Coiba Visit

Sunrise in the bay just behind the cabins at Coiba

We made it to Parque Nacional Coiba. If you don't know what Coiba is, check out any tourism guide book for Panamá, because it is one of the main natural resources, but here is a quick explanation.


Kevin on the way to Coiba...island (and neighboring smaller islands) visible in the distance.

Coiba is an island located south of the isthmus and was formed with the Galapagus Islands and then drifted on the edge of a tectonic plate. The island is not considered volcanically active today, but hotsprings in the park testify to it´s past. Coiba was (well, still is for about four of them) a penal colony for about 85 years (1919-2004). During it´s years as a penal colony there were 16 separate camps spread over the central and east side of the island. Only the main camp is still in existance today and serves as the Police headquarters now. The other camp sites are being reclaimed by the plants and wildlife.


What a contrast of use and beautiful setting - the building says Penetenciaria.


Our group in Coiba´s old jail hospital. Note the official attire of our policeman (hey, a machine gun makes any attire official enough).

Because it was a penal colony for so long, it was not cut or farmed and is large enough to have sustained populations of monkeys (white faced and howlers, who are amazing to hear howl), scarlet macaus (Coiba is one of the only places in the world to still have wild populations, and we got to see about 10 pairs - they mate for life - fly overhead while we were at the prison), lots of other birds that a birder would love to see, nueque, rays, dolphins, corals, lots of pretty fish that we have only seen in an aquarium. We also saw a whale, swordfish fin, crocodile, and tons of hermit crabs.


This is how most visitors arrive to Coiba, although our two our ride did not have a canopy. Some visitors arrive in their own yatchs though (complete with basketball court).


A shell from a Coiba beach, which we replaced on the beach after the picture, since you can "take only pictures, leave only footprints" in this paradise island

The sites on Coiba are beautiful- whether small or large. As a very new National Park, Coiba still has much growing to do. There is not a lot yet in terms of interpretive signs, trails, and tours. The land, plants, and animals of this park will really make for an incredible visit when this park is fully developed. For the moment, the visitor to Coiba must be prepared to come looking for the uniqueness of the park.

April's toes in the main cove; other coves were even clearer

My favorite part was the crystal clear water. I mean....I can see my toes and they are more than 2 feet deep. Snorkeling was very cool...even though we were sharing equipment. We will just have to go back for a longer visit in the future.

(This trip to Coiba was with eight other volunteers from our region; we went out after our quarterly regional meeting in order to teach the park rangers English, since they have many tourists who come visit from non-Spanish speaking countries. Maybe we can arrange to do it again. :)

How we celebrated the holidays - 2007

The Christmas and New Years holidays are celebrated a bit differently on our island than we were accustomed to back in the States, but we did our best to incorporate some of our own traditions.

Christmas

This year, we invited Mac and Brooke, another couple from our group who live in the province of Coclé, east of us, to come out to island. Our first night, after making them help us teach English class in the chapel, we put them to work creating crackers (or poppers, depending on how you call them). It being our first holiday here, we had to use new wrapping paper, but like normal, we filled each one with some candies, a pencil, and some confetti (it said Happy Thanksgiving, but that´s okay).



Brooke, Mac, and Kevin constructing crackers

On Christmas Eve, we walked them all over the island to talk to friends, distribute crackers, see beaches, go swimming, buscar pulpo (search for mini-octopus), and dig concha (small shellfish). It was a great day and we returned well tired and enjoyed a dinner of roasted cauliflower and wine.


Cecilia and Maria Louisa, host moms #2 & #3, dishing up arroz con pollo

On Christmas Day, the only big event on the island was the Mothers Group (a class sponsored by the First Lady and taught locally by our last host mom) doing a traditional arroz con pollo and potato salad, at the chapel. They invited us to come join them, because there is always enough arroz con pollo to share.

Afterward, we returned to our house to begin preparing our own Christmas dinner and put out lights. One neighbor connected traditional white blinking lights at his house but we went with luminaria (candles stuck in sand - no lack of that - in clear plastic 2lb rice bags with paper around them to soften the flame - only a few were lost to the winds and fire) and some small battery-powered lights that came as Christmas presents from April's folks.

