Saturday, October 23, 2010

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 ;)


 

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