Monday, March 28, 2011

Lets All Hug Some Trees

It has come to my attention that not only my parents are going to be reading by blog. I have gained and lost some readers over the last eight months and I knew this would happen. It was only a matter of time before people I was only acquaintances with or even good friends of mine would drop off into their own lives and slowly forget about Adam. This is actually OK with me. Especially since my posts lately have probably been less than exciting. I'm no longer in great mental pain over my situation and I haven't seen many dying or dead animals in or people in awhile. My blogs have changed from me judging random people in an airport by their appearance and talking about the dramatic rescue of someones life to talking about the fact that we are selling more chocolate now. People were bound to loose interest and that is OK with me.

Next month should be the big test in terms of our tour. My piece comes out in the local newspaper about my work and the chocolate tour that we are doing and I expect that people will be calling the Oreba Chocolate phone on a regular basis. It will be the big test to see how much volume we are ready for. As of today we have gone three straight days of doing a tour and have two separate tours scheduled for tomorrow. Its going good and with every tour we are fixing the little things that tourists mention. I'm hoping to slowly pull myself out the equation too which is obviously the desired result and from the looks of things should not be any type of problem. I sat back and barely guided Solomon today while he created a logo for our future T shirts and then put it on his USB stick to take to the printers. This is a good sign. We have also talked about hiring someone from Almirante that can translate tours for us in the future if we get busy which would be great and reassuring to me that the main problem of being able to speak English can be handled. Enough about all that though.

Here is some more opinionated stuff that might go along the same lines as some earlier posts of mine and if you are easily offended or just don't want to hear it by all means skip to the end where I just complain about my health; I have decided that whenever someone comes into my site and starts salivating over the great planks of wood that they are chopping out of the trees here, I'm going to tell them that the wood is poisonous. I can't tell you how many people have come into my site under the guise of “helping” or wanting to support the local poor, and then start asking about how strong the wood is, how much it sells for, and how they cut it. I understand that it is fascinating to know that we have some of the hardest wood around and that the local economy here is getting something out of it, but these people that are coming in and encouraging the cutting down of trees are starting to wear on me. I've decided that it is not their fault though. Some people are really interested in getting hard wood for a good price. Especially those who live in this country. And not too many gringos are going to build all cement houses or even use non wood materials when local woods are so readily available.

My problem with it all is that the people here are not ready for it and the people exploiting them on the price aren't following the laws here about cutting down the trees (Not that it matters in a country where money means everything). Most people in my community have a huge number of trees in their farms and some of it can be considered forest. This is because the cacao needs a certain temperature and shade to grow. Thank god for this, because if it were not for the cacao this place would be cut down and shipped just like other places I've seen where the poor live. Even in my own community I have seen not just single tree felling for a quick buck, but whole areas cleared for pastor land. Part of the reason I stopped eating red meat because I see first hand how it is single handily destroying complete ecosystems along with the jungle.

The sad thing is that it will never stop. Someone here and in other places around here are going to want a quick payday and have this “money tree” sitting on their land looking pretty good to bring home dinner. The demand will always be there and will actually only get larger. The people here get money for cutting the wood, the person who owns the tree gets money for the wood, and the people coming to pick it up and sell it get money for the wood. It does bring money in though its sustainability is not too great considering it takes 100 years for some of these trees to grow this size. I can only hope that I can one day live in a house built from low impact and maybe even recycled materials, but the fact is that right now and probably in the near future I will be living in and using a lot of things made from wood.

Now you can cast me as a tree hugger because I'm pretty sure that most of what I'm saying makes me one but hear me out on just this one point. Everything on this earth is here for a reason. The birds, soil, plants, and trees. They all have their niche and have evolved that way throughout millions of years. Only in the last blink of an eye of time compared to the existence of living things on this earth have we started to change the make up of our environment. Everything in this world has worked in conjunction. One thing helping or complementing the next. I'm going to give you a microcosm of an example; There is a moth that only lives in the fur of the sloth. The moth lays it's eggs on the ground when the sloth goes down once every couple weeks to defecate. It is a well accepted fact that without one, the other would parish. There are thousands of cases like this and probably millions if you consider the multiple cases where the death of one species affects hundreds of others in different ways.

So who cares. We have lost tens of thousands of species already while we have been here and we are still living right? Well, ya. Kinda. We are finding new and important species of plants and animals all the time. Many with healing properties that we never knew about and could unlock cures for a variety of different diseases or conditions. There are so many of these species that we have never seen due to deforestation and pollution that we may have sealed our own graves already.

