Why is there a roach hiding in my man bag?

My relationships in the school with the professors are starting to change a bit. Some teachers are warming up to me and less of them think that I am a spy. Ive had lunch and dinner with a few of the teachers and am starting to form a good relationship with them. The students are no longer afraid to talk to me and go out of their way to say something to me. Some try to practice a few words with me in English or scream “Hola Profe”, or “Hola teacher, but I still have a few people that act kinda flacky. There are some teachers have asked me to join their class and help with lesson plans. However when the day that I’m suppose to help comes, they say either they are too busy or they send me to a hot classroom and say wait for me there and no one shows up. Even though it can be annoying none of these incidents make me angry any more. The longer I am here in this country my patience and my since of humor expands.

One day I was walking around the school looking for the professor of English. She wanted me to join her class to talk about families with the students. All of a sudden I hear someone on my right side call for me. It was a professor that I’ve never met before. She started off by saying Hola como esta. I responded accordantly and then she asked me do I speak Spanish, and I said yes more or less. For some reason she decided this was the right moment to display her newly acquired English skills by saying. “You…… fat.” I asked her to repeat what she just said to make sure I heard correctly. Here the Panamanians speak a lot with their hands. She then made a hand gesture like a pacman chomping on some ghost towards her mouth and then blew her cheeks up like a balloon. I didn’t understand why this 5ft women, I’m estimating about 200 pounds was going out of her way to call me fat. I waited for her to say something else, but that was it, that’s all she wanted to tell me. I just smiled and walked away.

Here just about everyone has prepaid. So every couple of days I have to refill the minutes on my phone. Even though I have to constantly go to the store all the time I really don’t mind, there’s a cute women there that sells me phone cards. Just like any other day I went to the store and asked for a phone card. Today she decided to stop me and ask question about my life. That day I decided I was going to be smooth and test out language skills with the ladies. I was there for about 30 minutes talking to her and I ended up forgetting a word in Spanish that I couldn’t describe, so I opened up my man bag and pulled out my dictionary. I guess the roach that was hiding in my bag was hot because he jumped out on to the counter to say hi. FAIL!!! I don’t think there as any recovering after.  I need to move out of the house Im in ASAP.

A lot of the trainees here have had a lot of experience with bats flying around in their rooms. The majority of the houses here that are located in the poor communities have a roof made of zinc and the walls are concrete. Because of the slant of the roof the walls usually don’t connect with the roof, leaving about a 12 inch gap between. This leaves a space more than big enough for a bird or bat to fly in. The first month I was here in my training community I was outside taking a shower. While I was showering I heard another volunteer next door telling his host mother that there is a bat in his room at night. For some reason, here a lot of people believe in witches. She told him that she hasn’t seen a bat in the room but it is very possible that a witch could be flying around his room at night. I sat there in the shower for about 10 minutes just laughing out loud at their conversation. A month later another volunteer called me from his community and told me “why did I leave my comfortable life in the states to live in a room with bats”. I couldn’t resist laughing again. But Karma has its way of getting around, because a week after that conversation I saw 2 bats flying in my room.

I’m excited to be finally completing my first month here. It gives me an opportunity to move out of the hood and into a different part of the city. The school year is about to end also. So I can finally sit and plan what exactly I’m going to do in the school and decide if I’m going to teach a class. Hopefully I find the role that is best for me to do the best job I can. Until that day comes Ill continue exploring, learning, and making sure there are no roaches in my bag.

What did I get myself into?

I’ve been warned by the other volunteers that have lived here for a while that the first 3 months in your community will be frustrating and probably the longest 3 months in your life. Its only week two and I’m starting to feel a little bit of it. When in this short amount of time I have already asked myself a series of questions.

