Moving into my rented house and preparing it for company
was no easy task. When you basically
live outside – in that nothing is sealed, so that bugs and come and go as they
please and there is no such thing as climate control except for a roof to keep
out the rain – it is essentially impossible to keep things clean. Now that I am entirely and solely responsible
for all household chores, I have a much greater appreciation for the monumental
task that some of these things are.
In my first two days in the house, I had already 1) glued
together a poorly-attached joint on a branch of our aqueduct feeding a
neighbor’s house that had been leaking onto my property, 2) thermoformed (used
hot oil to melt PVC into a desired shape) a replacement pipe to my branch of
the aqueduct that had been cut with a machete, 3) scrubbed the inside of the
150-gallon water storage tank that I use when the water goes out, and 4) locked
myself out of the house.
In subsequent days, I discovered exactly how long I could
store vegetables in a closed container without refrigeration before they start
to rot, constantly fought off the mosquitos that seemed to be drawn to my
bathroom, mopped all the floors only to have them covered with dirt again
instantly, and discovered all the places that cockroaches like to hide (boxes
of tea are a favorite, apparently).
And last night I was attacked by the Formics: my house
was swarming with ants, in giant clusters on the walls outside, walking in lines
into every room, crawling along the ceiling.
They waged a massive, comprehensive, full-scale invasion, and we fought
an epic battle that began with spraying DEET around the exterior of the house,
then mopping all the floors, and continuing deeper and deeper inside until I
was in my bedroom crushing ants that were beginning to crawl into the mosquito
net around my bed, threating my very last refuge. It ended with picking off the remaining
survivors one-by-one, hiding behind the pictures newly pinned to my bedroom
wall. I finally declared victory after
killing a massive winged queen, hoped I had utterly destroyed them all, and
felt like Ender (Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s
Game).
These many observation led to a few discoveries – and a
greater understanding – about life in the campo. First of all, I have an even great
appreciation for the “cuando hay” mentality that I mentioned before – not only
must you eat food when it is available because you don’t know when you’ll be
able to buy or find more, but also, if you don’t eat the food immediately, it
will very quickly go bad, thanks to the lack of refrigeration.
I also began to appreciate more the gender division of
labor that is very strongly maintained throughout the community – I found
myself wishing several times that I had a wife to look after the house while I
was out doing my work all over the community; it’s a lot to do the laundry, the
cleaning, the cooking, and the general maintenance while trying to get work
done on top of that! Plus, when I was
gone from sunup to sundown doing surveys, no one was in to house to receive
guests, an important form of communication in this place with few functional
cell phones and no email. And I am only
taking care of myself – imagine if there were children to care for on top of
all that! I am realizing that, while it
is not completely unreasonable to do all of the house chores while working
full-time in the US, the lack of modern conveniences makes house chores a
full-time job here. There’s no such
thing as microwave-ready meals, or leftovers (which is often what I ate in
college). Laundry can be a morning-long
(or even all-day) chore, depending on the availability of water (if you have to
walk to the stream to wash it) and how much clothing has to be washed. And as much as I hating waking up to see a
pile of dishes in the sink of my host family’s house, I find the same
occurrence in my sink, especially after hosting visitors and offering the
requisite drink.
So I have learned a few things from this. First, I have begun a list of the appliances
I miss the most:
1)
Laundry machine
2)
Refrigerator
3)
Dishwasher
Second, the division of labor – that women are expected
to perform all of these chores (and more, depending on the location and
conditions of the house – like gathering firewood and root vegetables,
accompanying children to school, retrieving water, etc.), lacking the
technology to reduce the time spent – has continued to inhibit women from
seeking other opportunities and roles in society. Even if the man has a sufficient education to
find a job instead of working as a subsistence farmer, the woman is still held
responsible for all of the household labor.
So even as the subsistence agriculture lifestyle has change or evolved
or shifted, allowing for more leisure time, or more educational opportunities,
women’s labor has not changed.
When I held our community meeting to discuss daily
schedules, I asked the participants who has more free time and who has to do
more work. The answers were unanimously
that men have more free time and women have to do more work. A few voices spoke up in favor of the men
helping their wives with the chores, but the prevailing notion was that women
had to do more work because the men had the responsibility of planning for the
family. Naturally, I found this very
bothersome – are women not capable of doing the planning?