There is also the fact that biodiversity works well for this planet. Leave it humans to think they could improve on nature. We make chemicals that kill weeds and end up poisoning ourselves and other plants around it. One example of thousands. I could dig up countless journal article about how the killing off of species will come back to bite us in the ass, but I will leave that up to you. I'm just planting the seed so you can see for yourself. I'd like to get back to the tearing down the of the forest. I don't blame these people for selling their trees. I would do it if I were in their shoes and didn't know any better. I blame the people that need an entire extra story to their house so that when aunt Margret comes to visit she has enough space to feel like she is in a different house. If it wasn't for the outside world, the forest would be intact, the animals would be replenished faster than they could be killed, people would live an average of 17 years longer from not being introduced to the nutrient poor food that is being brought in, un-biodegradable trash wouldn't be scattered everywhere, and being at peace with the jungle and its surroundings would have been good enough instead of having a new god to bow down to.

But again, this was all inevitable and is part of the reason I'm here. To help these people adjust to the new world. A world that is changing faster than we ourselves can keep up with. It's a cycle that can be stopped with education, hard work, old traditions, and new technology. Its finding that right mix that is the tricky part. Let's just hope there are some trees left by the time we do just that.


Health Report:

I've been doing good. I swear. Well, that was until I got Giardia. I have have unusual low energy for the past three weeks and I knew that something was up. I couldn't sleep at night and just getting up out of bed took more effort than I was willing to give. Everything else was OK and there weren't any other signs so I thought maybe I was just overworked. Well, turns out I had Giardia. So that is that. I'm supposed to be at a Peace Corps training session where all the volunteers in my group are and here I am at my site making sure I don't crap my pants. Shit happens I guess. Literally. Other than that I'm doing good. My foot still hurts every once in awhile but I've learned to block it out just like the pain in my right for arm and on the right side of my face. (If you want to know why those hurt, you will have to comment below about them).

Until next time...

Monday, March 21, 2011

A Quick Progression to a Chocolate Tour

If you would have asked me 8 months ago what cacao is I would have told you I had no idea. That was before I joined the Peace Corps and before I knew I was coming to Panama. Fast forward to today and you can find me quickly correcting everyone’s pronunciation of cacao as it comes out of their mouth. That's “cah-cow” just so you know. I had been to Rio Oeste Arriba located just out of Almirante in the foothills (and yes its up the river to the West) during training and the volunteer that I visited here seemed to be a little somber. It rained more than it shined and sickness was a weekly battle. He seemed more than beat down and was ready to go home. After coming returning to Peace Corps headquarters near Panama City from my visit I quickly told my superior that I didn't want to be in that site and preferably somewhere where it didn't rain as much. It was taken into account and I was sure to get placed in the beach community I had always dreamed about. If you don't know anything about the Peace Corps, we are unpaid volunteers working with the state and local governments who each live in severely underdeveloped and poor communities for just over 2 years.

Needless to say, I got placed in the site I had feared and I was not happy. Not only was I afraid of hating my service for 2 years, I was afraid of being sick the whole time. I had already started things off on a bad note and the day I met President Martinelli I had two ear infections and an allergic reaction. Things didn't get better. The first three months in my community when we are required to live with host families, I became sick with, amoebas, parasites, and dysentery. I had lost 15 lbs, along with any motivation I still had and my Spanish was sometimes good enough to see if the latrine was occupied. I was miserable to say the least but was determined to make it through.

As time went by my body started getting accustomed to the food and I started filtering and adding chlorine to my water. My Spanish got better by pure necessity and I even started to gain back some of the weight I had lost by keeping the peanut butter companies in business. The cultural differences were still great and the belief I had that my talents were being wasted in a place that had no electricity was hard to get over (I worked with non-profit websites and marketing back home), but I hung in there. I hung in there because every day I woke up in my host families house and watched the kids eat the same dismal meal I was and get just as sick as I was getting but without the help of government sponsored health care or a jar of peanut butter in their room. I also knew that living poor for 2 years is nothing compared to living poor your entire life.

