Final Boat Update

A few weeks ago, I thought I wouldn't have any more progress to report. They had righted the boat and put a "roof" over it of zinc panels. I thought that was to keep it drier during the rainy season than it would have been otherwise.

(Allie's boat under cover for the rainy season; it was perfectly upright originally, but they tilted it again when they continued working)

It turns out I was wrong. They covered it so they could keep it dry enough to work on. Pedro and a fellow from port applied fiberglass to the lower sides of the boat (a very smelly process) and then started to paint it. The fiberglass and resin/glue cost roughly $800; which is more than most folks on the island make in two or three months, so it took some budgeting and planning to purchase the materials and have them applied (labor is probably $8 to $10 a day as well, and probably took three to five days on a boat this size).

(Painting the boat after the application of fiberglass layers; five on the keel/bottom and three on the sides.)

Pedro achieves the very straight edge by tautly stretching a line of cord from the back to the front of the boat, and slowly painting and chatting.

(April helped out with the chatting part of the painting, which is a very common form of help)

Grand Opening for the Island Library

It happened!

La Biblioteca (the library) is open! As you may recall, the community had made plans to make bookcases and organize books. Well, the chainsaw never worked out (due to a lack of gas and/or oil and/or machine), and bookshelves never got built. But, there was a spare bookcase from the kitchen in the school, and they decided it would work fine for the library and they would replace it when the chainsaw happened.

So, as scheduled, on 5 June Cecilia and her husband Eduardo brought their boat to our cove and we loaded up the six "Panama" bags we had filled with the books stored at our house and hauled them to the school. We organized them that day and the next with Cecilia and Maria Luisa into little kids (thick pages), easy reads, medium reads, chapter books, Panama information, science and education books, health books, books about adolescence, and English or Spanish books. We confirmed the plans for the checkout system and library hours. They talked to everyone about the Grand Opening on Tuesday, 9 June, and we actually left for the weekend, arriving back on Tuesday morning.

It turned out that Cecilia and Maria Luisa, together with the maestra, were up to a bit more than the Grand Opening of the Library. The maestra had organized all the kids in the school to sing a song or recite a poem for us, and they had a going-away lunch.

Then we had everyone wash their hands (manos limpias para los libros - clean hands for the books) and we held a story time to celebrate. We had all the kids, plus some younger siblings, and numerous parents. I read one of the Guillermo Gusano / William Worm books that the kids have enjoyed. I think it was a good example for the parents of how to read to the kids.

Then April went over the rules of the library and how to treat books well so they last. (And to think, I was librarian's child. :)

(April reviewing the rules of the library, on the whiteboard and posted on the wall. Together with a map of the world - we later added a map of the Gulf of Montijo and one of the island - it looks pretty official. The books nearly fill the bookcase already; they are planning on making another one.)

After the rules, April read them a book we hadn't read in nearly exactly a year, Donde Viven Los Monstruos.

(April with a very attentive crowd of listeners as Max sails back home)

When the wild rumpus started, April shocked them to their feet to dance around, while I joined in banging on a plastic bucket. They thoroughly enjoyed story time, and hopefully Cecilia, who will host the Wednesday Library Hours with Story Time, will carry on the enjoyment. (Maria Luisa will hold Sunday Library Hours.)

But while we do hope Story Time continues, one of our main goals is to encourage kids and adults to read in general. We hope to have something for everyone.

(Rubiel, Carlito, and Kiko reading, while Roxanna and Soray look at books and talk with April)

Thus, this picture is one of the ones we enjoyed the most. These three boys all clambored to find a small book and sat down to read it. Kiko lives north of us and had been by our house regularly on his way home from school to ask for a book to read, and searched out his favorites. Rubiel lives on the south of the island and Carlos near the school, so they had not read any of the books before, and enjoyed discovering the options. I have faith that they will continue to read in the future.

