Don't call me Aesop

The Ngäbe sense of humor takes some getting used to, but I think I have part of it figured out. Child falling down and crying=funny. Child throwing a stick at a chicken=really funny. It seems to be part of the culture to laugh at the small misfortunes of others in a way that would certainly be considered cruel in the good ole U. S. and A. For the minor travails of others, we seem to instinctively say ‘ooooh, you okay?’ when we know they really are. Not here. You won’t find any cooing sympathy unless you really merit it, and if you fall you’ll be able to tell if anyone saw because you’d hear them laugh. It’s like the crowd at a professional wrestling match or something.

Well, everything on the Ngäbe humor scale involving me is multiplied by my gringohood. To everyone here to some extent, especially to strangers, and especially to strange children, I am a zoo animal. Completely foreign and, even when merely reading a book, completely facinating. Being stared at is why I use the term ‘zoo animal,’ because staring back has no affect. A child stares at me, enthralled with the nothing I am doing. I smile and wave back. Still staring. I stare back. Still staring, and then beckoning his friend, ‘look, he’s just sitting there and he was staring at me a second ago.’ Much how we would interact with the primates at the San Diego Zoo. Among people I don’t know well, I feel like those monkeys dressed up like humans. The orangatang looks nothing like us, but here he is wearing clothes and acting like a human, and that is hilarious and facinating. What makes these chimps such comic gold is not only their similarities to our actions but also their differences. Sure, the chef’s hat and apron makes the monkey look like a cook - and that’s genius - but it’s equally fun to laugh at the mess he makes when his primate fingers try to crack an egg. I’ve gone pretty far afield with this analogy, but the point is that people I know laugh at me too, and this is more often for things I try to do and fail, such as wield a machete, which remind them that I am different and strange.

I thought of this right after I finished my last blog entry. I had mentioned that my day’s plans had fallen through, so I had nothing to do. I decided to help Jessica’s community haul rock for the springbox they are reconstructing. I’ve realized throughout the house-building process that I enjoy physical work but really dislike carrying materials. (As a fellow volunteer pointed out, this is like saying ‘I like working, but not when it involves work.’ Touché.) If I am digging a trench or clearing land, I at least have those products to show for the work I’ve done. When I haul things, which in itself isn’t fun, all I can point to is that what was here is now there. So I’m getting ready to load up my bag with rocks, and wouldn’t you know it, dozens of people have lined the streets, in town to register for next school year. I can feel eyes on me as I grossly overestimate my own strength with the first rock I pick up. It’s almost too big to lift and certainly too big to fit in my bag, but I’m determined not to fail in front of all of the now-entertained onlookers. So I roll it over to my bag like a caveman and try to wrap my bag around it like a woman trying to squeeze into tight pants. This would be a trying and frustrating task even if I could do it well and no one was watching, but I can’t, and they are. The rock is not fitting and I can hear the laughter, so I pause to glance behind me before resuming my doomed attempt. The expression I try to convey contains more than one choice expletive and clearly doesn’t translate because the laughter is unfazed. At this point, if this is the only rock I carry today and I break my backpacking backpack in the process, I will. Just as my last ounce of self restraint is evaporating under the midday sun, an old woman whose family I know well steps from the crowd and tells me without a hint of irony or sarcasm that that rock is too big and I should go for the medium-sized ones. ‘Oh,’ I say, and calmly nod. ‘Thank you.’ She helped me pick out some good medium rocks.

I got laughed at more that day, and the next, and the next. And I will continue to. And some days it will piss me right off. That’s okay though, because this is an anecdote not a fable. If it were a fable, I’d end with some line about the valuable lesson I learned: ‘and after that day, everytime I thought about getting mad, I thought of that woman...’ But then I’d have to actually do that, and that would be hard.

Note: I usually write these blog entries up in Cerro Iglesias and add the pictures when I'm at the internet later in David, so the two are completely unrelated. Sorry. Last time, the pictures were of my house (one of the roof from inside the house) and my host family. The two pictures this time are of me and Carlos' horse hauling wood for my doors (horse:6, me:1) and of the completed front door to my nearly finished house.

I can't draw

Life here, especially in terms of getting anything done, is much more an art than a science. Science depends on assumptions and exact calculations, one step following the other as planned. In many ways I hadn’t realized, ours is a culture of science. We lead crowded, efficient lives, and our time maximization is only possible because we know how long the drive to the store will take, what they will have, and how much it will cost. We know this because we’ve done the same thing dozens of times.

Here though, doing something like traveling to the store to buy bread might produce ten different results if done a dozen times. Art requires patience, creativity, and the knowledge that things are almost never exactly as they were last time. Perhaps ‘art’ is too romantic a term. It’s more like depending on the weather: it follows a general pattern, but you never know. Things fall apart, people show up late or not at all, and this happens all the time. In the States we would call this the ‘x factor,’ but that’s not quite right because it isn’t the one forgotten link in the chain that breaks down. Every factor, previously assured or otherwise, is an ‘if,’ not a ‘when.’

This morning, I was headed to Davíd with Florentino to buy PVC piping for the aquaduct. We needed to get the money from the Aquaduct Comittee’s bank account beforehand, so the treasurer was going to accompany us to the bank. When we went to pick him up at his house this morning, he was in quite a state of surprise. Antonio had apparently forgotten the date. He had no one to watch the house, so he couldn’t go. Bam! The whole day derailed. We were planning on buying the nails we ran out of yesterday as well, so we couldn’t work on the house either.

