GRE anyone?

Our COS (close of service in PC lingo) date is just 9 or so months away (anyone else shocked by that?).

I mentioned COS because we (and most everyone else too) are thinking about what is next because next is coming up sooner and sooner. (Moms: Don't start hoping for answers to the "What next?" question yet, cause I don't have any. :) I think that every PCV thinks about grad school of some sort. I have come to the conclusion that I would like to do a Masters at some point after PC if I can figure out how to pay for it (or have it paid for).

That means thinking about taking the GRE. Thanks to Mom and Dad Cropper's birthday gift I have a GRE prep book to prepare with. However, I find myself worrying for the first time in my life about the vocab section of the test. I was always decent in those parts of the standardized testing, but just now I find my self worried. Why?

When I talk to Kevin the Spanish words arrive faster than the English about 50% of the time. I find myself struggling sometimes for words in English the same way I struggle in Spanish. "You know, that thingy" is not a GRE level response to a vocab question and hand pantomimes are not going to help me either they way they do when I faulta (lack) a Spanish word...did you see how that one just slipped in there? That is about the 6th spanish word to sneak its way into my thoughts while typing this.

Other PCVs have told me that taking the GRE or similar test while serving in a foreign language area is not good for your GRE scores...and I am starting to belive them. It doesn't help that when I am tired I find English words slipping into my Spanish language conversations as well. They just pop in there as if they were the right word, but I notice right away (I hope I always notice!).

I have also noticed that it is ever increasingly hard to not through in a spanish word while we are talking on the phone to family and friends. It is like trying to avoid using acronyms when your work uses them all day. It is tough.

To make matters just a tab worse, I have reached the language point where I seem to communicate just well enough that some Panamanians are now talking at normal speed with me! SLOW down please. Just because I can express myself at a decent rate doesn't mean that I can follow your thoughts at Panamanian speeds. This has been a confidence boost and blower. It is good to have them respond like normal...but being back to not understanding sometimes can blow the confidence apart.

So at the moment, we are still thinking, planning, dreaming, and worrying about how bad the GRE really could be. Hasta pronto!

Fish for sale!

Living in the Montijo Bay area means that we live in a community of fishermen. They tend to fish mostly with nets, the type of net depends on the type of fish desired and the time of year. So what happens after they catch it?

I was in Port the other day and Vernabel, a really nice guy who lives north of me on the island, was there selling his fish. I took pictures to share here.

Vernabel typically fishes at night, for most of the night. Each fisherman tends to have his favorite time of the day to fish. Vernabel told me that the fish he was there to sell represented about 5-6 nights work for him. He also will buy fish from other islanders and then re-sell them with his. He keeps them fresh with ice in the big plastic cooler, the ice can last for up to a week if he is careful and the weather is not too hot. When he has a full cooler, or when his ice is running out he heads to port to sell his catch.

In the above photo he is working with a friend to organize his catch by value of the fish.

When a bin is full it is hauled up the dock ramp by hand to the waiting truck where they weigh it. This box weighed in at 110 lbs. Vernabel is then paid for the weight of fish that he brought in. Most fish sells for $.50 to $.80 a pound. Shrimp that are a good size (about 8-10 shrimp per pound is good size) go for $4-$5 a pound, lobsters run more...but I don't know current market value for them.

The fish is then tossed in a similar cooled in the back of the truck to be hauled to Santiago. In Santiago there is a big commercial fish market where it is sold for consumption locally, nationally and internationally. Fish that are most commonly caught and sold locally include:

• corbina (drum -according to a list of fish name translations)
  
• pargo (red snapper - seen in photo below)
• atun (tuna)
• tiberon (shark, in this case usually hammerhead sharks)
• lobsters (they don’t have claws here) Lobster numbers are down and you have to have a special permit to use a lobster net, but not everyone follows those laws.
  
• shrimp (shrimp the size of my hand are not uncommon….well they are becoming less common but no one gets as excited by how big they are as I do!).

There are also several species of fish that are caught but are only used for family consumption as they don’t have enough market value to sell, like congo (similar to a bigheaded catfish). They also collect some mollusks and clams for family consumption.

