Lost Stories: Sometimes, They Surprise You

Written June 22nd, 2013

If you asked me about the organization of my community, I would laugh at you. We are a hodgepodge bunch held together with chewing gum, string, and luck. I can't schedule a boat for even an hour in advance and the equivalent of a city council meeting is announced the morning of by beating the metal hubcap with rebar an hour before dawn so as to catch people before they go to work. Planning ahead is a difficult concept to grasp.

So when I got back to site on June 12th and random people started telling me that Playona would be hosting 300 gringo students for a few nights, I point blank didn't believe them. Then one  morning, 4 border police showed up on my porch asking for my help, because 300 teenagers were coming for 2 nights and 6 meals. I could no longer write off what my community had been saying for 3 days as wrong. The gringos were coming, in mass.

Still, in the village of Playona, no one moved. By Monday June 17th, with just 4 days to go before my community more than doubled in population, I was very concerned. No one knew for sure how many students, how many journalists, nor how many soldiers were coming. No one knew for sure if they were sleeping with host families or on the flooded soccer field. Some said 6 students would be assigned to every house. My house will not, under any circumstances, fit 6 more people. The who, what, when, where, and how of cooking for so many loomed over us like a pending hurricane. Plus of course, how much everyone was going to get paid for all this was a white hot topic.

After a weekend of sitting in my house reading and ignoring my community as I waited for the typical Father's Day disgusting drunken debauchery to pass, my inner stage manager was flipping out. I wandered my tiny community for an hour looking for my Noko (he had to have been purposely avoiding me, you can circuit my town in about 20 mins). When I found him I showered him in all the logistical questions that had been plaguing me for a week:

How are we getting 300 people and all their stuff down river by canoe?

How much gas for the boats is that?

Are we responsible for getting that, or are they?

Is it 300 students PLUS journalists and soldiers, or 300 total?

Where are they going to poop? We don't have latrines!

What water are they going to drink?

How are we cooking for that many?

Do our little stores know how much food they need to have for that?

Where will they sleep?

Am I going to be responsible for any of this?

Can I just leave and avoid all of it?

Is it true they are walking to Sinai? How? You guys can't walk that road this time of year! How will they?

How long will they be here?

Do they know they have to bathe in the river?

Do they know that bathing in the river means bathing in THAT?

His answer to most of my questions was 'Yea, yea, we have to figure that out.' I took a deep breath because I wanted to scream, "WHEN?!" but he must have read it in my face because he promised me we would meet Tuesday afternoon.

The meeting began swelteringly hot and humid, which then naturally erupted into a rainstorm mid meeting. We shouted and yelled at each other through it all, in a vain effort to be heard over the roar of rain on a tin roof. I tried to let my heads of the community run the meeting by themselves. I really, really, tried. They made some good progress with organizing cooking groups too. But after 3 hours of talking in circles with nothing officially being decided, I left my comfy seat on the tree stump and jumped in to help facilitate and get things moving. Both men, my Noko and the President of city council seemed simultaneously annoyed and relieved.

In the end we decided and planned the following:

-3 of our guys would drive the big canoes the soldiers were providing

-The group coming in needed to bring all the gas they would need for the boats

-The Noko would call them Wednesday to confirm how many of them there were

-(This part took over 2 hours) The women would cook in groups and we would divide up the students accordingly. We tried to get 3 equal groups but due to social and family politics ended up with 9 groups of 3-8 cooks each. Depending of the number of mouths to feed (which my Noko was going to confirm the next day) each group would get 6 students per cook so that a group of 3 cooks would feed 18 and a group of 8 cooks would feed 48, so that everyone would get paid equally.

-A task force of 5 men was created to dig 10 new pit latrines for the visitors, who would pay the workers for their labor. Part of my soul died to hear that we were getting 10 new nasty mosquito breeding cesspools.

-The soccer field would still be used for the students to sleep on, they were apparently bringing tents, but we would put sand in the parts that were flooded the worst.

-The group needed to bring their own bottled water. We talked about how all water used for cooking needed to be rain water, not river water, and that it should be boiled well.

-Each cooking group needed to build a covered rancho for the students to eat in.

-Each cooking group was responsible for their own menus and needed to tell the store owners what they needed before Friday, when the owners were going to Meteti to restock.

-The group is arriving Friday afternoon after lunch, walking to Sinai Saturday and we need to send pack lunches with them. They will walk back on Sunday and leave after breakfast on Monday.

-The artisan group is going to put up a table to sell their crafts and every woman is responsible for the sale of her own crafts.

-Everyone is going to get painted on Thursday and we will get extra jagua to paint the visitors $1 each.

-There will be a mandatory community clean up on Thursday for everyone.

-There will be no classes at school on Friday but the students still need to show up to clean the classrooms for the journalists to stay in and to prep the welcoming.

-Everyone needs to pen or tie up their wildlife by Friday afternoon. (Dogs, parrots, horses, chickens, pigs, monkeys)

I am crazy impressed with my community not just because we had what might have been the most productive Embera meeting in history, but because everyone actually followed through with their jobs. Pit latrines were dug Wednesday, albeit in the wrong place. They were redug on Thursday. Rancho construction started Wednesday. I went to Meteti for groceries Thursday morning and when I got back that afternoon, I had the messiest yard in town because everyone else had cut their grass, raked up the cuttings, pulled their weeds, picked up the trash (EPIC), and put logs or boards over puddles in the walkways. I hurriedly raked up my yard, bathed, and went over to Erica's to get painted.

Friday morning I woke up to boat motors at 5am as guys went upriver to check their fishing nets. I got up, made coffee, cleaned the inside of my house and then started doing rounds of the community, checking in with different people. Claudia asked me if it would be ok to decorate her rancho, and I encouraged her idea. Pretty soon all the teenage girls were running around decorating ranchos with parumas, flowers, and braided palm leaves.

Ben and Danielle arrived mid-morning to hang out and see what 300 gringos in Playona looked like. Danielle made a beeline to my neighbors to get painted and Ben went to the church to talk to the guys who were building benches over there. They made themselves at home and I ran around trying to get the heads of my community and the heads of the school to just talk to each other to plan the welcoming, while getting pulled into dance practice. At 12:30pm we got word that the group was 2 hours away so we all dispersed to eat lunch and get cleaned up. The gringos were coming, and much to my surprise, Playona was actually ready.