I'm Back

After a clearly too long of a hiatus, I've decided to get back in action with the blog writing. As I have been keeping up with my journal while I am in the community, I have found that even though I enjoy the stress release and happiness that writing in it brings, it's very cumbersome and heavy to bring in and out of my site- if you know where I live you understand why carrying as little as possible is key. This is why I am continuing the blog so I can get those thoughts out that I normally leave in my journal. And so for those of you who don't know, allow me to enlighten you on what goes on in my world since I've been gone from blogging...

I live in a very small latino community in the mountains of Panama, technically called Panama Oeste or West Panama. This means I'm still inside of the province that is home to the capital of the country but I am worlds away. No matter where I am going, it will always take me 1 1/2 hours to get to the main highway and this is ONLY if the cars are coming all the way in to my community. When it is the rainy season (we are finally getting over that!) the cars either will go up to a certain point which is where the gravel road stops and conveniently or, rather, inconveniently for me, right where my community begins along with a purely mud road OR it won't come at all and then the walking ensues for 2 hours, through sometimes knee deep mud, crossing through 2 rivers (only when they are low enough) and arriving at the asphalt road. But I love it! What a great exercise to have to walk the 2 hours... only if you don't have to haul a lot of shit.

And when people have come to visit me or I talk to people on the phone, they will ask me questions like, "Why are you still sleeping on an air mattress? Why don't you just buy a real bed?" And then those who are visiting have to walk out with all of their belongings and quickly realize why- it tires you more than you would think. Those hills look small and easy enough to tackle but this is not so when you are full up of 'carga'. So it isn't that I wouldn't love to have a real bed, I just don't want to carry it.

Just ask Parker, my now fiancee (hooray!). He will tell you all about how I warned him about a two hour walk in to the campo of Panama and how he kept reassuring me that he had walked for 12 hours to the top of a mountain in China, smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Ten minutes into the walk that would take us to my house, with all of our carga (my parents loaded him up with stuff) he was ready to turn around. Everything ended up ok (except for me getting amoebas) but it just goes to show that things aren't always as easy as they might seem.

This applies to what I am doing in my community. I think to myself, sure, it will be easy to start home gardens with people and have them be successful because the gardens are close to their houses and so surely they will take care of their little vegetable patches. So not easy. People have asked me why their seeds have died or why they haven't sprouted. So I go through a battery of questions about the general upkeep of the garden and get "No's" for about every answer. This is hard because they figure that if I show them how to do something, it will work always and that they can just leave it like they do with their crops of rice or corn even after I have explained how important it is to keep close watch on their gardens. This is the biggest learning experience for me. That explaining something to someone doesn't necessarily mean they will get it the first time... or maybe even the second or third times.

With that being said, I can finally answer Jennifee's question: Have you learned a whole bunch of stuff about yourself that you didn't know before? (Or something to that effect, right, Jennifee?) The answer now is yes. I can, in fact, be very patient. I do, in fact, speak very good Spanish (more or less), especially when I am getting heated about something. I have learned that I LOVE not stressing myself about things that I cannot control. Like waiting 2 hours in the hot sun for a truck to come- that's ok. What else was I doing anyway and what am I going to do that can't wait a little bit longer? This isn't to say that I don't get frustrated still and that I'm always chill and mellow. It very much annoys me to wait from 8:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday for someone to tell me I have a 5:30 doctor appointment on Thursday. Quite irritating.

And so, I will be back to share more of my adventures of campo life. And if there is some burning question that you want answered, diga me.

Until next time...