A Month in My Flip Flops

Yes, all activities were done wearing flip flops. Unless I was barefoot. :-)

Sunday, February 3rd

Wake up at 6AM when the girl next to me starts elbowing me repeatedly with as she brushed her hair. The bus takes a pit stop for breakfast but I am too tired and cranky to buy anything. Two and a half hours and a boat ride later, Ben and I finally arrive on Bocas Island, our 26 hour cross country bus ordeal finally over. We find out our next boat doesn't leave until 6pm so we catch a ride to Starfish beach and spend the afternoon in paradise. Our ride back shows up late so we get back after 6, terrified we missed the boat. Turns out the driver is still in the casino so we meet up with Tricia and Grayce and watch the Super Bowl until he is ready to go at 8pm. We get to Tricia's island in the dark, get to her hut, make dinner, and go to sleep immediately, about 9.30. I haven't been this tired since college.

Wednesday, February 7th

We start moving at 6.30am and Tricia makes oatmeal and coffee for breakfast. The 4 of us Volunteers are ready to start working by 8.30 when we meet up with some of her community members to throw the top floor of the latrine. We spent a few hours building the forms and support tables and mixing cement. We get the floor and back doors thrown just in time for lunch of rice and stewed hot dog. We clean up and haul materials back to Tricia's house, arguing over who gets to shower first. The water is out so I decide to wait. A few little boys come over and ask me to read them the book 'The Lion King' and I do, but it is in English so I have to translate it to them as I go along. I adapted the story according to the parameters of my vocabulary! I took my phone up the hill to check for messages, came back to shower. Tricia made us a batch of brownies on her stove out of locally grown cacao. It was so delicious. We made an early dinner of some kind of tomato paste, pasta, and chopped veggies then settled down for movie night. Tricia kinda burned the first batch of brownies so she made us a 2nd batch that were super gooey this time. We plugged her laptop into the car battery and watched Inception. Partway through a neighbor came over selling lobster tamales and we each bought some. My stomach was starting to hurt so I saved mine for later. After the movie we talked about how inception is basically our job, then set up beds and went to sleep about 10. Tossed and turned with a stomachache. Probably due to too much chocolate!

Thursday, February 14th

Alarm went off at 7, got up at 7.30 and helped myself to the hostel's awesome breakfast bar of coffee and toast. Checked the internets, dressed, and caught a cab with Sarah at 8.30am into Panama City morning traffic to get to the Peace Corps office. Picked up a Christmas care package from the secretary I didn't expect to be here yet! It is full of chocolate! Melinda is awesome! Worked in the Volunteer Lounge until a medical officer could see me about the stomachaches and nausea I have had for a week. (Apparently Bocas is famous for its bad water. I didn't know that.) She orders a series of tests for me at the lab. I go back to the lounge and finish my paperwork then catch a metrobus from the office to the main terminal, transfer buses, and take it to the hostel. The driver goes passed my stop even though I hit the button so I have to get off at the next one and walk back. At the hostel I find some Volunteers from G71 that I haven't seen since our IST in November so we chat for a bit, then I set off walking for the lab. I find it within half an hour and guys on the street try to sell me flowers and balloons for Valentine's Day like 3 times. On my way back, the same guys try the same thing all over again. Back at the hostel I shower, start a load of laundry (2nd time I have used a laundry machine in country!) and put on something that is kinda clean. Get invited to dinner with the girls. I am not hungry but the idea of Greek food sounds good so I get a gyro anyway. I eat part of it and feel terrible after, but it tasted really good at the time. On the way home I get myself some Sprite and the groceries I need for site. I get 2 months of city food for less than $30! Back at the hostel again I hang out with other Volunteers swapping stories and share a bit of the christmas chocolate since it is Valentine's Day. At 11 I get my laundry, repack, and am in bed asleep by midnight. (The next morning I find out from my labs that it was probs just a virus so by noon I am on a bus headed back to the jungle.)

