Dana
November 30, 2003
Chickens and Goodbyes

hey yaīll!

first order of business. my new address (although you can still use the one for panama city if you have that one. itīs for the peace corps office...iīll resend it later)

send me lots of mail!

Dana Perls
Entrega General
David, Chiriqui
Republica de Panama

so iīm saying hello from the grand city(not so) of panama. here, i will have internet access for a full week, and then after that, not so often (once every 2 weeks?) so for all those of you reading this, write to me and we can have a daily dialogue! sweet! this is a fairly long letter, and even so, iīll only touch on one or two things. it would be like a novel were i to write about all!

what am i doing in the city? well, i have just completed an incredibly tearful goodbye to santa rita, the tiny campo community where i have been living for the past 2 months. yeah. i feel pretty torn up. for a place that was so confusing and in which iīve experienced so many roller coasters of emotions, i am not ready to leave. i am and iīm not. i have finally made my home, i have a family with whom i am actually an integral part. i know the community and have even entered the gossip circle (that only happens when you have been accepted as a friend and one of the community. what was the gossip? something about the fact that my next door neighbor and friend had a large crush on me, but my family and his family donīt talk to each other...more silly drama...) anyways, everything panama i have experienced, from language, culture, agriculture, about my self and others, and even everything about the other volunteers iīve spent 24-7 with, is attached to santa rita. as i left, my! host mom started crying and then the whole family (including cousins) started crying and then i lost it. oh yes, composure went straight out the door. i felt broken inside. not quite hysterics. i felt a bit like when i was leaving the US. i am a new plant, just strong enough to make it out of the seed bed and into the ground.now i feel like i am being torn out of my ground and all the dirt, which is my community, shaken out from underneath me. i will return to visit them, but i will not be living there anymore. itīs not the same, ya know? well, i could go on about this for a long time, but i wonīt subject yaīll to my inner dialogue of torn up emotions.

speaking of torn up emotions, i experienced one of the more horrifying events of my life. yes, an extreme statement...in my training commuinty, we had a chicken project. this means that in a small group, we had to raise 50 chickens from the egg to the grave. this might sound easy, but it wasnīt for me. chickens are a pain in the ass. at first they are really cute and fluffy, and then they start to go to the bathroom in the water and the food bin (an open pvc pipe) so that when i had to clean it out, it took way longer and i had to throw away the chicken shit infested food. and they peck my feet. i felt so badly for them the whole time. most of the chickens here in panama (that people own individually) are free range ( meaning they even get to play in the houses sometimes). these chickens were able to walk around, but in a large caged area. big and fat and smelly. but i felt so badly for them. it was like out of that movie, chicken run. only i was the farmer! that wanted to free her own chickens and help them escape. my group partners werenīt so cool with that. they kept telling me to not get emotionally attached to the chickens. but they are life too, right?

anyways, so the horrible part...the chickens had to die. it was part of a project to help with the lack of protein in my community. a sustainable project where they can forever raise chickens and eat them amongst themselves and still have some left over to sell (right now they sell them, but donīt really have enough to eat as well and donīt get protein much). here in panama, people are much more familiar with the basics of life. death is familiar (with both people and animals) and people understand that killing animals is for their individual surivival. it is not done in excess in the campo (way out in the middle of nowhere places) so i should feel okay, right? so i thought. the group got together and my host dad taught us the steps to killing the 50 chickens.

i watched the first one, and then snapped inside. i just couldnīt handle it. i felt like i was going to throw up. it wasnīt the blood that bothered me. it was the harm being done and felt. i am okay with people needing to eat the chicken and undrestand that it had to die in order to be eaten. but i personally couldnīt do it. i cóuldnīt handle the pain, watching the chickens (normally incredibly noisy) go completely silent after the first one died. watching them flap around upside down as they fight to stay alive. watching and listening to a bunch of people (volunteers and panamanians) talk about the chickes as if they were objects. heartless killing. no conversation of appreciation. no recognition of the lives been done away with. i took refuge to the corn field and took charge of digging the hole where we dumped the organs of the chickens that werenīt going to be used otherwise (most are used for something, mostly food for other animals).

i really wanted to challenge myself and decided that althouggh i wouldnīt personally slice the throat of the chicken, nor would i dunk the partially dead chicken in boiling water, but i would try plucking the feathers. i did that for about 30 seconds, until i could feel all the organs and i was staring at the chickenīs eye and it looked like any olī eye. not a chickenīs eye, but the eye of something that had been living... break down number 2. i spent the next hour crying in the corn fields which are almost as tall as i am. thankfuly, my group understood that i just couldnīt settle within myself to do it, so i was incharge of delivering the chickens to the people in the community.

sorry that description was not so happy. it was a really really hard day for me. and it didnīt help that my family just didnīt understand. they are wonderful, donīt get me wrong. it wasnīt just them. none of the panamanians understood why i was so upset. they are just chickens. donīt worry, they odnīt feel the pain. they donīt know what is happening to them. they will die anyways...on and on. itīs something people here grow up knowing how to do. my precious 7 year old cousin knew how to kill and clean the chickens. so, while i stared blankly at the dinner table, they ate fresh chicken and laughed about how i cried. so funny to them. even after i explained, they just laughed. they are just chickens they told me. they need to die so my familiy can eat. even so.

okay, so that was it for the crying. the other stuff has been wonderful adn fun. many of you have asked what i did for thanksgiving- the peace corps bosses hosted a huge thanksgiving dinner to which my entire training group went, as well as many other volunteers. it was delicious (mostly because it wasnīt fried, it wasnīt rice, and it wasnīt yuca root). there was even a large feast that the vegetarians could eat. and pies. oh yes. i miss the pies. then after that, a group of us met up with some other volunteers at a near by beach and we danced and talked and sang and partied until the wee hours in the morning. crashed in a cabin on the beach, wonke ourselves up the next morning with a swim in the tropical ocean. actually, my friend and took quite a long swim. there is the cool island about a mile off shore. we decided to go for it. after confirming with some local fisherman that there werenīt any sharks known to that beach, we embarked in what turned into a 2 hour (roun! d trip) swim. beautiful. still a bit burned on the back, but it was cool to see panamaīs shores from out in the ocean. the next day i found out that in fact those waters do have some sharks...luckiliy i didnīt see any. i donīt think iīll do that swim again.

que más...so this week iīm in the city, and then i give a not-so-sappy goodbye speech (as a rep. for my training group) to a large auditorium of panamanian government and ngo people. i think the US ambassador will be there too. iīll have to make sure to not bad mouth the govt. then i am off to my site! scared? you bet! i donīt know this community, nor the language...my ngabe language is coming along, but slowly.

anyways, there is so much more i want to tell yaīll about, but i should end this email before i lose yaīll.

i miss everyone tons and definitely hope to hear from yaīll. to those of you who have slacked on writing (or not written at all!)....you know who you are...iīm waiting...:)

remember, reply right away, while i have this constant city access this week!

love to yaīll!
Dana

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