Coming Up on a Year

Its dark and late and I'm sitting in my hammock swinging back and forth to the rhythm of loud zacaida bugs. I've been putting off writing a blog post for some time now and as time goes, so does my desire to write them. Part of the problem is that I've been pretty sick the last month and this pretty much drains whatever energy I have after the heat has taken its toll on me. I had giardia and Ascaris worms last week at the same time and realized there was something wrong when trying to give computer class I almost fell over.

I've become desperate in my pursuit to stay healthy and due to a recent declaration by the medical officer saying that if I get sick one more time in my site I'm going to get moved, I have been more diligent in trying not to get sick. I've resorted to boiling all the water I use to drink and make food, putting chlorine in the tank of water that I use to bath myself, not eating any food given to me from anyone in my community. I also have to wear shoes everywhere for now on apparently because some parasites can in through my feet.

The community and the artisan group are doing great. They work a lot and they are more organized than some American organizations I've seen. I'm pretty confident in taking them to the next level which is looking for a grant to get chocolate making machinery. The machine is from a company called cacoatown.com and the solar panel needed to run it all should be coming from Panama City. 11K in all should do it. Now I just have to find the money.

I've started to get a little nervous for a couple reasons. First, there is only two months left for the me and the girl that I have been dating and I'm not sure how it is going to be without her here. We will have been dating for about half a year which is pretty significant and going through all this with someone else always creates a bond that is hard to match. I'm not looking forward to the day she heads back home and I stay here. It seems cruel that the thing that brought us together is now pulling us apart. The other thing is visiting home. I'm excited and nervous at the same time. Not because I will be the best man at my best friend's wedding or the fact that I haven't seen any of my friends and family for a year now. I'm more nervous because of the sheer number of people I will be thrown into and craziness that is California. It will be shocking for sure but having the saving grace mentality that I will be returning to my hammock and dark jungle will be good for sure.

Speaking of dark jungle. I got a solar panel. A gringo on the island was selling it for pretty cheap and I could not resist. After buying an equally expensive battery for the system, my neighbor, Salomon and I set it up. Seems to work great to charge my iphone and computer which will be handy as I'm starting to write this grant and will need the power.

There is not much else going on. I did start working on putting in more catchment systems in community and they should be completed within a month or so once I can get the tanks here. We had another doctor group come in and it went pretty smooth. A women needed money to get the lesch meniasis shots for her kid so I worked out a deal with the artisan group to give her some money from our emergency fund to send her. Good to see the system working. It has been raining a lot more lately and everything I have is moldy. I will be spending a good part of the day tomorrow washing my clothes and sheets in the river. On second thought, I might actually pay my neighbor to do it...  

Tour Updates

This is pretty much just an update on our tour. The following appeared in the local newspaper which was written by yours truly and their are some links at the end that point to a couple other articles that others have written. Enjoy: If you have shopped at Super Gourmet specialty food store in Bocas town, you may have noticed some of the many chocolate products available. You can find anything from homemade brownies and cakes to roasted cacao nibs and handmade dark chocolate fudge. You might have also noticed the growing number of companies or organizations making this chocolate. You can find Oreba Chocolate produced by a local indigenous community, Dorothy's Own chocolate products made by an expat local who supports indigenous farmers and the Bocas Caribbean Chocolate Company, which makes delicious refined chocolate bars among other. And this is all just in the Super Gourmet. Walking down the street and into Starfish Coffee, you can find ground cacao liqueur balls for sale from various local farmers along with many books about what makes a good chocolate. Even further down the street, the Buena Vista Bar & Grill restaurant offers delicious goodies made from the Cerutti Family Chocolate farm, Green Acres. If you're the adventurous type, you can even take a walk to the Up on the Hill shop on Isla Bastimentos where you can find organic homemade chocolate coconut balls, among other products. It seems that Bocas has quietly become a small chocolate and cacao haven and for good reason. We are surrounded by it. If walk into the mountains of Almirante or pretty much anywhere in the Bocas archipelago you will encounter a large amount of cacao trees which produce the fruit that is then turned into chocolate. If you came to the island by bus from the Costa Rica border or over the mountains from David, you passed hundreds of thousands of cacao trees and most likely didn't realize it. Don't worry if you feel like you missed a big sign that said “Cacao Tree Here.” They're just not that obvious. The trees come in all shapes and sizes as do the fruits and that can make them hard to spot. Also, the fact that the trees grow within the jungle makes them easy to miss. In fact, almost all the cacao in Bocas is shade-grown. Cacao trees need filtered rather than direct sunlight to properly and generously produce. Young, healthy cacao trees Árboles jóvenes y saludables I'm not an expert on cacao or chocolate production by any means, but living in a cacao-producing indigenous community as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have learned a lot in the past year. Whether it be from the Peace Corps cacao training workshops, working in the farms with community members, or just talking to others in the chocolate industry, I can honestly say that I learn something new every day. The first week I arrived in my community I had no idea chocolate came from a fruit. Fast forward to today and you can find me grafting cacao trees with local farmers to increase yield. And from what I have seen, there is an endless amount that can be learned about cacao and chocolate at every level of production. Some say it is like wine-making in a way – as every slight variation in temperature, location, fermenting process, drying process, and production process will change the final outcome of the product. Those who read the cover story in the April 2011 issue of the Bocas Breeze already know a little about me and the project that I'm working on. Simply put, working as a volunteer in the Peace Corps I have used my business background to help the chocolate artisan group put together a native-style chocolate tour that takes tourists through the indigenous farms and surrounding jungle to explain the entire process of turning organic cacao into simple chocolate. Along the way there are always animals, such as sloths and parrots, and when we arrive at the top of the mountain we give a traditional chocolate-making demonstration where you get to taste dark chocolate that was made right in front of you on a grinding stone. In the short time since we started this chocolate tour, we have been contacted by various tour operators and are now even listed in guidebooks as one of the top things to see and do in Bocas.

