Fiestas Patronales

The Feast of Saint Anne has come and gone, and with it all kinds of hubbub and commotion and shenanigans in the town of Santa Ana. First rumblings had been coming, with nightly well-attended church services followed by fireworks for the nine days leading up to the festival. Then Friday my school shifted gears, teaching no real classes and just giving all the kids arts and crafts projects. That night there was a big procession, carrying statues of Saint Anne (Jesus's Grandma) around the town. Then we came back to the well-lit church (most of the houses in town have at least a couple of banners and/or some christmas lights) where a choir sang, and there were more fireworks including a "running of the bull"-- there was a wooden bull head and torso topped with fireworks, that were lit as a friend of mine carried it on his back and ran around chasing people.

Friday my family had also started gearing up, because our house was the most happening place in town for all of Saturday. The mom served meals to anyone who came, and there was a bar I helped set-up and load with more than 1200 beers for the day (they ended up needing to restock). On Saturday I tried to keep-up with the brothers on beer when they started drinking at 10 AM, but ended up falling asleep in bed from 2 to 4, and waking up with a headache I had to take some time to walk off. Rest of the day I just hung around watching all the antics, enjoying the live music (violin, drum, PVC flute, guitar-- all playing traditional music), dancing a bit (including with a chair after a pretty drunk guy decided he wanted to lend me his "woman").

Sunday afternoon was the juego del toro-- literally "bull game." When I showed up I was afraid it was going to be a bull-fight of the kind where they kill the bull. I was relieved that it wasn't. They bring a truck of bulls, unload them one at a time, let each one run around a bit while they pester it with red capes. Sometimes someone tries to ride the bull. Then the lasso the bull and struggle to get it up a ramp into a different truck. I'm not sure about the ethics of it, but I was relieved enough that no animals were being slowly killed (or killed at all) that I didn't feel too bad enjoying the excitement of it. I sat on top of the fence along with a bunch of friends. Sometimes the bull would charge the fence, but were okay as long as we raised our legs (other than the one bull that was into headbutting, which didn't cause any problems for me, but toppled my neighbor off the fence). I also went into the ring some, bolting up the fence when the bull came near. This happened over and over again, for 6 hours each day from Sunday to Tuesday. The last few days there was also live music. For most people it seemed to be just an excuse to gather, and for many of them to enjoy a good number of beers or seco (the liquor of the area, which is basically flavorless like vodka but made from sugar cane like rum). 

At night after the bullfights, there was a "discoteca" with a DJ the first night, and "bailes" with bands playing traditional music the next couple of nights at the jardin (giant pavillion with a bar in the back). I went to the discoteca and the last baile. Both were fun because of dancing and friends and drinking and music and whatnot. The thing that surprised me most were how many seperate parts have to be paid for-- entry cost money (some nights), there were also seperate charges for dancing,  lawn chairs, little metal tables. Ice however, was surprisingly free and bountiful. 

Unsurprisingly, Monday and Tuesday were very minimal school days. Very few students showed up (60/160 on Monday) and so I didn't teach at all. More frustratingly, today, which was supposed to be my last day and big goodbye and whatnot, was cancelled because they were going to cut the water for the whole area for 12 hours. In fact, that didn't happen, but schools not happening anyway. I'm gonna drop by tomorrow for a quick goodbye, then I'll be off to a monkey sanctuary, followed by the hub of a coffee-growing area, and some tropical islands. Then it'll be an overnight bus straight back to Panama City where I'll get on my plane and be USA bound.

Sidenote: The USA beat Panama in the Gold Cup (Soccer championship for Carribean, North, and Central American countries) final on Sunday. 

What time?

So all that free time I felt like I wrote about last time has diminished significantly. Especially the last few days. I've gotten to know some of the guys I play soccer with pretty well, and since the soccer field (is a grassless playing surface still a field?) is taken over by a bull fighting set-up (I'll get back to that shortly), we've been going to the beach in the afternoon. It's a lot of fun, we load up in the back of a pick-up, splash around, play beach soccer and volleyball, and take logs out into the water as makeshift rafts (nets and goals are also made of found wood). I come back, shower, eat dinner, and then everyone's hanging out in the park by the church-- there's nine days of special masses gearing up for the town's Patronal (saint's day) which is also why the bull fighting arena has been set-up. We hang out, enjoy the free ice cream that's sponsored by whichever family has a birthday or other special occassion, watch the fireworks (we've started watching them from the safety of the park's little shelter because the homemade fireworks don't fly very true and a few have crashed dangerously close to us-- one even hit the shelters wall). All of this is a lot of fun, but the slow pace of life I'd come to enjoy has been replaced by a faster and more social lifestyle, which is probably a lot closer to what I'd live if I were from here. On the one hand I miss the quiet reflective time because it's a deceptively hard thing to find time for in life, but on the other hand, I'm grateful to be having fun and also getting more of a sense of what people in my town do.

