Books A Million

Reading is very much a cultural thing, so I have discovered. In the United States, we are brought up with the mindset that reading is important and it helps broaden your mind. I may not have always liked reading when I was growing up, but I never hated it. I have noticed over the past few years that I read a lot more and a lot faster when I am abroad. This is highly due to the lack of the many distractions that I have when I am home and the fact that reading is a comfort, a little piece of home, when I am abroad. In Panama, it is the complete opposite. Every Panamanian I have talked to says they hate reading. One of the first things I noticed in my host family’s house during the first week is that there are no bookshelves, no books. From my experience, thus far, as a teacher in Panama, there is also very little reading done in the school too. How is it that such an important part of education is lacking in an entire country?There are no bookstores in Santiago and on my few weekend trips to other parts of the country, I have never seen a book store. Reading is just not a part of the culture here, the television is though. My host family would rather watch T.V. or play video games than read. I am baffled! I have spent a few nights at home reading a good book in the living room while the rest of the family watches yet another baseball game or an episode of Deal or No Deal. Books are an escape, a chance to travel to any place in the world or the imagination, without leaving the comforts of home, and I am at a loss as to why a country who wants to be more like the U.S. or least more developed, would not want to read about all those other places to see how they became so powerful or learn about their histories so as to perhaps avoid some of their mistakes. I spend nearly all of my spare time at school reading  and the few times I have sat a the professors table between my classrooms to read, my students have made funny faces and signs of dislike. Even my co-teacher has stated several times that she hates reading! She said she might be able to handle a children’s book that is very short.

I have read six books so far and just started reading my seventh book yesterday. It seems the theme for my book selection in Panama has been books that have been turned into major films because nearly all my books have been turned into films in the last few years. I started my journey by reading The Hunger Games, a really good book and great movie as well because I went to see it here in Panama last week with two other volunteers. I then moved on to Water for Elephants, a book that I loved reading. Then on to something different, a Nicholas Sparks book which has not been turned into a film yet, Safe Harbor. I discovered after these three that I was rapidly making my way through the books I brought with me, so I searched for books in the World Teach office to read and I found a 655 page book that should occupy some time. I took Inkspell, the sequel to Ink Heart which is also a movie, and it kept me occupied until Easter. I moved on with Something Borrowed next, a book which I am sure made for a good chick flick! At this point I was ready for one of the books I was saving for the end of my trip, The Help! I read this book in a week, all 500 plus pages of it – I did not want to put it down! When I finished it on Friday, I loved it so much, I was tempted to read again! I have safely tucked that book away and moved on with yet another book I found in the World Teach office, The Great Gatsby, I have never read it and almost feel like it is one of those books that if it is not read in school, you should be required to read it at some point in your life because I have always heard that it was just one of those books. It is short, only 189 pages, so I am sure I will finish it by the end of this week, leaving me with just three more weeks to fill with other reading material!

When I get home, I plan on having a movie marathon and renting the movies that have all been based on the books I have been reading!

Semana Santa

Easter is not just a day in Panama, it is an entire holy week, thus the name Semana Santa. Since I work at a school which enrolls students from across the country, my holy week vacation was a little bit longer than the other volunteers’. I worked the Monday before Easter and that was it because Tuesday was a half day, with the other meant to be spent meeting with student’s parents. Of course I found out that my vacation was more than a 4-day weekend at the last minute, so I was not able to extend my stay in Boquete, but I think the week turned out just fine.

I spent Tuesday relaxing at home while my host family was at school and work, then packed up to head to Boquete Wednesday morning. Boquete is a beautiful little town up in the mountains and is about 45 minutes away from the Costa Rican border. This 3.5 day vacation was my first solo vacation and I managed to do it in another country too! It takes two buses and about 4 hours to get from Santiago to Boquete. My hostel was situated right on the town square where there was a fountain and a gazebo. After checking into my shared dorm room, I found a nice place to read for a little while until it was time for dinner. I didn’t get very far before I began striking up conversations with other people staying at the hostel. I befriended a girl from Washington state who was taking a semester off from college and we had dinner that night to continue our conversation and so she could help get me oriented around this little town.

Can never have enough air fresheners!

fountain in town square

gazebo in town square

The next morning, I woke up and took a luke warm shower, the first I have had since my weekend in Santa Catalina a month before, and then made my way to the kitchen to make pancakes. The hostel provides the batter and coffee, you just have to make your own pancakes. The first day of pancake making was not a pretty sight, but by the next day, I had mastered the making of a giant fluffy pancake in the hostel kitchen.

