Tech Week in Panamania
This adventure begins when I woke up to finish packing at 4AM on Sunday
the 3rd. It had been a short night since a crazy party the night before
had music so loud that, even though I had an 8PM curfew, I was awake
until after 1AM. So we were already off to a great start for the
'hardest week of PST'. I left my house at 5:15 and picked up Andrew and
Kerri en route to the Diablo Rojo ('Red Devil' It's an old school bus
painted crazy colors and typically has loud music) that Chet arranged
with his Dad to drive us to the central bus stop on the Pan American
Highway. We went 20 min west to the stop, switched buses, and then went
40 min east to the national bus terminal to get tickets to take us 6
hours west. (Welcome to Panamanian travel, friends.)
We got to the terminal (Albrook) at 6:30AM, and stood in line until 7:35 when the first 9 in our group were able to get tickets on the 8:30AM bus, but the other 10 of us had to come back at 8:30AM to pick up our tickets for the 9:30 bus. So we all went off to find breakfast. At 8:15 I went with Tyler and Jordan to the ticket window and had to cut the line of 100 Panamanians waiting to get tickets to talk to the woman at the window. I was afraid we were going to have problems with the angry Panamanians glaring at me, but Tyler and Jordan literally had my back, smashing themselves in behind me and in front of the rest of the line. I got our tickets without incident and distributed them to the remaining 10 of us. I ended up in the back of the line and by the time I got to our group at the actual bus, the woman taking tickets told us that our tickets were no longer good because the bus was full. However, Tyler had already made it on the bus so at least he was headed in the right direction. I however, had to take the remaining 9 tickets back to the window to cut everyone once again to get them exchanged for the next bus. I did so, and this time Danielle and Jordan had my back, but when we got our new tickets the doorman would not let us out to our platform where we had left the rest of the group and our stuff because we were too early for our next bus, and it was sketchy that 3 of us had 9 tickets. Ugh. I finally convinced him to let us through (AKA kept arguing with him until he was tired of having to deal with me) and he let us through. We tried to get on the next bus, but we apparently had to wait for the next bus. But somehow she did put Bob on that bus, I'm not really sure what happened there. But then there were 8. The next bus came, and we tried to get on again. This time the driver told us that we were at the wrong platform, that we should go upstairs for our bus. I didn't believe him so I asked around some more and found a woman who was also on our bus, and we hung out with her. FINALLY our actual bus came and we made sure that we were the first 8 on it do there was no chance that we could get bumped again. At 11AM, 5.5 hours after this trip started, we were passing the Santa Rita exit off the Pan American Highway...right where we started. Fortunately most of us were so tired that all of this was just ridiculously funny and we had a good laugh for several minutes after we all finally boarded the buses.
The rest of the ride was uneventful thank goodness, and I did get a skype phone call from the fam, so that was cool. We got to Tole only about an hour late and the chiva ride to Chichica was squished and rainy but we had a pretty view until they closed the canvas sides in on us. Then it was just dark and airless. When I met my family that night my host dad and my uncle were building my bed, using a chain saw to carve boards out of a tree trunk and then hammering it all together without any sort of measurements, and it all went together pretty smooth. However, I soon discovered that the bed was shorter than I am, and when I laid out flat on it, the bed stopped halfway down my calves. Sleeping on my side worked for a night or two, but then the bruises on my hips from sleeping directly on boards made me resort to the foot overhang. It really wasn't bad except for two things: the door opened flush into the foot of my bed, so if I was sleeping and someone entered (they did that a lot) my feet got smashed between the two (I learned how to recognize the sound of the door opening even in deep sleep very quickly) and the other was that my feet stuck out, outside of my mosquito net. So, alas, after a week, I counted 82 bug bites on one foot alone. Itching is my new favorite pastime. (Don't tell me not to. I know not to. But scratching hurts soo good!) Also, I used my SFO hoodie as my pillow for the week, and it fared pretty well for me.
Sunday night's dinner was a glass of chichime de maiz, a warm drink made of chopped up corn, water, and a little bit of sugar in a glass. Imagine drinking a lukewarm corn on the cob smoothie. It's like that. It wasn't bad. But...that was it. Then 2 small pieces of yucca and some strong black coffee for breakfast on Monday morning and I was worried. I knew PC was arranging lunch for us each day so I wouldn't starve, but without a real breakfast or dinner I was very concerned that it was going to be a rough week.
About 30 minutes in to the first day of tech work I massively tore my pants climbing up a hill- from the zipper in the front to the pockets in the back. It was a 20 min hike back to my house that I couldn't really leave for so I borrowed some duct tape from Nathan and took care to tread lightly the rest of the day. Regardless, by the time I was hiking home at the end of a day of water surveying I was pretty sure that it was a little breezier than it should have been!
I owe my math teachers an apology right now. Yes, this is actually really hard for me to admit, but in order to do my PC job I have to use some trig functions. So...Mr. Aaberg from my high school pre-calc class who taught me stuff I was absolutely certain I would never use, thanks. If I get a site that needs surveying done for an aqueduct, I am literally going to be using these trig equations for every 20 feet of my waterline. It surprises me every day what random life experiences and skills come into play whilst living the Panamanian life.
