I just completed my third month in site, and like getting settled in any new environment, one get's into routines. I've been feeling the rhythm, keeping busy in the school and in the community, while trying to help out the host fam when I can, and spending nights reading or trying to learn the blues. Routines are nice, keeps time flowing right along under the toes. That said, I haven't had the drive to update y'all on the number of mosquito bites I had the other morning, or how I've spent countless hours trying to learn Paul Simon's "Peace Like a River."
Last week I finally finished my last week of observations in the secondary school. Two weeks ago, Joel, my APCD (director of TE program) came to visit for my SENA presentation (school needs assessment, sorry I'll cut it out with the acronyms that I still don't really know). It was a solid day, 5 of 6 teachers showed (la directora was also absent, but we caught her the previous afternoon), I gave me feedback and presented my plan and ideas, and we all chatted about my role, the Peace Corps TE program, and English education in general. It was nice having Joel there; I think he legitimized my role as a volunteer and got me a little more street cred... I return to primaria tomorrow to work with the two teachers in the afternoon on lesson planning and classroom management strategies. I want to focus more on sharing ideas and practicing English outside of class, but I also plan to participate in pre-planned lessons in the classroom. Some teachers are more excited to work with me than others, but I am pretty persistent and plan to approach any hesitation or stress with pura positividad. And of course always keeping in mind, it's the little wins in this world.
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| Team English, Tortí |
Rainy season steadily gains steam as it rolls through the jungle, with storms increasing in strength and frequency (which means more hammock bonding and struggles in the morning rolling out of bed. Most of the good fruit seasons have ended, leaving Nancé at the forefront (semi-sweet, mushy-textured little berry-thing, not so great but not bad in a fresh chicha) and Naranja coming through next. Been hoarding and chopping up lots of pipa recently, which is the pre-mature, green coconut, and it is incredible. Pipa have delicious sweet water inside and a kind of semi-solid jelly on the inside of the shell which is delectable and healthy as well. Coco is great too, but used more for cooking sweets or arroz con coco, or as oil.
Spent one afternoon collecting mamón (delicious little sweet and sour fruit):
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| My homie Cristian, and little Marisbeth behind helping collect the fallen treats |
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One Sunday, after the restaurant closed, I went with the fam down to the river Ipetí to wash German's chiva (bus) and go for a swim. Driving your car into the shallows of a river is an excellent and cheap alternative to going to the car wash.
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| New friend, one of my student's pets, un mono araña |
Pasearing has been going well. Little by little I am making it to more and more of the small communities surrounding Tortí where many students at my school come from. Ipetí a town about 15 minutes in chiva west of Tortí, and is basically made up of 3 separate communities: Ipetí Latino, Ipetí Emberá, and Ipetí Kuna. I really enjoy visiting the Emberá and Kuna communities that border Río Ipetí, but on opposite sides of the highway. The cultures and languages are totally different, the people are beautiful, and there is so much to learn about their traditions and customs. I frequently visit the house of Álvaro in Ipetí Kuna. One of his sons is in 7th grade in my school, and I am in the process of working with Álvaro to start a weekend community English class for adults and kids in the village. The Saila (chief) has given me the go ahead, so I am just waiting to meet with the director of their little school to see if there is a classroom I can use. Álvaro is going to get me a list of people who are seriously interested and dedicated. I am very excited to get involved with this Kuna community, as Peace Corps has not had volunteers in any of the three Kuna Comarcas in some time due to political reasons, especially working with the Sailas because it is a very closed culture that really tries to retain its autonomy, independence, and heritage in any ways possible /(which definitely has put a strain on "development" in some aspects, but it is a tough situation and I have an incredible amount of appreciation and respect for the indigenous of Panamá.)
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| Yani, daughter of Álvaro and her really cool bracelet making contraption |
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| My student Alvaro and his little bro Albis, with a puppy, and their cousin |
At the end of June, I made a trip out to Coclé for the weekend to meet up with my pals Nate and Phil. We stayed at Nate's site for a night, cooked, chatted, and awoke the next morning to swim beneath the enormous waterfall nearby his house. It was breathtaking, literally. Standing below the falling water felt like being blasted with a fire hose. The next day, we went to visit La Finca de Los Perezosos, a permaculture farm run by an ex-Peace Corps volunteer named John Douglas. He served in Peace Corps in 2001 and started his farm about 5 years ago, and it is truly a food forest. John is called the Lazy Farmer because he focuses on using "trash" (organic scraps) as fertilizer and the multi-use of different plants to act as natural defenses to pests and weeds. At the farm, I reunited with an old amigo and fellow Ohio brethren John, who has been in Central America working with sustainable agriculture since January, and was volunteering on John;s finca for a month. It's always an amazing occurrence when you cross paths with a familiar face in another time and place. Ohio John gave us a tour through the fruit wonderland, as we picked off leave, fruits, and flowers from enormous, healthy trees and bushes to munch on as he explained some of the basics of permaculture. Truly a magnificent creation, let nature do what nature does by just putting the elements in place. It is unbelievably sustainable, but definitely would take some time to develop/replicate, and it is hard to sell to many Panamanians who rely on Monsanto chemicals to clear hectares of monte for high yields of rice, corn, yuka, or otherwise. I definitely plan to read/learn more about permaculture, and would love to spend more time on La Finca de Los Perezosos! That night, we convinced my pal John and his 2 awesome fellow volunteers, Alan from Mexico and Holland from England, to join us for a night at the beach in Santa Clara. We shared rum and wine, stories, thoughts about the environment and the future of humanity, laughing and chatting under the starry cosmos. A big yellow moon lit a path across the dark sea, and while we rambled on about the future, time, and space, I couldn't have been more content in that moment.
