Calante Work Update

I should start this post with an apology.

Dear Calante Project Donors,

I did not build any composting latrines in Calante.  I'll get to how this all came about, but I just want you to know that I'm sorry.  However, all is not lost.  I was able to use some of the funds to build a second spring intake for the water system.  Instead of latrines, Calante now has unfettered access to clean water all year long.  This second spring will bridge the gap during the dry season and allow for any population growth in the future.  The remaining funds will be rolled up into a general fund for future Peace Corps projects.  Once again, my apologies.


Sincerely,
Austin

Sigh.  I remember when I was competent.  I remember when I got $#!* done and people thought, "Wow.  Austin gets $#!* done."  But that was all back when I understood the language, the people, the culture.  And maybe more importantly, that's when I was with people that understood me, the vision of what we were doing, and wanted to achieve that vision just as much as I did.

The nitty gritty is that families who had originally wanted latrines started to get cold feet. One family left the community (not because of the latrines).  In general, despite all the charlas and conversations, there was a disconnect about what was expected of them.  I would be building the latrines with them, not for them.  They would be paying a small portion of the cost.  This was all explained ad nauseam, but it took starting to bring in the materials for doubts to come out of the woodwork.

Another key aspect of composting latrines is adoption rates.  It's a great technology if used correctly.  Unfortunately, there's a long history of latrines falling into disrepair and not being used.  I didn't want to be a case study for future groups.  Furthermore, I didn't want to have an example latrine that still had all the bug and odor issues of traditional pit latrines.  My community already did not like pit latrines.  I was worried without a feeling of ownership, these families would actually dissuade adoption and make things even worse.  These sorts of things happen in development work.

I started to feel it in my gut at the beginning of the year.  Then in March they started talking about not wanting a follow-up volunteer.  In April we were back on track.  In May they didn't want a follow-up volunteer.  In June we were back on track.  You get the idea.  In that kind of climate, taking on the latrine project just didn't feel right.

So no, I didn't build the latrines.  I did build and connect the second water source.  When discussed in general terms, it suddenly becomes a theme for service.  There's an emotional roller coaster that is all consuming and riddled with misunderstandings. You don't complete what you had planned. Instead you end up changing plans and doing something else that may have been the better decision to begin with.

A Few Favorite Books - Part 2

Last year, I posted a few favorite books from the first year of service.  This past year has been filled with a lot of wonderful books as well.  Here are a few worth checking out:


Non-Fiction

Mountains Beyond Mountains
Tracy Kidder

Being a development worker, it's always refreshing to read about someone kicking @$$ and taking names.  That man is Paul Farmer and well, he's just great.  The book is a well written window into his life and inspires you to shine.

What is the What
Dave Eggers

I spent most of this novel with a soreness in my throat.  I'll be honest, it's a tear-jerker.  This memoir follows the fascinating story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the Sudanese civil war.  We live in an unfair world for much tragedy to fall on one man's life.  But Valentino remains optimistic and the result is a beautiful story.  A truly powerful novel.

The Big Short
Michael Lewis

I just read this book last week.  What a great primer on just what the hell happened with the economic collapse.  Michael Lewis expertly breaks down the lead up to the collapse: key players, types of bonds, credit default swaps, etc..  A must read to understand how we got to where we did a few years ago.

The White Man's Burden
William Easterly

I've read a lot of books on development over the last two years.  While I admire the efforts of Jeffrey Sachs, Easterly's analysis rings truer. A lot of money is being poured into programs fighting poverty, disease, etc.  This aid is important, but so is coupling these programs with accountability and feedback from the population it's meant to serve.  It's an eye-opening thesis that's completely accessible.

Fiction

Everything is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer

I had already read this book a few years before the Peace Corps and loved it.  I saw a copy floating in the volunteer lending library and I have to report, it's still just as amazing. The story follows an author retracing his family's roots in Ukraine.  He solicits the help of an ad hoc tourist agency in Ukraine and what transpires is witty and magical in a One Hundred Years of Solitude kind of way.  Just wonderful.

A Few Favorite Albums - Part 2

Last year I posted a blog on a few favorite albums.  Here's some favorites, old and new(ish).

The Best of Muddy Waters
Muddy Waters

I keep going back to this album.  What a great sound.  I don't really have the vernacular for a comprehensive music review.  I just know I always feel good listening to Muddy Waters.

Wounded Rhymes
Lykke Li

She's great, really great.  Just listen and tell me you're not a fan.

So You Wanna Join the Peace Corps? - Part 1

This YouTube video has been floating around for some time and admittedly, I'm running out of things to write about on the blog.  It's a cop out, I know, but I have to postpone final thoughts for next month when I'm actually packing up and heading back home.

The video is a humorous if not cynical view of Peace Corps.  I wish I could say that none of it were true.  That being said, I still think Peace Corps is a great organization and I've been extremely lucky to have this experience.  Thank you US taxpayers.  You've foot the bill for some amazing personal growth and development work in the region in which I live.

