My New Little Friend

Ok, before you bust out the box of tissues, this is not a cute story. In fact, this is yet another story of me complaining about the fauna here in Panama. I have a new little friend, correction: new MAN-EATING-SPIDER friend that has started to hang out on the rim of my latrine. And by man-eating-spider, I mean the largest tarantula I have ever seen in my entire life. Yes, even larger than the one in Home Alone, *man scream,* which by the way, was my favorite part of the movie. The first time my new little friend and I met at 3 am in the pitch black with a sorry excuse for a headlamp (thanks dad), he gave me the closest thing I've ever felt to a heart attack. I learned that he only comes out during the middle of the night when I'm the most disoriented and vulnerable and can swim through human feces like Michael Phelps in chlorine, which makes him something straight out of the X-Files. I knew that show was on to something … So anyway, after several nights of urinating behind the house at 2am I finally grew a pair and brought a death-stick into the latrine to … well I wasn't quite sure exactly how I was going to yield this death-stick … but the second it came close to Mikey, he took a beautifully executed swan dive 15ft into the stinky abyss, only to wait patiently with that evil, shit eating grin on his face (literally) until I naively thought it was safe enough to come back later and use the bathroom … and there he was, again. So tonight, after a So-Panamanian chain of events happened exactly halfway through me typing this very story, Mikey met his end. And this I will describe next because it is now 1am instead of 10pm when I started to write this story and it deserves to be told.

 

So in the middle of typing about how Mikey was quite possibly the scariest thing in my life right now, there was an explosion of water 5 ft outside my window and 2 horses ran away naying and doing their scared-horsey sounds… so I knew it had to be good. I run outside to see a geyser of water in the front yard from where, I have speculated, one of the horses tripped on the water hose and broke the cheap-plastic-tubing-panamanians-use-for-everything in half. As I'm watching the yard quickly fill up with water, I'm faced with the decision of whom to wake up, so I choose my neighbor Fula- my first host family right across the street. After feeling terrible from waking her and her husband up, we start walking into the yard so I can show her what happened and a huge dog fight breaks out in the jungle next to the house. Well with my aforementioned sorry excuse for a headlamp, I think its MY puppy, Pulgita, and I flip out and run over to stop it catching myself on the barbed wire fence my headlamp conveniently did not illuminate. However, I come out unscathed and find out that it wasn't Pulgita but a coyote pup, which piques my interest and I go on a jungle hunt, alone, to search and locate it. This proves futile and so I return to the matter at hand. Fula and I go to 4 houses total (and at this hour the ENTIRE community has been asleep for hours already) and have to wake up the families there. Finally the owner of the house where Jonathon (the previous volunteer) lived wakes up and agrees to help. In the middle of him repairing this geyser I nonchalantly tell him that I think there is this man-eating-spider that is dwelling in my latrine, can you please save me thank you. I walk away and he kills it with his machete and then parades around with it hanging off the end telling me that if it had bitten me (in the ass) I would have had to have been hospitalized (marinate on that one for a hot second). Gee thanks. Now that I know Mikey is gone, undoubtedly bestowing his three hundred million eggs nestled under my toilet lid, which are probably hatching this very moment, I can sleep soundly tonight, to the serene, gushing sounds of nature 5ft outside my window. Oh Panama.

 

On a lighter note! Here is some information about the previous weeks here in the beautiful country of Panama.

 

So we recently had an All Volunteers Conference (AVC) in a city close to my community (close = 3.5 hours). Every volunteer had to attend and it was at a really nice hotel with a bar and pool and the whole shebang. It was 3 days of meetings and conferences and opportunities to share your ideas or projects with other volunteers. Not to mention we had an opportunity to meet all the volunteers from other groups. There was a "prom" which was just an excuse to drink a lot and throw everyone in the pool with their nice clothes on. We also had "Campo Olympics" which was super fun and our group 65 (the newest) won the whole thing! The champions win the "golden machete" which I guess has been passed on from champions to champions. The day included a round of games from the backcountry of Panama. For example, there was "solomaring" which is a call and respond type yodel-esque song the men do here during a hard days work to raise spirits – a pair from each group was picked to perform the solomar the most accurately. There was also an orange peel contest where you had to peel an orange with a machete the prettiest (they take a lot of pride in how pretty they peel oranges here). In addition soccer, chicken fights in the pool and a food eating contest of bananas and sardines from a can (food staples in the campo). Overall I had a blast and can't wait to practice my solomaring because I come from the part of the country where it is used all the time, so I gotta represent group 65 next year.