Dinner on Monday night was a decisive improvement with rice, chicken, and avocado. Also I had this playdough like ball of stuff that tasted somewhat like corn. Not sure. I was trying to get to know my 3 little sisters(ages 9, 10, 16), and learned that they loved stories about princesses and adventures...but couldn't get them to tell me any stories. I quickly realized that though they had heard of Snow White and claimed her as their favorite, they didn't actually know any of the stories. And thus began story time. I started out with the story of Beauty and the Beast because it was the easiest for me to translate and I know the details really well. So I could relay the story to them, and draw pictures of things (like Lumiere and Cogsworth) when words failed me.
Throughout the week this would evolve into a nightly event, and even though Ngobere women and girls are very quiet and shy and rarely speak up, my sisters would gather around my table as I was finished my dinner and wait. They never said a word, but when I finished eating and found my notes (I started prepping my stories and researching my words earlier in the day) when I asked them what they were there for they would say nothing, and then if I asked them if they wanted a story they would smile. So over the course of the week we went through Rapunzel, Snow White, The Lion King, and Peter Pan. Peter Pan was really complicated and took a lot of prep work from me, and when I told it on Friday night, I was able to tell it detailed enough to last just over half an hour. At that point my audience was my sisters, the boy from next door, and my host mom who brought her sewing out to the table I was at to listen too. The fun part was that yes, I was telling the story, but when I struggled with words or ideas I could play pictionary with them to get the missing piece and by the end of the week I could get my little sisters to talk to me without looking at the floor. And Friday at the cultural session my 10 year old sister even came to watch us, then walked around with me holding my hand as we talked to other aspirantes and watched the boys get their butts kicked by the Panamanians in volleyball. She then invited me to play beisfut with a few of her friends and I quickly realized that beisfut is kickball. On a team of 8-12 year olds, I am great at kickball, even when playing in the mud wearing a skirt.
So my family, consisted of my mom, my dad, my 3 sisters, and the extended family next door. Our house was 3 rooms with dirt floors and walls of strips of bamboo. The kitchen was on one end where they cooked over a fire to prep all the meals, which was almost always pretty smoky. Then there was a main room with sheets hung up on one end with a bed behind it for my parents and 2 of my sisters. Then the other small room off to one side with my bed and the bed of my 16 yr old sister. The porch outside is where the table for all of our meals was, and I liked being out there more anyway with more light and a breeze. My family had 1 flashlight for after the sun went down (by 7 each night) and they were super jealous of my headlamp. Btw, there's no such thing as too cool for a headlamp in Peace Corps. Those things are like gold, because keeping them in batteries is tough.
More about the actual tech work we did coming in the next blog post.
We got to the terminal (Albrook) at 6:30AM, and stood in line until 7:35 when the first 9 in our group were able to get tickets on the 8:30AM bus, but the other 10 of us had to come back at 8:30AM to pick up our tickets for the 9:30 bus. So we all went off to find breakfast. At 8:15 I went with Tyler and Jordan to the ticket window and had to cut the line of 100 Panamanians waiting to get tickets to talk to the woman at the window. I was afraid we were going to have problems with the angry Panamanians glaring at me, but Tyler and Jordan literally had my back, smashing themselves in behind me and in front of the rest of the line. I got our tickets without incident and distributed them to the remaining 10 of us. I ended up in the back of the line and by the time I got to our group at the actual bus, the woman taking tickets told us that our tickets were no longer good because the bus was full. However, Tyler had already made it on the bus so at least he was headed in the right direction. I however, had to take the remaining 9 tickets back to the window to cut everyone once again to get them exchanged for the next bus. I did so, and this time Danielle and Jordan had my back, but when we got our new tickets the doorman would not let us out to our platform where we had left the rest of the group and our stuff because we were too early for our next bus, and it was sketchy that 3 of us had 9 tickets. Ugh. I finally convinced him to let us through (AKA kept arguing with him until he was tired of having to deal with me) and he let us through. We tried to get on the next bus, but we apparently had to wait for the next bus. But somehow she did put Bob on that bus, I'm not really sure what happened there. But then there were 8. The next bus came, and we tried to get on again. This time the driver told us that we were at the wrong platform, that we should go upstairs for our bus. I didn't believe him so I asked around some more and found a woman who was also on our bus, and we hung out with her. FINALLY our actual bus came and we made sure that we were the first 8 on it do there was no chance that we could get bumped again. At 11AM, 5.5 hours after this trip started, we were passing the Santa Rita exit off the Pan American Highway...right where we started. Fortunately most of us were so tired that all of this was just ridiculously funny and we had a good laugh for several minutes after we all finally boarded the buses.