And here's another YouTube video for good measure.  Fun.  Completely applicable to my experience.

Photos from Robert's Visit

I spent the last week hosting Robert here in Panama.  It's been a great time as the photos will show.

• Panama Vieja - This is a World Heritage site where you can walk amongst the ruins of 16th century Panama
• Obligatory visit to the canal
• School children in Calante
• The finished spring intake in Calante (yay for water all year long!)
• Kwite work day -  The main line in the community has been buried.  Now all that's left is connecting each house to the line and installing faucets in the home.  This has been an epic project and it's finally coming to an end (not a moment too soon).  Kudos to everyone involved!
• Bocas Island - Yeah, life is rough

Anecdote #4,138: Panama City

I can't say I've spent a great deal of time in Panama City, but I'm always struck by the skyline upon approach.  It stands tall and majestic.  Most striking is the endless construction in Panama City.  It feels as if every Panamanian is either welding, bending rebar, pouring concrete, or watching someone else do one of the three.
 

At the foot of countless skyscrapers is where the living actually happens.  It's gritty and smelly.  Soot fills the air and sewage dumps out to sea.  It's a developing city in the trappings of  first-world metropolis.  And it's this dichotomy that marks many larger cities across the globe.  While the elite eat ceviche on their 30th-floor balconies, the majority live in the slums that pepper the cityscape.

From David, it seems appropriate that you cross the canal to get to the city as if to explain the wealth you see before you.  The funny thing, it turns out, is Panama has about the same GDP as Vermont, which in turn has the lowest GDP in the US.  Panama also has only 3.5 million people.  What that means is that the skyline at night is surprisingly dark. So why all the construction?  Why the impressive skyline?

I can posit a guess.  Developing country in Latin America without a lot of regulations.  Neighbors Columbia.  We built the canal.  Now we're building the skyline, one white line at a time.

Anecdote #4,137: Agencies in Conflict

The Ministry of Education does a remarkable job (usually) of getting food for school children to some pretty remote places.  Six hours from roads and electricity, kids still receive a school lunch.  One favorite among everyone are the government-issued galletas.

The small cookies come in different flavors, all packed in the same small plastic wrappers with an official-looking government insignia.

Panama is a beautiful place.  The Smithsonian Institute has set up shop to study the wide range of flora and fauna that Panama has to offer.  As such, there are agencies setup in Panama to protect land and promote environmental stewardship.

That brings to to anecdote #4,137 about my time here.  I live along a beautiful river.  The boat ride I take into site takes me from expansive marshes with white egrets into thick jungle with parrots flying among the vine-laden trees.  And so it is with great pain that I tell you the number one source of trash in the area:  those damn cookie wrappers.  They litter the trails.  They litter the river.  I'll hike along trails more frequented by tree frogs and snakes than humans and there's a wrapper wedged among the roots and vines.

It would be great if Panamanians had a sea change and started picking up their trash, but I think that's still a ways off.  In the meantime, if I were head of an environmental agency, I'd walk down the hall of the office in Panama City and tell the Ministry of Education we had some room for collaboration.  Biodegradable food wrappers.  Curriculum on environmental stewardship.  It would go a long way towards helping the environment in these remote and stunning locations.

Educacion en el Campo

I've spent much of my life thinking the US education system is a sad state of affairs.  While other countries are investing in their future, as Americans, we're becoming obsolete.  Underfunded, undervalued, we're slowly shooting ourselves in the foot.  Even so, my time in Panama has given me a new-found respect for all that we are doing.  Here's a few highlights of what education means out in my neck of the woods.


1.  Hours of Instruction:  School is only in session when teachers are actually there.  Most teachers come from Santiago, a city a full day's travel from my site.  That means they stay in the community during the week and take long weekends, sometimes really long weekends.  I get it.  They want to see their families and the system creates this problem by not hiring locally or providing overlapping shifts to allow for these family visits.  But it's the kids that are losing in all of this.

Some of the school day is taken up by physical education, which may combat childhood obesity back home, but is laughable when the majority of kids are going to go on a three-hour hike to get bananas right after school.

Then there's the logistics of a school in the tropics.  If it's a heavy downpour, it's hard to hold class under a tin roof.  When the river rises, the kids that have to cross the river to get to school are staying home that day.


How can the children in my community hope to compete in the workplace when they only receive four hours of education a day on the days that school is actually in session?!


2. Facilities:  If you're lucky, like those in Calante, the school is a cinder block structure. Often times, it's just an open structure with a concrete or even dirt floor.  Calante is the only school in the area with electricity (solar).  In general, that means no teaching aids like projectors, TV's, DVD's, computers, etc.  The desks are usually something out of a black and white photo of a US classroom in the 1950's.  Kidding aside, they may actually be the same desks.  Chalkboards aren't much better.


Again, how can these children hope to find work in the future?!

