Found some more amoebas; how fitting that my first three
months in site be bookended by these unwelcome guests. At least I’ve learned – from the first time –
the symptoms and how to manage them: go immediately to the lab to poop in a cup
and begin taking anti-parasite medication.
As a result, I have a little extra downtown with access to electricity
and internet to share another post.
Got a couple new limericks, each with their own special
story:
Splash of mud, flower still in her hair
Fitting end to the day for poor Claire.
But she smiled once more
At the metaphor:
“Sunshine with a sh** stain” is her flair.
This one really is Claire’s story – a fellow volunteer
from my training group, she is in the Sustainable Agriculture sector, and we
were roommates in our host family’s house for Ngӧbere training – but the phrase
she coined seems to describe Panamá just perfectly, many days. There is a lot that is beautiful and
wonderful about Panamá, about the people who live here – and while we go into
each day hoping that we will be able to enjoy the “sunshine,” inevitably, we
always get to see the “sh** stains,” too.
I suppose that is the nature of our work.
You can find many other such metaphors, here: last
weekend I attended a birthday party. It
was an hour hike up the hill to a house with a gorgeous view of the Bocas Islands;
I spent the night up there, awoke to help gather firewood for cooking the
massive pig they killed the day before, and then learned from Ema, my original
mochila-making teacher, how to make the strap for my first mochila (bag). As the day wore on, and it became clear that
we would not be eating at noon as had been suggested, I began feeling quite
hungry and irritable. The mochila was
finished, and without anything to occupy me, Roger began asking me bazillions
of questions: “How do you say “piedra” in English?” (Rock.) “How do you say “ahorita” in English?” (In a little bit. This is a silly question, because it’s really
more a cultural thing of time than a language thing.) And on top of that, a Mama Tada church
service is going on in the next room (a Ngӧbe take on Christianity, the service
is conducted entirely in Ngӧbere and, from what little I understood, mainly
consists of the most fantastic cacophony of chanting human voices that I have
ever heard).
So I’m hungry, and tired of answering English questions,
and my ears are hurting from two hours of chanting, and am ready to run out the
door and down the hill to escape the whole thing, when, miraculously, the most
majestic rainbow appears – a complete arc across the sky, stretching across my
entire community, in front of the sea (none of my pictures did it
justice). Surely, it was a sign from God
that I was to be saved from this uncomfortable situation. I ran outside to enjoy it and take
pictures. As rainbow faded, I returned
inside, feeling a bit refreshed, ready to take on the unpleasantness once more. Roger asks me how a rainbow is formed;
excited to have a fun science discussion, I ramble about light and color and
prisms for a few minutes. Then he asks:
but when did the rainbow begin? I’m
confused. Do you know the story of the
rainbow?
Oh. You want to
talk about Noah’s Ark. That was really
tricky of you.
So he explains to me how the rainbow was really formed,
for the first time, as a promise from God to never drown the world again. And I feel very uncomfortable, having already
expressed my views on the matter – that the Bible is not a science textbook. And so, this rainbow, a perfectly beautiful thing
to be enjoyed, has had all of the awkwardness of our cultural clash smeared all
over it.
Another example: bananas.
The Bocas province is an especially prolific producer of bananas; the
port of Almirante is dominated by the giant Chiquita Banana barges, and the banana
plantations stretch for miles around Changuinola. All to ship those wonderfully delicious
yellow fruits all over the world.
Bananas have always been one of my favorite fruits, but once I got into
college I ate fewer of them, thinking of how far they had to travel, how
energy-intensive it was to get them to me.
Now, I get to eat all the bananas I want, guilt-free! The only problem is that everyone here eats
them in their most unappetizing form: green and boiled. Bananas – which had the potential to be
wonderfully delicious mature fruits – are instead a very bland chalk-like
starch when they are green. And the
reason for this habit of eating green bananas turns out to be that the food
energy works out better in the immature bananas. And, when you’re poor and practicing
subsistence agriculture, it’s important to get as many calories as you can. So no more tasty bananas: what a bummer.
That has been my primary realization for the week – it is
a real bummer to be poor.
Sure, obviously, intellectually – but also physically,
emotionally, I think I have finally made the intellectual connection to the
physical and emotional feelings.
The concept of “cuando hay” illustrates an entire
mindset, an approach to living. “Cuando
hay” means “When there is.” It’s the
answer to lots of questions: Do your kids eat sweets? Cuando hay.
How many meals do you eat every day?
