The Desperation of a Salesman

Unlike my other blog posts where I comment about what I'm doing in Panama, this one is actually part of what I'm doing and allows the reader to participate. Let me explain:
I'm working with a coffee cooperative in Cerro Iglesias, and the project we hope to complete before next year's harvest will improve both the quality of our coffee and the quantity we can produce. Because I am not allowed to ask my friends and family to send down envelopes of cash, no matter how noble the cause, we solicited funds through an organization called Peace Corps Partnership, which allows other people to donate online to fund our project. Here's the website:
www.peacecorps.gov/re sources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=525-087&region=latinamerica
On that site, I think I do a pretty poor job of explaining what the money is for and who will benefit, so I'll try to do a better job here.
The money (approximately $1500) is primarily for two things: a 2 1/2 horsepower, gas-powered motor, and the materials for a coffee drying house, similar to a wood-framed greenhouse.
1. Five years ago, a Japanese NGO built a coffee processing plant (beneficio) in Cerro Iglesias so that the people could process their own coffee beans. The green apparatus in the picture is the de-pulper, which removes the bean from the fruit by forcing the beans through two revolving turbines. A wooden funnel on the second floor, which is connected to the de-pulper, allows for many bags of coffee beans to be de-pulped at once. Due to the size of the de-pulper, it can not be turned by hand, which is why we need a motor. Perhaps the NGO did not provide a motor in hopes that the community would prove its commitment by buying one themselves, but this type of motor costs $400-$500, which is money they didn't and don't have. The local cooperative managed to acquire a smaller, hand-operated de-pulper, but during the peak of the harvest it is insufficient as the processing of coffee is very time sensitive. This smaller de-pulper is also not sheltered from the rain, so when a downpour comes both the men working and coffee get soaked. With a motor to power the larger de-pulper, we will be able to process more coffee and at a higher quality, while staying dry.
2. The rain, which peaks during the coffee harvest, is the reason the drying house is necessary. Much like de-pulping, drying is very time sensitive: the longer the beans stay wet, the more flavor they lose and the lower the buying price. The drying house, which is much like a wood-framed greenhouse, will allow the beans to continue to dry when the rain comes. Right now, we place the beans out in the sun in the morning (see below) and then cover them up when the rain comes in the afternoon. Because our drying facilities are inadequate, we sell our beans partially dry, at a lower price. The drying house will allow for more coffee to be dried more quickly.
Those are the two main components of the project, but paramount to those details is the fact that the project is an investment in local agriculture, which is the best way for this indigenous area to advance and gain autonomy. Agricultural crops such as coffee are the only products that people in Cerro Iglesias and the surrounding areas can sell outside of their communities. Therefore through agriculture is the best opportunity for local employment, which is the only way to entice the younger generation not to look for work in the cities. Cerro Iglesias will advance and adapt one way or the other along with the rising tide of modernization, but if done through agriculture, such as a coffee, that advancement can promote autonomy and retain local culture.
I really dislike the role of the salesman, primarily because I am so bad at it. I think this project is important though, and not just because it will make me feel like I got something done in my time in Panama. So I'm schilling here. Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays.

My Dad's Harrier Jet

I’m not sure why, but talking about money with people here doesn’t bother me. As I’m sure I would if I had a really rich friend, Ngäbes, especially kids, ask me what everything I own costs. Everything. This makes most volunteers very uncomfortable; they feel that sharing the information that their hiking boots cost more than most people here earn in a month only further isolates them. An intricate system of white lies and half truths assuages guilt.

For example, my closest neighboring volunteer went to visit her friend who was volunteering in Kenya at the time, and she didn’t want her community to know that she had the money to swing over to the other side of the planet when she felt like it. So she devised an elaborate story involving an imaginary global Peace Corps conference held in Africa at which she would be representing Panama. This, I believe, is ridiculous for at least three reasons. First, in this deception she is still going to Africa. If people here knew how much the flight cost or how far away Africa is, these facts alone would shock them and differentiate her regardless of who paid. Americans have all the money in the world, and this is only further proof. Second though, most people here don´t know how far it is to Africa and have even less idea what it would cost. Being on a plane, whether it’s bound for Honduras, Bangladesh, or the center of the Earth, is essentially the same thing: having the money to board a flying machine makes her as eccentric as someone in Colfax, Washington with a tank. Hank the tank-owner isn’t a local novelty because of what he does with the tank, where he goes, it’s because he has a tank. In terms of how long the journey is, visiting Africa is more likely to shock another volunteer than someone from Cerro Iglesias; to most people here, Africa is just somewhere else. I was talking to a high school kid and when I asked him where he lived, he pointed with his lips and said ‘over there.’ When, in the same conversation, the location of Europe came up, he pointed his lips in the same direction and told me it was ‘over there.’ Apparently, to get to his house, you make like you’re going to Europe and you can’t miss it. If you hit Lisbon, you’ve gone too far. Europe, like Africa, is just not here. Third, it was a complicated lie that she wanted me to maintain if anyone asked me about her. I have enough trouble keeping track of my own b.s.

This is an extreme example, but most volunteers I know go out of their way to avoid talking about how much they paid for what. They reply that they don’t know the price because it was a gift, or they lie and quote a much lower, more reasonable price, or they exaggerate to the point of hyperbole and humor. I don’t mind telling people what things cost, but of these three I like the last option because it stems from the saying ‘you can’t get a little bit pregnant.’ The reason volunteers don’t want to talk about money is they feel it isolates them from the people in their community, makes them strange. I agree to some extent, and I do want to assimilate while I’m here, but I could spend ten years in Cerro Iglesias and still be pregnant. I’m the only white person in town, the only one who lives alone, the only one who eats peanut butter, the only one who can type without looking at his hands, the only one who can’t throw a machete with speed and skill, the only one who can’t speak Ngäbe. I am strange. In a binary system, I am 0 and everyone else is 1, and how much my headlamp costs isn’t going to make me a 1. That’s why I tell the truth about what things cost and how much I’ll be earning when I go back to the States. I’m already an alien, and whether I’ll be making $15,000 a year or $60,000 isn’t going to make me more or less so. If I told someone back home that a) I have a radio (ipod) that contains thousands of songs and I can listen to any of them whenever I want, and b) that my dad has a Harrier jet, they would probably call me on b), and rightly (and unfortunately) so. Here though, I am an extraterrestrial, a gypsy; I am Marco Polo. The same slow nod that follows a) would follow b), even though it is obvious to the reader it is a lie. But if a Ngäbe was living in Colfax and told his neighbors that a) Ngäbe men often file their teeth to points for style and b) bestiality with a horse is perfectly socially acceptable, which would you believe?

Note: I don't have any pictures of me making money transactions, so these pictures are from a hike I did with some other volunteers to an abandoned copper mine.

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.