What I do in the Peace Corps.

Despite what one might think, that the Peace Corps is a two year vacation, I am indeed very busy. Yes, it´s true that I spend a lot of my time lounging in my hammock, watching the sun descend upon the horizon, traquiling strumming my banjo in the late afternoon, reading books and working on a mess of craft projects. But I´m a resourceful busy beaver and one all of a sudden has a lot of time on their hands when they go from living in the inner city to living in a rural rain forest. But I digress......

Women's Group Project:
Ngäbe women, when not bearing children, feeding children or schlepping 1,000 lbs. of bananas around on their heads, make bags called ´chakaras´. One is not truly a women in Ngäbe culture if you aren´t constantly breast feeding or if you don´t make chakras. They are made from a natural fiber that is pulled out of a cactus-like plant called ´pita´, washed, bleached in the sun, dyed with natural dyes from jungle roots and berries and finally hand rolled into string called ´kiga´. Since I arrived, I have helped the women in town organize themselves into an artisan group. We have made connections with a local artisan cooperative where we now sell their products. Besides basic business skills I am aiding them in a variety of agricultural projects also. One of them is to a communal artisanal garden of pita and also the roots, berries and vines that have to be found deep in the jungle which usually remains far from the town, and rare or difficult to come by. The idea is to cultivate the materials of this traditional craft to them both accessible and to promote cooperatively.

Cacao Project: This will probably be the bulk of my Peace Corps service. The mission of this project is, with community leaders, other participating neighbor communities and local government agencies, including the Bocatoreño cacao cooperative, we will coordinate a series of educative seminars on cacao farm improvement. The themes will cover everything from improvement of agroforestry techniques to promote farm biodiversity and crop yield, to cacao maintenance through pruning, organic fertilizer use including worm castings and green manures to grafting. If all goes down as planned, we should kick off by June, si dios quiere.

Misc. Health Projects: I have been helping out a neighbor volunteer who comes from the next town over and whose main project is to make an aqueduct for my town as currently we get our water from the filthy stream that runs through town. This usually means rolling up the sleeves, throwing the shovel around and using the ol´elbow grease in the hot sun. We have built a water holding tank and buried over 3,000 ft. of PVC tube from the spring of the water to the pueblo below. You should see my biceps is all I have to say.

A past volunteer years ago did a composting latrine project and Nudobidi had about 15 made. Soon I will be conducting a house to house inspection to make sure the people are still clear of how to maintenance them and how to harvest and utilize the compost. (Hell yeah you can use human waste to fertilize your garden!) With that will come workshops for the whole family about why you shouldn´t shit in the river which is one cultural tradition that just can´t seem to die even though every man woman and child is riddled with more worms, intestinal parasites and skin infections than I care to talk about.

Sex ed!! is my favorite subject ever. I love it. I have done a couple condom on the ol´banana demos and HIV-AIDS workshops in some neighboring communities (which makes me feel weird as bananas also happen to be the main food staple here). But my brain child is to the Peace Corps-Bocas del Toro Sex Ed Tour 2007!!! and I´ve recruited a mess of other volunteers to collaborate in a one day seminar, first in our sites and eventually when we become famous visit every PCV site in the province and possibly beyond. We will cover everything from the ´birds and the bees´ (you would be surprised how many teenage mothers have no clue what the culprit of their three pregnancies was) to the variety of modern birth control that is available and accessible to the common impoverished undereducated rural women (rhythm method what?) to STDs and HIV ed. I´m banking on a UN program that I´ll be meeting with next week who may donate mad condoms to us because I already have my two tiendas on board to sell them for 5 - 10 cents a pop to raise money for the health committee. For our slogan I want to rip off Nike : ¨Family Planning: Just do it!¨ or perhaps ¨One less mouth to feed, who already have ten¨. Sorry that was insensitive.

And then theres English class, playing volleyball almost everyday and random farm visits which consist of schlepping around bananas on my head, planting bananas, cleaning cacao, harvesting cacao, harvesting corn, oh, did I mention schlepping bananas around on my head?, washing clothes in the river and of course, strumming my banjo on my front porch. I´m like a modern day Doc Boggs but my backdrop is jungle and Caribbean islands rather than the Appalachian Mountains.

Ju Tigwe (My House)

My new home is certainly not perfect, but nothing short of amazing because its mine. It finally happened after after 10 straight months of living with host families all over Panama, coast to coast. I began to feel comfortable with the idea of my general state of health, both physical and mental, in the hands of another. From the food they give me and the sanitation practices they abide by (or not), hearing their 20 children screaming at all hours, or having my basic privacy raped of me, I know with independence my healthfulness will return.
We cut down three threes (actually yelled out ¨NO!¨as I watched the cedar fall because I had no idea they were going to cut it down, which they still bring it up daily how hilarious and ridiculous I am), fixed the stairs, the porch, the bed, the windows. The house itself is stilted about 8 feet off the ground. Ones enters by climbing the stairs from beneath and emerging onto the porch of 6 x9´which holds a new sweet smelling cedar table and one cloth hammock courtesy of my two little hands. The door leads you into a 5 x 9´room which has enough room to hold my bed and a small table that my gas stove sits on. And that's all theres space for. Oh, and theres a shelf that hold things, which when the kids see the mountain of books resting on it their mouths drop and the tornado of questions begin. And I know I have blown their minds. (How many are there? How many pages are in each one? Can you read all of them? How many pages have you read? How many books have you read? Are they in pure English? Why don´t they have pictures?) The palm thatched roof (penca) towers about 15 feet over head, which is an ecosystem in and of its own. It houses bats, sparrows, cockroaches, ants, termites, 100 different species of spiders, and more scorpions than I care to talk about. I´ve killed about 7 in this week alone. The location down right sucks because its the most public place in town, which is what the people wanted. Now they´ll never be bored again what with the little stage (my porch) right before them, more entertaining than watching the grass grow or the clouds moving which is what they usually turn to to pass the time. It also makes it quite easy for the 7,000 children that roam free in the community like a large pack of wild coyotes to come and go as they please, or cualquier passerby on their way home from the finca, usually thirsty and expecting something. Now what you have to understand about the Ngäbes is they are obsessed with food, not the quality (as boiled bananas is it, salt on top if you´re lucky) but the quantity. And so the people visit each others house when they are either hungry, too lazy to cook or when they don´t have any food in their own house. The custom is when you see someone going to their house with food (usually as their walking home from the finca) you give then a little bit of time to prepare it before coming over and then you only eat a little, wrap the rest in a banana leaf and bring it home for the kids. I have been permanently marked as ¨greedy¨ because I can´t seem to get the para llevar part down. I want to think that when people stop by my house its to say hello, but this is not the case. The first few people who came by, usually with their 2 - 7 children when I moved in would come up the stairs, sit down, painfully try to make small talk (which Ngäbes are nearly incapable of) before asking ¨Where´s the food?¨ Yes, they say it just like that, as there really is no filter in Ngäbe culture. And you can imagine the shock when I tell them there is none (I mean come on, that's a lot of boca to feed). Lets just say that the instances of visits have been getting less and less as the word gets around about ¨Sara Mescina¨ (¨Greedy Sara¨) Fortunately I have a lot of nicknames.
Independence tastes good. The first morning in my place I woke up and made a cup of hot black bitching strong coffee (they drink it cold and resembles sugary water more then anything else, says the caffeine addict) and layed in my hammock to watch the sun rise over the misty forested hillside in peace and quite and I actually shed a little tear and then I went back to bed just because I could.