My main reason for going to the mountains was to escape the heat for a few days and relax, just do what I want when I want for a few days. Across the bridge, the fair grounds were open for the annual orchid festival and if there is one thing missing in Santiago, it’s an abundance of flowers. I went over early in the day to avoid crowds and to also scope out potential things to buy as well. The fair grounds were a giant garden with a few stands and make shift shops set up on the sides and few permanent little shops spread throughout the middle. Being overwhelmed with freshly bloomed flowers was quite the refreshing experience compared to my normal life in Santiago of sun and dust; I had time to actually stop and smell the roses! The flowers were beautiful and souvenir shopping was productive.

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The next thing on my agenda, relaxing in a coffee shop. Boquete is one of the prime areas for growing good quality coffee and as a result, there are a number of little coffee shops in town. I slipped into one just a block down from my hostel, ordered my drink, and snuggled into one of the big chairs in the corner in front of the cooling fan. I spent a couple of hours in the most comfortable chair I have found in Panama so far, sipping on my coffee and reading…..and of course people watching out the window that looked out to one of the main streets. I enjoyed this place so much, I went back the next day for more reading in a cozy chair!

Good Friday, the next day, would turn out to be a little tricky because it is a holiday in Panama, yet this town was packed full of tourists from all around the world. An interesting dilemma, considering I had a few things that I wanted to do before leaving Saturday morning. My host family had shown me pictures and told me about this one garden that I had to go to, so Friday morning I flipped through the tourist book at the front desk of the hostel and figured out how to walk there and set out on my way. A 25 minute walk through town and then gradually winding up part of a large hill, I finally reached the garden only to be told that the garden was closed for the weekend. There would be no exploring the garden with wooden statues of cows painted in crazy designs. I walked back down to the hostel and busied myself until it was time to leave for my coffee tour.

That afternoon I walked down a block to another coffee shop that was bigger than the one I had been going to because this was the one place that was doing coffee tours on Good Friday. I walk in, and just who do I see standing in line for coffee, my other teaching half, Maddie, and her boyfriend who came to visit for the week. We talked while we each waited for our tour buses to leave – my coffee tour and their canopy zip-line tour. The Kotowa group had a hostel up in the mountains that was also home to a canopy line and a coffee plantation. Just as it began to rain, we hopped on our separate buses and headed up into the mountains. The drive through the mountains was beautiful with flowers and low cloud coverage hanging around the other mountains in the distance. Upon arrival at the Kotowa plantation, I was whisked away to the coffee room, where our group was split into two, those who wanted Spanish and those who wanted English. First, we heard the history of how coffee was discovered on the Eastern Coast of Africa and then how it slowly began to be exported and grown in other parts of the world. The best place for growing coffee is between the tropics in the highlands. Panama may not be able to produce quantity, but they pride themselves on producing quality coffee. At this point, the rain had slowed and we took off down the side of the small river and across the swinging bridge to walk down into the coffee plant field.

Our tour guide began to tell us about the different coffee bean plants grown here and then began to tell how long it takes before a plant becomes a production plant. The bean plant must be grown for a year in a small bag before it can planted in the soil on the plantation and then it is another 4-5 years before you can begin to harvest the beans off the plant. The coffee beans are actually two very small beans inside a red berry. Each of us picked a berry off of a plant and popped it open with our teeth; coffee beans initially taste very fruity because of the berry they grow in. When it comes harvest time in Panama, it is the indigenous who are brought in to harvest the coffee on the slopes of the highlands. They are paid $3 per five gallon bucket picked and $5 per five gallon bucket of the geisha plant that is picked. After harvest season is over, the indigenous go back to their villages. After picking, it is a lengthy process before the beans are ready for the market. It can take a year or longer for coffee beans to be ready for sale. From the plantation, the beans are then shucked out of their berry skins and then left to dry for about a month. Once they have dried most of the way through, the beans are placed into bags for about 6 months to age, continuing to enhance the flavor of the bean. The next step is sorting the beans for roasting. Did you know that the difference between light, medium, and dark roast is only one minute? Light roast beans are roasted for 14 minutes, Medium for 15 minutes, and Dark for 16 minutes. Also, if you drink coffee for caffeine, then you should drink light roast because it contains the most caffeine.

