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 All of this is a lot of fun, but the slow pace of life I'd come to enjoy has been replaced by a faster and more social lifestyle, which is probably a lot closer to what I'd live if I were from here.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.