Terremoto!

We experienced the first earthquake of our lives on Tuesday.  Actually, it was a few tremors, not a real earthquake, but by New Jersey standards, it was quite something!  It was really weird to feel the ground move - the first time it happened I didn't even realize what was going on until it was over.  The epicenter was 20 miles away and the quake measured 4.6 on the Richter scale.  Here in our town there were 5 different tremors, each lasting only one or two seconds.  They started at 5 pm and ended at 2 am.  Each one was enough to shake the house, but not enough to knock anything off the shelves.  I'm sure in California they don't even notice things like this, but here in Chepo the whole town is still talking about it.  On Saturday we had another tremor, a bit longer but not nearly as strong.

Earth Day in our town was celebrated on Thursday by the entire school.  Each class made banners which they carried in a parade through the town.  You can see a two-minute video of the parade here.  It starts with the pre-kindergarten and goes through the sixth grade in white shirts followed by grades 7-9 in blue shirts.

Seventh graders and their banner

 Here are the boys' and girls' dormitories at our school.  50 boys and 50 girls sleep over Monday through Thursday nights.  There is one big room for each group.  It's the weekend, so the rooms are empty.

Girls' dorm

Boys' dorm

Our big news is that we have found a house to live in for the duration of our two-year stay here.  We move in on June 15th, after spending the required three months with our host family, whom we have grown to love over the past month.  The house is brand new!  Due to unfortunate circumstances the person who built it needs to move to a different province, so it hit the rental market, which is pretty limited here.  We feel very lucky to be able to live in this house, which as you can imagine is very fancy by Peace Corps standards.  We have indoor plumbing - two bathrooms with showers, balconies front and back, and a nice front porch.  There is plenty of room for visitors!

The house is a 15 minute walk from our present location.  We will have a new group of neighbors.  On Saturday we met a lot of them, including this group of adorable kids that Heather teaches.  We are really looking forward to getting to know them better.  They are a lot of fun.

Kids here don't need expensive toys to keep them occupied.  Here they are sliding down the steep pine-needled slope behind our new house sitting on palm leaves and holding on to the stems.

New Priest in Town

The big event on Sunday was the mass given by the newly ordained Catholic priest from our town.  It is the first time in the history of the town that anyone born here has become a priest.  He was ordained last Saturday in the regional capital Chitré, and he came here to give his first mass. 

After the mass, food was given out to all who came, a group of over 200 people.  The preparation of the food began days ago.  A pig was killed and roasted, palm leaves were boiled for tamales, and a huge vat of corn was boiled and ground up by hand.  The food was delicious!

Roast pork, anyone?

The final product is below.  Everyone who was at the mass got one of these on the way out - tamale, rice, pork and a sweet dessert.  It's too bad we couldn't recycle the containers!

Weekend guest

This weekend we had a visit from Savannah, a Peace Corps volunteer from a nearby town.  We hiked all over the area, including the Alto del Higo, the highest point in our province. 

Savannah, Heather and Steve

We also hit the swimming hole, where we saw the locals showing off by jumping from the heights.

Ernesto jumps while Savannah watches from below

While we were having fun hiking and swimming, our host father Aristides was busy baptizing people in the local river.  He baptized nine people on Saturday.

We ran out of bananas in the house, so our neighbor Joel and his friend went to our host family's farm and wheeled two big bunches up a really steep hill to our house.  You can see how much he sweated doing it!

That's a lot of bananas!

Here are a few pictures of the scenery here. 

this is the view on the walk home

view from our window of the rainbow

Below is the view from where we have to go to get a signal on our phones. It's a 3 minute walk from the house. We can make calls and check emails here, but the data is really slow for things like Facebook.  We have satellite internet in the school which is a bit faster, but sometimes when it rains a lot the service goes out.

That's it for this week!

Climbing the Tower

This week we had no rain all week, so we were able to enjoy the mountains.  On Thursday afternoon we went back to the highest point in our province with three of the teachers from the school.  It was a beautiful afternoon, and the views from the top were great.  This time we went up a different antenna which allowed us to go much higher than the previous time.

How's the view up there, Steve?

Ida and Heather watch from below

Beivis, Ormelis, Heather and Steve

View from the top

Another view from the top

"Living fences" are very popular here in Panama.  Farmers often use them for their fields, but this one is a floral variation on the standard fence, which always includes three strands of barbed wire, even if no animals are on the property.