The final step of our tour – taste test! Six varieties of coffee grown on this plantation were placed on the table before us in whole bean form – light roast, medium roast, dark roast, organic, pacamara, and geisha. Our guide took us through the steps to show us how the smell and flavor of the coffee changed with each step. I tasted a coffee bean from almost each one before they were ground. After grinding the beans, we passed them around to get an idea of the different fragrances of each. The last step was to add hot water to the ground beans and let it steep for a few minutes before tasting. Did you know that coffee in a whole bean form can keep its flavor for about 2 years, but once it is ground it begins to lose flavor after about 2-3 months? The trick to tasting coffee like the critics – slurping! Each person has their own spoon, once you have a spoonful of the coffee, you quickly slurp the coffee off the spoon so that you can get the full effect of all three components of tasting coffee: flavor, acidity, and after taste. The acidity and caffeine you feel on your tongue and the after taste is felt in the back of your mouth and throat. After trying all six different types, my favorites were the organic and pacamara. At the end of the tasting round, there was a test! We were sent to the corner while our guide moved around the cups and chose four different kinds of coffee for us to try to see if we could correctly identify each of the coffees based on the things we had just learned. Out of the four, I got two or three right. I felt quite proud of this because I am not a big coffee drinker, but I do like to try different coffee when I am abroad, especially if I am in a country that grows coffee!

On my last night in Boquete, I went to dinner with Maddie and her boyfriend so we could spend some proper time catching up on the past few weeks and complain about working at school. To try something different, we went to a Peruvian seafood place that was a block off of the main street. It turned out to be a great choice. I even tried a little bit of octopus that came with my fish, along with the largest shrimp I think I have ever seen in my life! I think the nice surprise was that the side for my dinner, as well as Maddie’s boyfriend’s, was creamy mashed potatoes! We had good food and good conversation for the evening, a great way to end my first solo vacation!

My other teaching half and I

A Little Green in Everything…

I am very behind in posting updates about a few weekend adventures and daily life in the classroom at school, so hopefully now that I have been surprised with a four-day weekend, I will get some updates posted!!

My practice teaching partner from orientation was assigned to a school in Panama City, so after three weeks of nearly being attached at the hip, we were separated for the remainder of our semester here in Panama. On the Wednesday night before St. Patrick’s Day weekend, I received a text from my long lost other half inviting me to Panama City for the weekend so that we could celebrate St. Patrick’s Day together. I was excited for this invitation because this year was my first real St. Patrick’s Day that I could celebrate with fun because for the past three years, while I was in college, I have always been in Woodbridge, VA with my fellow crewtons for spring training over our spring break. This year turned out different; no double practices, no trying to find something green that I could row in, this year was just fun.

Friday, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, Amy, Jennifer, and I headed for the bus terminal after school so that we could get to the city before dark. Once we arrived at the terminal/mall in the city, we met up with Maddie and ate dinner and then we were whisked away to her local hang out bar, Al’fuego, where we met up with the other city volunteer. It was a nice night out and catching up with people I had not seen in almost a month.

For the majority of St. Patrick’s Day the three of us from Santiago were left to roam and explore the city on our own until it came time for our shenanigans to start. We stayed in the historic district of the city, Casco Viejo, which is a UNESCO world heritage sight and because of this, it is slowly being beautifully restored. Right next door to our hostel, we discovered the church which housed the infamous “Golden Altar.” The altar is grand and completely covered in gold. The story goes: When the pirate Captain Morgan came to Panama, he wanted the golden altar. The priest in the church knew this, so before the pirate’s arrival, he painted the entire altar black. Upon Captain Morgan’s arrival, the priest convinced the pirate that someone else had already stolen the altar and what he saw was the best that they could do to replace it. Captain Morgan some how believed this and was even convinced by the priest to donate towards a fund to raise money to replace the golden altar.

Walking around Casco Viejo felt like we were walking around an 1800s Caribbean town straight out of a movie, perhaps Pirates of the Caribbean. Once we reached the Point, we could see where the historic met with the modern. The Point offered wonderful views of the modern city with towering sky scrapers. Standing at this point I could really see how so many other people have been right in their assessment that the money earned from Canal really does stay in the city and is not distributed about the rest of the country. If you think the distinction between the haves and have nots in the US is bad, you have seen nothing until you come to Panama. After gazing at the city, we began our walk along the bay. First to the fish market, where Amy and I each tried ceviche’, a cold treat served by cooking varieties of fish, shrimp, or octopus in lemon juice (the acidity of the lemon juice cooks the seafood so that it can be served cold). We continued walking towards the city, stopping at a man with a cart so that we could have respou, which is a cone of shaved ice and flavor with condensed milk drizzled on top and sometimes also with some kind of sweet syrup too. Once we finished our cold sugary treats, it was time to stop and ask how to get to the place we wanted to eat at for lunch. It was a welcomed break from the heat outside once we stepped inside the air-conditioned Crepes and Waffles restaurant. I had a sweet tooth at the moment, so I went for the sweet crepes which came with slices of banana, strawberry, whipped creme, and a scoop of raspberry ice cream, I believe. I also added a passion fruit juice/smoothie on the side too! It was sweet and delicious and perfect for a hot day in the city.