Going backward, Monday I went to Las Tablas, the provincial capital, which had just finished it's huge and notorious patronal. Las Tablas throws the biggest Carnival in Panama, so last weekend was the #2 biggest event in the #1 festival spot in Panama. I wasn't there because I was on a different trip (to be described shortly), but I came Monday for the National Pollera Festival, an event honoring the extravagant traditional Spanish dress that still has life in Panama. It was a spectacle, women waving the gaudy dresses with huge skirts on a stage with a live band and a huge backdrop with statues of Spaniards meeting bow-and-arrow weilding natives. I was glad to see it-- it felt like a lingering legacy of Panama's early colonial wealth when it was the departure point for all the gold the Spaniards took out of Peru.

The weekend before was a very different slice of culture. I went to visit a friend from school, Adam, who's doing environmental work through the Peace Corps in Cerro Pelado, a town in the Comarca Ngöbe-Bugle-- a semi-autonomous district up in the mountains run by the two tribes in the Comarca's name. The town he's in doesn't have electricity (although it's supposed to arrive within a couple of months) and is inhabited pretty exclusively by subsistence farmers. I met a lot of people there (a big part of the Peace Corps lifestyle seems to be saying hi and talking with everyone you can to build support and awareness), tried some traditional foods (like cow foot soup, which was quite tasty), learned one very random and particularly funny sounding phrase in Ngobe (ngamu mnimni ngangali means "scrambled ant farts"), and helped harvest some corn (this involved machetes, and a long trek that felt even longer on the way back as we carried a giant basket backpack of corn). I also got a little insight into the politics of the place-- the comarca recently banned all mining, but a big gold deposit was found in the hill that Cerro Pelado is named for, and it's taken a lot of struggle to keep the mining companies out. One man described it as the continuation of the fight of the indigenous people that's been going on since the Spaniards first arrived. He described it as a war, one that you had to believe the next generation would continue. It was a very real moment of big forces popping up in what I'd framed in my mind as a quaint and pleasant slice of countryside-- wooded mountains with scattered little families and villages.

The Comarca is a few hours away from my town, which just meant a few smooth bus rides on the way there, but was a little eventful on the way back. The truck with a tarp and benches in the back that was supposed to take me to the highway didn't show up, but another truck (sans benches and tarp) passed by, so I jumped in the back with a couple of other people. Then it started pouring. Someone in the cab passed us an umbrella, which we shared, huddled underneath for a half hour of torrential downpour as the truck struggled over the extremely ragged and jagged mountain road. Fortunately I had one shirt and one pair of shirts that were cleanish and dryish, so I changed at the bus stop (using a sheet as a cover-up, much to the guarded amusement of all the other people at the bus stop) before getting on a bus headed home. That bus had AC pointed right at still-drenched me, so I was freezing. The next one was more pleasant-- deluxe even, with a flatscreen playing music video mashups of pop music in Spanish from the 90's.


That's all the words I have to write for now-- I'm internet-weary because just before writing this I was investigating what kind of circuit I'm going to do for the 5 days after I finish teaching before I leave the country. My departure is really sneaking up.  Looking at a monkey nature reserve, a mountain town by a volcano where lots of coffee is grown, the tropical archipelago of bocas del toro, and maybe visiting another peace corps volunteer. Other than that all that's left is a full weekend of festivities here, and three days of teaching. The plan is to squeeze in as much as I can.

Time Gets Filled, One Way or Another

I teach from 7:30 to noon or one (often with a free hour or two thrown in) which means that while teaching is the major activity that I'm here for (in addition to the ever-vague "cultural experience"), I've had a lot of free time. Of course, I jump on conversations and adventures when the opportunity arises, but that's not all the time, so I've spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and lying in hammocks. I tried to write a post about a week ago about the balance between those things and some of the other things I've been thinking about, but it was too hard to write, or at least harder than I was willing to deal with when I really don't want to be spending a lot of time on the computer.