I also find it interesting that some parts are dried and sold separately. For example the lungs of large corvina are dried and sold for about $10 a pound. They look like hard, semitransparent white, elongated 10 inch disks. The same price of roughly $10 a pound is true for the fins of the sharks. Both products, I am told, are sold to an Asian medicinal market.

The practice of catching sharks and removing the fins and then tossing the mortally wounded shark back in the ocean has been banned, but continues to be a problem because the shark meat may not be as high a value as some other fish that they can catch. So the fishermen will sometimes catch a shark and be tempted to remove the fins but not keep the meat because it takes up space that they would like to fill with more profitable fish.

It just goes to show that our consumer choices can have a real impact on a world scale and small local economies far more distant than we sometimes realize. The people in my village are directly impacted by the world's current thoughts about how "in style" is shrimp or lobster. They remember clearly a time when the shrimp demand pushed the price up to $8 a pound.

I urge each of us to think when we shop about the impacts (locally and globally) of our consumer choices. With seafood it is much easier to do than you would think, just visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium website to read, download or print a current seafood consumer guide: http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_regional.aspx

I challenge you to use the guides provided by Monterey Bay Aquarium the next time you eat in a restaurant or shop for seafood...I bet you find your meal tastes a little bit better because you know that you are a smart and environmentally minded customer.

Feeling the impacts -US economy

Ok, so I know that the economy has been doing crazy things....ups and downs and more downs and budget issues and bank problems and home foreclosures, well that is what I hear anyway.

The reality of my life is that I feel isolated from the US...too isolated for the first time ever. That was a good thing when I got to miss the 3 months of pre-Christmas commercials. It has been a good thing this year of election madness. However, just now it does not feel like a good thing (other than still missing out on election madness). I can honestly say that I do not really know what is going on up there other than the election.

We don´t have the access to news that some volunteers have, be it a newspaper or television or regular weekly internet. Most of the time I am fine with that, but right now I would like to understand what is happening in the economy better. After all, our COS (close of service in PC lingo) date is just 9 or so months away (anyone else shocked by that?). How can we plan what is next if we don´t understand what our options are and are not?

While the economy changes don't totally feel real from here, we also are impacted. On a personal level, I checked out my IRA savings in Vanguard the other day...thankfully I don't remember exactly what the value of it was before I joined PC, but its value is down that much I know. Every year Kevin and I compare how our IRA did for growth for the fun of it...this year we may be comparing who lost less value.

From a Peace Corps level, budget shortfalls have been caused primarily by the declining value of the dollar and the consequent increases in the cost of running a program overseas. Peace Corps, which has a budget of 330.8 million dollars, estimates its foreign currency losses from 2008 to be 9.2 million dollars.

These budget shortfalls have resulted in lowering the amount of volunteers placed (even some who where approved and now are not being sent), decreasing training for new volunteers, and decreasing the staff and resources supporting current volunteers. Yes, we can personally see a change in the office's outlook on what they can do and not do based on funding. For a fuller account, check out these news stories:

www.latimes.com
www.ipsnorthamerica.net

To put the Peace Corps budget into some perspective as to size:
Peace Corps proposed 2009 Budget: $343.5 million
2009 Enacted supplemental Global War on Terror Funding (see pg 22): $68 billion
Peace Corps 2009 budget= .005% of 2009 Global War on Terror budget
OR
In 3.65 days the Global War will spend as much supplemental/emergency funding as the whole Peace Corps budget.

Now, before some of you get upset by my comparison...I do fully support our troops. I just wish that our national spending reflected a greater commitment to non-military options for promoting peace.

I hope that you all are fairing well, personally and professionally, during these economic turmoil. Know that we are thinking of you all. Please help us to make this feel more real and understandable, email or post a comment below to tell us how the economy is impacting you or your community. We want to understand and be supportive.