This past weekend our town hosted an Evangelical campaña, which appears to us to be similar to an old fashioned revival.  Pastors came into town from other cities and preached and sang to large (by our standards) crowds.  The affair started Friday evening and continued evenings through Sunday.  People came from the surrounding towns by horseback and foot to participate in the spectacle.

On Sunday morning we took our biggest hike so far.  We hiked up our favorite mountain, down the back side, and around the base back to town.  It took about four and a half hours.  The scenery was spectacular, and we had several views of the Pacific off in the distance.  There were a lot of steep hills, and we were glad when we finally got back to town.

A very big fig tree!

This land is part of the Montuoso Forest Preserve.  Over the years, farmers have been chipping away at the forested area, slashing and burning to create more farmland.  Now only about a third of the original area remains as forest.  Here is a recently burned area.

At one point we ran into a woman who was going our way for the last two hours of the hike.  She had decided that it was better to hike barefoot over the gravel roads and carry her sandals in a bag.  She said that she does this a lot, and claimed that her feet weren't sore by the time we reached town.

I mentioned in the last blog entry that the sun is directly overhead at noon at this time of year.  Here is a picture taken at noon to illustrate the point.  I'm not casting much of a shadow!

Easter

We have now finished three weeks in our site.  Here’s our news for the past week:

Steve was able to get more computers working by swapping parts out of non-working ones.  The total is up to twenty now, which is a huge improvement over the twelve we had last week.  The seventh graders have classes of 32 students, so having more computers definitely helps!

We finally saw a good sunrise this week.  Usually there are clouds low on the horizon which hide the first view of the sun.  This picture doesn’t really do it justice, but it gives you some idea of the view from our window.

On Good Friday we went to the town of Pesé to see the “live crucifixion”.  They actually have three men carry their crosses to the top of a hill where they hang suspended from the crosses.  They are pretty tough men - they stay up there for about 45 minutes.  They don’t use nails, though – just ropes :)  Unfortunately we couldn’t stay in the town late enough to see the reenactment, but we got to see the stages where they were to re-enact the last supper and various other parts of the Easter story.   The original time for the re-enactment was 2pm, but by 4pm we were still waiting for it to start.  We had to catch a bus out of town then because we didn’t have a place to spend the night there and public transport doesn’t run very late in the day.   It wasn’t a total loss, however.  We got to spend the day with a couple of PC volunteers in our group.  We did see some Roman centurions walking past, and also a Roman on horseback.  There were plenty of floats to see in the church, as the traditional Easter procession was also on the schedule.

Hanging out with Miranda and Savannah

I got these pictures off the internet, as we didn't stay long enough to see this for ourselves.

The Crucifixion

Re-enactment

 There was a lot of activity getting ready for the procession.

Putting the flowers on

One of the floats in the church

Flower display in the church

Heather’s birthday was Saturday, and host mom Odilia made another of her delicious cakes.  We actually celebrated three birthdays that night.  Odilia and Aristides’ daughter Anna had a birthday the week before, as did Darisnel, a neighbor.  Anna was visiting for the weekend.

Darisnel, Heather, and Anna

On Sunday morning we saw another of those poisonous frogs in the road.  This time he stood still long enough for us to get a close-up picture.  He's only an inch long.

Looks innocent, doesn't he?

Also on Sunday we went to one of the local Evangelical churches.  There used to be one, but due to unspecified differences of opinion, there are now three for our small town.  The one we went to had about 25 people at the service.  It was more like a bible study course than the kind of church services we are used to.  We spent a lot of time reading biblical references to the events of Eastertime and talking about them.

 We are experiencing both religions that exist in our town.  A couple of weeks ago we went to the Catholic church for the mass celebrating San Jose.  In the mass they asked us to carry a basket of fruit forward and give it to the priest as the offering.  It is an important symbolic part of the ceremony, and we felt honored to have that special role in the service.

Today (Monday) is special here because the sun is directly overhead at noon today.  This happens twice a year - now and September first.  That makes it really hot now in cities like the regional capital Chitré, where we went this weekend.  Fortunately we are cooler up here at 2000 ft. elevation in our little town.  Our temperatures range from 68 F in the morning to the low 80’s later in the day.  School gets out at 1pm most days, and when we walk home uphill in the direct sun with no breeze, we do feel that heat!  Fortunately our house is on a ridge which usually gets plenty of wind to cool us off.