Saturday, February 16th

Monique gets me off of her floor where I am sleeping in Meteti at 5am with coffee and we pack up the stuff for the seminar and are out by the road waiting for a taxi by 5.30. 2 hours later, we still haven't found a driver willing to take us to Port El Salto. The aqueduct engineers agree to pick us up when they finish their breakfast. They get us, we go to Port Lajas Blancas so they can pick up some stuff, and we eventually get to Port El Salto, only an hour late. We meet up with another PCV, Chris K and 2 of his family members there, then hop in the canoe. Pena Bijagual is 45 min down river, so we get there about 10am, unload our stuff in Chris M's hut, and get the water seminar started. We begin with a name game followed by selection of the water committee and water system technicians, I give a lesson on how bad water can make you sick and how to prevent the contamination of water in the home, and then we have lunch of rice, lentils, and sardines. After lunch the engineers take us on a tour of the system where they teach everyone about the intake, the solar powered pump, the water filtration house, the storage tank, the air release valves, and finally the spigots all over the community. We even got to climb to the top of the 48,000 gal tank! After the tour we jumped in the river and I watched the boys race the kids down the muddy river bank and then throw themselves into the water. Back in the hut Chris M made us great spagetti and campo garlic bread from homemade bread. He made an adobe oven under his house that a youtube video taught him! The food was so good and I was hungry for the first time in well over a week. At 7.30 we hung up 3 hammocks for Chris K and his family and the other 3 of us crawled into mosquito nets below them. Chris M took his dishes to the river to wash them and I was asleep before he got back.

Wednesday, February 21

My alarm goes off at 6am, the normal hour to wake up in my community. I hit the snooze button until 7.30, and then continue sleeping. At 8.45, I berate myself for being a lazy pile and get out of bed. I mix powdered milk, oatmeal flakes, cinnamon, hot chocolate powder, and water in a bowl and it eat uncooked and sit in my hammock and watch the community for a while. I decide to be productive so I start writing the play for my health seminar. Suddenly I am starving. I look up and it is almost 2pm. I make an egg-veggie-pasta dish for myself and finally get to eat at almost 3. I remember that I should go visit some people but I am sweating sitting in my hammock and don't want to leave my hut. I work on posters for my health seminar instead. At 4 I go visit Elpidio but he is not home so I play jump rope with the girls for like 5 minutes, buy some garlic from my neighbor, and go home. I sit in the hammock stitching my plate and watch the teenagers play soccer. At 6 I realize I am almost out of daylight so I quick clean up the hut, do dishes, clean the stove and countertops, lock up the food in rodent and roach proof buckets, and head to the river to bathe. I get home as the last of the daylight goes away at 7. Inside my room I sit in my 'inside hammock' and read on my tablet until 8, then call Deanna in the US. My phone runs out of money on it within half an hour, so I go back to reading for a bit. I tuck myself into bed at 9 and listen to 1 song on the ipod before I go to sleep. (Minstrel's Prayer, in case you were wondering)

Thursday, February 22

Again with the alarm at 6am, and I continue to test the snooze button until 7, when I finally decide it is working properly. I get up, repeat the oatmeal concoction, boil some coffee grounds in a pot of water with a lot of sugar, and settle down for breakfast. Victor shows up to declare it is a work day so I tell him I will be over in 5 minutes. I finish breakfast, wash dishes, change into work clothes and head over to Misa's latrine. We spend the morning cutting lumber, framing the house, and putting the zinc roof on top. (Keep in mind these are all hand tools! Power tools don't work so well without electricity!) When we finish Misa's we go over to do David's. We finish that one at 1.30 and I go to Misa's for lunch. It is my favorite dish in Panama- stewed tomatoes and scrambled eggs on rice. SO GOOD. I can't believe my luck. We find out Avelino is short some lumber for his house so we can't build it today and it is really hot so we call it quits. I go home and grab my laundry then head to the river to wash it and bathe. I get home about 4, hang up the clothes to dry on the line, change, and sit in the hammock. I start to compile my survey results and fall asleep for about half an hour. At 5.30 I quickly fry a few plantains and sautee the last of my peppers and onions, then do dishes and bathe in the river again. Once home I bring my laundry in, make some tea, and sit in the 'inside hammock' to read. The battery on my tablet dies with just 60 pages to go before the end at 8pm so I plug it into my backup battery to charge overnight and go to sleep early. About 10 minutes after blowing out the candle I hear rustling in my roof. It sounds like my old roommates are back. I tell myelf I should probably get a cat.