Our luminera around the porch, lights in the rafters, and candles on our new table

Dinner featured fresh baked bread and spinach pasta with brocolli and tomato. We even cloved an orange. Ironically, one of the mothers returning from their party was blocked by high tide from getting home and so joined us for dinner and got to try brocolli for the first time.

Our Christmas Feast on our new table

After dinner, we chatted with our folks while standing in the corner of our porch that receives cell phone signal and wished our families in the States a Merry Christmas! I think we were a bit warmer than most of them.

Kevin and a luminaria bag, talking to home; our neighbor's boat is still in the end of our porch, but it makes a good seat at times while on the phone

New Years

It seems that there is more of a celebration for New Years. There were many parties, and one of the main traditions is to quemar la muñeca (burn the doll). Our neighbors made a 7ft tall scarecrow, complete with a coconut for a head (including a carved nose and mouth), a baseball cap, and shoes, all on a post to stand him up for the burning.


Our neighbor's daughter and muñeca

At the stroke of midnight (well, whenever the watch of the guy in charge hits 12), they set it on fire, to burn away the bad from the old year and welcome in a good and prosperous new year. Probably the stuffing, which I think was gas-soaked dried leaves, makes sure it burns well.

The muñeca well into burning; he was moved from under the trees in the above picture to a post in the field for the ceremony

So while we missed our families and cold weather, we certainly enjoyed the new customs (though I´m not sure we can quemar a muñeca when we return to Columbia, MD) and had a lot of fun. And a December (and November and October, for that matter) without tons of holiday sales and music was quite a nice change.

What and how do we cook?

Food....an all important subject. Many of you that I have talked to on the phone in the last month have asked food related questions, so this blog is dedicated to all of you who think with your tummies (like me!).

Me with a veggie omlet and hash browns on Christmas morning.

The photo below is my kitchen in our house. Actually the photo is a bit old and we have since put in shelves below the counter and a spice shelf up above the counter on the left side....but you can get the idea. The cement to my left in our sink...a sink of all purposes - cooking and laundry.



You can also see our stove for cooking. It is a three burner stove that runs on a 25 lb. tank of propane. Our first tank lasted us 7+ weeks which quite impressed some of the neighbors. Also impressive is the ingenuity that we used in constructing the cement counter - we included PVC piping through the counter and uprights to allow us to pass the stove tubing through the counter and have the tank safely out of the way and still be able to put our stove anywhere on the counter that we would like. That was a new innovation for the island.


A full stove...usually we use two burners for food and one for hot water for tea.


So what about refrigeration? Well, we don´t have any. This makes life simple and yet complicated. As a result we have developed the following stratagies:

1. Focus on buying those foods that will last without a refrigerator. (this includes some surprises like ketchup, bbq sauce, and mustard which all last long enough after opening to be worth stocking)



2. We also rank foods by how fast they will go bad and eat them in that order - rationing to make veggies last. (for example we buy brocolli and cauliflower and eat them in the first 2 days home, but tomatoes and carrots last longer, we also can get a squash called zapallo that lasts like a pumpkin and can be eaten when all else is gone).



3. Cook only as much as we can eat in a day or two.

4. We reheat foods thoroughly before eating them and try not to eat leftovers if more than a day or so old.



Achiote - a local spice growing on a tree right outside our house. Used to color and flavor rice; note the color on my fingers.

We use both locally purchased foods (rice, oil, sugar, onions, flour, raspadura-cane sugar, eggs, some fruits and veggies) and food hauled in from off island. People are also very generous with food...if they have plantains that they don´t need they will give you some when you stop by to say hi. From the supermarkets in Santiago, we typically haul in:

parmesan cheese, brocolli, cauliflower, onions, peppers, potatoes, carrots, peanut butter, sauces, pasta, tea, seasonings, nutella, apples (lots of apples), dried fruit, oatmeal, chocolate, cookies, bread (nor more than a loaf), popcorn to pop, bbq sauce, soya texturized vegetable protien, soup mixes, and tang mix. (Notice...no dairy in that list.)