Post lunch break, we managed to find Maddie while she was looking for us just a few blocks away. While we were walking, two other gringas who were also decked out in green yelled out “Happy St. Paddy’s Day!!” We stopped and talked to them for a minute and they said we should in the place behind them because they had green beer and free green bead necklaces. We turned and looked and what do we see…..Hooters! A place none of us had ever been in the States, well, there’s a first time for everything! Amy was adamant about not going, she tried, but no, couldn’t stand to sit in Hooters. Maddie, Jennifer, and I enjoyed our green Panamanian beers and a basket of curly fries for a little while. Just kicking off the beginnings of St. Paddy’s Day fun! It was not quite time for dinner yet, so when we left, we collected Amy and hopped in a cab and drove to the other side of the city to visit the original city, destroyed by Captain Morgan in the 1500s (I think).

Panama Viejo was what you could expect from old ruins, just with a tropical twist and interesting history. The main part of the old city that is still standing is the tower of the old church; the rest of the buildings are pieces of walls and bits of foundation in the ground. As we walked around, it was nice that they had considered tourists that would come here – the information signs were in both Spanish and English. I love history and the history of this original town is rich and colorful and includes pirates!!

We had sufficient fill of touristy things for the day and were ready for a little green fun. We had made plans for dinner at the only Irish restaurant in Panama City, Bennigan’s, which of course is an American chain and has American prices and not Panamanian prices. I’d been in Panama for about six weeks at this point and was ready for a break from chicken and rice! It should be no surprise that the Guinness hamburger with onion rings caught my eye….it was perfect. St. Paddy’s Day with green beer and a giant Guinness hamburger…yum yum. I, of course, needed to gather more green things, so I asked the hostess if I could have one of the green hats that so many of the other customers were wearing. I collected three green bead necklaces and a shiny green hat throughout the day! After dinner we took a little break and then went out to a dance bar for the night and had fun. It was also nice to run into another group of gringos at the dance bar who were also celebrating St. Paddy’s Day, decked out in their green and their green and white felt hats. It was quite evident that the locals at this bar were not a fan of St. Paddy’s Day, but oh well, we still had fun!

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Universal Remote

Not the kind you are thinking of! I’m sure when you hear “universal remote,” the picture of the singular remote that works all of the extra boxes that are hooked up to your TV pops into your head. Well, here at house in Panama….the universal remote refers to the singular remote that controls the TV in the living room as well as the TV in the kids room. When someone gets tired of watching whatever is on in the living room (usually the news or baseball), they take the remote to their room – thus beginning the remote war! Aaron is usually the culprit who takes the control into his room and doesn’t bring it back out to the living room, but the girls do the same thing sometimes. So, if you are ever looking for the remote in this house: first check under all the cushions in the room, then check the counter corner of the bar, then the kids room. One time, after all of these searches, which were repeated several times over the course of two hours, we came to the conclusion that the universal remote was lost. This was not the case, however, after two hours of Samuel being unhappy that he could not change the channel from Disney to a sports game, Aaron all of a sudden ran next door when his dad went into his room. He soon came running back into the house with the remote hidden under his shirt. Apparently the strange little boy, whom I have determined lives next door and whom also randomly appears in our house in his underwear, had taken the remote home with him. For what reason, I never understood, but it sure was fun not having to watch sports for just one night and discover that the remote had temporarily left the house to go on an adventure next door.

Nuts and Coconuts

Sorry I haven’t written in a while, I know I am behind on updating everyone on my weekend adventures from St. Patrick’s Day and Easter Break, but I haven’t really felt like writing lately mainly because I think I have finally hit the “Panamanian Wall” of frustration. It is always an uphill battle at school and with the school system and just the general fact that education is not taken seriously in Panama. A 12th grade education is probably the equivalent of a 6th or 7th grade education in the US. There are some days when the little successes just don’t seem enough because I am just one of ten volunteers trying to fight this old system and old mentality of education in Panama and it is exhausting when you come to realize that you have to fight the entire hierarchy in the education system to gain a small amount of change. And lets not forget trying to figure out where I can afford to go to graduate school in the fall, that life decision has been taking up the majority of my spare time in the afternoons and weekends. So that my dear friends is why you have not heard any updates recently.

