La Reinando

Around 2 weeks ago we had the 'Crowning' of the queen of all of Rio San Juan Piquini. There were 5 contestants and a girl from my village won! The way they win is they fundraise for the school, and whoever makes the most money gets the title. Then, we have a big party and the queen and all the runner ups have to dance with a fine young gentleman of their choice(pre-picked, of course). Anywho, here are 3 of the 10 videos I took that day. One is of the queen dancing with her fella(who is actually in fact her older brother), another is the kiddies having a very nice time with all of the toys the adults provided and the last is the Embera girls from my village dancing and singing. You can't really hear them singing over the crowd, and we ran out of light...but hopefully you all enjoy.

Behold!

May I please present to my vast internet audience the Elementary School of Emberá Puru del Río San Juan Piquiní, along with it's 28 or so students(2 are lefties)grades 1-6 all in one classroom and the lovely Profesora Anayanci!

Here's the not so bad view from the steps of the school at around 6:45am, which is what time I arrive to teach class. Coffee in hand, I await the struggled arrival of the students along with the inevitable 'crema' the PTO moms are cooking up (which I dream about nightly, salivating slightly all over my pillow).

Well I've been up river for a few weeks now and I decided it was time to come back into town to check off some errands and buy food. I'm moving into my third and last host family house before I get to live alone in my own pad(finally). Things are going really well in site so far, and work is starting to come along. I started my first classes teaching English to the kids in the school around 3 weeks ago, and last week I began my adult basic English class twice a week. I also offer a class for the more advanced students once a week in order to have exposure the more complex themes of the English language that they normally would not get. I'm learning a lot as I go, but teaching can actually be pretty fun.

Besides that I've spoken with much of my community about various projects and the importance of each. They seem pretty excited about building a water-catch system for the school. Currently the closest running water is around 200 yards downhill, which means in order for the moms who cook the food for the kids to retrieve water to cook with or wash the kids dishes, they have to either haul 5 gallon buckets uphill or take everything down to the spicket and then back up to the school. Also the kids currently do not have any drinking water nor a place to wash their hands. This seems like a good project for lots of reasons. Hopefully while this project is going on we will build a rancho area to make into the kitchen next to the school for the moms to cook at, as well as a place for all of the plates, cups, silverware and food to be stored.

There is a long list of other projects as well that we will be trying to get going, but I need to make sure I don't try and look ahead farther than I can work with right now.
My new paint job! Still missing a few spots...but I'll work up the courage pretty soon.
The back.

My view in the morning from my last host house.

Pretty awesome. The government makes cookies for the kiddies to eat in the school! Yum!

A few weeks back after our Agency Tour in Colon we went and stayed the night in Portobelo. Love that place.

Gettin´that gold!

During off season my community pans for gold.
Me! Panning for gold!

Little guy

Passion flower growing off my dugout canoe garden

My host mom for the month of July chats about...primarily me. Her name is Zuleica and she´s a little hard to hear, plus she´s only speaking in spanish, but enjoy!

The ladies in my village practicing a dance around dusk...a little dark

Whew! What a month!

These days I spend a fair amount of time thinking about all of the awesome things going on in site that I would love to tell other people about. I'm not so great at paragraph writing, so I think I'll make a list, as I am so fond of doing in all areas of my life.

1) I was sitting with a young woman in her hut the other day while she was rocking her one year old in the hammock, when the baby suddenly started to pee. The pee of course went straight through the cloth of the hammock and due to the heavy swinging motion she proceeded to draw a straight line around 1 2/2 meters long on the ground...with her urine of course.

2) The little boy who lives across from my house seems to pride himself in finding places that I will least expect him and then trying to get my attention. He is 3, and typically all that he wears is a string tied around his waist where there is sometimes attached a loin cloth. Once he gets my attention, he becomes so overwhelmed that he has trouble breathing a little bit and sort of makes these half laugh, half gasping noises as he climbs the ladder back up into his house, turning his head to look at me again about every 2 steps just to make sure I'm still watching.

3) I was asked the other day if I knew what an airplane was.

4) I was lucky enough to get to watch Lionheart staring Jean-Claude Van Damme 3 days in a row. Possibly the best of the 3 times was on the third day when we merely fastforwarded through the entire thing, but in the slowest setting possible, which condensed it down to around 15 minutes.

Last night...we watched Torneo de la Muerte, which I believe was filmed in 1964.

I think that's about all I'll say for now.

Part of my village on a cloudy morning.

Standing in the tourist house looking out at the river during heavy rain.

This is one of the lessons in the book the children in my school are given to learn english...awesome.

Frog in the water

Boat ride out of my site early in the A.M.