 

In addition to AVC we went to the beach afterwards to "unwind." It is a world-renowned surfing beach so the swimming was a little scary but the hostel was filled with Israeli and Argentinan surfers and was a great opportunity to just kick back and relax. After the beach another volunteer, Mary, and I went to a community of a peace corps married couple who were helping put on an eco-fair in the school. We had stations to play games demonstrating how to re-use, reduce, recycle… which the first two are redundant here in the campo – all families here use very little because they can't buy a lot, and they naturally reuse everything that's humanly possible because they cant afford to buy a lot of new things, so the most pertinent is to teach about recycling because there aren't even garbage disposal systems here, let along programs to collect recycled items… so to raise awareness among youth is the first step. My station was to paint a jungle scene mural on one of the walls of the library … which was interesting because the first group of kids were kindergardners and it was more of a tornado of paint vomited all over the wall, so after all the groups were done and a lot of nasty looks from the teachers, we had to repaint a lot of it to make it look pretty, and it was very pretty. The group that put on the eco-fair was a woman named Ruth, she is a graduate from Princeton and she is doing research on spider monkeys here in my part of the country and part of her grant requires "environmental education" which was the eco-fair. I got her information because, of course, I am interested in research with primates and she is SO CLOSE to me. We'll see what becomes of that contact!

 

So after talking with some volunteers and assessing the community history and needs, I've decided to start up a Girl Scouts group (Muchachas Guias) here in my community. There has already been a group here with the second to last volunteer and there still remains a lot of interest from the parents and girls of the community. I attended a Parent/Teachers meeting (Padres de la Familia) and at the end I brought up the idea of a Muchachas Guias group again in the community, and right as I began talking this huge downpour of rain came (remember all the roofs here are tin) – meaning no one could hear anything I was yelling. The entire room of 40 parents were just staring at me completely lost, if there was no rain you would hear a chorus of crickets. Fortunately a woman that I've worked with got up and repeated what I said and all of a sudden all the parents were all excited and agreed that it would be a great idea. I'm starting to think of really cool activities to do with the girls and possible field trips, but I have to contact the head of the group here in Panama first to talk about how to establish an official group and also I will need to start writing grants to fund all the activities and field trips. Overall I'm very excited because I think a lot of women here lack self-esteem and the drive to be independent because of the "macho," male-dominated society. But I see a lot of strong, smart and curious girls in my community and I think this could be a really fun group to have!

 

And last but not least Pulgita is growing fast and chewing everything she can get her little mouth on. I call her my little exterminator man because she is a fierce cockroach/beetle hunter. I have applied her first dose of Frontline which seems to be working quite well so far, along with her first dose of de-worming medicine. Its super nice because here you don't need a prescription for anything to buy from a vet, so I can just restock whenever I want, not to mention its super cheap ($8 per does). She absolutely hates getting baths, I'm sure it sounds like am slaughtering puppies every day down the road. I have this special soap that does a pretty good job at killing the adult fleas and I went to look for it yesterday because I was going to bath her again but I couldn't find it anywhere… I know it fell off the sink outside a couple times before but it wasn't anywhere on the ground…. Hours later I was fixing Pulgitas bed (2 big sheets) and deep inside the sheets, neatly hidden with little puppy teeth marks was the bar of flea soap… I wonder who hid that there? Sounds familiar Mom (glasses + cheese isle)? This is foreshadowing of the next 8 months of my life I'm sure … but I've already taught her how to sit and come to her name in both English and Spanish so I feel like she is going to be a smart one ;)

 

Heeby-Geebies

Two life changing events have happened at site already. The first: whilst dressing myself the other morning, I got stung in the boob by a scorpion. Yes, a scorpion stung me in the BOOB. Let me preface this anecdote with the fact that if you know me, you know that I love all god’s creatures, I really do, but scorpions are one of the ONLY invertebrates that haunt my dreams - NEVER in my life will I ever want to come anywhere close enough to a scorpion for it to touch my skin. I would rather be bit by 354 non-venomous snakes than be stung ONCE by a scorpion… and this I’ve thought about a lot here in Panama knowing it was just a matter of time before this fear became a reality. I haven’t met one volunteer that hasn’t been stung at least once by a scorpion. The weirdest part of this story tho, other than the location of the sting, is that I was even THINKING about scorpions as I was getting dressed because my host sister had found one in her clothes the day before. I was thinking “hmm, I really should start checking my clothes before I put them on. It would be just spectacular to go these 2 years without – ouch – what the hell was that? Ouch, OUCH OUCH – MY BOOB IS ON FIRE” And I looked down to find that little p.o.s. ready to fight 5 inches from my face, perched on the piece of cloth right above the ball of fire that was now my boob. A little dramatic I know, let’s just say I momentarily became the world’s fastest contortionist as I ripped that sports bra off without letting it touch my face, arm or shoulders. Impossible? Definitely not. Then I pulled a Jess move and felt too bad to kill it, so I left the room as my host parents did. Sometimes I wonder? But nevertheless, this has been a fear of mine since childhood and if you are going to get stung by something that scares the shit out of you, what worse place than in the boob? So I guess I got that fear over with pretty quickly. And if you thought I took forever to get ready before, you should see me now … especially because of my 2nd life-changing-event:

This one isn’t so painful, just really f*ing gross. There really isn’t much explaining other than last night I reached into clothes drawer without looking (terrible decision #195 in the tropics) and grapped a GIANT cockroach instead of a pair of socks. Now I’m sure you are thinking “ew cockroaches, that sucks” but I want you to fully understand the size of this thing. Look at your hand … yeah. It’s literally that big. Its not even the same species as the ones we are used to. And yes, it flies. So the other volunteer at my site walks in my house as I’m ready to stab it with my machete sharpener, and I suffer another Jess moment and have him do the dirty work. And if that doesn’t give you the heeby-geebies, later that night as I was preparing my now very fragile psyche for bed in the bathroom, which is totally across the house from the kitchen, and I hear a scratching in the kitchen sink. The second I heard it, I knew, it’s another one. They are so big that they can’t even crawl out of sinks. *shudder*

But anyways, these two life-changing events that were really not so life-changing just made me realize I need to toughin up a little bit because this country is full of the creepy-crawlies. God bless you Panama and all your idiosyncrasies.

Loss of a fellow gringo:( and the entrance of Pulgita:)

So the other volunteer that had extended in my site has completed his service and left this weekend … we threw a big despedida (going away party) for him and good times were had by all. There was a tipico band that played, and they were really bad but almost endearingly bad. I learned how to dance “tipico suelto” which is just where there is an inner circle of dancers which have partners in an outer circle of dancers, and both circles go around to the music, partners switching from inside to outside circles. Sounds complicated but it is actually really easy and very boring considering each song is like 20 minutes long. After a couple songs another volunteer informed me that if you dance with the same guy more than once sometimes it means you want to go to bed with him, so to avoid any confusion (because I wasn’t sure exactly who I had danced with how many times) I just took a break from dancing for the rest of the night. Things like that a woman (and sometimes men too) really need to be aware of because a ton of gossip can be started without you even coming close to realizing what you did wrong. The gossip in this culture is out of control, and if too much gets spread about you and another community member, sometimes the mother’s will lose respect for you and choose not to let their kid hang out with you or be a member of your youth group (or w/e group you have)… we’ve had a lot of cultural training in the beginning of service so this doesn’t come as a surprise to me, but I still have to be on my best behavior. This is why I choose not to drink in my community, only on special occasions like Jonathon’s despedida, where I only had 1 beer.

I’ve moved into a temporary house by myself which is the “summer house” of the daughter of my first host mom. It’s a really cute little house, but they occasionally come on the weekends and spend about 3 months here in the summer when the kids are out of school (which is winter for us and is coming up soon), so unfortunately I will not be able to continue living here, even tho this would be considered a SUPER nice house for Peace Corps standards (it has an indoor shower!!!!! Doesn’t have an indoor toilet but most Panamanians don’t anyways). But I’m taking advantage of it while I start to repair the actual house I will be living in, definitely not as nice and very old … but I will make it look nice. And its got a really beautiful view of the mountains, already picked out a prime spot for my hammock.

So having more time to myself leaves more time to think about stuff, which is not always a good thing. So since Jonathon’s left I’ve thought a lot about what the next 2 years are going to be like, and it’s pretty scary. I feel that I got lucky with being able to have another volunteer in site to ease me into the role of a volunteer, but I also feel is has set me back because now I have to go through what all of my group members have already gotten over, the “oh shit, I am truly alone here and no one understands me” type realization. Don’t get me wrong, we all love our communities, but what we’ve signed up to do is not easy and it takes a lot of emotional control and mental reasoning. You are in a completely different culture that will right off the bat think you’re weird and not understand most of the things you do at first. When you try and explain yourself, you realize that you can barely speak the language and sometimes say something wrong and make yourself look even weirder. You don’t fully realize how nice it is to just be able to say what you want to say until you are in a place that doesn’t speak your language at all. That is why having a volunteer in site for my first 3 months has set me back in a way, because every couple of days when we hung out I could just say whatever I wanted as fast as I wanted and I knew he would understand every word, and when you are the only gringo in site that isn’t possible, and you end up building up all these thoughts that normally you would be able to tell someone, and its very healthy to tell someone … but you cant. One of the volunteers in my site years ago just couldn’t handle it and left a year early – and at first I didn’t really understand why because my community is so nice and hospitable, but now I have a house to myself I realize how easy it could be just to sit and listen to music or read all day long and not go visit the community. Specially that I’ve just started and don’t have a lot to do. But that is just the type of behavior that breeds unhappiness in the long run, and no matter how down you are feeling, or how lazy, the best thing to do is get off your ass and go visit people. It will always make you feel better.
But enough about the serious stuff … I finally got my puppy named Pulgita (little flea). And yes, she is covered in fleas which I feel really bad about but I have to wait another couple weeks to apply the flea/tick control medicine. So I’ve been bathing her every day in this special soap to kill them, but the water here is always freezing and its been pretty chilly and rainy the last couple weeks so every time I give her a bath she acts and sounds like I’m killing her so I feel really bad. For 20 minutes after the bath she just shivers and whines which makes me feel like a total douchebag but at the same time is has helped the fleas a little – so in a couple weeks I’ll be making a trip to the vet to pick up the new spray they have that supposedly works really well? We’ll see. Until then she’ll live up to her name well :)