Ngäbe woman toasting coffee.
Second, the first two to three months in your country of service is spent learning what you will need to know to work in your “sector” or area of focus for two years. Also, a big portion of your experience (for me, more than half of my time) is spent outside your sector work: doing secondary projects of your own choosing, or just passing time in your community with the villagers.
Girls playing on a rice drum in Laguna.
Growing up in the States has given me a completely different perspective of the world from the people I live with and provide for some very interesting conversations, as the Ngäbes are very inquisitive about what the world is like outside their 200-acre field of view. I’ve made note of some of the questions I’ve heard just in the past month, and if you’re worried about being “qualified” to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, consider the following: I’ve found it important to know that no, you cannot drink water from the ocean (no matter how much of it there may be); SPAM is not an animal; water flows uphill, not down; revenue minus expenses equals profit, and a negative profit is bad; fabric starts out as cotton, it does not grow from a tree; and the amount of money in use is controlled by the government, not by some foreigner who doesn’t want to share. A reoccurring difficulty for me is trying to express the size of the world to someone who has never ventured more than a day’s walk from their village. It’s like trying to explain to an ant the contents of a grocery store when it hasn’t left the jellybean section.
Five of my 14 host siblings.
There are certainly days when I learn far more from the people I live with than I could ever teach them. For example, in the States we are taught that dogs can’t eat chicken bones. That’s a lie. Dogs are chicken-bone-eating machines! Dogs get just as excited as the natives when a chicken is killed because they know they’re going to eat well too (and I’m just talking about the bones here). And school? Completely overrated. The medicine man in my village hasn’t attended a day of school in his life. According to him, you learn from trial and error. He has learned that when you slice your hand open with a machete you flood the wound with the sap from a banana tree, which serves as a coagulant. Someone needs to pass the word to the doctors in the States. Clearly we’ve got it all wrong.
A truck ride out of my site. Also, did you know that when you’ve got a mad cow you trap it in a corral so small it can’t move? Leave it there for three days without food or water and every couple of hours you cut off some of the hair from its tail, burn it, and force the smoke up the cow’s nose. It clears things right up.
Sunrise from my porch.
Sunset from my porch.
The people in my community speak Spanish as a second language. Many don’t speak Spanish. The Spanish they do speak is crude at best. They use two of the fourteen tenses in Spanish to express all fourteen of them. Picturing them talk to me is, at times, is like imagining how I might speak to a very, very, old person in a convalescent home who forgot to put in their hearing aids: slowly and LOUDLY!
My host aunt peeling leaves to use to make bags.
Coming to the Comarca to learn Spanish would be like sending someone to the backwoods in Louisiana to learn English. They could live with someone named Burris Ewell in a small shack, listen to them speak Creole among themselves, and whenever someone in the family wanted to say something to their visitor they could turn and scream in their ear something like “DA BABY NO LIKE BISCUTS” all said about three times slower than normal.
Picture that person in London traveling after their two years in the bayou saying something like “ME GOES BATHROOM WHERE?” Sometimes I feel like that person. I remember saying something in Spanish in Bogotá and the person I was talking to had this expression on their face like they had just bit into a lemon, “Where did you learn to speak Spanish?” was their response. Rewarding. It’s all incredibly rewarding.
A banana tree.
I heard a friend of mine here in Peace Corps who lives on the beach say she doesn’t know the Spanish word for sidewalk but knows four different words for sand. That comment describes our situation quite well. Words like “elevator” and “carpet” aren’t in our vocabulary. Thinking about all of the words I use on a daily basis (snake, machete, rice, etc) the word for slippery has become by far the most used and most important word to my personal health.
Independence day parade.Let me sidetrack on a tangent for a minute if I may. While getting to know other volunteers, stories about our college experiences often come up. One question I have gotten sever times is “Were you in a fraternity?” My response is simply that I did my freshman year at the U.S. Air Force Academy. For me, military academies are the quintessential embodiment of a fraternity. Take 4000 of America’s brightest, most athletic, testosterone driven high school graduates, put them in a single building large enough to have its own zip code, and tell them to study. Never have I seen so many creative uses for water balloon launchers (http://www.frattoys.com/index.php?cPath=34 or check out this site, you can actually “support your troops with ‘fun’ water balloon slingshots”: http://www.slingking.com/).