We also supplement our diet with vitamins and calcium suppliments provided by Peace Corps.

We, like everyone on the island, eat a lot of rice, lentils, beans, and fish. Unlike everyone else, our beans and lentils tend to be liberally mixed with garlic, onions and other veggies as available. We also eat a lot of soya aka "fake meat" which is good if you don´t try to compare it to real meat. Usually our soya is served with....yup you guessed it: rice!


Lobsters given to us by a local fisherman. These are on the small side...they can get to be so big that their main body alone is about as big as my hand.

Our two closest nighbors are fishermen and they regularly share their catch with us and so we eat fish 1-2 times a week...as fresh as can be! We have had what the local fishermen call Pargo (red snapper), Congo, Corvina, Baracuda, Hammerhead shark, bull shark, shrimp, crabs, and several different types of mollusks. The lobsters above were given to us by another fisherman. They were wonderful. Lobsters here do not have claws like those near Maine. Lobsters, and all types of seafood, are now found in less abundance than they were in years past. There are discussions on going at both the national and local levels on how to protect the future of these resources.


A typical "visitor" meal. Note the size of the localy caught shrimp. It is a visitor meal because it has rice with lentils and two types of seafood. Usually only the rice and lentils are served...or rice and fish...not always the three together in a normal meal.

We are trying to walk a line between cooking like the locals and making ourselves happy. We want to both blend into their way of life and yet offer them new options. So far in our time here we have introduced families to popcorn and brocolli (although popcorn recieved a much warmer reception of the two ;)

I am experimenting with making bread with some success and have had many women tell me that they want to learn how when I get it figured out. I think that if I teach them I will use it as a chance to teach them about the food groups and starches. Here rice is such a big part of the diet that a meal without rice is not considered a meal....so if they eat pasta, it is served with rice. Needless to say, weight gain and diabetes are growing issues in Panama.


Local little clams we collected with visitors for a dinner. Note the tablespoon for size reference. Yummy.

We are looking forward to starting a vegetable garden when we get home. We are hoping to have enough veggies to return some of the generous sharing that we have recieved while living on the island. We hope to grow tomatoes, cucumber, beans, zapallo, zuccini, carrots, and some other more typical local foods like yucca and guandu.

Food remains an interesting part of our life, but every week we feel a little more at home and comfortable with what we have. As we prepared to leave the island for the travel that we are on right this moment, I noticed that for the first time I was not looking forward with gusto to going out to eat in the city...I take that for a good sign that I finally feel in control and comfortable with my food options.

Hope we have whetted your appetite to come and visit us! Buen provecha! (literally translated means "Good Belch")

What are we doing in Peace Corps Panama

So perhaps you noticed the list of books we've read, down on the right side of the blog, and decided that this is nothing but a tropical vacation for us if we read that much. I must disillusion you. April has always been a voracious reader of novels, and I've suddenly found myself without emails to read, internet to surf, newspapers to read, TV to watch, or any of the myriad of other time consumers of ¨normal¨ life in the US. And I´m definately enjoying filling those holes with pleasure reading, something I haven´t done regularly since before college.

The point being, yes, we read, but we do more than read. Now that we´ve (mostly) become oriented to who is who here, where they live, and what they do, we´ve started into our ¨real¨ work. As you may recall, I´m Sustainable Agriculture Systems (SAS) and April is Community Environmental Conservation (CEC). (For a broad list of what the other sectors are doing in PC Panamá, check the related post, What is the Peace Corps doing in Panamá.) So naturally the first formal work we undertook was teaching an English class.