Take care out there. Get ready to get out and

Panamanian wins Latin American Idol

Panamanians had a celebration to beat the band when Margarita Henriquez was announced as the winner of Latin American Idol on October 10th. Because we live in an area without much electricity, and because we don't watch much TV, I didn't know what was going on when it was announced. I was in Santiago, at a friend's house when the car horns started honking, and the yelling and the fireworks added to the general noise of celebration...celebration that continued for hours. Dancing in the streets would be a realistic way to describe the scene in many areas of Panama.
Panamanians were so excited that the volume of cell phone traffic was enough to overwhelm the cellular tower capabilities and cell phone systems collapsed...and were not fully returned to service in some rural area (meaning my house) for 2 days. The press conference held when she returned to Panama was carried live on several television networks....interrupting popular novelas (evening soap operas). However, her victory did not result in a national day off like the Olympic gold medal winner's.

Nineteen Central and South American countries participated in the contest. The two finalists competing were from Panama and Costa Rica...raising the tension with some friendly neighborhood rivalry. If you would like to see her sing, and she can belt it out, check out this youtube video:

Margarita's last Latin American Idol song

Garden Update

You may remember when we started a garden quite a while ago. I thought you might be interested in seeing our progress. Gardening in Panama is not the easy, high producing task that I thought it would be. Yes, things grow fast...but only when happy...and the weeds are ALWAYS happy.

In our garden we planted tomatoes in several places to test how best to grow them. Tomatoes are much more prone to problems with fungus and molds here in Panama because of the high amount of rainfall. The tomatoes planted out in the garden proper are still between 6 inches and 24 inches tall and are leggy and fairly unhappy looking.

To see if rain is the challenging part of raising tomatoes we planted in a bed under our eaves, right next to the house. These plants have grown quite big and sturdy. They are quite a rich green and have a ton of flowers and are starting to put on some good tomatoes. Of course, we have added quite a bit of compost and organic material to this bed to feed them. We have them staked up and only water them from below in order to keep the humidity down as much as possible.

We also planted tomatoes in a 5 gallon tank, and those are now fairly large plants…it is hard to see the tank from the front. All of the soil in this planter is from our human manure compost efforts (if you don’t remember that particular adventure check it our at: )…and the tomatoes seem to love it.

We just harvested the first tomato from this bucket planter, it took forever to ripen. I think that they are ripening slowly because they are under the eaves to protect them from the rain, but this also keeps them in the shade most of the day. The neighbors are very impressed by our tomatoes, most tomatoes die before they can produce…so I am keeping my fingers crossed that things keep going this well.

In addition to tomatoes we are growing sugar cane (the grassy looking stuff on the right in the photo below), zapallo (which is like a pumpkin or winter squash), radishes, a couple of carrots, and peppers. We are also growing canavalia and mani forajero - two green fertilizers (plants that are grown because they add nutrients to the soil as they grow). The zapollo is taking over the garden and my neighbors are all waiting for them to come ripe…they all want one. It is good to be doing something that causes envy in our neighbors. I should also mention that the number of family vegetable plots in the area has grown quite noticeably in the past 7 months. I don't know if things are related...but one can hope.

Update to the update: This week´s sucesses and failures - We harvested 3 zapollos from our vine and gave two to our closest niehgors. Also, we just lost a tomato to a fungus (I think?) on the lower stem just above the soil. So the battle for fresh produce continues.

School Garden Success

Hector is one of our school students; he is holding the first carrot that was worth pulling it up to see if it was ready yet.

The students' work in their school garden has also produced several cucumbers, and their tomatoes are coming along. But it is the carrots, which they've never seen growing before, that they are most curious about. We've mentioned several times that the carrot is below ground and the green part above needs to be left alone so the carrot can grow bigger. We might have lost a third of the carrots to their checking to make sure we were right about that. Now maybe they'll believe us.

Update on Composting

Our 55-gallon barrel toilet filled up again (see http://ak-panama.blogspot.com/2008/05/composting-latrines.html for info on our barrel, and http://ak-panama.blogspot.com/2008/05/composting-update.html for the update on our last batch of compost).