I felt a little frustrated at first, but I’m no longer too surprised by these types of letdowns, and that takes a lot of the edge off frustration. Maybe my scientific brain is getting soft around the edges. Maybe. More likely, I don’t feel rushed to finish my house like I did a month ago, which keeps my sanity much more even keel. Sara has come and gone, so the dream of finishing the house in time for her arrival is a distant memory. More important to my emotional well-being, I am no longer living with a host family. I started living at the coop when Sara got here and have decided to stay until the house is done. I don’t have that much more privacy than I did at the daycare center, but I can use the indoor shower and cook for myself.

Of four, we have half of a wall done on my house. Flor tells me we should be done this week, but I’m in no rush.

I am lame

Last year, my brother Bradley was in Russia, and during this time he kept a blog. It was much funnier and more insightful than this particular webspace and I checked it frequently to escape the tedium of everyday life. After about four months though, he gave up, stopped updating the thing altogether. Lame.


I had a feeling that I might succumb to the same combination of weariness, boredom, and percieved lack of interest, and in fact I did. Few things in this life are predictable, but my own sloth certainly is.


While working on this house, I've been thinking about how useless excuses are to anyone but the one providing them. I don't want to hear why the bamboo is still sitting at the bottom of the hill, I just want it up here. So it is with great and self aware hypocrisy that I present the tale of my most recent month and a half, much of which will come off as a long winded excuse for why I haven't updated for so long.

After Thanksgiving, I stayed in site for three weeks. This turned out to be too long. I was still living with the host family and their nine kids, and house progress seemed to be forever frustrating. When the primary focus continues to disappoint, every other problem takes on extra weight and the days begin to sag heavy and long. Little annoyances graduate to a swell and all of a sudden, life is a frustration. How did this happen, you ask? Well, several reasons really.


1. Nothing was occuring in the way of house progress, but nearly everyday held the promise. So I stayed in site or avoided doing other things with the constantly dashed hope that we could get something done. We never did.
2. My host family contains no fewer than nine kids, four under the age of five. Nearly everyday I would come home in some level of dejection, and the constant din of screaming and crying did nothing to soothe my weary soul.
3. I stayed consecutively for as long as I did in part because I knew I had friends visiting over the holidays and I would be out of my site a bit. I wanted to build up some goodwill and prove my dedication before I dashed them by leaving a few weeks later.

It sounds like I am complaining and in fact I am, but it is in the past tense and our story has a happy ending. I came out of site December 16th and sat down to write a blog entry, but all I wanted to do was complain about my situation. That's what friends are for. That's not what blogs, which are read by worrying grandmothers, are for. So I didn't write that day. The next time I was out of my site was to pick up my friend Sara in Panama City, and the whole time she was here I was busy emersed in Panama bliss. She left this morning, so here I sit.

Our vacation in brief: First, we visited my friend Stacey at her site called Isla Cañas, in the south and had some delicious watermelon. We spent Christmas at my site, which isn't nearly as big of a holiday as Mother's Day or Patron Saint's Day, so we hiked to the river and went swimming. We went to Bocas del Toro (mouth of the bull), an archipelago of islands in the northwest of Panama. This picture is of Sara at a particularly beautiful beach there. From the beach we headed to the mountains in Boquete and hiked to the top of Volcan Baru (the highest point in Panama) for New Year's. We were told that it was cold, really cold. But it was up there with the coldest I've ever been, mostly because we were so poorly prepared. Sara and I hiked with six other Peace Corps volunteers and none of us had so much as a pair of gloves. Wow, just thinking about it makes me cold. Luckily, we got to camp early enough to gather wood for a fire. The hike up was brutally steep because the trail was actually a maintenence road leading up to the cell phone towers on top, so there were no switchbacks. Eight miles took us six and a half hours. That, along with the temperature, had me questioning my sanity, but we woke up early enough to see the sun rise over the cloudbank and watch the shadow of the mountain cast for miles behind us, and it was certainly worth it.

Waiting for us down in Boquete after the hike back were two of my best friends from college. Cameron and Corrina had been volunteering in Nicaragua and were passing through on vacation, what luck! So we spent the day walking around beautiful crisp Boquete, and I felt almost overwhelmed with goodwill.

It's quite a strange experience when two of your worlds collide, and hanging out with friends from the bay and Peace Corps peeps at the same time certainly brought home that feeling. Since August, Panama and the people I know here have been my life, nearly my entire life, but seeing friends from home is a welcome reminder that the other branches are still there and continue to grow.

Cam and Corrina decided to come back to my site with Sara and I for a few nights, and when we got back, a miracle had occured. I went to visit Florentino to see how he had been the past week when I'd been gone. The moon was full and bright. So bright I couldn't make out the craters that we've convinced ourselves look like a face. (They really look more like a rabbit). He told me that he got some of the house done and asked if I'd like to see. Yes I would. We walked to the site and there, sitting undernealth the moonlight, was the frame of a house. I was floored. I have left my site often with promises of work to be done ringing in my ears. Simple tasks, and they are never, never done. Wow, I still can't believe that happened.

Cam and Corrina seemed to bring us a wealth of good luck. The chiva was on time and not too crowded, the weather was great, the moon was full. Life was good. The next day, we hiked to a little swimming hole seen below.

They had to leave the next day, and Sara a few days later, but that doesn't make me sad for some reason. I remember when we first came to Panama and visited a volunteer. As we left him that day, I remember thinking how sad and isolated he must feel. But he was just smiling and waving, content to be where he was. I think I understand now.