Speaking of weather, it didn’t rain here for three months, and now it has rained every day for eight days.  Sometimes it just rains for an hour, sometimes for several hours, sometimes at night, sometimes in the day.  Everything is turning green here, and we have no problems with dusty roads any more!  Plus, it is too wet to burn the fields, so we don’t have smoke drifting in.  It is very early in the year for the rainy season to be starting.  Most people expect to have some dry weather before the rainy season starts in earnest, but you never know…

Week Two in Review

Our second week in our site went very well.  Heather is busy helping with the English classes, and I am busy rejuvenating the old computers in the lab.  We have about a dozen which are in working condition, ready for the hands-on computer classes which start today. 

This past week we ventured to the local swimming hole, which is about a 10 minute walk from our host family’s house.  The water comes straight from the mountain.  It is most refreshing and we had fun swimming and jumping from the rocks.   Unlike the last place where I jumped in from a tree branch into neck-deep water, this swimming hole is so deep I couldn’t reach the bottom even though I tried several times.

Watch out below!

Heather enjoying the cool water

We hiked to the end of town on Thursday evening in time to see the sun go down into the Pacific.  There is just a thin finger of the sea reaching this far inland, but it was a beautiful sight.  The picture doesn’t really do it justice.

Friday morning at school there was the first parent’s meeting of the new school year. It was held on the covered basketball court in the open air.  A parent from each family is required to attend. Roll is taken, and if a parent doesn’t show up the family is fined $5.  This is a significant sum for some families, as the daily wage for a worker to chopear in the fields with his machete is $8.   Parents showed up from all of the surrounding towns, by foot, by truck, and by horse.

The parking lot!

At the meeting, the school director introduced us and we gave a short speech introducing ourselves and explaining the purpose of the Peace Corps.  The next item on the agenda was to elect new officers for the Padres de Familia (Parents Association).  This group is much more powerful than the PTA of the USA schools.  It has the power to fire teachers by going to the provincial educational authority.

The new officers for the Padres de Familia were then nominated from the floor.  After there were a sufficient number of these nominees; they decided among themselves who would be president, vice president etc.  One of the items on the agenda was to collect money from each family ($2) to put towards a fund for students who become ill and need medical attention beyond the local health center.  (Previously, teachers or the people who oversee the boarding students, accompanied sick children to a hospital were paying the fees up front and had to wait to be reimbursed.)  Also a parent from each family is required to give 2 days of service at the school per year.  This could be cooking in the school cafeteria, clearing brush, or working on the school farm.

On Saturday we hiked the highest mountain in our province of Herrera  (3,000 feet.) with our host father Aristides.  He is 72 and we could just about keep up with him!  He is a great guide and explained different plants and animals as we passed them.  We heard howler monkeys in the distance but never saw one.  We also heard toucans but didn’t see any of them either.  Heather was relieved not to see any snakes!  They do have fer-de-lance snakes in our area, which are poisonous.  In the dry season they usually come out at night near streams and rivers, so there was not much danger to us in the mountains.  Nevertheless it’s a good idea to carry a machete just in case.

Aristides was our guide

Unfortunately the highest point in the province doesn’t have a view to speak of.  The summit is completely surrounded by trees.  However, it appeared that lots of people had climbed up the antenna for a better view.  If you go up high enough you can see the Pacific, which is around 15 miles away.  I didn’t take a picture because the day was so hazy.

How's the view, Heather?

The weather has been very hazy this past week due to it being the height of summer and also lots of farmers are burning their terrain.  That is how they clear the brush from the fields to prepare for planting.  It hasn’t rained since we arrived in January, so the sloped fields are very dry.  The farmers are all waiting for rain to get here so that they can plant.

Burned fields in foreground and also in the distance

Sunday was a special day for two reasons.  We finally saw a toucan (actually two of them), and it rained for the first time in three months.  We were really glad for the rain, not only for the crops, which were really suffering, but also for our walk to school each day.  There was so much dust in the road that our shoes were always completely covered.  Most of the teachers take a change of shoes for when they get to the classroom.  We didn’t get enough rain to turn everything to mud, just enough to keep down the dust.  

The second toucan is hiding behind a branch to the left of the one you see clearly.

Nature lesson of the week:  These are termite nests.  The termites construct little tunnels running up the outside of the trunk of a tree ending in a huge nest.  The locals say that if you break it open it is excellent food for baby chicks.  These nests appear to be empty, though.  

Lesson number two:  These little blue and black frogs are only an inch long but are extremely poisonous.  They say that the milky liquid they give off when frightened can kill a person in three minutes.  We saw two of these.  Luckily they run away and hide when a human approaches!

Don't get too near this guy!  I zoomed in a lot to get this picture.