You may remember when we did it the last time we were concerned with killing all pathogens dangerous to humans, so we made bocashi (or boccachi, or bocochi, or boccoshi), which is a fast hot compost, with it. We knew from our research that bocashi temperatures could get high enough to kill the pathogens, and we were pretty sure that ours did get that hot. However, last time we did not have a thermometer to test our assumptions....this time we did, and here are the results.

First, here's our list of ingredients:

• 60 gallons of poo & sawdust (we had another 5-gal bucket sitting around waiting)
• 4 sacos of balo leaves (balo is a tree here in Panama that grows amazingly)
• 6 ounces of yeast
• 8 cakes of raspadura (pressed sugar cane), mixed in about four gallons of water
• ~20 feet of tallo de platano (plantain or banana tree trunk), chopped
• 1 gallon of urine, mixed with about three gallons of water (our toilet seperates urine into a tank, and since urine is high in nitrogen it can be a valuable ingredient)
• 2 5-gallon tanques of soil
• 2 5-gallon tanques of finished compost from the last time
• 1 cartucha (plastic grocery bag) of carbon (ash from the school stove)

(A raspadura cake)

We mixed them all together. Many people would worry about the smell and ick-factor but amazingly there is almost no smell and ickyness to deal with, got to just trust me on that...April too was ready to wrinkle her nose and was plesantly suprised both times. In fact, the ickyest thing to go into the pile was some balo leaves that we had left soaking in water...those, ironically enough, smelled like stinky poo.

(We managed to time it just right so that the entire mixing process took place without shade)

(Therefore, April had to take this picture after I mixed the pile; she then gave me a glass of water)

Then we put the pile in our compost box, stuck in the compost thermometer my folks brought down for us, and watched the temperature rise. We talked about what our hopes were for peak temperatures...and we both independantly had been hoping to hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit and maintain it for at least 2-3 days including one re-mixing.

(The mix and the thermometer, beginning to heat up.)

It is important to have the temperature rise to kill weed seeds in the mix, as well as any pathogens. April did some research and got the following time/temperature combinations from the Humanure Handbook (http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/humanure.html) indicating what is needed to kill pathogens that cause concern for human health.

(We made this chart to facilitate envisioning the numbers from the following paragraph)

(See Chapter 7, page 144:
Complete pathogen destruction is guaranteed by arriving at a temperature of 62°C (143.6°F) for one hour, 50°C (122°F) for one day, 46°C (114.8°F) for one week or 43°C (109.4°F) for one month. It appears that no excreted pathogen can survive a temperature of 65°C (149°F) for more than a few minutes. A compost pile containing entrapped oxygen may rapidly rise to a temperature of 55°C (131°F) or above, or will maintain a temperature hot enough for a long enough period of time to destroy human pathogens beyond a detectable level (see Figure 7.6).)

So how did our pile do heating up? Here is a chart of the temperatures we found by poking around in the middle of the pile and the corners/edges, looking for high and low readings.


If you'd rather just see the numbers graphically, here is our high and low readings from the center of the pile, compared to the temperatures necessary to kill the bad stuff and how long they need to be maintained.

(You can see that our high (red) and low (grey) have exceeded in temperature and time even that needed to kill everything in one minute (single orange dot at 6:30am, just 18 hours after we started). Depending on your browser, you may be able to click on the chart to see it bigger.)

(The thermometer reading at a hot spot)

Needless to say, we have been thrilled at our sucess with getting the bocachi to heat up sufficiently. Look for a post soon on the beautiful soil that was produced by our first batch of bocashi and what we're growing in it.

Reforestation Update

SUCCESS!!!

Some days we just have a real Peace Corps day…a fulfilling, good work day. Well, Tuesday September 30^th was one of those days. Together with 24 youth (the teacher had not come in for the week yet) and adults from the island, we planted 210 tree seedlings. Many of you will remember when we first started this project by working together to fill the bags with soil. If not you can check it out at: http://ak-panama.blogspot.com/2008/05/reforestationthe-first-steps.html

We planted them around a fuente de agua (a fresh water spring) with the goal that the grown trees will help keep the water source running strong. Forests protect water sources by absorbing and retaining more rainfall than un-forested areas. The area that we planted in serves as a backup water source for the neighborhood nearby. When the aqueduct fails to deliver water to their houses, because the users upstream have used all that is available, they go to the pozo (water pool) and dip up water for all their needs. Some people do this for up to 4 months of the year.