Anyway, while I've had a lot of free time, I have done some things that are more exciting to write about than just reading and lying in hammocks. Before I get to special events and adventures, I finally found out during my second week where and when people play soccer. A bunch of guys, mostly in their teens and twenties, play every day on the little dirt field every weekday at 5. They have a good system for deciding who gets to play when, and everyone seems to enjoy it a lot. For me, it's been nice to get exercise and to have activity to fill my time, but actually the biggest benefit has probably been a social one. Weekend nights--especially Sundays for some reason (and not really Fridays at all) people gather at the bar right by my house (actually one of the two that's within two blocks), and the times I've gone since I started playing soccer, there've been a few there who've been super friendly. I learned that most of them are fishermen, which pays reliably enough not to worry about eating, but often not much more than that. A couple of them love the lifestyle--as it was described (in a fashion that had me seriously considering what it'd be like if I moved here permanently, although I'll admit I was a few beers in): you spend all day out on the water with your friends, then come back and play soccer with them, then a few nights a week go out to bars. (I think it's worth noting that the bars here are giant pavillions with one bar at the back. People here call them gardens when it's a laid-back evening of drinking, and discotechs when theres a special event).

Speaking of the fisherman, today was the Saint's Day for the patron saint of the fisherman-- Santa María del Carmen. Yesterday, I went to the mass at the little church out by the beach (with a gorgeous mural in the back of Jesus among fisherman), which was followed by a procession. They carried two floats with statues of Santa María to the beach, then one went on a boat and continued parallel to the other float, which they carried across the beach. Tons of people were there, and lots of them were launching homemade fireworks. I went with my host mom (although a couple of the fisherman had invited me) and as we were leaving, one of the soccer players, insisted on getting me a beer, and as he gave it to me, insisted multiple times that I tell him if I want another. Sometimes the generosity I come across here is really humbling.

Whenever I walk into a bar, lots of soccer guys and friends of the family buy me lots of beers, but whenever I go anywhere at all, I always here lots of little voices shouting, "Benjamin!" And then the next day I'm always told that I was seen. Today in school, at least thirty kids told me that they'd seen me. I never quite know how to respond because literally all they say is, "Benjamin! I saw you!" Half the time they also tell me where they saw me. Sometime I say that it wasn't me, it was my evil twin, but that joke felt played out very quickly. I'm not really sure how I respond these days.

I also took a trip last weekend. It was the midpoint break for our program so we all got together at a beach to take a break from the lives we're leading and to talk about how things have been and how things can be improved. I've been really impressed by the discussion activities we've done, both this past weekend and during our orientation. I also had some really good conversations, taking long walks from one end of the beach to another. One guy in the program is doing research on attitudes toward Panamanian education, and that started some good conversations. As for the beach, it was nice but not exceptional, and kind of a strange place. A group of Israelis bought the entire beach ten or fifteen years ago, and now they've put up a nice hotel, hostal, and restaurant. We ended up hanging out with the owner of the hostal, and the family members of the hotel owners. They're Panamanian, but also not; Israeli but also not; and their lifestyle seems to be showing up at the hostel with a bottle of alcohol to make a mini-party with whoever happens to be there.




Three Differences
1. Houses are much more functional than aesthetic. A lot of them would be considered shacks in the US. Except for the old houses that are made of adobe, pretty much everything is either cinderblock or concrete with corrugated metal roofs. My house has a ceiling, but I think that's a rare luxury that came when my host mom won a lottery a few years back.

2. Speaking of lotteries, people are lottery crazed. Everyone watches when they pull the numbers on TV, and in the cities there are people selling tickets from folding tables on the street every couple of blocks at least. Also, department stores do their own version of a lottery-- basically you load a gift card, and if you win you get ten times what you put, but otherwise you lose nothing. Seems like a smart business strategy to me.