So what came of the donations, which were originally intended for sealable boxes and desecant packs? Since the community decided the books would be more accessable on a bookcase, and donated the bookcase, April searched around online and found another addition to the library that they had wanted: an encyclopedia, to support homework projects and learning. She found one from Encyclopedea Brittanica for $250 (plus $50 S&H once we got an Embassy address; originally, to ship to Panama was $250 as well!) with 20 volumes, aimed at the middle school age range, so it should provide as much as they need. We just spent the rest of the money yesterday at Hombre de la Mancha, one of the few bookstores in Panama (the name comes from Don Quixote, not only one of the greatest Spanish-language novels, but an appropriate label for the jousting at windmills that is selling books in Panama), picking up the fourth Harry Potter, a set of 12 books on nature, the world, and science, and other kids books. In total, the library now has nearly 400 books! Thanks to all of you who shared your love of reading and your willingness to help with our community members!

Campaign Signs

I know the election is over, but here are some photos of campaign signs.

("Chalo" is running for Alcalde, or mayor, of Santiago. Because he is the PRD candidate, he is in the first position on the ballot, thus the "1" with a checkmark. His suplente, or backup, is also listed. And the presidential logo for Bablina/Navarro 09 is included, along with the name and photo of Ruben de Leon for Diputado, which is more or less a congressman.)

Often, utility poles will be utilized by all the parties.

(This pole has a Molirena flag on top, then a Union Patriotica poster for Diputado - which also includes the presidential alliance with Martinelli of Cambio Democratico -, then off the side a PRD flag, a Cambio Democratico poster for Alcalde, and then a PRD poster. The PRD poster says Vota PRD and Vota Plancha, which means vote the party, and shows the Presidential candidate, the Diputado, the Alcalde, and the Representante. There is a "1" on the side, just in case you forgot which spot PRD holds on the ballots.)

Follow Up Volunteer

Peace Corps service is only two years. At the end of two years, if you've really "done" it, you have a pretty good grasp of the language, you understand most of the culture, you're comfortable eating, getting around, and travelling, and you have a good grasp/understanding/comfort level in your community. And then, just when you are starting to feel successful, everyone wants to implement the ideas you've been mentioning, and suddenly you have tons of work to do, it is time to leave.

If, like in our case, you were a first time volunteer, the community has finally gotten a good grasp of your grasp of the language, they understand the aspects of your culture you've displayed in site, and they know what you are comfortable eating, and have finally gotten a good grasp/understanding/comfort level with the gringo in their midst and what is Peace Corps. And just when they are wanting to implement the ideas you've been mentioning and have tons of work for you to do, you leave.

The solution? A Follow Up Volunteer. New blood (for the chitra and mosquitos, quite literally). Someone who can come in and continue the work you started, hopefully picking up right where you left off. Thanks to your efforts, they shouldn't have to learn everything from scratch, won't have mention the ideas for the first time, and should be able to implement.

We will benefit from just such a Follow Up Volunteer in the island, and hopefully she will benefit from us. We've been able to arrange for host families; she should get all of our household goods at a discount (and not have to haul them out there); we're providing her a map with everyone's name, nickname, and relationship (so she'll know who are siblings, cousins, etc); we've made a list of in-progess projects and potential projects, as well as groups and people to work with; and we've made a list of all the other secrets, tips, and hard-won knowledge we've picked up in our two years here. With luck, she'll start at about the level we achieved in just the last half-year.

Allison is from California and has a strong background in environmental work. She heard about our site from the CEC (April's sector) volunteer who visited us two weeks ago and told Francisco (April's boss) that she would like to come here. (There are no couples in CEC or SAS in this group, which is ironic after our group two years ago had five couples.) She is tall apparently, which is lucky, since we built for our height and things shouldn't have to be lowered. Beyond that, we don't know much yet. She will do her Site Visit (recall ours' here) in mid-June, ironically when we are in Panama City to do our COS (Close of Service) medical appointments. Then she will swear-in on 30 June and head to site later that week, which, as you know, is right when we leave the country. So, we aren't sure yet when or how we'll meet her to chat about the island. But even if we don't, she'll have all our notes and the support of our great friends in the community who are enthusiastic about helping her get settled in. We wish her the best of luck.

Off to Coiba!

Just a quick update....

I (April) am off to Coiba National Park today to teach a Certified Interpretive Guide course with park rangers there. In this case interpretation means interpretation of a history, resource or other story....such as guided hikes that our National Park Rangers do in the States...they help you interpret what is unique and important about what you are seeing/experiencing. The training will be an official course within the curriculum of National Association of Interpretation. (See their webpage at http://interpnet.com/ to learn more about interpretation as a profession and a skill set.)

