Beautiful Hike

Two weeks ago we decided that we had recovered enough from our illness to try a longer hike.  We didn't go up and then down, though.  We started at an elevation of 2000 ft. in our town and hiked down to the town of Los Seibos, which is only at 1000 ft.  The climate there is very different!  There are ripe mangoes everywhere, which we ate and took back with us.  One of the students in sixth grade, Oliver, has relatives in Los Seibos and agreed to guide us down and back.

Our tour guide

Oliver was a wonderful guide.   He was very talkative, and pointed out all sorts of interesting things along the way.  When we got to the famous steep part “El Picacho” (steep peak), Oliver pointed out the place where a horse fell into a big hole and died.  They reworked the road two or three months ago and it is a lot better, but you can see that it is still pretty rough.

Climbing El Picacho (in sandals)

On the way down we passed lots of steep terrain where farmers have planted their crops.

rice, corn, yucca are planted here

A bit more than halfway down the trail we came across the Los Seibos School.  It is a K-6 school, but the population has dwindled over the years.  There are currently eight students and one teacher in the school.  The fence is new this year.  Since cars or trucks can’t make the trip, the fathers of the school kids carried everything down either by horse or on their backs.  Many of the residents in the area prefer to send their children to our town where they have 56 students and one teacher for each two grades.  Oliver lives with his grandparents in our town and his brother and sister also live there with the other set of grandparents.  One of the families we were going down to visit have a house in each place and spend weekdays in town and weekends in Los Seibos.   They have five school-aged kids, three of which would have gone to the Los Seibos School.

Los Seibos School

Once in Los Seibos, we had an introduction to the families.  There are only six houses in the hamlet.  Then we walked down a steep hill to the swimming hole where we enjoyed playing with the kids in the water.

The swimming hole

Heather enjoys a natural jacuzzi 

Steve plays "freeze tag" with the kids

Two of our hosts - Efraim and Isidro

After the swim they insisted than we mount the horse for a photo op.  We didn’t actually ride anywhere.

We chose a different way back to town to avoid “El Picacho”.  It was longer but not so steep.

Here is the group at the top.  They loaded us down with mangoes, plantains, and yucca, but we were lucky that the grandfather carried our gifts on his horse.

Our escorts for the trip uphill

Other Stuff

The fish seller comes past our house once a week in his pickup truck with fish fresh from the Pacific in huge ice chests.   Red snapper is $2.00 a pound!

On Friday evening the neighborhood kids took us to a hilltop to look for the sunset.  We saw the Pacific, but no sun.

Myelis, Joanis, Noelis, and Johnny with us

Of course they had to show us their climbing skills on the radio antenna!

June 25 -29 was our province’s English Week.  We celebrated with games, a spelling bee, talent show, and various contests including a poster contest.

Heather and Orme  (co-teacher in the middle school) in front of the winners of the poster contest.

The primary school spelling bee finalists with English teacher Omar

Last but not least is the inauguration of the newly built first ever police station in our town.  Until now the closest police station was a half hour drive away, and the patrols through our area were few and far between.  The community feels better with 24 hour protection.

The Minister of Security of Panama arrived at the ceremony (90 min late!) by helicopter, which landed on the town playing field.  The local kids all raced to the field to see the landing.

That’s it for this week!

New House

We haven’t written a blog entry in a while.  We have been very busy here with moving to our new house, which happened on June 22.  Steve also had a presentation to make to the community about which projects he would be doing in the next two years, and that took a lot of preparation.  It turns out they are most interested in reforestation, the handling of garbage/recycling (there is no trash collection here), and environmental education for the youth of the community.   Steve is also going to work on a web site to promote tourism in the area.  This will include helping create and maintain trails to the most scenic spots in the area, and also taking pictures of those spots for the web site.  Sounds like fun!

We love our new house!

We have been busy getting settled in the new house.  The stores in our town only sell basic food and cleaning items, so we had to make several trips into Chitré to get all that we needed.  On Monday night we hosted five people sleeping over in our house, which was quite a feat considering we only have the bottom floor of the house.  We originally thought we were going to have the whole house, but the owner of the house wants to keep that separate.  Right now the top floor is not finished, so no one can live there anyway.  We had five people here because there is a team of paramedics from Montana touring our province teaching first aid.  Heather and Steve both translated for them on Tuesday afternoon at our school.   A couple of people slept on the front porch, which eased the crowded conditions.

Paramedics Sierra, Dan and Parker and organizer Amanda behind our house

Here are some more pictures of our new house. 

Heather having breakfast

A hammock with a view!

We just found out that we have cell signal on the back balcony!

Here is the view from the top of the hill behind our house.  At night you can see the lights of cities which are 30-35 miles away to the north.  We have hiked down into the valley to a small village at the bottom, which we will describe another day.

Our new neighbors include two sisters ages 10 and 12 who have helped us out with lots of things.  They brought us house plants for our front porch when they saw we had none.  They gave us lemongrass to plant when they found out we liked to make lemongrass tea.  They helped us clear a path to the top of the hill with machetes, and finally they helped Steve make shelves from the fridge box.

Noelis (age 12) and Myelis (10) 

Noelis swings a machete while Myelis moves brush

Reusing the fridge box for storage

All of the female employees of the school organized a Father’s Day celebration for all of the male employees of the school.  They raised money by selling raffle tickets for a food basket.  Father’s Day is the same day in Panama as it is in the US, but Mother’s Day is celebrated on December 8^th here, to coincide with the Catholic Day of Immaculate Conception. 

The females drew lots to provide a gift for each male.

The women serve up the food

Mangoes still have not come in season yet in our town, which is at an elevation of 2000 feet.  There are many nearby places at lower elevations which have lots of mangoes right now.  Steve had a meeting with an environmental agency on Monday and came home with a ton of mangoes.

Can we eat all of these?