Hello there!

Where do I even begin? With an excuse I suppose. An apology, to anyone who still bothers to check this little web corner. I stopped writing initially because I felt I had run out of steam. Check my last two entries. Pretty weak, even by my standards. I felt like I had been forcing things, shoehorning themes and revelations.

Every now and then, I’ll get an email from a friend with whom I’ve been out of contact and if I don’t answer it right away, it grows. It grows; not just the email I am to write but the responsibility I feel to justify my ever-extending neglect. After a month passes, I feel that nothing short of a Tolstoyean tome connecting the recent events of my life with the broader questions of life itself will suffice. And this blog is like an email to all those whose inboxes I don’t want to clog. So it grew, and that is kinda how a third of a year passed without an update.

Other factors intervened as well. I’m sitting at the co-op’s computer on a beautiful late afternoon that reminds me of a summer evening back home. It was sunny all day, so there’s plenty of juice in the batteries and I don’t feel bad using it. It’ll be sunny tomorrow. Incredible, that knowledge, that confidence. Two weeks ago, the co-op would have been socked in by fog and rain and we’d have just enough energy left over from a mostly cloudy day to turn on a few lights. Not even enough to watch dubbed Bonanza reruns, which take priority over the computer and nearly everything else. The weather has only recently turned, turned all of a sudden like a flash flood in reverse.

But before I get to the weather and our struggles with it, the past few months from thirty thousand feet. My family came and made me feel like a rock star, especially up here in Cerro Iglesias. A month later, twenty volunteers-in-training came to help with a latrine-building project. Organizing that week, the food, the host families, the transportation, is not something I ever want to do again, but now that I am decently removed from it, I can convince myself it was a worthwhile experience and a good opportunity to meet some new folks. Anxious to be the guest not the host and to avoid the pressing rain, I visited some friends on the Caribbean side. All of them live in Ngäbe communities, but the differences between them and Cerro Iglesias reenforced how big this small country is. The end of October marked one year in our communities, and as a group we celebrated on the beach and spoiled ourselves at a nice hotel. Three weeks later we were up in the slightly chilly hills to celebrate Thanksgiving just like last year, except this year the food came on time and some volunteer set a fire on the roof and got sent home. That’s a lot to skim over I know, but I’m playing catch up.

Back to my favorite cure for a convervational lull, the weather. Starting in August, as my family can attest (sorry), downpours were fairly common. In September they were frequent, and for about a month between mid-October and mid-November, the sun was a recluse, only emerging every four or five days to rub his eyes and clear the newspapers off the front porch in his bathrobe. As I’ve said before, the weather is like food in that I don’t realize how much it affects my mood until it’s consistently bad. Heavy rain is paralyzing; umbrellas are useless and roads become rivers. Once the rain starts, wherever you can find shelter closest you stay and wait. The daily afternoon stagnation gives me the restless and stranded feel of a sailor adrift. I remember pondering a blog entry I planned to title ‘Water, water, everywhere, but the fact that I can drink it doesn’t stop me from cursing,’ but I never got around to it. Probably for the best, that’s a pretty poor title.

The weather got under my skin and in my head, and through my roof unfortunately, but the effect it had on Cerro Iglesias was much more dramatic. There are two roads into town, the main one is made out of rock and leads directly and steeply up from the highway. The other road is clay and is less steep, connected to a paved road to the west. Any road that isn’t paved needs constant care and maintenance, especially during the rainy season. Because the government was planning on paving our main road the following year, the community decided to let it go to seed. Even before the rainiest part of the year, it became undrivable and the only way in was the clay road. Last year, even with a maintenance crew working almost daily, the main road was impassable on the rainiest days. The clay road didn’t have a chance. Chiva tires tore through it like frosting and the sun didn’t fulfill his drying responsibilities. Days passed without a single car making it up. Stores ran out of rice, sugar, and coffee. Teachers stopped coming up to teach elementary school, not wanting to walk when they’d been able to ride in the past. Everything stopped, everyone huddled and buckled down, knowing summer would dry us out eventually. Not to sound too much like the Bernstein Bears, but how the people responded was kind of inspiring. The community shed the imposed Western values of capitalism and invidualism for a communal sense of survival. The question wasn’t ‘how is Alfredo’s chiva’, the only one that actually belongs to a Ngäbe and hence is always broken, it became ‘how is our chiva (and where is it stuck)’ The sacks of rice that arrived at the co-op after much struggle were a community triumph, our rice.

I studied development in college, so you might think that I would have already known this, but it came as a surprise that transportation is the most important single factor in affecting change. I had always thought it was something like education, healthcare, or even entrepreneurship, but each of these is nearly impossible without reliable transportation. For anywhere not on the coast – and excluding helicopters and jetpacks, even though those would be sweet – a community cannot advance very far beyond subsistence without some sort of road. It’s very difficult to build a school or a clinic without a road and nearly as hard to stock it and staff it once you do. Getting products in and out to establish trade with the rest of the world is done two hundred pounds – what a strong horse can carry – at a time. Every inch of life in America is paved and so I can’t think of a contemporary analogy. Imagine an outpost in The Old West. The small town is surrounded by nothing for hundreds of miles in all directions yet the store still somehow sells Swiss chocolate. A rutty wagon trail is the only tenuous thread connecting the town to the modern world and when that washes out they go from foreign sweets to what they can grow or kill. I’ve gotten a little more dramatic than is necessary here, but even in Cerro Iglesias it is easy to become used to modern conveniences like bread, easy to forget how easily we can revert to horseback and root vegetables. Maybe that’s why they like Bonanza.

I add the pictures later, so a note on them: the first five are from various Independence Day parades, check out the through-the-pouring-rain dedication. The last three photos are of our clay road in stages of deterioration, this is the last hill into town, if they clear it, they're home free.