As my parents have heard... I originally proposed this week long class last February. I wrote the proposal three times before it was accepted (English, Spanish, and official government format Spanish). The course has been postponed twice...once in November due to a broken electric generator and again last month for unknown reasons (internal agency confusion seems likely on that one :)

The funding has come from the national environmental agency ANAM and all of the students are ANAM employees. All told we hope to have representatives from 7 different Panamanian parks in attendance. I even have a wonderful co-instructor to share the work with...Eylin Martinez is a Panamanian who also holds the certification from the National Association of Interpretation. I am so lucky that she is donating her time and efforts to this workshop...she brings a great point of view, excellent Spanish and a cheery disposition. All in all she is quite likely to be the main reason I survive the week with any sanity. Thank you Eilyn!!!

So, off I go to fix up the last minute details and make the last of the copies needed. I will post later about how the class went...with photos of course. If I get lucky I may even get in some snorkeling time...I am taking my gear just in case.

Boat Repair

Do you remember the boat that was in our house when we first visited in July 2007?

It was still there when we moved in in November 2007. It stayed for December...and January....and on and on. We got used to using it as a type of bench. Then April told the owner that she was going to move it...he just needed to say where to put it.

Then the first weekend of May 2008 (less than 2 weeks after April asking where to put it), we came home to find that the boat was no longer there. Our neighbor had finally moved it into his front yard. It stayed there for about a month, before moving into the Casa Comunal (a very similar design to our house, but much bigger) across the field. Over the course of the last year, they worked on it, practically taking it apart and expanding it into something larger. The finished boat was about 1 1/2 feet wider and a couple of feet longer than the original. They put fiberglass on it, and put it in the water around January of this year.

And the fiberglass separated.

So they pulled it out in the cove near our house, cut off the fiberglass, and put on a new layer (ouch, expensive mistake, since everyone would like to fiberglass their boats to make them last longer and float lighter, thus using less gas, but it isn't cheap).

Then they pushed it back into the water.

(Check out those long legs helping to push)

After cutting some lengths of a trash tree (grows really fast, dies fairly soon, and isn't good for anything other than making O2) to serve as rollers, they recruited a bunch of neighbors and kids to move it back into the water.

(Almost there, although if it were a really high tide, it would already be in the water)

Someone gets the job of running the logs around to the front once we've rolled off the back ones, since they haven't lined the entire length to the water.

(At last, it makes it into the water; it is one of the brighter boats in our community)

This time, the fiberglass held and the boat has been put to work fishing and transporting people and stuff. It is a bit larger than most of the boats folks use around the island, but makes for a nice ride to port, with the little casita to shelter from sun and rain.

We are seeing an increasing number of boats that are either all fiberglass ($$$$) or have a fiberglass layer on the bottom ($$). For those of you who remember Allie's boat that Pedro was building, it is still sitting pretty in his front yard waiting for the plata (money) to finish it.
The art of making and using an all wooden boat is not lost in our community, but in our two years here we have seen an acceleration of the change away from natural local materials. We have also seen at least one small boat handmade from a single log...but there are not that many big logs anymore to use this way. Things will always change, the changes just feel faster sometimes when you can actually see them in progress.

Mail Hold - Don't Send Any More Letters or Packages

To all of you who have sent us letters and packages, we have loved getting the ones that made it.

To all of you who have sent us letters and packages, someone or some mice have loved getting the ones that didn't make it, inspite of any Jesus stickers and tons of tape.

But to those of you with great success rates and those without, it is with great sadness that I say, please stop sending those letters. With as long as letters sometimes take to arrive at the Post Office here, and as long as it may be before we can visit and ask the nice ladies behind the counter to check the General Delivery under "C" for Cropper, we think the time has come to ask you to stop sending them.

It is hard to write about leaving; we have tried in many ways to avoid it, or at least thinking about it, and the sadness it will bring. But returning to the states (if you didn't hear, April didn't get selected for the Australia dream job) will at least mean getting our mail, even if it is a bit more expensive now. :)

Library Fully Funded

Well, one can always use more money! However, our Partnership grant for the community library has been completely funded through donations. This means that the money will arrive soon into our hands so that we can start using it.

THANK YOU!!

