friends. In a way I think it is these small everyday things that have the biggest impact. People see me as there friend, adopted daughter, the gringa who lives next door who lets us color in her house, as Pai. Those things are far more important to me than having people see me as a Piper, Peace Corp development worker. At the end of the day, they will remember that I spent the afternoon making bread with them just visiting, not that I helped them balance a check book.

Here are a sampling of photos I have taken over the past few months.

I have started sewing more and have made a few dresses for the little girls and new babies in the community. Everyone calls this little girl Muñeca, which means doll. She is one of my favorite babies and always makes me laugh.

I went on a all day hike across my island with some friends and we came across this grandpa hauling a load of bananas back to his house.

I have started taking photos of all the new babies so the mothers can have a copy. This is Yasi, the new baby girl of one of the artisan ladies, Darmaris.

Where did the last two months go?!

I guess that is what living on an island does to you. All sense of time sort of slips away...like living under an imaginary rock of sorts. I am doing great and have been getting more into the groove of work and life on San Cristóbal. My main project is helping my tourism group get a hostel up and running. The area of Bocas del Toro is currently booming and the country is pushing tourism hard, so there are lots of agencies and other NGO´s here working to promote sustainable tourism, ecotourism, ethnotourism, geotourism....pick one and it is happening here. Luckily the community I work is motivated to take advatage of the action, so we are working on completing this hostel/hotel so people will have a different option for accomodations here in the islands. We already have a group from France that comes to stay every other month or so for a cultural exchange, so they will be happy to have a place to stay. I have been working with the president of the group, Esperanza, do things like track expenses, work on creating a price list of activities, and whatever else... including builiding a composting latrine for people to come use when they come visit. Lucky for me the latrine is right next to my house!

View of my house and new latrine from the hostel. The guy working hard is my friend Jesse or Krawdi as he is know, who lives about a 40 minute hike away in a neighboring community called Valle Escondido.

Fun times with concrete. I have a new respect for anyone who does construction/mansonry. It is hard work and mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow in the heat is no easy task. Pai seems to have caught on as my nickname of choice. I was dubbed Melly when I arrived, but only a few people use it anymore. Fine with me, I like Pai better.
My friend Brian, or Kogira, he came out to lend a hand. He is in the process of having me dread his hair so he looks a little more crazy than normal.

View from the second floor of the hostel at sunset. Pretty huh?

The guys working hard to trim the inside of the thatch roof. I got up there to help out too. Not easy work.

Last but not least here is little video I took of my house. I have been living there for about a month and it is wonderful. I love having a place to feel at home finally unpacked the slippers my mom gave me almost 6 months ago. I have been enjoying cooking and having some nice quiet time in the evenings to read. I do miss my host family thought. I always felt a part of things and didn´t have to do much to be out and involved in daily activities. Now I have to go out and search people out. Kind of a weird switch to make...luckily I have no shortage of visitors.

It is hard to believe I have been here almost 8 months. A new group of Peace Corp trainees, group 63, arrive in a few weeks. On the one hand, I am almost a little sad to know I won´t be a new volunteer anymore but on the other I am happy to have training and the first few months in site behind me.

Home Sweet Home...almost.

One of the biggest projects I have been working on this month is fixing up my soon to been house. It can be a bit of a long process because you have to find a tree, cut it down and then haul it out from the jungle. Luckily the woman who is my landlady had a tree on her farm, so after that got cut into boards we spent two days hauling wood. I can honestly say, I never in my life thought I would be hauling 2 x 4 on my shoulder out of a jungle. But when it is for you own house, it is not hard to find the motivation.

Luckily, we are just fixing it up at you can see from the photos so once the wood was there, it wasn´t to hard. As you can see from the top two photos, we are fixing that corner, which is the kitchen and the front half of the house also got a new floor and window for my sink. The man in the red shorts is my host dad, Martin. It will still be a few weeks before I can move in because we used up all the wood and still need more for the shutters and some furniture. That means going through the whole process again. A bit of a set back, but that is the way it goes.

I have been in Panama for almost 6 months now and have loved living with both of my host families, but I am ready to have a place to call my own. I can´t wait to finally unpack my bags, put up photos and cook my own food. There will be lots of room for visitors, hint...hint!

Time Flies

Top photo: the view of my neighborhood, Middle: My host sister, Leyda, hanging laundry we just got back from washing, Bottom: My host families living room.

I can´t believe it is already one month into the New Year. I am getting more settled into the pace of life here and this last month has just gone by in the blink of an eye. The first few weeks of the year, I got sick with a bad cold, followed by a nice bacterial infection but I am back to feeling great and enjoying life.

The ¨job¨part of Peace Corp is starting to kick in and I have spent a lot of time working on a community analysis as well as talking with people about what changes they want to see. I just attended my first regional meeting which is where all the volunteers in my region, Bocas Del Toro, get together to talk about projects, issues, life, and get updates on what is happening at our headquarters. As volunteers we are responsible for reporting and quantifying all of our work in site and worldwide Peace Corp is implementing a new system for tracking so we were also given an introduction to that. It is important, but I guess even in the Peace Corp you can´t escape bureaucracy.

In one week I have a week long in-service training with all the other volunteers in my group, 62, which should be fun. We have language instruction and lots of different seminars on topics such as basic accounting, the current economic situation here in Panama, starting youth groups and group leaderships. I am really looking forward to it since I haven´t seen a lot of them since we left training so it will be nice to share stories and see how everyone has changed.

Thanks for all the great comments and emails! I love reading them. Hope eveyone is happy and healthy so far in the new year.