Happy Thanksgiving

Little late but hope everyone had a happy thanksgiving. After another whole week of being out of site, I'm heading back today. My group had 4 days or so of extra training, some of which was useful some of which wasn't at all but thats alright.. was cool to see everyone again.

Over 100 volunteers got together in Cerro Punta for the holiday.. they cooked 5 turkeys and 5 hams and everything else that goes along with tday. Heres a picture of my cabin.

My plan for December.. the first week, a spanish teacher is coming to stay in Nikki's site so I'm going to try to take advantage of that as much as I can since she's so close. I'm going to finish up in the school (their year ends soon).. and then start my community-wide english class. I've got to work on applying for grants for the penpal program and for the stoves. I'd like to try to get an environmental youth group Panama Verde going as well.

Besides that, I am going to be doing a ton of pasearing because I've been getting that out of site guilt trip lately. This might be a good time to make my map with everyones names.. itll help me actually memorize their names. I've really only got down the people I talk to all the time and certain kids. This is a hard job for someone whose bad at names ;), especially ones I can't understand or spell sometimes.

Mid-december, right around when the kids are taking exams I've got a few more gringos coming to visit.. I might force them to do a night of hannukah with me haha, then theres xmas and new years (not sure where I'll be for those)

Metallica

Panama City, March 8. awesome

http://www.metallica.com/page.asp?id=600036

November

I’ve been starting to feel a bit guilty lately about being out of site with the little trips since Maria’s been around, but the days that we’re in town we do enough pasearing and I work at the school so the guilt goes away pretty quick. We’re currently in the city dropping Maria off at the airport tomorrow. We stayed in Nuevo Emperador with my training family which was fun, they were all stoked to have me back even for just the night. Everything was the same except the puppy I lived with during training is now a full blown dog.

After 7 months in Panama I finally went to see the canal haha. Well.. I’ve seen it tons of times driving over it, but just now went to the locks/museum/etc. Glad I read Path btwn the Seas before I went b/c I could fill in all the blanks of the history the museum left out (lots of blanks.. read the book).

Anyway, backtrack a bit to Costa Rica. Monteverde was way fun, definitely did its job as a tourist town. There were way more gringos walking around than locals.. little different than Boquete where the tourists were a little more mixed in. We ziplined with a company called Aventura and were gonna do a night hike in the park but it started pouring mid-zipline. The rain made it way harder to slow down, adding to the fun so it was nothing to complain about.

Next day we went out to a chill Caribbean town, Cahuita. We walked around on the beach, hung out with the owners and did a mini-hike through the national park. The trail is right on the coast, looping around a little peninsula. Didn’t see any howler monkeys but definitely heard em. We decided to turn around midway and head out to the sloth sanctuary. Still haven’t seen one in the wild but saw a good amount in rehab.. funny looking things.

The bus back was better than the way there as in they gave us meals and put some movies on. Either way it was still an overnight bus with a shitty, 3 hour border crossing :p. After a few days hanging out in site again/working at the school, we left again and well I guess that brings me back to where I started this thing. Here are pictures..

monteverde

cahuita

sloth

NE

canal

Estufas

A few weeks ago the director at my escuela mentioned to me that they're very interested in building heat efficient/wood saving stoves. I thought sweet, work opportunities. What this entails is soliciting help from a non-government agency called Cosecha Sostenible Internacional (Sustainable Harvest International). I found out they were actually started by a volunteer in the 90's from Coclé and are now all over Central America. The head of the group now in Penonomé is actually the brother of the director at my school, both of who are awesome and am finding out are pretty easy to work with.

Besides getting help from Cosecha, I will be applying for grants to get the funds for the project. Of course none of this is happening anytime too soon, especially because I'm sitting in a wireless cafe in America (Albrook mall) right now waiting for a bus to Costa Rica.

I had a chance to help out with the building of these same stoves at a neighbor volunteer's site. Here is a link to a bit of information from cosecha's site http://www.sustainableharvest.org/stoves.cfm although the model is a bit different than the one we worked on. To get 2 or 3 built, we'd only have to collect $100 to $150.. not a whole lot with how efficient the stoves are compared to the current methods. The school cooks a ton every day for all the kids, so they really do save a lot of wood (less work/less trees used)

Below are a few pictures of the work.. Maria got in there too. On that note, the cultural exchange with her around has been through the roof.. which is 2/3 of my job haha. We went to a baile in Penonomé on the 6th to celebrate.. I want to say the founding of the city. Two big names were playing, Alfredo y Nenito. She said dancing tipico is kinda boring but likes the music. Its true the dancing is pretty simple but hey, at least I can do it.

Alfredo on the left.. he killed a guy! machetazo

The wood is placed inside that elbow so the heat comes straight up onto the pot. Eventually ash surrounds the entire chimney so heat isn't lost.

Securing it with muddy paste

Filling the ash

Boquete and Bocas

The quick decision to head up to Boquete was definitely worth it. Nice, quiet mountain town.. too bad we didn't have a few days to do the hikes in the area but we did take the Cafe Ruiz tour.. there were only 4 of us. The other guy and I both spoke spanish and english but his girlfriend only spoke spanish and maria, english.. so the tour guide did double the work and gave the whole tour in both languages. For Thanksgiving I'll be up in the same general area at Cerro Punta.. hopefully there'll be some time to hike volcan baru.

Right after the tour ended we booked it out to David and up to the Bocas Islands and met up with some volunteer friends for halloween festivities. I finally got to be a tourist.. as in spending too much money. We took a day long boat tour of 4 islands, saw dolphins, snorkeled (well I did at least, Maria took pictures from the boat) and chilled on the beach. We're in David now, heading back to LB tomorrow for the holidays. Heres some pictures of the trip so far.. the ones that look like a Caribbean island is Bocas.

Boquete

Learning how to prep pescado

At the creek in site, heading to the waterfall

teaching ingles, we're playing hangman w/ family vocab

you can't see me. i'll leave the guy on the left nameless to protect his dignity