It was quite a process to get the trees planted. We had to get them from our house to the planting location…which is normally a 35 minute walk without the weight of tree seedlings to carry. The walk includes an occasionally slippery sidewalk, a challenging set of 80 uneven stairs, and a wooded trail. Rather than haul the trees over all of that we hauled them 100+ meters and loaded them into my wonderful neighbor Julian’s boat and sailed them around to the community dock.

We then used buckets to haul the seedlings, 8 at a time in buckets, up the challenging stairs to the school where they spent the night. In the morning we used the extra hands of the other community members to haul them up the trail to the planting site.

Before we headed out to plant trees, we gave a quick demonstration of tree planting best practices. We covered how big/deep to make the hole, where to put the fertilizer, and how to pack it in at the end. We were hoping to increase our tree survival rates as much as possible. Below you can see the instruction sheet that we (meaning Kevin this time) made for the demo in all of its Spanish glory.

When we went out to plant, hey used machetes to chop back the monte (wild plant growth…and it can be very wild) and clear planting space. Once we got into the monte everyone split into working teams to plant…with varying degrees of efficiency. We used coas (a flat metal spade attached to a long handle that is used as an all-purpose digging tools) to dig the holes for planting.

We put a small sprinkle of chemical fertilizer (hauling organic compost would have been asking just a bit too much of everyone this time) in each hole and planted above it. We planted a variety of tree species, all of them native.

Afterwards we had cool aid and cookies to celebrate our success. Then we went home and rested. It was a long day even though planting only took about 3 hours. We still have about 200 trees to plant this year and it feels a bit like a race because dry season starts in late December. The trees need to be established before the rain stops for the summer. Come February we plan to plant more seedlings for next year….as many as people request for projects and for their personal land (well, within reason).

2009 PC Panama Calendar is coming soon!

Front cover of 2009 VAC Calendar (click on photos to see larger version)

One of the projects that we (Kevin and I) have been working on is the 2009 VAC calendar. VAC stands for Volunteer Action Council and is the Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) committee that serves as the PCV voice to the PC office.

Every year VAC puts out a wall calendar full of photos taken by current or very recent PCVs. 100% of the proceeds from the calendar go into SSPA grants. SSPA stands for The Super Small Project Assistant Grants. These grants are $60 or less in size and to help supplement project or activity funding. They make many small projects possible that would otherwise not happen, and many times it is the small projects that have the most incredible impacts.

This year I did all of the layout and formating for the calendar (with copious help from my loving supportive and patient husband). It is quite lovely and the best one yet to be made...or so I am told (she says in her most humble voice). January photo and calendar page (click on photos to see larger version)

• It has 14 months (Dec 2008-jan 2010)
• It includes US and Panama Federal holidays (Panamanian in italics)
• It includes Chrisitian, Jewish and Muslim major religious holidays.
• It also includes: moon phases, equinoxes, daylight savings, and other important days like earth day, world aids day, and tax day.
• It has a mini calendar for the previous and next month on each page.
• It is stuffed full of photos!! Every spot I could put them I did.
  
• All photos are from PCVs current or very recent.
  
• All photos are captioned with what and where and credited to the photographer
  
• The calendar focuses on panama culture, sites, people and places.There are lots of cute kids, pretty flowers and cultural events featured.
  
• There is a center info page on PC panama and the type of work that we do here, complete with pictures of volunteers at work.

Back cover (click on photos to see larger version)

Please consider buying a 2009 PC Panama VAC Calendar. The calendars will be for sale (very soon) online at:

www.pcpfpanama.org

Last year they sold for $15 per calendar, I am not sure what they will go for this year (they changed from 12 months to 14 so production costs are a bit higher). All I can promise is that the money goes to a good cause and you will get at least one big smile a month from the photos included. Not every calendar can make such a promise!