Training and Site Placement

Bienvenidos a todos!

I´m trying this blog world out while working here in Panama with the Peace Corps.  I´m hoping to use this blog for more of the development work and cultural exchange side of my work here and reserve personal emails for more personal conversations.

For the last six weeks I have been living with a host family in the town of Rio Congo near Chorrera (about an hour and a half west of Panama City).  Twenty other volunteers and I make up group 66 of Peace Corps Panama.  We are currently Peace Corps Trainees on our 10 week route to become Peace Corps Volunteers.  Our mission, if we choice to accept it, is to educate rural and indigenous communities about water and sanitation while also assisting them to provide small scale infrastructural improvements to their communities.  In the last six weeks I have learned to build composting and pit latrines, repair aqueducts, the basics if gravity fed water systems, and how to educate adults effectively about improving their health in relation to water and sanitation. 

I have been very pleased with the Peace Corps´ promotion and conceptualization of sustainable development.  I find it funny that many of the critiques aimed at the Peace Corps and I myself was guilty of consisted of a fear that they came into communities without cultural sensitivity and ¨pushed¨ US ways of doing things onto others.  Some form of cultural imperialism.  Unable to realize the brillance and resourcefulness of the campesinos themselves.  Or that we came into communities with an agenda and didn´t really address the desires of the people.  This my friends is everything Peace Corps tries to avoid.  We have had countless classes on how to access the needs of a community.  Our first three months are dedicated to our community analysis or ¨proyecto amistdad¨ (friendship project) as my APCD (Associate Peace Corps Director: aka my boss) likes to call it.  This time is spent getting to know the entire community, learning their way of life, their skills, their talents, and addressing those areas where they could use some help.  Our number one desire is to destroy paternalism and build upon passionate community leaders skills to help communities help themselves. 

In my time here I have traveled to the Comarca Ngabe-Bugle (Comarca´s are similar to U.S. Indian Reservations-land dedicated to indigenous communities to repay lands lost during colonization) for a volunteer visit of five days where I witnessed devastating poverty that consisted of babies with blown out bellies from worms and dirt floored homes for six to eight the size of my bedroom for one back in the States.  This poverty was accompanied by extremely hard working, generous, and kind people.  The Ngabe (or Ngobe depending on the publication) originally inhabited the Pacific Coastal lands but were slowly pushed up into the mountains and over to the Caribbean Sea by the Spanish and Mestizos.  Older generations speak Ngabere but the children have lost contact with the language due to their schools only teaching English and Spanish.  Two years ago one of our language professors published the first written account of the Ngabere language and this year marked a pilot project to bring Ngabere into some Comarca classrooms.  The success of this will most likely be dependent on Ngabe people actually teaching this subject, which is difficult given that many Ngabe communities have trouble paying for their children´s transport to school.  During my site visit a very bright boy that was my volunteer´s counterpart´s son had just finished middle school but given the distance to high school he was left at home to help his father with the farm.  Effectively, many Ngabes don´t make it beyond a sixth grade education. 

A week ago I returned from the Darien (the jungle area between Panama and Columbia: impassable) where my group and I spent 10 days building two composting latrines, two pit latrines, two new tap stands, fixing pipes, understanding gravity fed water systems in the field, and engaging in cultural exchange by living with a host family.  The community was called Pueblo Nuevo and was an Embera-Wounaan community.  Although two large Comarcas were created for these people recently, many have lived in their communities for over 30 years and weren´t about to leave the easy access of the Panamerican Highway to enter the jungle and have rights to their land.  Consquently the government allows Embera-Wounaan people living in the so called ¨collective lands¨ no private property rights and live with only a titled lease to their community and the inability to access loans by using their property as collateral.  My family was a Wounaan family are were generous and kind beyond belief.  My saddest moment however was learning late at night that the three children in my family went to bed hungry after my fellow volunteer and I had already eaten.  The projects we did in Pueblo Nuevo are the antithesis of Peace Corps promotion of sustainable development as I´m sure all your critical minds have noticed, but their was a volunteer in the community who worked to provide the infrastructure to those most in need and who will spend her remaining two years educating the community about their proper use and maintenance.  However, this does not make it entirely sustainable and acts much more as a training exercise for us to bring the skills we will need to our respective communities. 

That said, onto today´s news: my site placement.  If you go to google maps and type in Bocas del toro panama you back up a bit you will see a bunch of islands in the south and to the east and then a peninsula jetting out from the east.  At the top of the peninsula is Kusapin, a two hour hike from there will bring you to my community of Playa Balsa going down the peninsula on the Caribbean side.  My main access point will be Chiriqui Grande.  I´ll take a two hour boat ride from there.  I´m officially in the Comarca Ngabe-Bugle but my region is much more similar to Bocas del Toro.  My spot is reported to be gorgeous. White sandy beaches, turquoise waters, spearfishing under water, and good surf.  My community has never worked with an agency so they were extremely excited when the Peace Corps showed up for their multiple site development visits when they said they would, and are supposedly very eager to start on composting latrines and improve their aqueduct system and potentially start collecting rain to drink.  I have no available cell phone access and Internet is a two hour boat ride away in Chiriqui grande so although this email is extremely long, there will be relatively few. 

I hope everyone´s life is going well and thank you for being my teachers, friends, and inspiration.

I´m stoked!