Thank you to one and all who donated! We don't know who most of you are, but thank you from both of us and our community. We will now start looking for a way to store the books that will best protect them from all of Panama's challenges. We will be sure to post a blog with photos of the finished library and the opening day for you all to enjoy.

(And if you still want to help some other Peace Corps Volunteer with a project, check out the full list of projects in need of assistance.)

Thank You Donars!

Hello,

I just wanted to post a quick note thanking all those who have donated to our Peace Corps Partnership Grant for the community library. (If you don’t remember what I am talking about check it out: Community library post). The total donations have brought our amount needed down to just $175!!

One of the reasons that I wanted to say thank you is because unless you give Peace Corps specific permission to tell us who you are during the donation process (which I have been told means checking some obscure box in the forms) we never find out who gave money. We want all those who have given to know that we appreciate your help...as do the people in our community; we may just not know who you are to say it personally.

If you have not yet donated and still want to...there is still a bit left to be given. You can check it out at: Community Library donations

Last night, by phone, Kevin told me that our library now fills the shelf alloted for it...a shelf that is about 6 feet long. That is a lot of books especially when you consider how many of them are thin childrens books. Poco a poco. (little by little)

Boat Progress - Painting, roof, tools

If you've been waiting for an update on Pedro's progress constructing the boat, well, not too much has been happening lately. They are waiting on some more wood to dry we heard. But a few changes happened in the past few months. (BTW, this is a different Pedro from the cattleman who went to the demo farm with me.)

(Pedro working on the sides of the boat)

If you recall the last photo, there were still some boards missing on the sides. Now Pedro has put the sides together, along with most of the top.

(This is most of the tools he's using: a saw, a hammer, a plane, a couple of clamps)

Alex (who did go to the demo farm with me) is the one paying for the boat to be made, and he and his family have been a part of the process too.

(Alex, his wife, and daughter, painting the inside of the boat; supposedly they just didn't have enough of any one color to do it all.)

I can't figure out why they painted the floor, because if he is going to put cattle in it, normally there is a floor of boards over the bottom.

(The current state of the boat, for about a month now)

We'll have another post soon about work on other boats on the island, because the summer/dry season is clearly the time to work on boats.

Estufa Lorena - the first fire

We recently made an Estufa Lorena or earthen stove with Cecilia and Eduardo. We were pretty excited about it and that made waiting the 30 days for it to dry pretty hard for those of us who are impatient at times (who? me? never!). Luckily, our many guests came along and being guides for them took our minds off of the stove...and before we knew it the time for lighting the stove was here.


Cecilia and her family did a fabulous job taking care of the stove while it was drying. They did layers of mud and later ash every two or three days as directed on the calendar that we made them to follow. That ability to follow directions is rare in any community, but spectacular here. As a result of their daily work, the stove was beautiful. It looked almost like cement and was wonderfully smooth and dry. Unknown to us, Cecilia had carved our initials into the front of it very prominently to remember us as she uses the stove. Of course, that just upped the ante on hoping the darn thing worked well.Below is a view of the inside of the firebox (admittedly not the prettiest view) which allows you to see the upward slant of the smoke tunnel as it heads to the second burner. This style of stove uses the hot air for 2 or 3 pots to get the most efficient use of the wood being burned. In the back you can see bits of the original brown clay that she did not cover.Here is the firebox with a fire in it. Getting it to burn well took some practice, Cecilia is used to really packing in the wood (because normally the fire is in an open area) but this smothered the fire a bit in the stove. You can see the pot on the burner, positioned just above the main body of the fire. Despite good pot placement we had a hard time getting the pot to boil...it formed little bubbles on the bottom but never reached a rolling boil. Not having a rolling boil is a problem, without it no woman would be happy with this stove. We decided that we needed to adjust 3 things:

1. Sand the indents where the pot sits for a better flush seal between pot and stove (and less smoke would escape too).
2. Make the burner holes bigger to allow more heat passage to the pot. This limits how small a pot she can use, but made the rolling boil possible.
3. Adjust the angle of the roof of the firebox to slope inwards so the smoke would head towards the back and the chimney...not out the mouth of the firebox.