Teaching English in the school to interested community members

A big part of that orientation period was finding out what people wanted that we could offer. And one of the most requested was English. Obviously, some folks liked the idea but really had no concept of what learning English would entail. There is some English instruction in the schools here, but not wonderful and rarely have the teachers been given much training in pronunciation, etc. (Language teaching in Panamá will become even more interesting in a couple of years when Mandarin Chinese becomes another mandatory language.) So our first class had 27 eager folks, some of whom seemed a bit surprised that they didn´t learn tons of useful vocabulary right away. But 22 returned the next week, and 16 the third. Not bad considering our classroom changed everytime because the school roof was being replaced, that there are under 200 people on the island (swelled by summer vacations right now), and most live 30 minutes to over an hour away. But week 4, only six people showed up. The difference? A party thrown by one of the political parties - which featured 4 piñatas, food, and gifts for kids and families (gifts such as mattresses and other large useful items; not that politics here is about buying votes). Week 5, held the Sunday before we left the island, we recovered with around 20 people. We anticipate to settle around 5 to 10 core folks who really do want to learn, a mix of adults (at least 3-5 very interested ones) and students (some, but really, it is summer vacation right now).

So far, we have taught some vocabulary and the sounds of the letters. Pronunciation is difficult, because many English sounds do not exist in Spanish, so their mouths and tongues and minds just don´t know how to make them. We´ve also done key phrases like "I do not understand", "How do you say ___?", "I need help", "Repeat that please", and "Talk slower please".

So beyond English, what work related to our sectors (SAS & CEC) have we been tackling? We've begun work on compost, insect control, and weed control for small gardens. Seed collection and preservation for both gardening and trees is coming up, which will be followed by reforestation projects. For all of these, we spend time walking around and talking with potential adopters of the ideas and processes, explaining positives and negatives (cheap but more work, benefits the environment, etc) and sometimes helping them work on implementing the ideas, such as a small garden so they can expand their diet to include more vegetables.

Kevin with a short pickaxe, digging two double-dig beds back in October

Here is the start of a double-dig bed we did at our third host family's house. A double-dig bed loosens the soil and mixes in compost and other good things for the plants (chopped up banana trees for potasium, horse and cow poo, balo leaves for nitrogen, etc). She now has tomatoes and habichuela (greenbeans) growing in it, and is a big fan of the organic insecticide we made for the garden; she continues to use it after we've left to keep away caterpillers and other bugs.

In addition, we do some work on capacity building with community members. For instance, we are out of site now in part because of a training this week on Project Management and Leadership, which we will attend with two community counterparts. Together we will learn tools for setting goals for groups and the community and how to achieve those goals through management styles and communication skills. The intent is that upon our return, we´ll work to implement what we´ve learned and hopefully instruct other community members so that they will be able to utilize the training.

We´re also working to construct the estufas lorenas we´ve mentioned. We developed a handout with a drawing of the estufa with the parts labeled, listing the positive (it requires less firewood, helping the environment and freetime, and sends the smoke out of the house) and negatives, so they will be aware of what they are getting into, and on the back, a list of materials necessary for construction. We´ve handed out a few of the sheets to folks we know are interested and we think will be good "early adapters". And just last week, we walked across the island (well, pasear-ed across, which means stopping and chatting with just about everybody on the way, so it took us about 3 hours; a big plus was hearing a resident explain the estufa and its benefits to her grown daughters who were visiting for the summer) to help one of them begin collecting materials and review the steps necessary for construction. We especially want to build a big one at the school, where the Madres de la Familia currently cook in a room that is totally blackened inside from the smoke of the open fire they cook on for daily crema and lunch.

On the environmental side, April will be hosting activities Tuesday and Thursday mornings throughout February for the students on vacation. They´ll observe environmental aspects of their home island they may have taken for granted, hopefully watch An Inconvenient Truth in Spanish, learn to read a map, and in general she hopes to expose them to things they just won´t get in normal school. Watch for more here after she´s done some classes (but with this Tuesdays and Thursdays and English class Sundays, we aren´t sure we'll be able to get out of site until March).

The other big agricultural request I´ve gotten is for pasto mejorado, or improved pasture grasses. There is a lot of cattle raising here on the island and everyone has heard the buzzwords of pasto mejorado. So I´ll be working with MIDA (Ministerio de Desarrollo Agropecuario - or agriculture development) to give talks on how best to plant seeds for the improved pasturelands, what else they can plant, like shrubs or ground cover, that will improve the soil, provide shade and erosion control, and be enjoyed by the cattle, and methods for managing herds that will optimize pastureland use.

