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.