For the 4th of July, many East-siders, Darienistas, and some trainees who were on their site-visits converged in Canglón, Darién toward the end of the Panamerican highway. Killed a pig and chowed on some delish Peace Corps grub (pasta salad, an amazing peanut butter spinach dip-esque dish, and even deviled eggs!) enjoyed beverages and grooved through the night to a healthy mix of American jams. We all crashed in a very nice, raised Eco-cabin in the jungle with a fridge and bunk beds (pretty luxurious by PC standards, though most of us were on the floor with as little as a sheet, or halfway off a sleeping mat (me)) A very solid independence day away from the mainland, spent with great gringo company. Afterwards, I traveled with my buddy Andrew and the trainee who was visiting him to his site in Agua Fría de Ipetí. The hike to his site starts down the road from my place, but it is a 2 hr hike up and down hills, through mud and across rivers, until reach his little valley where about 50 families live, some hours apart. It is absolutely beautiful, tranquil, pristine. We followed on the rivers up and climbed some small waterfalls, and he showed us the hydroelectric plant that has been a project of the past couple volunteers in his community. Very neat engineering.
Probably the coolest event from the last month here in Tortí was a 5 day film festival put on by the Smithsonian and University of Panama. The festival focused on the history of Lago Bayano and surrounding communities. The goal of the festival was to have campesinos, indigenous Emberá, and indigenous Kuna come together to share culture, art, and film, and to encourage the vision and shared responsibility of a common sustainable future. Some of the films were about history, specifically the construction of the artificial Lago Bayano and hydroelectric dam that powers the city, some short documentaries made by Panamanians, others about indigenous cultures in other countries (from Canada, Perú, Bolivia, Zapatistas from Mexico), but the general themes were cultural tradition, globalization and modernization, the environment, and indigenous land rights and conflict. The crew was made up of a biologist from Peru, a bunch of cool Canadians, and Panamanians.
My favorite night was when they showed a Kuna Yala documentary that made it to Sundance, called Burwa Dii Ebo. It was shown in the Casa Comunal of the Akua Yala community on the edge of Lago Bayano. An incredibly diverse group (in age and cultural identity) filled the traditional Kuna meeting place; a huge hut with a palm thatched roof, made of wooden planks and sticks, benches filling the dirt floor. The film was displayed on a white sheet hung from the ceiling, cast from a projector plugged into a Macbook. Children giggled and shuffled around the room, babies cried while mothers tried to calm their hunger or fever. There were minor electrical difficulties, but being in such a room, vibrant and teeming with life and culture was quite a unique and authentic movie theater experience. What's more, a young Kuna dude named Mani, who helped work on the film, was there to talk about the filming process. I sat next to Maninaindi on a Diablo Rojo bus coming from Panama City during a weekend trek shortly after I arrived to the city. He had written his name in my notebook, I showed it to him to confirm, and he was equally blown away at the coincidence that we would randomly cross paths again. I tip my sombrero to you once again, Universe.
What a cool opportunity and unprecedented experience for the communities in the region, to share in culture and film and realize their shared connection to land, history, struggle, work, family, and life.
So getting in the routine of things, I have noticed the more natural changes and cycles in nature, like more rain, less mangos, more mud, a "greener" jungle (as ridiculous as it sounds, it's true, the monte is alive and soaking up some serious h2o), tall corn and rice, and lots of new life:
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| Abelín, Adiel, y Hermancín hangin with some pooches |
And death:
Sometimes, death and really pull you from the cycle or routine of things, and this happened when tragedy struck Tortí last week. Wednesday morning, a family friend borrowed someone's sedan to drive 5 students to school from Curtí, a nearby pueblo. He lost control, went off the road and the car flipped multiple times. An 8th grader named Anabel was ejected from the vehicle and died in the field. Christian, another 8th grader, is still in the hospital in Chepo in critical condition. The highway out east is super dangerous. It's two lanes the whole way and the vast majority of drivers, in trucks filled with lumber or cows, buses/chivas, or regular campesinos in trucks, drive with little caution and way too much speed, even in more populated areas like by my school or in the centro of Tortí. Fatal accidents happen every month out here on the stretch between Chepo and into Darién.
We were talking about birthdays in a 10th grade class when a student showed us a picture of the mangled car that was uploaded to facebook. Anabel is related to Cansarí, one of the custodians at the school who always wears a warm smile and has the calmest demeanor. I saw him in school that morning and didn't know the victim was a relative, and couldn't tell a difference. My perspective on the whole ordeal is interesting because it was a lot of names and stories and families, and my Español is nowhere near perfect. There was a lot of sadness and confusion in the school, no one really knew what was going on or how to react, and many students travelling from that way witnessed the accident and were visibly traumatized. The school community is very large, and students come from a number of surrounding communties, but word travels fast around here and people are very supportive and caring. Hopefully the school community and the community of Curtí can pull together and recovery from the loss. And hopefully it will not take more tragedies like this one to bring some awareness or caution (or speed limit/traffic signs for that matter) to those who drive on the highway.
Keeping the family and friends of Anabel Cansarí in my thoughts and prayers. Descanse en Paz, niña.
I have been in site for a whole month, and I am itchin to break out of that rhythm a bit. Nothing like a little travelin' to change your tune for a bit; keeps things fresh. On Wednesday I am heading to Metetí in order to depart from the port around there to travel in boat to La Palma, where a few volunteers and I are going to lead an Elige Tu Vida (a kind of youth camp for kids the Peace Corps does). I am excited to check out La Palma for the first time, apparently it is pretty sweet. You have to arrive by boat along the largest river in Panamá that empties into the Golf of San Miguel in the Pacific.
Un abrazo,
Dani
Danny, your writng is as amazing as your experiences in panama. I love the festival poster, did you get one for your room? Miss you, mom
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