Now onto happier and funnier stories!

The other night after dinner I was sitting on one of the couches in the living room watching TV with one of my sisters when I noticed that there was a strange sound coming from the kitchen and then I heard Juliana, my host mom, laughing. I thought nothing of it the first time, but then a few minutes later, I heard it again, so my curiosity got the better of me and I got up to investigate the source of the odd sound I was hearing. As I approach the back door in the kitchen I more clearly hear the sound of a crack made at something hollow. I round the corner and join Juliana and my little brother in the doorway to the backyard and see Samuel, my host dad, sitting on a very small stool on the concrete porch just outside the door with a machete in one hand while the other hand holds a large coconut steady on the ground. WHACK!! The machete slams down into the coconut, leaving a deep slice across the length of the coconut. The machete is wriggled out and then another whack. I flinched every time the machete came down on the coconut crossing my fingers Samuel has done this enough times in his life that he won’t lose his grip on the coconut and accidentally whack a finger or two off. While the loud and forceful whacks continued on this coconut, Juliana and Arron showed me the previous victim of the machete….the coconut whose outer layer had been peeled away and all the straggling little hairs had also been picked off. Once the current coconut victim had cracks all the way around it and a few made in a diagonal, Samuel hacked off the ends so that he could start to pull the outer casing of the coconut off, much like when peeling the skin off of an orange except that the outer shell of a coconut is hard and not soft. It was comical to actually watch a full grown man battle with this little coconut, trying to rip off the the big pieces of shell once they had been peeled back to the other end. He would sometimes use his feet to push down on the coconut while he used his hands to pull up on the hairy piece of shell he was trying to get to come off. In the end, he succeeded in getting the outer shell of both coconuts off and still had ten fingers and ten toes at the end. This process is quite different than what we are used to in the US where you can just walk into a grocery store and the coconut is already prepped to be opened to get to the coconut water inside. I can understand why coconuts may not always be cheap – I just watched all the manual labor that went into getting to the middle of a coconut!!

I never knew until I came to Panama that the cashew nut actually grew on a fruit. The cashew nut looks like a funny stem growing off of a fruit that is grown here in Panama, as well as northern South America and other tropical areas. The Portuguese name for the fruit on the cashew tree is “caju” which is how the nut got its name. My host mom makes a variety of fresh juices from fruits, which are called “chicha,” and the juice made from the cashew apple and cashew nut is interesting and different, but I like it.

Diagram of the cashew fruit

Cashew tree with apple and nut

Now what brings me to telling you all of this you may wonder, well, when I came from school around lunch time on Friday, I come home to find Juilana and my sisters sitting on the side porch, each with a small rock and each with a piece of of flattened cardboard. On each piece of cardboard is a pile of large black nuts and there is a bowl in the middle of all of them with a growing number of freshly cracked cashews in it. I know how time consuming cracking nuts can be because my mom has taken to collecting pecans from my uncle’s backyard in Alabama and then spending hours at home cracking them to use for baking. Cracking your own nuts is a lot cheaper than buying them in packages, plus I think they taste better right out of the shell. What I observed yesterday afternoon was quite interesting, it is how I imagine people used to crack nuts back in the good old days before inventions and technology ruled the world. Each one, Juliana, Dayeris, and Dairybeth, used their specially chosen shaped rock to smash the the outer edges of the shell until it cracked and they could pick out the beige colored nut out from among the black shards of its shell. I could tell they had been at this for a while not because the bowl in the middle was 3/4 of the way full, but because all of their hands had completely turned black from holding and cracking the black shells of the cashew nuts. This was the family activity for the afternoon and some of them even managed to multitask too! Dairybeth, who will be 14 on Tuesday, was of course managing to hold the phone between her ear and shoulder so that her hands were free to continue cracking cashews. Dayeris had made herself quite the spot just inside the side door with a cushion on the floor so that she could lean up against the door while she watched the Yankees vs Angels baseball game on TV. Moral of the story, if you ever really just need to crack a nut, find a nice smooth and round rock that is just a little smaller than your hand and have at it….crack away!

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