The day came where my Spanish clicked and the dry season came. I had worked in the cacao farms to get to know the farmers and their work and because of this I had learned a great deal about what goes into the process. I also learned that my gringo body is nothing compared to the pure muscle Ngabe people that have worked like this for hundreds of years if not longer. I woke up at 5am when they did and hauled hundred pound sacks of cacao beans to the road where we took a taxis to the cacao co-op in Almirante and waited all day for them to check the quality. I read up on the process of chocolate and researched what made a good bean and where those beans came from, I talked to Peace Corps experts and cacao vendors and found out that our cacao goes into some of the best chocolate in the world, and then I talked to the local farmers and found out they already knew all this information. Each day I became amazed on how much these people really knew about the tree that has become their livelihood. I came to the conclusion that when you have no TV and all you have is time, you tend to notice what makes a good cacao bean.

I quickly realized I was living within experts and my interest in cacao and chocolate was rising right along side my excitement. I found out that waves of international and local government agencies have been teaching and mentoring these people for years. Mixing old traditions with new methods and keeping everything 100% organic and shade grown. USAID had come in and built expensive solar dryers for the cacao so people could sell year round, a Swiss company came in and showed advanced techniques of using compost and natural plants and animals from the forest to become organic certified, and the Peace Corps had been here for over 5 years now helping build composting latrines and organizing the main artisan group to work together.

I became mesmerized at the different types of cacao and how they each had a distinct flavor, shape, and color (We have more than 100 different kinds of cacao trees here), I became intrigued as to how just a slight variation in temperature could effect the harvesting cycle, tree growth, fermentation process, and drying process, and I became increasingly impressed that these people knew so much about it all. I also found out after doing what we call a “Community Analysis” in the Peace Corps, that 98% of my community absolutely relies on their cacao farms for income meaning that without it, they would either have nothing or have to sell all the trees in their farms. Luckily for everyone they kept the trees and kept the their traditions of keeping the trees healthy.

In no time I started loving the community and the people in it. Seeing sloths and toucans on a daily basis traversing the jungle and having fresh chocolate, and chocolate milk 3 times a day didn't seem all that bad and my Spanish got better than I ever thought it could. I also realized the potential of my particular community in terms of processed chocolate sales and the possibility of having tourists. After spending about month doing a comprehensive analysis of the market and the communities ability to have tourists I saw nothing but green lights. Rio Oeste Arriba is only a short 15 minute taxi ride away from the boat dock in Almirante, there is a brand new government paved road all the way into the community, and the people here have had so many book keeping and marketing classes it had seemed they were just waiting for the opportunity.

We spent months talking and defining what we could do for a tour and brought tourists in from the island to come see what we had and help us determine what we needed to add and cut out. People in the community took notice and started to get excited at the fact that people might come see what they have been doing for hundreds of years and that these people might even want to pay for it. Groups of 30 people sometimes spent days clearing paths and cutting stairs into the mountain (cacao grows better on a hill which is all we have here). We built a traditional house made from penka (a type of palm leave) and vines over the ancient grinding stone deep within the cacao trees so we could do chocolate making demonstrations. I noticed people making artisan crafts to sell, more people showing up to my English class, and many people asking me questions about gringos and if they would like the things here. These people have been ready to share their secrets with the world but just didn't know how.

We decided on the name Oreba meaning cacao in their native language of Ngabere and after days of community members giving up ideas for a logo we decided on one that was then sent to another Peace Corps member with graphic design experience to finalize. After teaching a couple community members about presentation and marketing and with our new packaging for our hand roasted and ground cacao, we have now started selling our finished products on the island. Of course without the help of a couple generous and business savvy individuals on the island we could have never gotten as far as we have already. Namely, Lorelei at Super Gourmet, and Bryan and Jana at Lula's B and B whom have supported our chocolate selling effort with great feedback and ideas, met with local community members about their products, and helped promote our chocolate and our tour.

We have now had many groups now take our tour with rave reviews and word is spreading faster than I ever thought it would. I'm busier than I ever thought I would be and love every minute of it. I'm only about ¼ of my way through my service and I've already had people come up to me and thank me. I feel great about the work and I'm excited, but I also know that it will be never ending. With all of the profits from the tour and chocolate sales percentages will be going towards eduction, re-forestation, and community projects such a computer lab and library. What is probably one of the most important funds that money will be put into is one that anyone in the community can use in case of medical emergency and not have to pay back.