At the very least, I recognize that, while I can’t solve
all of these things – like ease the burden of not having a refrigerator, or
completely reinvent gender roles – doing something like helping to provide
sufficient and consistent water in the house can go a long way to reducing the
workload of household chores.
And this month, I made a preliminary step in providing
one option for having water in the house – rainwater catchment! This little experiment is illustrated below,
with more explanation along with the rest of the pictures, most of which are
from the time Matt was here visiting, first in Quebrada Pastor, and then
traveling throughout the western side of the country:
Panama! Can you
spot the Christmas tree? Went all the
way back to Panama City for the second time this month to go pick up Matt from
the airport.
We spent our time in the community doing work:
Meeting with my boss and the community, presenting the results of my 3 months of analysis
Ferrocement Tank Construction Party! I invited volunteers from around the area to help Matt and me build a rainwater catchment storage tank, as an example to show to my community members – kind a marketing device. A few curious and interested people even stopped by and helped us out!
Vacation time! I finally lived like a tourist for a few days!
Exploring a cave on Isla Colón; the location is used as a shrine and for holding Catholic mass
Happy Hanukah! In Bocas del Toro
Staying and hiking at the Lost and Found Lodge, located in the Cordillera (the spine of mountains that is the continental divide that divides Panamá)
Hiking to a waterfall near Boquete, located in the mountains, with requisite tree-hugging, admiring pretty flowers, and analyzing the aqueduct we found along the way
Mom sent me Rosie the Reindeer, a family tradition, who kept us company for the entire trip
Venao Cove, located at the southern tip of the Azuero Peninsula in the province Los Santos. Matt, Rosie, and I pretty much had the beach to ourselves! We made full use of it – Bananagrams, snorkeling, building a sandcastle…
And returned back to my community in time for New Year’s: Dusk on New Year’s Eve from Ángel’s house
There it is – the Ngӧbe Mansion, as the Bocas Regional Leader calls it. It is unreasonably large for one person – two guest bedrooms? – but the house where the previous two volunteers lived when they began living on their own, and is plenty accessible to the road and anyone (from the community or elsewhere) who wants to come visit me!
As Mary Catherine, another volunteer in my training group, would say: “A house with a hammock is a house with a smile.”
And some thoughts about my first few months in site:
Chocolate Forest
I live in a chocolate forest
Filled with tiny red frogs
And bright green parrots
And leaf-cutter ants
And gut-wrenching amoebas
I watch the sun rise over the sea
And fall behind the mountains
And rain sweep across the islands
And clatter on the zinc roof
I hear the breeze whisper through the palms
And the screaming brakes of the semi-trucks
And the wailing of a hundred babies
And the squawking roosters hours before the dawn
I smell the sweet stickiness of orange on my fingers
The gentle rotting of cacao pods
The sharp stench of chicken sh*t
The acrid choking smoke of a trash fire
I feel the mud sliding beneath my boots
Fat drops of sweat falling from my eyelashes
Giant ants biting my ankles
The slick mazorca slipping between my fingers
I taste the mamón juicily exploding on my tongue
The picante biting back at my gums
The joints of the chicken feet like human fingers
The sourness of vomited stomach acid
I live in a chocolate forest
And speak in strange tongues
And inspect the holes of latrines
And sing songs about hand washing
And wash my clothes in poopy water
I ride the bus to the internet
And call home from my talking rock
And curse the crying babies
And make bags with plastic thread
I stare at hummingbirds flitting around the hibiscus
And take pictures of giant bugs
And make plans knowing they’ll be cancelled
And tuck my mosquito net tightly around my mattress
I set my drinking water out in the sun
And French braid my hair in the morning
And run along the highway with the trucks
And hide crunchy peanut butter in my room
I think about leaky pipes
And the definition of poverty
And what I’m going to eat next
And whether I can actually change anything
I dream up grand strategies with my counterpart
Then decide all of them are impossible
I laugh and cry and sing and fall hard in the mud
I curse my boots and the rain and the path and the mud
But I stand up again and chant to myself
I live in a chocolate forest
