Cerro Hoya and others

So I’m ready to get my Panama Verde group off the ground… but to be considered an official group nationally, we have to make a directiva, which is a board of committee or whatever its called, I’m losing my english. A president, treasurer, secretary, bla bla bla is what we need. I set up a cool meeting at the school with a game at the beginning and pictures I even brought cookies and punch! ….. 5 people showed up  Every one that told me they were going, didn’t show up. When things like this happen, its kind of a slap in the face. Not even my counterpart that helped me plan the whole meeting and was supposed to come and speak showed up. I know Panamanians don’t know how to use an agenda, I know they don’t have clocks in their house, but don’t tell someone you are definitely coming unless, well, you are DEFINITELY COMING. There weren’t enough people at the meeting to choose a directiva so I gave all the cookies away to those that did come and left some of the punch for the teachers. There was still a lot of punch left that couldn’t fit into the fridge and one of the mom’s that showed up was really worried about wasting the punch. We filled up some water bottles for her to take home even though she has no fridge to keep them cool. They are serious about wasting food and drink here, even though it was 50 cents of sugar powder in water. Watching her figure out how to take the rest of the punch home cheered me up. Sometimes they piss the HELL out of you, and sometimes they put a smile on your face. You just never know which is coming.

I went into the city and turned in all the entries for the children’s world painting competition. There were some really cool drawings – I’m proud of my kids. The chances of them winning are zip to zero (is that the saying?) but it was still fun for them. Next we’ll be doing a drawing competition just in the school. They will be drawing something about the conejo pintado (big endangered rodent here in Panama) conservation and the winner’s drawing will be painted on the conejo pintado cage facility we have down the road. The conejo project hasn’t painted it yet and I think it would be cool to include the kids in the design. After the winner is chosen, I would like my Panama Verde group (if it ever gets off the ground) to help paint it one day. Just ideas. Might never happen. The co-op is slow coming, the agency keeps saying they are coming for a meeting and then don’t show up. The group is losing faith, and quite frankly my faith left the building weeks ago. I’ll do what I can to keep it going but it’s ultimately up to the agency to get their shit together and stop messing around. Que va.

My boss is planning on coming to the closest community to me (about 2 hour hike away) to develop it for a new volunteer, yay!! The new volunteers are coming this month and will be on their way to their communities in July, so I might have someone that I can hang out with this year! But the same day he comes all the way out here, he is going to try and bring a projector and screen so I can show a cool movie outside to the community. I would like to show Fern Gully, but it depends on what I can get my hands on. A friend of mine that lives in a nearby beach town come down with her cousin that was visiting and another friend to hike to the National Park (Cerro Hoya) this past Monday. It was amazing! Beautiful scenery, but we walked FOREVER. A very grueling trip indeed. They don’t make their trails hiker friendly because they always travel by horse … so some of the trails were as steep as you can possible make a trail, and went on it seemed like miles. But we made it, camped out at a little cabin owned by one of the people that lives in my community, and explored Cerro Hoya mountain the next day. Two of the girls went to the very top, I decided against it because of how tired I was and the weather was about to get really bad. I will save that for another trip  Other than WAY too much walking up and down hills, it was an amazing experience, and got me really interested in the conservation situation going on out there. The parks are encroaching on the park and the campasinos still illegally poach animals out there that should be protected. I will be doing much more research into that for the next couple weeks! But can’t wait to return next year!

Pulgita is doing so much better. She has such a ferocious appetite now. She does still have a couple patches on her sides where no fur has grown, which the doctor says is some type of mange I think. The treatments for mange here scare the bejesus out of me, so she recommended I try a natural remedy first. She told me to put aloe vera straight from the plant on the spots once a day, and in a month they will start to clear up. I would much rather go about it this way, because its natural and free. We are also working on her little food aggression “problem” with other dogs. Every dog in the campo is extremely protective over its food because most of them are starving. I’ve seen them literally almost kill each other over a chicken leg. Well she has learned that behavior from them, even though she is the fat, spoiled rich kid in the neighborhood and definitely doesn’t need to freak out when another dog is close to her food bowl. So when the dog next door (Rambo) comes over, who will eat a plate of motor oil and rice if you gave it to him, I feed both of them at the same time in the same room. I’ve done this a couple times and she is so much better now. She just needed to know that she’s not going to starve if another dog eats close to her.

I was checking out the full moon last night with my telescope in my front lawn, and I spotted something that didn’t look like a star. I thought it could be mars, so I checked it out, and it was Saturn!! I have to say, seeing a planet as beautiful as Saturn by surprise like that took my breath away. I was so excited that I ran down to the center of my community and found the only family that was still awake. I showed them the moon and Saturn and they thought the whole things was really cool. I can only imagine what I looked like to them though … out of breath, with a dorky head lamp (which NO Panamanian uses) attempting to explain the planets all excited in broken spanish while fiddling around trying to put together a telescope. They use the same word as us to describe someone l like me, NERD, except pronounced a little differently. However, It was a really cool experience. One of the guys pointed out another object that didn’t shine like a star, and I think it was another planet but I’m not sure which one. It was really impressive though that someone with an untrained eye spotted something like that in a sky full of lights. I’m going to call him “Astronomer” from now on  I’ve downloaded a cool program that when connected to the internet shows me what celestial bodies I can see from my house every day. This will come in handy when the kids at school start learning about space!