3. As I said, I had a bunch of conversations about Panamanian schools and the ways their different from schools I know in the US. I'm not gonna do much analysis, but I'll mention a couple of things I've noticed (I guess I'm being flexible on how much information constitutes a single difference for this section)

• Even in kindergarten, the kids are expected to spend the whole day sitting at tables or desks. Sometimes they sing and walk around a little, but mostly it seems like they do arts and crafts to keep them quietly and calmly(ish) sitting at their places.
• When the supervisor came from the regional office of the ministry of education and met with all the teachers, she basically talked about nothing but the school's decorations. She encouraged them to find patrons to sponsor banners with the schools values on them. She also critiqued their mural design, told them that their summers should be spent improving the school, and brushed aside the criticism that parts of the school are falling apart.
• The school gives the kids a lot of food-- cookies and milk when they come; and beans, hot dogs, and rice before they leave. And still, almost all of the kids bring a couple of dollars each day to buy sweets and potato salads and flavored mayonaise sandwhichs and fried foods and ice cream and things like that from the school store during their fifteen minute recess. 
• The only classes that aren't core subjects are English/Art (the curriculum combines them, which ends up giving the teacher a lot of flexibility in what to do each day), and Phys. Ed. 
• Teacher's don't provide materials and students have to pay for anything the teachers have to copy for them (a nickel a copy in the office). Supposedly this is covered by a stipend/bonus the government gives to families with kids in schools, but I've heard murmurs that it isn't enough. (I don't know who pays for all of that in the US come to think of it...)
• Kids who don't want to participate do just that. The teachers usually don't argue with them or force them, unless they're being exceptionally disruptive. 

Hope this wasn't excessively rambly... Please feel encouraged to comment or shoot me an email!

Beginnings

This is going to be a pretty  bare-bones blog, without pictures or pretty background or probably any editing. Still I'm going to post from time to time because I want to have something out there to explain to interested parties what I'm doing (and to be in honest, in no small part so that I have an easy out when people ask for updates or a recap). Also, you're going to have to bear with the parentheses-- I've grown very fond of them lately.

Anyway, I'm here in Panama. After a few days of orientation in Panama City with the other eight gringos, I came to Santa Ana, a town of 3,000-some in the Los Santos region. My host family centers around a matriarch, Mercedes, who calls me hijo, and who I call mama. I live in her house with two of her five adult sons. The others all live near by, as do other assorted relatives. The house is the family's social hub-- I met so many relatives here in my first few days that it took a while to figure out who I was living with, and whose names I needed to remember (actually I'm definitely still working on that one).

The other main part of my situation is that I'm teaching English at the town school, which is K-6. There are two English teachers there, both of whom actually have pretty solid English, and I'm there to give an extra boost of fun, pronunciation. That said, they give me a lot of lattitude, so I've tried to edge in some bits of motivation and linguisticky understanding to go make all the bits of English they learn helpful/meaningful/less of a chore.

At school the kids have been reasonably well-behaved (although there are exceptions among the kindergartners and 6th grade boys). The classes are reasonably sized, in the teens and twenties. The teachers have been kind of inconsistent in that sometimes they just give me a topic and tell me to teach it right then and there, and other times having me as just a parrot, showing off my "perfect pronunciation."

A couple of adventures:

• Today I went to the pig farm that mi mama owns together with a son of hers. I watched them slaughter a pig. Not a thing I'd seen before. There are a lot of thoughts one can think about it, but the thought that really struck me was how much life comes out of the way things are arranged, and how critical all the bits of the arrangement are.
• I got dropped off at the beach, which is about 6km down the road. I took a dip, walked across the beach, and then walked back. It was really nice to have a long walk, the length of which I didn't have control over. I also noticed how much more quickly it went when I had an active goal-- scanning the treeline for ripe mangoes. 

A few differences I've noticed:

• Back to the mangoes, no one buys them here because the trees are everywhere. It seems like people are just tired of them. Lots of them fall and rot on the ground, and no one minds if you knock one of their tree to eat (although I'm still not sure if it was kosher for me to have snuck under a barbed wire fence to grab one)
• People aren't so easily definable by their profession it seems. My host mom is known as 'la profesora' because she teaches professional ethics at the university, but she also does a lot for the pig farm. Her son/partner does even more, but he's also works as a government auditor. Another son works at a bank a few days a week, and driving a circuit from the beach to the town to the city nearby on other days.
• The people who pack the bags at the supermarket checkout also take your bags out to your car and load them.