In a true show of self motivation, Cecilia did all of these changes while we were out of town...unheard of! She did a wonderful job...even adding clay to the mouth of the stove in a test to see if that helps to limit the blowback when the wind changes direction. She is an amazing woman. The best part is, after the changes she got the ultimate reward: seeing her changes make her stove work better...she got a rolling boil and cooked her first pot of rice with it.

We were able to use the photo above to illustrate that you can use smaller diameter wood effectively with this stove. The wood on the left is the size she would normally use...a bit bigger than my wrist. The wood on the right is smaller, about the size of my thumb. Both can be used, but normally they would not bother to collect the smaller stuff which is typically blown down rather than cut down.

Below is Kevin with the stove that first burn day...note the temperary chimney. They will make a permanent chimney when they finish the new roof (hopefully before rainy season!). Having only a temporary chimney has served well to illustrate how much better the stove works with a chimney. Cecilia is excited about cooking without so much smoke and heat. This could be a good life change for her, and if anyone can take care of this stove and make it last for 20 years it is her.

So what is next? Well, tenemos ganas (we have the desire) to make a stove at the school where the mothers cry from the smoke and sweat from the heat almost every day as they cook lunch. But community development means you do what the community wants to do to better themselves. With that in mind we have a meeting at Cecilia's house on March 5th with the mothers who do the cooking at the shool. The goal is to show them the stove, explain what it is, how we made it, and what are the pros and cons of this type of stove...and then ask if they want one and will work with us to build it with them. I think that they will want one...I mean it is cheap, cooler, safer, no smoke, and less wood to burn. But vamos a ver (we will see) what they want and go from there.

Long shot job

As we move under six months remaining in our Peace Corps service, everyone (friends, family, fellow PCVs, our bosses, ourselves) is asking, "What are you doing next?"

We've been discussing (there is a lot of time for talking when the sun goes down by 6:30 and you don't have electricity) grad school, the National Park Service, organic farms in Vermont, applying our tropical island agriculture experience in Hawai'i, and numerous other crazy schemes, including returning to Maryland. And we try to keep an eye on the jobless rate in the states too, because while the pay isn't great, an extension in Peace Corps is a job that provides enough to live on.

But the current iron in the fire, if we were to get really lucky, would take us from "the toughest job you'll ever love" to "the best job in the world"? (Google those two terms and the top hits will explain the jobs.)

So, after staying up way to late to finish up the last details, here is my application for "the best job in the world". Turn on the sound.

If you want to see some of other 14,000 applicants they've supposedly gotten, try http://www.islandreefjob.com/. To see my video, look under the country of Panama (this post was written before they had approved my video, so I couldn't provide a link). The close date for applying is 22 Feb (hmmm, that's today; I guess I scheduled the posting of this blog just right so that you couldn't read it, apply, and bump me out of the running :) and they will announce the final 50 videos on 2 March, so check back then to see if I made it!

More Jack'o'lantern pictures

As you'll see, once April returned the day after we carved the zapallo jack-o'-lantern, it was no longer the scariest looking thing on the porch.

(Here is the jack-o'-lantern by itself.)

(Then April asked the kids to make faces.)

(They really understood making faces once they saw the picture of my face.)

(Then April made faces with the kids, but the parents started to join in too.)

(So April got a couple of the moms to make bruja (witch) faces, and they quite literaly let their hair down....)

It definately seems we started something they'll continue after we leave. And they probably won't grow zapallo just to carve faces either; Maria made zapallo bread with the jack-o'-lantern the next day, and it was quite yummy.

Where is the baseline?

Peace Corps seems to inspire introspection about oneself and work. We seem to have in common a desire to change ourselves and the world. But how do we know if we are really changing anything? What should we be using as a baseline for the comparisons that we make?

Over the past year I have had several people remark to me “you have really grown / changed in the past year” or “Peace Corps has changed you”. I found myself a little baffled by this as I feel like the same person. It finally clicked for me when a PC staffer made a similar comment and then asked me how Peace Corps has impacted me…the way the question was phrased implied that the changes/growth are a result of Peace Corps. That is when I realized: I wish he had come to my living room and met me 6 months before I came to Panama. He would have met pretty much the woman that he knows now: confident, caring, strong, goal oriented (sometimes to a fault) with a strong sense of self knowledge.

