A Day in the Life

(September 18, 2012 to be exact)

4ish AM- I wake up with a start, and I am not happy about it. I was having a really good dream about being in the US. It takes me a minute to realize where I am. Oh yea, my bed in my site. In Panama. Then, why did I wake up? It's only 4AM, going back to sleep. Oh. That's why. There's droplets of water falling off the roof above me right into the middle of my face. Awesome. I move my head 6" to the left, roll over, and go back to sleep. At least when it is raining it is cool enough to curl up in my blanket!

6AM- My 3-year old brother Feli throws his morning temper tantrum. Ugh. I lay in bed, refusing to acknowledge that I am now awake.

6:45AM- Sunlight is starting to make my room hot and stuffy. And I have to pee. I admit defeat and get up. I throw on yesterday's peruma, grab TP, and head to the latrine, mumbling a half-hearted, slightly incoherent blend of Spanish and Embera greeting to my host mom. After saying it, I realize my grammar was incorrect. Whatever.

Halfway to the latrine, Raquela, who is 4ish, finds me and starts yelling, 'Gringa! Gringa! Gringa!' Sighing, I stop.
A: ¿Raquela, what is my name?
R: I don't know.
A: Raquela, you know. ¿What is my name?
R:...Amber!
A: Eso. Gracias.
R: Where are you going?
A: The latrine.
R: What?
A: Right here.

I continue walking. She follows. When I shut her out of the latrine, she peeks through the cracks to see inside. I strategically hang my peruma on the door to cover the biggest crack. I finally get to pee. I notice the drain on the urine deflector is really slow. That is not going to be a fun thing to troubleshoot. I should deal with that soon. But not right now. Raquela is sitting outside the door waiting for me when I come out and tries to use my as a human jungle gym. I have to go back to my house to wash my hands but am finding it difficult to walk with this monkey. I pick her up, disengage her from my limbs, and send her unhappily back to her own house. So much for hand washing. I get home, deflect Feli's attempt at a high 5, get some hand sanitizer, then go appease the offended 3 year old. My host mom comes out with breakfast: fried platano chips, a pile of warm-ish canned tuna, and some very sweet coffee. Not bad.

8:30AM- Round up my laundry into a cubo. (cubo- bucket) Send Feli to go find the mandugo, since he was playing with it last to beat bugs. (mandugo- a hand carved wooden mallet used for laundry) Grab clorox, powdered laundry soap, scrub brush, and body soap, and shampoo. Leave my ring, sandals, glasses, and anything else not securely attached to my body in my room. Pick up the cubo, it is already heavy, because this is sheet and blanket washing day too. Put it on my head and walk down to the river. There are 2 women doing laundry on the stairs so I wade out to a canoe and pull it over to where I am standing in waist deep water, but am still close enough to the other ladies to chat while we work. Secure the rope for the canoe under my foot to keep it from drifting down river. Time to do laundry.

TO DO LAUNDRY:

Take your scrub brush and scrub down your work area so that it is free of mud, sand, and fish guts. You know it is clean when the water starts running clear.
Dump laundry into canoe, dunk cubo into river and fill about a third full. Add laundry soap and clorox. Mix it with your hands until you are covered in suds to your elbows.
Dunk each piece of laundry in the river. If it is visibly dirty, try to scrub off big chunks of mud or leaves with your hands. Then put it in the cubo. Mix cubo occasionally.
When the cubo is full or all clothes are in it, whichever comes first, mix clothes in the water like you are kneading bread dough. After a few minutes the fabric will start to have a squeaky, rubbery texture.
Start with the small things first, like underwear and tank tops. Grab a chunk of the fabric in each fist. With your palms facing each other, rub the fabric against itself between your fists. You are doing it correctly when it makes a squeak as your hands pass. (This took me weeks to get right.) Work your way around the entire article of clothing.
For visible dirt, use the scrub brush to scrub it out, but only scrub in one direction. Back and forth will put holes in your clothes faster.
Bunch the shirt or a few pairs of underwear together on a flat, clean surface. Use the mandugo to beat it half a dozen times. Fluff and readjust as needed. This somehow works because it literally beats the dirt out of clothes. You can watch the suds start turning brown.
Dunk beaten clothes into the river and rinse thoroughly. Double check for any dirty spots. Smell it. If it smells vaguely of soap, it passes inspection. Ring it out and put it in the clean clothes pile. If it is still dirty or doesn't smell clean yet, put it in the pile of clothes to be washed all over again.

Notes:
-DON'T use the mandugo on things with beads and wires, and be very careful around hooks, zippers, and buttons!
-DON'T use the scrub brush on perumas. This will tear the threads out. If they have a stain, pour clorox directly on it and hand scrub mercilessly. Then wear your dark blue peruma to soccer practice next time instead of the orange one!
-Towels, sheets, and sleeping bags SUCK to wash. They always have to be washed twice, they weigh an absurd amount when wet, and are a hassle to wrangle because one side always manages to find more mud. Wash these on a separate day whenever possible, and don't plan on having any upper body strength after you haul these wet suckers back up the hill to your house and hang them up to dry.

When I have everything in the clean laundry pile, I take off the peruma I am currently wearing and wash it. It is sort of cheating, and it's not socially acceptable to be without a peruma, ever, but I am in waist deep water and wearing shorts anyway. No one can tell, right?

