Welcome 2010!

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday back home. I was thinking of all my loved ones and sending best wishes your way. I spent Christamas in San Cristóbal and made spiced cider and Swedish gingerbread cookies to share with my friends and neighbors. It brought a little of my holiday traditions here to the tropics. 2010 has taken me by suprise and I can´t believe that this is my last year here. Looking back 2009 has been an amazing time...I can only imagine what this next year will bring. So far, it looks to be very productive and I have lots of work ahead.

One great suprise that appeared in my inbox the other day was a copy of this article which appeared in a national newspaper here in Panama, La Prensa. It is a huge boost to my group and they were just as shocked as I was. The photo is of the hostel we are working on and was taken when the US ambassador came to visit my site last September. It even mentions there work with Peace Corp ( that would be me!). The headline reads ¨San Cristóbal and Salt Creek: Examples of Ethnotourism¨and the strip in yellow says ¨On Bastimentos Island, Bocas Del Toro, two indigenous villages proudly show their culture¨. It goes on to talk about what the community offers tourists and how they have recieved support from Peace Corp. It also mentions my counterpart, Esperanza by name and talks about her leadership. It was a great moment to see their hard work pay off!

Best of 2009

The end of the year always means lots of "best of" lists. The best songs, most popular toys, top 10 news stories...you name it, they probably can find a way to make a countdown about it. So to say good bye to 2009, I decided to post some of my favorite images from the last year. Enjoy!

I took this photo at a kids birthday party. Ronnie is holding his candy from a pinata that was filled with flour.

Awesome koi fish in Boquete. The colors of the fish and the tiles of the pool were so beautiful.

A street performer in Costa Rica.

A tourist hanging out with the artisan ladies. She is learning how to make string out to a plant fiber. The women then use the string to make bags and whatever else they can think of!

Casco Viejo at sunset.

I am now obssessed with turkeys. I love how their waddles turn bright red when they are mad.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. I spent time in my community and had a great time making apple cider and pepperkoker (swedish gingerbread) for my neighbors. It was the next best thing to being with my family and friends back home. 2009 has flown by and I am looking forward to the New Year!

Graduation

December mean one things to the kids here in Panama besides Christmas...Graduation! The school year here starts in late March, so the end of this month means schools out for the summer. The colegio, or high school celebrated its graduation this past week with nine students being honored. One of the traditions is that you ask someone to be your escort, or madrina or padrino. If you are a boy you ask a girl to be your madrina...and vice versa. Think of it as being a godmother or godfather to the student, but only for an afternoon. Duties include walking in with the student, sitting with them and bringing a gift to present when the ceremony is over.


So you can imagine my suprise when my friend Joel asked me to be his madrina. He was first in the class, so I was very honored. The ceremony started like most events in my community...three hours late. But if that is all you got going on that day what does it matter right? After the presentation of the certificates and presenting the graduates we ate lunch and there was even a cake which one of the teachers brought. Below are some photos from the day.





Me, Joel and his aunt Griselda. She was his other guest, but I was the official madrina. Got to have a photo with the gifts! I cheated and asked him what he wanted. He got two new shirts.



Our community rancho all done up for the ceremony. I am sitting on the left up in the front. No event is complete without a dog in the mix.

Joel with his professor Demetrio and his mom Valentina. I have no idea why, but the minute you take a photo of anyone in my community they stop smiling, it is a cultural thing. It is so counter-intuitive! I have to sneak up on people to get a smile.

All in all is was a great time. It made me think back to my high school graduation, how I felt that day. I remember being scared, sad, happy, overwhelmed but mostly excited. Like that was the day my life was going to being. Moving out, college...I had no idea what lay ahead. Most of the kids here have parents who only completed sixth grade, so to continue on into high school takes motivation here. It was wonderful to see these nine students being celebrated and I was grateful to take part.

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.