The only baseline that staffer (and all those who know me here in Panama) have to compare me to is the “me” that was in training or soon after. Then I was a woman that had been stripped of all control of personal space, diet, personal and work schedule, normal methods of relaxation, and access to her normal support networks. In short, she was more stressed and with less tools to deal with the stress than at any other point in her life. Is that the baseline that we should use for comparison to who I am now?

For my part, I feel that it is only fair to compare me to the baseline or “normal” of who I was before coming to Peace Corps. Any change from that baseline could be reasonably linked to the Peace Corps experience. But if the baseline we start from doesn’t include the whole picture, neither will our understanding of the information.

There are also examples in my work: where you start looking from has an impact on what you see. In my neighborhood there is a clear uptick in the number of kitchen gardens planted by my neighbors. The uptick started clearly just after my demonstration garden was planted. So clearly, I am responsible for starting them on kitchen gardens, right?

No, not so fast. Further conversations with community members reveal that kitchen gardens are not a new idea, we are just responsible for the current uptick in interest. However, those conversations do show that the idea of planting tomatoes under your house eves (out of the rain) is a new idea…they saw it of the first time in our garden. Because it had never been seen before in our site, the baseline starts with our garden. In other words, efforts linked to the innovation od planting under the eves can be linked to our demonstration of a new idea.

As I mover ever closer to close of service (known as COS - it is approaching at an alarming rate these days), I find myself soul searching on the impacts of these two years…on myself and my community. Yes, I have changed personally – but which baseline are you seeing me from? I think that looking at our work here in Panama with an accurate baseline, and being honest about all of the variables involved, is one of the most challenging parts of Peace Corps, and yet one of the most important.

Thank you calendar buyers!

Wanted to send a big Thank you! out to all the folks who have already surfed on over to buy a calendar and support PCV projects. The PCPanama Friends website reports that 12 were sold in the first day that they were online! If you haven´t bought one but want to click the link below.

Peace Corps Panama 2009 Calendar

Out trip to learn about sea turtles is a great example of the work that is supported by the profits from these calendars. Blog posts about our trip are coming in the next week!

Quick notes:

I just wanted to pass along some quick information:

• Peace Corps Panama Calendars have been printed and should soon be available through http://www.panamapcv.net. I know that they are not posted there yet...but we are working on it. Please consider one of our beautiful calendars for your wall in 2009!
  
• We will be in working/site most of November, so be ready for some good posts in early December.
  
• We are hoping to get a way to upload our photos again...we lost the cable to connect the camera to the computer when our camera was stolen. A fellow PVC has an extra card reader and has offered it to us at thanksgiving. We have a ton of photos that we want to share. (Including a shot of baby hummingbirds...do you get any better than that?)
  
• It is thundering here. Not really news to you...but it means I am not in a rush to get off the computer now. :)
  

Take care out there. May you have lots of snow to make us jealous.

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.

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).

Olympic Update

For those of you who are watching the Olympics you may have seen the Olympic moment that has rocked this istmas....

Ships in the canal blew their horns and people in Panama City streamed out onto the streets cheering at 9am on August 18th when Panamanian long-jumper Irving Saladino's clinched Panama's first gold medal ever. This gold is Panama's third Olympic medal ever -- the only other medals were by sprinter Lloyd Labeach who won bronze medals in the 100m and 200m sprints in 1948.

Not only were there celebrations...but the whole nation took the day off last Thursday the 21st to celebrate the victory. Schools, goverment offices and some stores were closed. So far the only parts of the olympics that I have seen are 300 replays of the gold medal cerimony, one competitor for syncronized swimming, the men´s 2000 meter race, and a couple of women throwing/hurling heavy balls attached to cords. All in all an interesting experience.

The most interesting part of the coverage was that some of the channels that carried the awards cerimony for Saladino blacked out (literally with a big black digital square) the head of the man who placed the the medal on Saladino on the olympic podium. I never did get a clear answer there...but it seems that there was some contraversy over wether Panama´s Olympit athletes would get funding to aid thier trip...and this guy was part of it. Very strange. I don´t know if I will ever understand clearly why he deserved to go headless in the eyes of some TV executives here.