I empty and rinse out the cubo and put all the laundry back in it, rinsing it again when needed because somehow some pieces of clothing magically found more dirt. I grab some shampoo and my bar of soap and head out to the deeper water to 'get clean'. As clean as it may or may not be, after all that work in the sun it is always good and cold.

After bathing, I put my peruma back on, pile everything in the cubo, dunk the bottom of the cubo in the water to make sure it is clean, put it on my head, and navigate my way back to my house. As I hang up my laundry to dry, I hear the grumble of thunder. Just my luck.

10:30AM- After rinsing my feet, changing clothes, and putting my hair back up I chill out in the hammock. But despite the distant thunder, it is sunny and the zinc roof is making an oven out of our house. I decide to go visit Nelva. Her husband told me he would cut some chunga leaves for me when he went upriver next and I want to see if he has them yet. On my way there, Moiz stops me to tell me the teachers want to have a meeting with us at 4, and that our grant proposal to USAID for the latrine project has been approved!!! I'm in a great mood when I climb into Nelva's house and I immediately feel at home chatting with her and watching her stitch together a plate. No chunga yet. I ask myself why I don't visit her more often. After 20 minutes or so, I have told her about the beads I have been making out of magazines since the workshop and she wants to see them. We head back over to my house. (my mom is out, hmm) Thank God we left her house, I've remembered why I don't hang out there. I have been positively slaughtered by morongoi bugs. (like gnats, only with a sharp bite that bleeds. It's gross.) I show her my beads and she picks out a few pages of my Cosmo to make some of her own.

11:30AM- It's getting close to lunch time and I am really hungry. It is a little odd that my mom isn't cooking yet, but she's MIA. I go to Aurelina's to visit, because she will always try to give me lunch, but she isn't home either. I go to Lidia's instead. Her 2 20-something daughters are there and we spend the next hour rocking their infants in hammocks and I watch them fold chip bags to weave pouches, wallets, and purses- another recycling technique from our workshop.

12:30PM- I head home hoping to find lunch. No luck. I grab a book and chill in the hammock. My mom returns a few minutes later with a pot of nanci berries on her head. Ohhhh. So that's where she went. (She was picking nanci in the monte.) She starts cooking rice and we chat about my morning. She assures me it will start raining any moment because I did laundry. Pecho (9 year old brother) comes home from school, and she sends him to the tienda to buy chicken. There is none. No chicken, no tuna, no sardines, no spam, no eggs. After listening to this convo, I sigh and go back to reading. I don't want to know where this is going.

2PM- Lunchtime, finally! Rice with a broth that almost tastes like tomato soup. It is a wonderful surprise. Also, lots of nanci juice. I race Feli and Pecho to see who can finish first. I win. I tell my mom it was good and that I am stuffed. It's a lie, but after another glass of juice I do feel kinda full.

2:30PM- Grab some TP and head to the latrine. I don't get to pee. It has apparently been popular today, and the drain has clogged completely. The front section is completely full of urine, and maggots. It looks dangerously close to the rice and broth lunch I just ate. I sigh, for like the billionth time today, and go find Moiz. Armed with a plastic vegetable oil bottle cut in half, plastic gloves, scissors, my multitool, and a long spool of wire, we go through the absolutely disgusting process of emptying and then trying to roto-root our drain in the Panamanian afternoon sun. Thank god our med kits have gloves, is all I will say.

3:15PM- Return home, and remember I told Emily I would call her. Stand on a cubo to have strong enough signal to text in a code to buy more US minutes, then stand against the 'magic wall' where one miraculously gets 1-3 bars of signal depending on how the wind blows. I am not joking. We manage a half hour phone call, only dropping the call 4 times. Not bad. I wanted to call another PCV, but my battery is dying. Guess that will have to wait. Go to the river to bathe again.

4:30PM- Meet with Moiz and the 2 teachers at the school to take measurements of the existing classroom to draft up plans that will be submitted with a proposal to our representante for another classroom. Our school currently has 3 teachers but only 2 classrooms. It is sort of inconvenient. It felt good to talk about ground plans and sections and to think about the nitty gritty details of drafting, even if it was free handed. We then shared the good news with them about the latrine project, and scheduled 2 days next week for Moiz and I to come in an teach sex ed, and a 3rd day to do a recycling lesson.

6:15PM- I get home and my host dad has dinner for me: a fried fish and 3 boiled bananas. When he ducks into the kitchen, I ninja some of my hot sauce out of my room, drown my bananas, and hide it again before he comes out with more nanci juice. Yes! AND someone went and picked oranges today. Double win. I sit sucking oranges (Panamanians don't eat them, they just suck the juice out of them) while my family goes to church. I go to my room and listen to 5 whole songs on my ipod.

8:00PM- I go to Moiz's house to pick up the handbook with our sex ed lessons in it and hang out in my hammock for a bit.

9:15PM- I get home and my family is already asleep. I have been out late tonight! I put my peruma on the nail to put it back on it the morning and crawl into my mosquito net, tucking myself in securely. I put Vicks on my fresh morongoi bites from Nelva's and fall asleep almost immediately. It has been a really good day.