The rest of the ride was uneventful thank goodness, and I did get a skype phone call from the fam, so that was cool. We got to Tole only about an hour late and the chiva ride to Chichica was squished and rainy but we had a pretty view until they closed the canvas sides in on us. Then it was just dark and airless. When I met my family that night my host dad and my uncle were building my bed, using a chain saw to carve boards out of a tree trunk and then hammering it all together without any sort of measurements, and it all went together pretty smooth. However, I soon discovered that the bed was shorter than I am, and when I laid out flat on it, the bed stopped halfway down my calves. Sleeping on my side worked for a night or two, but then the bruises on my hips from sleeping directly on boards made me resort to the foot overhang. It really wasn't bad except for two things: the door opened flush into the foot of my bed, so if I was sleeping and someone entered (they did that a lot) my feet got smashed between the two (I learned how to recognize the sound of the door opening even in deep sleep very quickly) and the other was that my feet stuck out, outside of my mosquito net. So, alas, after a week, I counted 82 bug bites on one foot alone. Itching is my new favorite pastime. (Don't tell me not to. I know not to. But scratching hurts soo good!) Also, I used my SFO hoodie as my pillow for the week, and it fared pretty well for me.
Sunday night's dinner was a glass of chichime de maiz, a warm drink made of chopped up corn, water, and a little bit of sugar in a glass. Imagine drinking a lukewarm corn on the cob smoothie. It's like that. It wasn't bad. But...that was it. Then 2 small pieces of yucca and some strong black coffee for breakfast on Monday morning and I was worried. I knew PC was arranging lunch for us each day so I wouldn't starve, but without a real breakfast or dinner I was very concerned that it was going to be a rough week.
About 30 minutes in to the first day of tech work I massively tore my pants climbing up a hill- from the zipper in the front to the pockets in the back. It was a 20 min hike back to my house that I couldn't really leave for so I borrowed some duct tape from Nathan and took care to tread lightly the rest of the day. Regardless, by the time I was hiking home at the end of a day of water surveying I was pretty sure that it was a little breezier than it should have been!
I owe my math teachers an apology right now. Yes, this is actually really hard for me to admit, but in order to do my PC job I have to use some trig functions. So...Mr. Aaberg from my high school pre-calc class who taught me stuff I was absolutely certain I would never use, thanks. If I get a site that needs surveying done for an aqueduct, I am literally going to be using these trig equations for every 20 feet of my waterline. It surprises me every day what random life experiences and skills come into play whilst living the Panamanian life.
Dinner on Monday night was a decisive improvement with rice, chicken, and avocado. Also I had this playdough like ball of stuff that tasted somewhat like corn. Not sure. I was trying to get to know my 3 little sisters(ages 9, 10, 16), and learned that they loved stories about princesses and adventures...but couldn't get them to tell me any stories. I quickly realized that though they had heard of Snow White and claimed her as their favorite, they didn't actually know any of the stories. And thus began story time. I started out with the story of Beauty and the Beast because it was the easiest for me to translate and I know the details really well. So I could relay the story to them, and draw pictures of things (like Lumiere and Cogsworth) when words failed me.
Throughout the week this would evolve into a nightly event, and even though Ngobere women and girls are very quiet and shy and rarely speak up, my sisters would gather around my table as I was finished my dinner and wait. They never said a word, but when I finished eating and found my notes (I started prepping my stories and researching my words earlier in the day) when I asked them what they were there for they would say nothing, and then if I asked them if they wanted a story they would smile. So over the course of the week we went through Rapunzel, Snow White, The Lion King, and Peter Pan. Peter Pan was really complicated and took a lot of prep work from me, and when I told it on Friday night, I was able to tell it detailed enough to last just over half an hour. At that point my audience was my sisters, the boy from next door, and my host mom who brought her sewing out to the table I was at to listen too. The fun part was that yes, I was telling the story, but when I struggled with words or ideas I could play pictionary with them to get the missing piece and by the end of the week I could get my little sisters to talk to me without looking at the floor. And Friday at the cultural session my 10 year old sister even came to watch us, then walked around with me holding my hand as we talked to other aspirantes and watched the boys get their butts kicked by the Panamanians in volleyball. She then invited me to play beisfut with a few of her friends and I quickly realized that beisfut is kickball. On a team of 8-12 year olds, I am great at kickball, even when playing in the mud wearing a skirt.
So my family, consisted of my mom, my dad, my 3 sisters, and the extended family next door. Our house was 3 rooms with dirt floors and walls of strips of bamboo. The kitchen was on one end where they cooked over a fire to prep all the meals, which was almost always pretty smoky. Then there was a main room with sheets hung up on one end with a bed behind it for my parents and 2 of my sisters. Then the other small room off to one side with my bed and the bed of my 16 yr old sister. The porch outside is where the table for all of our meals was, and I liked being out there more anyway with more light and a breeze. My family had 1 flashlight for after the sun went down (by 7 each night) and they were super jealous of my headlamp. Btw, there's no such thing as too cool for a headlamp in Peace Corps. Those things are like gold, because keeping them in batteries is tough.
More about the actual tech work we did coming in the next blog post.
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