The best part was seeing the medal ceremony when they played the national anthem of Panama. I have always been a weepy sap for the national anthem of the USA... I feel the emotion well up everytime I hear it, even more so for special events like Olympic victory. It was funny (in a good way) to see the medaling ceremony for Saladino and find myself having the same emotional responce for Panama and their national anthem. No, I can´t sing it all...I don´t really want to. But I do feel enough connection to feel the welling up of happieness and pride like that.

I doubt that I will see much more of the games...but I have managed to hear that Phelps is rocking the swimming world again. Congratulations to both Saladino and all the other athletes who are wowing the world.

House Update

We have now been living in our island community for a year, and in our own house for 9 months. We are finally getting close to having the house "done".

If you don´t remember what it looked like before you can see some older pictures of the early kitchen, fully outdoors, at our post from January on cooking: http://ak-panama.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-and-how-do-we-cook.html, and some pictures from when we first moved in at http://ak-panama.blogspot.com/2007/11/some-house-udpates.html or even before we moved in, http://ak-panama.blogspot.com/2007/10/our-housethe-first-step-of-many.html

For those of you who don't remember (it was a very long time ago), the house was just two rooms with doors that opened onto a BIG porch of about 28' x 30'. Well, we used one of those rooms for storage/toilet room, and the other one for a bedroom. This left our kitchen and main living areas out in full public view. My neighbors are great people...but I was getting tired of being in full view 95% of my awake time in my own home. People could walk by and see us anytime.

So we added bamboo walls to divide the space, provide a bit of privacy, provide an indication to neighbors of what was outside and what was our space, and provide a way to open our bedroom door without being right next to the path and fully outside. We also did not want to make permanent changes to the community's building, and these should be fairly easy to remove.

We cut the first batch of bamboo, about 60 twelve-foot pieces and a few longer, at January's full moon (supposedly the bamboo does better with insects / lasts longer if cut at full moon, but frankly, there is a lot of powder coming out of the slats on a daily basis) and a second batch of 10 pieces in April.

A view from the outside looking at hammock area. We have 4 hammocks hanging...so we can welcome guests easily.As you can see below, the walls are only about 5 feet high...high enough to be taller than most people in the nieghborhood when you add in the step down off the cement pad. You can still peak through some spots, but those areas that look into private areas were built with closer or overlapping bamboo.

Kevin made the three walls for the four-foot square shower first and we put those up. Then he made a 13 and a 14 foot section for dividing the house, a 7 foot section to angle off the "bathroom" area, and a ten foot section to go from the wall by our door to the first post. We put all those up and were missing just the wall by the kitchen, on the back side, but we were loath to lose the light and the ability to toss stuff out. So we finally built a half wall with a two foot stretch that is full height, for blocking wind from the stove.

In the photo above the shower is just behind the curtain and the kitchen is to the right. The sink is multi-purpose: dishes, teeth brushing, clothes washing. Anything too yucky for the normal sink is done on the outside faucet in the lower left corner of the house. The big silver can on the counter is a water filter. We do fine healthwise without it, but water without floaty bits just is more fun to drink.

I have also made things more interesting by hanging 4 hummingbird feeders up with great success. (Thanks for the feeders Mom!) Most moments I can look out and see between 1-9 hummers hanging out nearby the house. If you were to add in the major hummingbird flight paths (red lines) into the house diagram you get something like this: (no joke...they really do fly right through all the time!)

The only path missing is the occasional circular loop into the bedroom and back out.

We also have started gardens to grow vegetables. Growing food here is easy and hard at the same time. Easy with temperature, sun and water (except sweet corn, which apparently needs longer daylight hours; OH we miss sweet corn!). Hard with too much water, and plenty of pests and fungus and other plant problems to deal with. In addition to the beetles that most USA gardeners are used to battling, here we get to fight leaf cutter ants for our food....great fun to watch them when the leaves that they are carrying are not from your garden. Our garden is protected from scratching chickens, munching horses, horsing around dogs, and running kids by a "fence" made from a retired fishing net. The garden looks tiny and sad so far, but all that can change in just weeks around here.

This is an experiment to grow tomatoes next to the house under the eave where they are protected from too much rain. The rain increases fungal and mold problems in tomatoes. We will see...and so will all of our nieghbors who are watching our strange ways with great interest.

So that is our home-sweet-home. I am still looking forward to coming back to the style of houses that I am used to in the USA, but for now we are very happy and reasonably comfortable.