Swear in!

Yesterday was our official swearing ceremony in the house of the U.S. ambassador. The vice-president of Panama was present, as well as the first lady of Panama and the ambassador to the United States. Afterwards many of us went out to Casco Viejo to celebrate the day many of us have been waiting for for almost 2 years.

Boat access only

I made it out! The jungle is nice, refreshing and dense. I have a feeling that Colyn and my mom are the only two people that will see these videos or read this, so this one's for you guys. A couple things to note from the trip:

1)The average spider is the size of my entire hand

2)Sloths!

3)I bath in a river, and a beautiful one at that.

4)My floor is made of treebark

5)I'm painted and look like i have tatoos now

6)rice, rice, rice and fried plantains. my belly is taking a toll....

Culture day!

This last Friday we had a big culture day in the Congo. This included native dress, music, dancing and best of all...FOOD! For future reference, the skirt I am wearing here is a traditional Emberà skirt that all the women will be wearing in my site(except they won't be wearing tops, we'll see whether i decide to or not). By the way everyone, I'm gonna be living in a National Park for the next 2 years! Pretty sweet, eh?

Unfortunately, we were not in town for the Strippers Mixto...

For the record there is a message painted on the rearview mirror. Or perhaps rather, a question: ¨Tell me how your heart feels, baby.¨

Good thing I was raised Catholic?

This morning I tought two Panamanian classes in a local school, and at the beginning of the Second Grade class the teacher had me stand up and recite the Our Father in English for the class to repeat...uhh....

This morning was excellent! I woke up around 5:45am and headed up to the fútbol field to play some sunrise Ultimate. Chris and I drew out in the dirt a small field to play 3’s seeing as there were only 6 of us(though not a bad turnout for 6am in a small pueblo in Panamá). It felt great to run around and get my blood going early, not to mention the delight that it could be done while playing with a disc. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out after a few points that most of the people who came out had a pretty good grasp on a few more technical rules than I had anticipated(insert me sort of looking like an ass a few times for attempting to explain what many of them already knew). At the end they were all excited to come back and do it again, so with any luck this will become a trend.

Aside from the Ultimate, I have been having a very nice time down here. I know it seems from previous post that perhaps all I do is await dusk to watch lizards eat bugs, but I promise that it is only a minor past time. Around 12 days ago a fellow trainee and I headed out to the Camarca to visit a volunteer living on a beautiful beach in the Bocas del Toro area. It required first a 6 hour bus ride, then a 2 hour chiva ride over the mountains, and finally a 2 hour or so boat ride across the Bocas Lagoon over to a little peninsula. The boat ride was beautiful and along the way we were even accompanied by a dolphin swimming and jumping with us only 20 feet from the boat. The other trainee and I spent around 3 days out there before enjoying a little bit of the David life where we ate pizza, used the internet and watched a Clash of the Titans in a movie theatre for $2.00. It was a good weekend.

I’ve been updating my smugmug frequently with photos, so if you have an interest to see what any of these experiences look like feel free to visit me there. www.tease.smugmug.com

Later dudes!

st

Nom Nom Nom! Lizard dinner!

73 bugs. one gecko. one mission.

Panama!

Here's a little boy hanging from a vine in a cave in panama. Today was pretty rad, if I may say so myself.

Eye of the Needle round 2!

Yesterday Brandon and I headed back over to Indian Creek in order to visit the Eye of the Needle, a hike that seemed very appropriate for several reasons. One, the "eye" was the very first location we ever went on as the worlds #1 hiking team ever. And two, we visited this location exactly one year and six months ago almost to the day, making our two experiences coincide on almost exact opposite days of the year. It was beautiful out there, and to see more photos of this experience visit HERE where they begin.

I prefer life at a very close range.

Here is a photo that I came across last night while browsing through my pictures trying to decide which ones to take with me to Panama seeing as typically host families in foreign countries enjoy seeing a representation of "life back home." Although i don't believe i will be taking this one with me, I none the less still very much enjoy it and decided it merited a post. I took this around mid October last year on a cool morning right before Brandon, Ben and I headed out for one of our best hikes of last year.

The second image here is the original photo. The first photo, clearly, is zoomed in around the middle.

Square dancing is maaaarvelous

The following photos represent a beautiful April evening on the rooftop deck of a Fayetteville resident where we Square Danced the night away to live fiddle music. I really enjoy the first photo for the quality that we look like ghost square dancers. Included also in this post is a video from the night where you can see that we range from first time dancers to those who have squared for years. A very nice time indeed!

I have to apologize for not getting the entire video of that particular square, they do tend to be pretty long though.