hey yaīll!
so time for another update. life has certainly picked up the pace here. the bucket showers continue and the fried food definitely continues, but training has become much more intense as we get closer to site visits. which we had our first one! totally amazing. this is the panama experience i was looking for. so we all split up and visited individual voluteers throughout panama for 3 days...check out what the different sites are like, talk to a voluteer, experience a bit more...the norm. so through the torrential rain, i took a bus ride with another volunteer to the outskirts of panama. there, we hopped aboard a tiny little pick up truck known as a chiva. the drivers are crazy men who like to drive down tiny paths that arenīt meant for cars...about 20 people shoved into the back of a pickup truck, we dashed up sheer cliffs (definitely felt my life passing before me several times), over bolders...the real reason for 4 wheel drives is to drive in panama. we drove through r! ivers deep enough for me to lean over and touch the water and we spun our wheels through thick mud. after about an hour of this we all got out and waded through a huge river, to find another chiva waiting on the other side. the adventure began again...the site that i visited was amazing. it was incredibly remote with no electricity, sometimes running water, and a totally intense mountain community of 150 people. they were all impossible for me to understand linguistically, maybe because most of them had no teeth, but also because it was a totally different dialect. mountain people have their own language, and i have yet to learn it. it was totally lush and green and the mud here is bright orange and it mixes with this other mud that is a beautiful purple. so to get to my site i had finally escape the chiva and walk up this sheer mountain. i was walking straight up into the sky for a good hour or so. it wou,d have taken less time had it not been so damn muddy. i was wearing ! tevas and was too lazy to pull my running shoes out of my back! pack, so i just accepted the fact that my feet would sink deep into the mud. itīs like quicksand. i had trouble retrieving them from the deapths of the earth. the purple mud seemed to suction more than the orange mud. pretty fun though. i would stop periodiucally and look out in the mountains. green everywhere, mist and rain and birds everywhere...the community i visited is spread out over a huge mountain. the volunteer was working on a ton of different projects that were dictated by the community. pure grassroots work. exactly what it should be. life is hard core here though. no veggies, no fruits (itīs not mango season for a while, and for some reason, i canīt get my hands on any of those amazing tropical fruits! and people just donīt believe in vegetables. they look at me so strangely when i tell then that i love salads. withouit meat? they ask...yes...withouit meat. anyways, no telephones, no running water, no lights. totally amazing. though a bit lonely. iīm taking advantage of! all the time i have left of training to really soak up all the great volunteers i have around me. iīve gotten to know a small group of people pretty well, and they are rapidly becoming closer. itīs hard though. you guys are all such amazing friends, itīs hard to find people to know as well and quickly. i miss yaīll.
anyways, during my mountain visit, i got a lot of mosquito bites, but, also got an amazing time in the farms. we climbed up even higher into the mountains for a several hour treck to a coffee farm. this woman lives way out by herself, totally alone, well, not totally. she claims to have several neighbors, but they live an hour away. the coffee farm was a crazy expereience. i have such an appreciation for coffee now. people are paid $4-day to pick coffee all day long. and you have to pick each coffee berry individually. there is no cheating or techniques other wise you will bruise the berry and itīs no good. so one by one, you gotta pick the berries. i tried to do some for an hour and in one hour, i was able to pick a fourth of what the people around me could pick in a half hour...yeah. i sucked at picking coffee. then after you pick it, you have to either drive out all the beans, (only after sorting out the red ones from the green ones, because they go through a d! ifferent process) then the are dried again, sorted again, roasted, ground....itīs a huge process!!
now iīm back in civilization, and am in love with the boonies. my host familiy is really worried about me, they tell me that i am not going to make it in the mountains because they claim that people in th mountains are crazy. locos. whatever. people here have such incredibly strong folklore. although there are some crazy stories that people lap up. one group of indigenous people were really upset that they got a male peace corps volunteer because they said that white males ate children. no joke. for the first 2 months, no one with children wanted to talk to him. i hope i donīt have to explain that i donīt eat children to anyone....
as for my site, i donīt know where iīll be going yet. i will find out soon though. give me a week or 2 and then you guys can all go check it out on an atlas...and tell me what you find out!
entonces....i love hearing from you all and would love to hear from more people! please write me lots and even though i send out these mass emails, i do respond to individual emails as well!!!
okay, iīm off to go respond to other emails and i canīt wait to hear from people. í love you all and missyou all!people love looking at all your pictures that i have with me. they laugh at some of them, enjoy others...i wonīt tell you who they laugh at...heaha
love dana