So if your a garden buff come check out our tour and learn learn about the 3 level organic eco system that lets animals pollinate the flowers, top trees provide just the right temperature for the cacao to grow, and organic material to replenish nutrients into the soil. If your an animal enthusiast come see the wide variety of poison dart frogs, giant tropical ants, butterflies, sloths, and toucans. Or if your just a plain old fashioned chocolate lover come watch a native chocolate making demonstration, eat raw cacao, try freshly made chocolate served on a cacao leaf, and take some packaged cacao home to show off. Tours run every day rain or shine starting at 10am and lasting about 3 hours and at the moment can be booked at Casa Verde Hostel or by calling 664 914 57. The tour includes transportation to and from the Bocas Marine Tour boat dock in Almirante, a complete guided tour of the cacao farm and village including explanations of the entire cacao and chocolate process, viewings of plants and animals of the jungle, a native chocolate demonstration where you can make your own chocolate to eat, a traditional Ngabe lunch including local roots and spices, and one package of chocolate to take home. The tour prices are $30 per person and $25 per person for groups of 5 or more. All money goes back into the community and is spent on health, education, re-forestation, and community projects.

If you would like more information, would like to sell the tour or chocolate, or would like to donate to the community, you can e-mail Adam Armstrong at californiaadam@yahoo.com or call him at 694 292-71. Also look for Oreba Tour on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Oreba-Chocolate/196669717020468


Thursday, March 10, 2011

A little bit of Carnaval

The bus careens back and forth as the cold mountain breeze sifts its way though my hair. As the light spraying of mist coming filling the cabin awakens me when I doze off, I'm reminded that we are very high and the air is uncharacteristicly cold here. I keep thinking of Carnaval, and how it was a 24 hour blitz of craziness I was happy to partake in, but also happy to leave. Trash, more people than can comfortably fit in one place, loud music, and pick pocketers encompassed all that is the festivities. The bus stops and then goes slowly over a portion of the road that has been covered in mud falling from the adjacent hill. Sleep has been sparse these last couple days and any sleep on just a concrete floor with a shirt for a pillow is going to be rough. Hence, passing out on a constantly moving bus is now what I'm faced with.

Blur

Not only has the last couple days been a blur, but the last two weeks as well. I've been waist deep in my work and at times waist deep in water when my river flooded. I didn't drink more than two drinks at Carnaval and for good reason. I need to be thinking clear from here on out. In the states if I would tried to motivate myself for a project I would have most likely slacked off until the last minute. I've found that here I'm constantly on the move. Meetings, teaching classes, more meetings, designing graphics, even more meetings, and then the random hard labor. The thing is that I like it. I'm going in and out of consciousness, but I like it. And we live in exciting times here in the jungle.

These people have been waiting a long time for someone to come along and ignite a fire they didn't know how to find. It is now found and I'm lighting it. Our schedule of things to come might clue you in on what we have been doing and what we plan to do. Tomorrow our first full paying tourists arrive to take our full length 3 hour tour, after that I teach English for 1 and half hours, and after that I will be walking an hour to the community next to me where another volunteer has the brochures that I made and that they printed out for me. Thursday we will be working all day making the trail for the tour better and making doors where there is just barbed wire. After that we will have a meeting where I will introduce the idea of us having the official Peace Corps Technical Week here in our site where we will be training new volunteers about cacao. Then I go to the Island. Friday I will meet two people from my community on the island where we have 3 meetings about selling our packaged chocolate, selling our tour, and possibly selling both in the same place. Saturday I figure out the logistics for Tech Week including the budget and what I will be teaching. Sunday I'm going to Church. Yes, I said it. I'm going to Church. The Pastor here convinced me to do it even though I think he and his evangelical friends are crazy. I'm hoping I get a little more respect in the community for doing this and plan on trying to understand at least some of what is being said. The problem will be that the more I understand, the more I will not want to be there.

So the list goes on and next week will be even more hectic as we figure out logistics of our tour, I try to teach indigenous people how to make a website when they don't even have power, and we hopefully have our first free willing tourists come. One thing that I'm trying to get myself prepared for is the fact that I will have to be on the island a lot more from here on out. Our tour and chocolate sales will depend on it. I don't really like this idea as it is expensive and feels like a vacation.

Health Report

Since Carnaval I have been sleeping almost 10 hours a night. I might be playing catch up, but I'm tired throughout the day as well. I just feel really run down and tired which could mean that I have either parasites or some sickness. My foot started hurting again after walking around Carnaval and I'm guessing it is just never going to heal. I've started to gain some of my weight back and now have a daily exercise routine. I'm also trying to eat as much candy, starch, and carbs as possible to put back on some weight. Hiking all day in the sun tends to keep you slim...