Kids preparing to dance for spectators.
One of the many ridiculous ways cadets at the Air Force Academy kill their free time is with a pastime known as Carrier Landings. Take a 200 foot long narrow hallway made of fake tile and stop up all door thresholds with towels, as well as a clear starting line about 50 feet down the hallway. Spread a thin layer of warm, sudsy water throughout the 150 foot “runway” and you are ready to begin. Cadets lineup and sprint down the 50 foot strip of hallway, launch themselves superman style over the start line and land on all fours, sliding full speed down the runway. As quickly as possibly you want your only points of contact with the ground to be your elbows and knees, to minimize friction, and increase the velocity with which you ram into the wall at the end of the hallway. If there were a winner to this game it would be whichever person could hit the wall at the end of the hall with enough force to draw out the most painful groans from the onlookers. It’s a GREAT time!
Still preparing to dance.
Now, back to Peace Corps. The Comarca is one giant Carrier Landing! Something about the wet clay here makes walking anywhere like trying to walk on a slip and slide. My ear has been perfectly tuned to listen for the slightest mention of the word “resbaloso” (slippery). Nine times out of ten when I hear this word from someone in front of me I end up on my back, usually with lots of firewood spread all over me, and the breath knocked out of me. I just stare at the clouds and swear under my breath in English while the natives (who never fall), time and again, stand over me and scream:
“¿Tare mäbtä?”
Now they're dancing. The first time I heard this I was so confused. My mind began to translate…..Are you in love? What, that can’t be right.
“Why are you asking me if I’m in love?”
The conversation switches from native dialect to Spanish.
“No, Choi, are you in pain?”
“Agh. No. Yes. That’s not what you said. You said ‘tare’ that means love.”
“It also means pain.”
Let that sink in for a moment. The word in their native dialect for “love” is the same word that they use for “pain”. So appropriate, yet so inappropriate at the same time.
Food. I was curious what I would be eating for my two years in Panama before coming here. I didn’t know what to expect. I am often asked by friends at home what type of food is Panamanian. Rice and chicken. That’s it. Nothing fancy. Where I live, however, you eat what you grow. That means root vegetables and rice, plain rice, three times a day, for several months at a time. Now, of all the things you could eat three times a day to live, rice would certainly not be at the bottom of the list. In fact, in the realm of volunteers in the Comarca I’m lucky. Many volunteers live in communities where they don’t grow rice. Instead, they eat bananas three times a day. Not yellow, ripe, sweet bananas. But hard, green bananas boiled in water until they have the consistency of a potato with absolutely no flavor. Ironically, the word for banana in Näbere (mröre) is also the word for food.
Adults preparing to dance for spectators.
Most volunteers, however, are able to live and cook on their own after a few months in site which is a wonderful change for those of us used to eating more than just rice or bananas for every meal. However, living a day’s travel to the nearest grocery store can create some interesting predicaments on the occasions that I don’t carry in enough food for my stay in site. Each of the following situations may or may not have happened to me on multiple occasions:
I open up my food box and…
1) SWEET!!!! Chocolate chip cookie mix! This is going to be the best dinner ever!
2) Rice. Mayo. Nutella. Huh. Tomorrow’s going to be painful.
3) Mancakes: typical pancake mix, replace water with rum.
More dancers.
The transition into Peace Corps is not natural, for anyone. You will give up every modern convenience you know and live out of your backpack in an obscure corner of the world. You will answer questions about how long it would take to walk to China and listen to people talk about what they would do if they had $100 dollars. You won’t understand most of what is said to you, although you will pretend you do, and you will be dirty, very dirty, for two years. But everyday something will happen, something will make you laugh or smile, and all of the nervousness or unfamiliarity will leave you and you will feel content with where you are, contributing to the life of someone who has far less than anyone you’ve ever met, and it will all be worth it. If it appeals to you, apply. You will never regret it.
Jatwaita.
Choi.
More dancing.
Ngäbe men prepare to work on the road to their village.
Pretty view in the Comarca.
A child looks on while her mom cleans rice.
Mixing cement for a latrine floor.
Typical Comarca house. 
And it's typically filled with kids.
Celebrating Independence Day in Laguna. 
Just hanging out.