Part of our job is to aid our community in making good working connections with goverment agencies. Entonces (so...), we will be partnering with agencies such as MIDA or ANAM (Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente - National Environmental Authority) on much of our work. We visit their offices in the district and provincial capitals, plan charlas (talks) with them, and formally invite them to come give the charlas to the community.

In addition to these activities we´ve already begun, in the near future we will be working on

• reforestation of the watersheds around the fuentes de agua (water sources) and ojos de agua (springs)
• trash, hopefully to decrease the amount of trash tossed on the ground and find a way to deal with it (currently, tossed in holes or burned, which really is the same as we do it in the US, just on a smaller, less organized, scale).
• other ideas, projects, and requests that come up, both within our community and within the Peace Corps Panamá program as a whole. April and I can´t help but think of process, documentation, and training improvements with everything we do, and there are organizations within PC/Panamá to help with volunteer programs and development programs. With under two years left now, we certainly feel like there is a lot more to do than time left to do it in!

In addition to our direct work with agriculture and environmental issues, the other two goals of the Peace Corps are cultural exchanges, what we learn, what we share with friends and family in the US and with Panamanians.

Part of our job is to expose Panamanians to reasonable, thoughtful, cultured, and intelligent American citizens. We take this part of our work seriously. (But we haven´t figured out just how to do it well...so we are inviting you to come visit and help us on this one.)

Kevin and Mac, a volunteer from another couple in our group, at a Christmas Day meal with the Mothers Group

We fit all of this work into the daylight hours, along with cooking, cleaning, studying, reading resource materials, writing letters (both home and to people or agencies here, since everything is handled with a formal - even if handwritten since we have no computer, printer, or typewriter in site - letter, including invites to off-island trainings or meetings), pasear-ing, walking to the tienda, chatting with the neighbors, and yes, reading for fun. And okay, I'll admit we do much of that reading for fun sitting in a hammock.

What is the Peace Corps doing in Panama

The Peace Corps in Panamá has four, soon to be five, sectors. April and I are in the Community Environmental Conservation (CEC) and Sustainable Agriculture Systems (SAS) sectors, respectively. I'll post more about our work in another post.

The other sectors are Community Economic Development (CED), Environmental Health (EH) (which enter service together), and the soon to begin Tourism and English Advising (TEA), which will enter with SAS and CEC volunteers.

CED Volunteers work with small businesses, cooperatives, and other community groups to enhance their planning, accounting, and management skills. They are generally in slightly less rural settings, where basic amenities (water, sanitation, electricity, transportation) are already established. For example, Fred in our region works with a panaderia (bakery) to help them transition from a group of women working together into a money-making business, with investments in equipment and supplies to enable greater production and improved sales.

A world map that many volunteers work with the schools and students to paint on a school wall

EH Volunteers work with sanitation products including aquaducts (water supply from streams to storage tanks to PVC piping to each house) and latrines, as well as nutrition education. They are generally in more campo (remote) areas, obviously possibly without water, normally without electricity, and tougher transportation (if it was easy to get the cement blocks there, somebody would have done it already ;). Our region just got its only EH Volunteer, as part of a married couple (the wife is CED).

Two volunteers preparing for a community fair about AIDS-HIV.

TEA Volunteers will be working to assist areas that are being visited by increasing numbers of tourists, yet lack infrastructure or skills to accomodate them. For instance, the port town where we catch the boat to our island also serves the international nature reserve of Isla Coiba (check any Panamá tourism book to read more about Coiba; we´ll actually be visiting there later this week to work with the park rangers on their English skills) and thus numerous tourists go through there. Yet there is nowhere to spend the night, no public bathrooms, and no one speaks English well enough to assist a confused tourist. The TEA program in Panamá is starting with the Group that arrives in April, so we´ll see how it pans out. We´ve heard that initially there are only 10 volunteers in that sector.

April teaching English in our community.

You can learn more about these, and other sectors in other countries, at http://www.peacecorps.gov/, click on What do Volunteers Do? on the left, or directly at
http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=learn.whatvol