Our New Site

Lisa walking alongside the sugarcane!

There are large expanses of cow pastures.

The cemetery.

The Catholic chapel.

Our room. Yes, we have a bed with a mattress!

Our host family´s house.

For the last couple of weeks we´ve been in our new site. It´s in the middle of country in the Province of Veraguas. It´s an agricultural community surrounded by fields of sugarcane. Yes, it´s hot here, but we´ll take it. It´s much better than freezing--we´ve done enough of that in our lives. I do however, need my shorts. Peace Corps frowns on shorts but in our site nearly everyone wears shorts because it´s just too hot for pants.

Our host family is a retired couple in their 60´s. The father is the president of the agricultural cooperative I´ll be working with and he´s a jovial man who tells a lot of jokes that we laugh at but often don´t understand! Our host mom speaks rapid fire Spanish and is the main caretaker for several of her grandchildren, who live nearby. She´s a bit intimidating, but seems to like us enough.

She´s currenly not impressed that I can´t eat fried food at the moment due to my many illnesses. Wow they like everything fried here. I guess I didn´t realize how spoiled we were with our host family during training. They fed us very healthy food.

Typical breakfast for our host family is thick homemade tortillas (she soaks corn overnight or boils it for a while) then grinds it in a mill and then forms it into a dough the size of a large frying pan and grills it until it´s cooked. Sometimes she puts cheese in the middle of it (don´t get excited, it´s yellow individual wrapped pieces of American aka fake cheese, oh we´d kill for some Cabot cheese!) She serves these with fried hotdogs. Other times for breakfast it´s patacones (fried green plantains) with a fried egg or hotdog.

Lunch is usually white rice, beans (all sorts) and sometimes some meat (chicken, pork or liver), or fish. Sometimes there´s coleslaw, cucumber, or a sweet fried plantain. Dinner is the same as lunch. Sometimes after dinner we walk to the coop and buy molasses cookies, they´re good!

Matt´s most likely going to work on building composting latrines. They´re a type of latrine that doesn´t require a hole to be dug in the ground. The people here all have pit latrines and they´re bad because during the wet season (April-December) they´re full of water. Another project he going to investigate is trash. Right now there´s no landfill, so yeah the trash is all over the place.

There are a lot kids (there are 800ish people in the town) and few youth groups. We´d like to start a girls scout troop and an environmental group. Our closest volunteer has both of these groups in her town and she´s going to bring her kids over to ours to see what the interest level is in our town.

There is a Catholic church youth group in our town, however we only have a chapel and the priest only comes every 8th of the month. We went to mass on Mother´s Day (December 8th down here). It was nice. Two babies were baptized.

Well, as long as we have our health, life here should be much better for us. The people are so generous. We´ve trying to visit every house in the community in the coming months. So far we received bags and bags of oranges, had fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, and agua de pipa (a type of coconut that one slices the top off then drinks the water out of it, and then one cuts it in half and eats the white, milky flesh inside).

Yesterday our next door neighbors, another couple in their 60´s, who don´t have children, made us a typical chicken stew. It was excellent. In addition to the chicken it has yucca, ñame (a root vegetable like yucca) carrots, and squash.

Happy holidays! It´s 85! We have to keep reminding ourselves that it´s December and that Christmas is rapidly approaching. I´ve never been anywhere this warm for X-mas. When I was Spain, Monica and I travelled to Italy for X-mas and it was cold!

Note: Post offices are few and far between here, which is why we don´t write snail mail much and why you Christmas card isn´t there yet!