3.  Access to Education:  Calante just started providing 7th grade this school year, making it a K-7 school.  Many older kids hike as much as two hours from neighboring communities to go to school.  Some have been waiting years to attend 7th grade because the cost of going to school afuera is prohibitively expensive.

Just the other day, one of the kids, Rodrigo, told me he was worried because the new 7th-grade teacher is going to Changuinola to report that her students are receiving failing marks.  He said there was talk they may cancel middle school.  Now this is where I really start to lose respect for out-of-touch Panamanians.  I reassured Rodrigo that the problem wasn't with him or the other students.  The responsibility lay with the teachers of K-6 that had let it get to this point.


How can these kids be expected to perform at the level as urban kids when you never gave them a fighting chance?!

4.  Curriculum:  The English books are all in English.  If you can read and understand the instructions to do the exercise, you probably won't get much out of the exercise.

Subjects are taught as rote memorization.  There is no analysis, no writers workshops, no thought to different modes of learning.  No, just copying pages from the board or textbook to the notebook.  Reading aloud signifies reading comprehension.  This is true across Panama.

The question becomes, how can Panama compete globally when others are learning to think critically, synthesize, analyze, and create?!

5.  Language Barrier:  Spanish is the only language spoken in the classroom (not including broken English).  Most teachers don't understand Ngabere, so they don't allow it.  What it means is that many kids have trouble understanding the curriculum and so, by 5th or 6th grade, there are many that still cannot read or write.  Those that can usually perform around the level of a 1st or 2nd grader back in the US.


How can you expect to educate the indigenous population when there is no acknowledgement of the language spoken in the home?!

6.  Homework:  We do a lot of learning outside the classroom.  Maybe that's in the form of homework, reading, the internet, or even watching TV.  What happens when the parents are illiterate, when there are no books in the home, no educational stimuli?  In a context outside of defining traditional working roles of men and women, the kids stop learning as soon as they leave the classroom.  In many cases, homework is a few minutes of work, often copying something without any analysis.


How can these kids compete when they are losing countless hours of education outside of school?!





Like most things in life, this is a process.  There used to be no school a generation ago.  The ministry, for all its faults, has managed to get teachers out to locations more remote than Peace Corps.  There's government-issued textbooks and basic teaching supplies.  And most importantly, there are proud parents and happy kids.

Education is important out here.  There was a school in Calante well before the aqueduct.  And for all the things I'd like to improve for these kids, there's also much to celebrate.

100 Days Left

In fewer than 100 days I will complete my service as a Peace Corps volunteer.  As the end of service becomes a more distinct point and not some abstract idea out on the horizon, I've taken to more reflection about what my time here has meant.

I've realized how much of my time has been defined by seemingly unsuccessful projects.  Against a backdrop of my initial expectations for what I thought I could accomplish in my community, the results seem meager.  Attempts at health education were met with confusion, attempts at organization with indifference.  And in this context, I began my descent down the rabbit hole of self-discovery.

I began questioning myself, my efficacy, my world view.  My optimism and overall mood ebbed and flowed.  You come into the Peace Corps with this conglomerate image of the successes in the developing world and living the day-to-day felt a lot like finding out Santa Claus doesn't exist.

Much as the seven-year-old learns to define Christmas without St. Nick, I've learned how to define my time here as a success.  My self-deprecation is unfair to everyone.  It overshadows a reality of excited community members.  In a culture buttressed by fatalism, I see hope.  In an region still new to the idea of breaking from family groups, people are coming together to organize as a community around the common goal of bringing water to the people.  In an area where the government drags its feet, half from limited access, half from prejudice, we're building and maintaining water systems.

I've learned to leave the "appropriate technology" and "Millennium Development Goals" back in the air-conditioned office where they were first hatched.  I've left behind the lofty vernacular for simpler "indicators".  It's the kids that were once scared of the giant gringo who now run down the trail just so they can hold my hand and walk with me.  It's the muchachos that come by to listen to Bob Marley and talk about girls.  It's the moms that love me for reading with their kids.  It's the dads that beam with pride for having shown me how to cosechar in their fincas.

In hindsight, I took coming from different worlds too personally.  The misunderstandings and challenges were symptoms of something much larger that my self-perceived ineptitude.  While many of my ideas haven't blossomed, I can't pretend to know what may have taken root.  And, at the risk of corniness, at the very least, I can always say I helped till the soil.

It's tempting to wish I would see more in place by the time I leave, not as a monument to myself, but to be able to come back home and say the stories from Hollywood and our collective consciousness were true.  One really can go abroad and do all these incredible things.  And while some do, for the rest of us, this is only a half truth.  The full truth is something more complex, but it's this complexity that gives it its richness.

It turns out the truth is rounded by mutual growth.  The gap is filled by laughing about our differences.  It's something intangible, yet palpable.  Part of it is progress, the slow change, but more importantly, it's the sharing of the human experience.