When I was in the states I was a target for multi-level marketers. I thought maybe I had a  huge sign on my forehead that said; Hey I want to make money on the side selling stuff  that I wouldn’t use myself. Now I ask Why am I a target for beggars. It’s about the 8th of November and I’m walking down the street blasting things fall apart by the Roots through my Ipod, with my man bag strapped on my left shoulder. I try to take a quick look to the right and the left to see where I am, Crap!!! I’m lost again. I would stop and think about where I’m going but if I stand in one place for more than a minute someone might ask me for money. I already tried the, I don’t speak Spanish card but it no longer works. For some reason every beggar knows how to speak English. I don’t understand how Panama has trouble finding people for jobs that require English speakers when everyone that asks me for money knows it fluently. How am I going to do this? This is a question that almost all Peace Corps volunteers ask themselves. I have been in my site for less than a month and I’m already asking the question. Before I became a volunteer I received a packet of information of the community that was going to be assigned to me. It gave me basic information on the community and what are my potential assignments for my two years. One of the assignments was to find out a way to clear out a field that is located in the middle of my community. If this field is cleaned up and maintained properly the neighborhood  kids would be able to use it for sports and dedicate their time on more productive  things instead of drugs or etc..   Yesterday the son of my community guide asked me to go with him to the cancha (the field). The field is a pretty decent size, enough to play football soccer or whatever sports they could come up with, and at the far end of the field there is a small basketball court where the kids are using it to play soccer. The field is overrun by weeds and the ground is completely uneven. To me it doesn’t seem like a simple lawnmower can fix it. This project will require a big machine to level the ground. It’s easy to see that there is a big need for something to be done. Even though the field has weeds knee high and probably has snakes in it; the kids are still playing on it. When I returned to the house I asked my current host mother about the field and why is it not maintained. She told me that when she was younger her and a few of the  people in the neighborhood would go out there with their machetes and cut down the  grass and spray something on the grass so it wouldn’t grow. She said she’s too old to  continue so she hasn’t done it in years and no one has the money to pay for it to be maintained. But the most disturbing thing she told me was that no one has tried  to do anything about it in 15 years. How am I suppose to get a community involved in fixing this when no one has cared in 15 years. How, me the gringo with the bad Spanish grammar suppose to inspire a community who is having trouble feeding their family and making ends meet to take this serious. Sometimes I ask myself, why am I here?  When I go to the school teachers secretly ask each other why is he here, and what does he want. When one brave soul comes up  to me and ask me directly all I can give them is this broad answer about me being able to give them support when needed and how I can help them with ideas and projects. Truthfully I don’t know exactly what I am doing just yet in the school. My first 3 months are supposed to be dedicated to getting to know everyone and learning how the school works. My community guide usually jokes with me and says everyone thinks that I am a spy. Their reaction is understandable I suppose. I am the first Peace Corps volunteer that they have meet, so it’s only natural that they are suspicious, however it makes my job a little harder. Why did I choose to be poor?  Yesterday I was figuring out my budget for the month and all I could do was sigh. There are different levels of being broke. There is the level where you have some money in reserve but it’s just a small amount. Then there is a level where you have only enough to survive and nothing extra. That’s the level where I’m at. When I was in the States if I dropped a quarter or dime I would just look at it and keep walking. I would say, Pssstt whatever. Now If I drop a nickel, I would probably do a swan dive on the concrete floor to pick it up. It’s kind of early in my service but I hope that I will find my answers soon.

If Panama was Arizona I would be Mexican

Its now November 5th 2010 and I have been here in Panama almost 3 months now. Since my last post I have moved out of my first family’s house and into another. The difference is that now I am in my assigned community and the other volunteers are all in their own communities. I no longer have anyone to speak English to and I only know a handful of people here.

But before I say what’s happening in the present day, Ill back track to where I left off last time.

When I was in the states I was against carrying the man bag. I always wondered why men carried purses, it made no since to me. Here everyone has a man bag, me included. I discovered that you always need to carry an umbrella, toilet paper, and your passport. Umbrella, because it rains all the time here. Walk into a store for 20 minutes and when you leave it’ll be pouring down rain. Toilet paper because I don’t have a car. There’s no way I can hold it in when I have a 20 minute walk to get to the house, and a lot of places here don’t have toilet paper in the bathrooms for some reason. No one told me these things when I arrived, so I had to find out the hard way. And you have to always ALWAYS, ALWAYS, carry your passport or an in country ID. If Panama was Arizona I would be Mexican. A few weeks ago I was walking down the street visiting the city of David with 2 other volunteers. One is brown skinned like me and the other had blond hair blue eyes (the true definition of gringo). We were just going to get something to eat when the police told me and the other volunteer to get against the wall and show our IDs. We asked him why and he just said pa revisar. At the time I didn’t know what that word was but I figured it was do it because I said so. Then I looked to my side and saw that they let blond hair blue eyes go. Oh and the exact place that this happened is now the community that is assigned to me for the next 2 years.

Sometimes living with a family from a different cultural background is difficult. When I first arrived at my host family’s house in Santa Clara it was real cool. I ate pretty well and they gave me space when I needed it. As time went by things started to change a little bit. Breakfast became bread and more bread.  I was being asked for the weekly allowance earlier and earlier. That was probably the most frustrating to me. It was already too early in the week to be asking for the money and he stuttered, so it was like he was asking me 5 times at once. The host father for some reason started walking in on me whenever he wanted. Just 2 weeks ago he walked in on me in the shower.  I looked at him like what the hell are you doing in here. After that his wife yelled at him and said didn’t you see the towel on the shower. For some reason I got along with her very well. Maybe because she was 28 and he was almost 50. After that incident she realized that I was over it, and asked me am I ready to move out on my own yet.

Soon after we all left Santa Clara we moved back into the army base in Panama City to do our final training and to participate in the swear in ceremony. Our  swear in ceremony was real nice. It took place in the ambassador of the United States house and we all had the opportunity to meet and take pictures with the president of Panama. I have one with him but I have to find the guy who took the picture. After swear -in we all went out to eat and a club. It was the first time I have been out in 2 and a half months. In those months I lost my ability to stay up late and my salsa skills diminished.

Currently I am living in David and enjoying it. I’ve had 2 host families here so far and they are both great. One was a house with a stay at home mother, the father and 3 daughters around the age of 20. The father was away working for the majority of the time so I was treated better than I deserved. I had nice big meals and coffee with every one of them. They were really nice and made sure I had everything that I needed. The second house I moved into and that I’m currently living in is a retired women and her husband. They are super cool.

To wrap things up, I hope all of you are doing well in the states. My thought are with all of you, take care. Till next time