In Quebrada Pastor they placed me,
Bocas del Toro’s where I will be:
They should not allow
Province of cacao,
Drinking chocolate all day by the sea.
I have just returned from a week in Quebrada Pastor, a community of about 1000 people along the Chiriquí Grande – Changuinola highway, in view of the sea, and yes, I may have had chocolate to drink five times in one day while visiting various houses.
Quebrada Pastor (“Shepherd’s Creek”) is a Ngӧbe community in the most northwestern province of Panamá (the yellow region in the map below that has all of our sites marked). The Ngӧbe people are an indigenous people of Panamá that currently live throughout the northwestern part of the country. Most of the people in Quebrada Pastor have previously immigrated from the Comarca Ngӧbe-Bugle (a semi-autonomous region in Panamá), and the main activity in the community is growing, processing, and selling cacao and other produce, such as bananas, limes, and coffee.
The people have been very welcoming to me throughout the week I visited, and they seem very excited that I am here to help with environmental health projects. My community guide, Lucas, has had a lot of experience – having been the community guide for two previous volunteers – has held numerous leadership positions, has done a lot of community organization efforts, and is well-respected throughout the community; he will be (and already has been) a great asset. My host family – Willy, his wife Mechi, their two-year-old daughter Heidi, and his father Bernardo – has also been very welcoming and treated me as one of their own; we’ve had some fascinating conversations, and I think we’ll get along well.
During our community meeting, I received the Ngӧbe nickname Chinӧre (roughly pronounced, “Chee-nwa-reh”), or just Nӧre. “Nӧre” is like a term of endearment, like, “love” or “darling,” and “chi” means “little.” The way Lucas described it, Chinӧre might be what you could call a kitten. My understanding translates this roughly to “Pretty little thing.” I’ll take it. As long as they aren’t calling me “Gringa” to address me, I’m happy with it.
Unfortunately, toward the end of my visit, the chocolate-drinking – or some other consumption of contaminated water – seems to have had some very immediate consequences. If I had had any doubts about the presence of water-borne illness – and hence the need for environmental health work, providing potable water and proper sanitation – in my community, all such doubts were alleviated:
Said, “I want to help, and sleep in a hut,
Live the problems I solve, no matter what,”
Then learned this could mean
Working in between
Diarrhea peeing out my butt.
It’s true, I was pretty miserable, between vomiting and diarrhea for a whole day, but I did appreciate the very vivid, personal, and intimate illustration of why I needed to be there. Didn’t even take a whole week to figure that out, firsthand: mission accomplished.
Quebrada Pastor has experienced a lot of growth in the last twenty years or so, and as a result, there is a lot of opportunity for improvement. I am the third Peace Corps Volunteer in the community – the first one primarily worked on composting latrines, and the second one helped to build several aqueducts. I have the opportunity to work with the community to improve a twelve-year-old government-constructed aqueduct that no longer meets the needs of its users, to build new aqueducts in parts of the community that still lack water, to improve the maintenance and understanding of composting latrines and to provide new ones, and to improve the overall understanding of the hygiene habits and connections between sanitation and health. The members of Quebrada Pastor seem very interested in working on these solutions; I think one of the most significant challenges will be trying to work with and coordinate all the different parts of the community, which consists of distinct groupings of houses by family, separated by the terrain, as well as leaving the community self-sufficient to continue to solve these problems themselves in the future, without a volunteer.
I have a lot yet to figure out during these last three weeks of training – but it is exciting to finally have a place upon which to focus my learning efforts, and to know the community I will be calling home for the next two years! The Swearing-in ceremony will be August 28, and I will be arriving back in Quebrada Pastor the 31st. Plenty to do between now and then!
Inevitably, my camera battery died during the trip out to Quebrada Pastor, so the only pictures I have are two of the mountains in the Chiriquí province, and one tiny picture that I took with my little cell phone from the porch of Lucas’ house when I first arrived. There will be plenty more to come the next time I am in site.
The other pictures are of my training host parents (and myself) enjoying some chicken jambalaya that I fixed for them the day before I left for my site visit. The dish was lacking cayenne pepper and had proportionately too much rice for the recipe, but fortunately, this made it even more perfect in the mind of the average Panamanian.
And finally, a sign in Casco Viejo in Panama City reminds us all to Don’t Stop Believing.
Leave me a comment if there is anything else you would like to know about my community!
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