Tuesday, February 26th

Danielle's alarm goes off at 5am and her and her parents start moving and packing up their stuff. I get up about 10 mins later. We catch a taxi from Meteti's 'hotel' to the main gas station where I get in a car with 3 other Volunteers and someone from the Department of Health drives us down the road to the restaurant and drops us off with 4 guys from the South Command of the US army. They drive us in SUVs 2.5 hours to the reservation of the Kuna de Wargandi, we drive through a river, and arrive in the community of Uala. A few minutes later a double propellar helicopter arrives and a medical unit climbs out, and then 2 black hawk helicopters land on the other side of the soccer field. We all hike across the community to the school where they set up a medical tour to treat the community members and I meet the army doc I will be translating for. He was a reservist on a 4 month deployment about to finish up and is an emergency surgeon in his normal life. I had translated for a medical tour before, one done by some missionaries in January in a Latino town, so I knew the process, but I had no idea what I was really in for until the first patient sat down. She only spoke Kuna. The doctor only spoke English. I spoke English, Spanish, and some Embera, but Embera is nothing like Kuna. We quickly found Kuna translators in the community. Thus began the most frustrating game of telephone of my life. The doctor would ask a question about the patient's symptoms in English, I would translate it as close as I could get it in Spanish, the Kuna guy would repeat some version of it in a language that has a tenth the vocabulary of Spanish, and the woman would answer. The kuna guy would give me her answer in Spanish, I would repeat it in English, and then the doctor and I would try to reconcile the answer with the question because often times it was very clear that something was lost in translation. Or the doctor would say things like 'tell the kid I am going to put this needle-less syringe in his ear' and we had to attempt to get that idea across to him before he started screaming. Our most exciting patients were a kid with a bug in his ear, a one week old baby with a cold that was painted blue, and a 4 year old that was 16 pounds.

At 12.30 it was lunchtime. We each got an MRE. First, they are really hard to open, but I got to take advantage of that to use a switchblade, which was fun. Secondly, they are delicious. I had meatball marinara with mashed potatoes. The army guys were fascinated by how excited the PCVs got by things like powdered butter, jalapeño cheese spread, turkey nuggets, and dried peanuts. Seriously. DELICIOUS. It was like Christmas. If anyone tells you that MREs are gross, they lie. Give them a bowl of chicken feet on rice or stewed pig heart or a cow's stomach lining or dirty river crawdads or boiled green bananas. MREs are delicious. I mean, of all the things in this post I just gave them an entire paragraph. Now that it is 2 months later, sometimes we still remind each other, hey, remember that one time we went to Uala? Remember when we got MREs? They were so good! Anyway.

After lunch Natalie and I went back to the river to find out that the SUVs had gotten full and gone back town without us, but would be back for us later. At 1.30, we sat on a rock and laughed at the soldiers trying not to get wet as they got ferried across the river in canoes pulled by small naked Kuna children. At 2.30 all the helicopters were gone and we were the only 2 left and we were hot and cranky and getting bug bitten and the joke about getting left behind by the army was no longer funny. At 3.30 we were swimming in the river fully clothed playing with kids. At 4.30 our ride finally got back to pick us up and the driver was like, '¿What? You went swimming?' And we were like, 'What? We're PCVs. That's how we do!' 2 hours later as we are shivering in the backseat of the car because we are wet and the guys have the AC cranked like Americans in the jungle would, one of them asked us, 'So what is it you guys do every day? Like, what is a typical day?'

I just laughed.