Three, cuando hay. Do you go to
the parade every year? Cuando hay plata
(money). The thing is, you never know
when “cuando hay” is going to be. That
is, you never know when you are going to have the money, or the food. This means that when there are resources
available to be consumed, they are consumed.
All of them, immediately. When
people sell their cacao, or earn their paycheck, they spend the money the same
day (the 16th and the last day of every month are crazy times to go
into town). If there is food to be
eaten, it gets eaten. There is no such
thing as moderation or saving. This has
an unfortunate consequence with respect to alcohol (which so far I have mostly
only heard about rather than seen), and the inability to plan ahead (like save
up $20 to build a pit latrine). But for
me, it has been most vividly expressed with respect to food.
I never really know when I am going to be eating
next. I’m lucky, here with my host
family, in that they do always feed me, and relatively well (which makes me
better off than a lot of volunteers), but I still never know what time that is
going to happen. And when I am visiting
other parts of the community, then I really am not sure whether I will be given
a meal or not. And when I go all day
without having anything to eat, I do get really cranky – “hangry” (hungry +
angry). It’s really hard to do work or
to have patience or to be nice when you’re hangry. So when I am given food, I eat it – even if
it’s rice and sardines and I really don’t like it – because I’m not sure when
I’m going to eat the next time, and I don’t want to feel hangry in between.
And so I have come to appreciate the strong focus and
connection to food – it is an entirely different perspective, a relationship
with food that I am not used to having.
I spend more time thinking about food than I ever have. The people always make the connection between
food and work – Willy will say, “This food is a result of the hard work of
collecting and carrying all of those lemons yesterday.” Ángel has said, “If I don’t work, I don’t
eat,” (and he enjoyed my quip that “In order to eat, you have to work, but in
order to work, you have to eat”). And
this relationship is even stronger if you live in a community of truly
subsistence farmers – where everything you eat is something you grew
yourself. My community at least has a
source of outside income – cacao – which they use to buy food, so we get to eat
a protein source every day and vegetables many times, which might not have
otherwise been possible.
I remember back to my first meeting in Quebrada Pastor,
when we talked in general about projects and my role as a Peace Corps
Volunteer. We had not discussed any
project in particular, yet the first question I fielded after the meeting was
from a woman who asked, “So who is going to provide the food for the workers on
the project?” I was baffled; we had not
decided on any projects, there was so much other planning that had to happen, I
didn’t even know exactly how funding for projects worked… I had no idea how to
answer this question. Finally one of my
counterparts saved me: she just wants to know whether the person who is being
helped (building the latrine at their house, or their branch of the aqueduct)
is going to provide the food for the workers.
And now I understand why this was of primary importance. Food is always the first thought; it has to
be addressed before anything else.
I am not used to this way of thinking about food, nor do
I enjoy it. It is a really bummer part
of being poor. I am looking forward to
living in my own house and providing my own food, having control over when and
what and how much, having certainty with my steady (if small) Peace Corps
allowance. My ability to escape from
this mindset of “cuando hay” is just one more way in which there is a
difference, an inequality, an injustice between me and my companions in the
community, and a vivid reminder of what I am working for, ultimately. To be able to escape that mindset, to be able
to plan ahead and save and have enough resources that they can be used in
moderation as needed instead of as soon as they come into possession: to not
have to live like you’re poor.
Early in training, Leigh, a fellow Environmental Health
trainee, offered this definition of poverty that she had read: poverty is like
living in the ocean in a boat that is just too small; you’re always trying the
bail out the water, but the boat just keep filling up, and so you don’t have
time to do anything else. You can’t plan
ahead, you can’t make preparations, you have no security, you can’t make any
choices about how to spend your time or where you want to go, and any big wave
could just completely wreck you. That’s
a hard way to live. And that’s why we’re
here – to try to help escape that trap.
The hard part, of course, is figuring out how, which I am
still in the process of doing.
Nonetheless, the Peace Corps office has already asked for us to report
on how successfully we have pursued our goals so far. I submitted my first Volunteer Report Form
(VRF) at the beginning of October. There
was not much to say after only a month in site, but we were still asked to
submit a “Success Story” from our service.
I opened my Success Story with this limerick:
First VRF and struggling a bit:
A success story with truth and wit?
No diarrhea –
There’s an idea!
That would be some really solid shit.
Pleased with myself, I finally got back the feedback on
my VRF recently; most of it was quite positive, but I did receive this gentle
admonition with respect to my Success Story, which I have since memorialized
into a limerick:
Submitting poop pun limericks is fun,
Just got feedback on my latest one:
“If you wouldn’t mind
Synonyms, could you find?
We do send all these to Washington.”
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