This Past Week

I thought I'd share a little about what last week was like for me since it's somewhat representative of the Peace Corps experience.

It's December, which means copious amounts of rain.  It also means I read two and a half books the past couple of weeks in site.  Atlas Shrugged and The Path Between Two Seas are great by the by.  But this past week wasn't just about reading in my hammock in sweat pants with cinnamon tea with a touch of honey and powdered milk.

I also went up to Altomono to discuss potential work on their aqueduct.  I've had a bunch of fruitless meetings and this wasn't really an exception.  But there are a few people that really want to work so I keep finding myself in Altomono.  Plus a 3-hour hike through the rain forest and scenic vistas isn't a bad way to spend the day.

I collected money with the water committees in Solaite and Quebrada Grande.  Attendance left something to be desired, but it's a process.  Poco a poco.

I held a water committee training with Gualaca.  They learned how to use receipts and manage community funds.  I was supposed to collect money with them last week, so I crossed the river only to find the whole community was at a funeral.  I rescheduled for a few days later.  Then it started to rain and rain and rain.  The river rose and I couldn't make the new date because the river had risen and crossing would have been dangerous.

We started building a new house for the administrator for the Red, essentially Panama's welfare system.  Unfortunately, the house is about 25 feet from my own.  No one bothered to ask me about it and I don't know if I'm really allowed to complain.  Instead, I woke up to the sound of the machete outside my house.  Shhht... Shhht... Shhht...  They were clearing the grass where we would bury the posts for the house.  I know it will mean people trampling through the flowers in my yard while they visit the administrator (based on past experience with crowds). But there wasn't much I could do.  I sucked it up and helped.  One thing about my time here is it's given me a better sense of humor.  I just laugh at these things now.  It's much less effort to just go with the flow.

The kids came over as they do everyday.  Reading books.  Making bracelets.  Coloring.  Talking about what animals live in Africa and Asia.  Making bets on whether it will rain in the next two hours.  Those are the major activities with the kids.

I left through Kwite as I always do, although this time it was without Jon.  He had already left to visit his family for the holidays.  So I hung out with his counterpart, Paulino, and his family.  I ate dinner with them and spent the late night explaining to Paulino and a few others about inflation.  This naturally turned into an explanation of the solar system, what stars and planets were, how we orbit around the sun, how the moon orbits around us, eclipses, seasons, gravity, sending a man to the moon (news to Paulino), Mars rovers.  Needless to say it was quite a night.  I have to say it was also one of my favorite Peace Corps experiences.  To see the faces light up as questions were answered and pieces falling into place was extremely rewarding.

So that's a typical week.  A little bit of everything with periods of nothing sprinkled throughout.

San Jose, Costa Rica

I know it's not "life in Panama", but I figured I might as well blog about San Jose since I'm here (in transit back home for the holidays).  San Jose is the launching off point for every foreigner's Costa Rican holiday.  As such, there isn't a whole lot to see in San Jose itself.  The people are friendly.  The food is great. They have one of the coolest pedestrian walk signals I've ever seen.  The little guy runs in a fairly fluid animation.  As the clock counts down its final seconds, the little man continually speeds until he's sprinting in place.  Our walk signals seem so boring in comparison.

There are a few large markets, one of which was founded in 1880.  The markets are busy with Costa Ricans and the occasional gringo buying meats, cheeses, produce, spices, grains, and household goods.

I found a more rundown establishment to take lunch and sat down to a plate of frijoles negros, tajadas, arroz, pollo con salsa, ensalada verde, y algo mas que yo no sabia, pero lo fue mas sabroso que todo (warm squash salad maybe?).  The locals on the bar stools on either side were joking with eachother.  From what I could gather someone's team lost miserably yesterday.  I'm guessing it was soccer since they said it was a 90-minute slaughter.  The food was both cheap and excellent.

San Jose has areas with a definite Spanish feel- pedestrian thoroughfares like La Rambla in Barcelona, colonial architecture, people conversing in Spanish.  ;)

I wouldn't want to spend a week here, but it has its charm for a 24-hour layover.  Tomorrow is off to San Francisco for a few weeks to celebrate the holidays with family and friends.

Climate Change - A Relevant Analogy

Over the past few months I've been trying to define the essence of why development work is so hard.  If it were easy, well, the developing countries would have already developed.  On a macro level there's a slew of issues from poor governance to the educated workforce leaving for greener pastures to poor allocation of aid.  But seemingly, on the community level, these factors shouldn't really come into play.  Why is my personal development work so hard?

In essence, I'm tasked with implementing behavioral change.  I'm trying to rally a community around completely foreign ideas.  It's one thing to organize and motivate around something that everyone believes in.  It's quite another when they've never heard of the ideas you're proposing.

That brings me to climate change, a good analogy to illustrate this point. Let's imagine that it's 1998.  The Y2K crisis is still off the map.  Dot coms are booming.  The economy is doing well. Seemingly America has hit its stride.  You're working for a small outfit lobbying for better environmental policies.  Your role is education.  You travel all over the US meeting with people on college campuses, coffee shops, etc.  But it's 1998.  Green buzzwords haven't drifting into the collective conscious.  Times are good. People are complacent.  For all your competence in listing off the problems on the horizon and what we need to do to change course, you have this feeling it's all falling on deaf ears.

Let's fast forward to today.  While people know more than they did twelve years ago, we're still not exactly storming the halls of Congress.  We're in a crisis folks.  This isn't just about saving obscure species of butterflies and villages you read about in National Geographic. Entire species are going extinct every twenty minutes. Over two million people die every year from air pollution.  More than 80% of the world's natural forests have been destroyed.

But how do you mount a green revolution?  How do you bring climate change to the forefront?  It's so abstract.  Temperature differences of a degree or two?  Ocean rises of maybe a foot in the next century?  The statistics seem almost palatable.  There are dire consequences for inaction, but it seems so far off, so removed from daily life.

So that's life on the Rio Mananti.  People are dying from totally preventable health issues.   But it's hard to tease those deaths out of the white noise of life where people come and go.  People acknowledge that sicknesses come from drinking contaminated water and there is a basic understanding of disease transmission.  It's just not quite enough for action.  So for now, I keep on keepin' on with the idea that eventually these ideas will stick, that behavioral change is just around the corner.

Site Photos

• Random Calante wildlife
• Quebrada Grande, where your donated Cub Scout uniform ends up (Author's Note: Jon and I were first white people to visit Quebrada Grande, as in... it's remote)
• Seco bottle in "preparation" for a Mother's Day baile
• Kids helping out around the house
• Dos Tigres coil burning to keep away the mosquitoes
• Jamming out with Polo
• My favorite old man (in Panama, don't worry Gramps), Ignacio, wailing away on a dead coconut tree in preparation for building a house.  As an aside, Ignacio is amazing.  He's late seventies and has the muscle tone of a teenager and seemingly boundless energy.  He took the ax over from the younger guys to show them how it was done

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