http://gocentralamerica.about.com/od/panamaguide/fr/Bocas-del-Toro-Chocolate-Tour.htm

http://www.samanthalowe.com/travel/?p=909

http://www.facebook.com/Orebachocolate

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g304171-d2085833-Reviews-Oreba_Chocolate_Tour-Bocas_Town_Isla_Colon_Bocas_del_Toro.html

http://www.thebocasbreeze.com/previous-issues/april-abril-2011-volume-8.shtml

Doctors, Teaching, Chocolate and Porn

As the time passes I'm starting to feel more and more like nothing is really going to surprise or shock me any more. Weeks will now go by and significant things will happen that I completely forget to tell people. I guess it is just all part of getting used the system, the country, the weather, and the way of life that is a Peace Corps Volunteer. That in mind here a couple of highlights of the past couple weeks.

I took Salomon (he spells his name that way. I'm not sure why) to a Peace Corps week long business seminar that he had already been to. We had to split the trip up into two days as the seminar was pretty far away and we ended up sharing a room in David. The seminar was great and even though Salomon had already attended two years ago, things had changed a little bit and Salomon was eager to show everyone the results of business seminars such as that one. We wore our Oreba Chocolate shirts, brought what I thought was plenty of chocolate that we soon ran out of, and Salomon talks endlessly about how good we are doing. If you know me, you might know that I can't be in one spot for more than 45 min without either falling asleep or wanting to explode from boredom so being in a classroom for 8 hours a day almost killed me. I also somehow got Ascaris worms for the second time and it was slowing me down quite a lot.

We have been having meetings with the different departments in our artisan group about how everyone feels and anything we can make better. The majority of people wanted more money which I guess is a common request in business, but others just wanted more tourists and some type of machine to help make the chocolate. I really thought that after having 4 months of tourists that these people would see what they are all about and want to give it up or at least be content with the 30 or so people we are getting on average every month. But I guess they want more.

Salomon and I took a really long day out and went door to door pretty much on the island talking about our tour and pretty much only came away with the prospect of selling our tour and chocolate at one really nice place on the island called Palma Royale. We now have a meeting with the people tomorrow and hope to impress. Other contacts will have to wait and things like adequate transportation if we were to have more people come on the tour every day, will become a problem.

I coordinated a group of doctors to come into my site named Floating Doctors and the day long clinic went pretty well. It just so happened that this was the day that the government gave families money for kids that were kept in school so we had a large abandonment of people around 3pm so they could get to the bank. I didn't know this would happen but the teachers brought in every single kid from the school into the church that I had borrowed for the event. It was pretty much mayhem for the first couple hours and I was happy to get away to my house periodically to help out with sonograms for pregnant women. The doctors were great, we found a couple kids with Lech Meniasis, couple UTI's and tons of colds, parasites, and just plain old old people. They are supposed to come back every three weeks and I'm hoping to set up a cleaner system to see people. I'm thinking of making a board that lists times and numbers.

Salomon helped organize a lot too and he sat patiently throughout the entire event in the sweltering heat. It was only at the end of the clinic as they were packing up that I found out he is almost completely blind in one eye. For the last 3 years apparently his eye has developed a large dark spot in the middle that has only gotten worse. Never have I heard him complain about it until he mentioned to the doctors. That in mind, I have started the look for an ophthalmologist that can look at it. I've started making a couple contacts with regular doctors that might know of some.

I helped out with teaching sex ed one day in the school which was pretty funny, but have now moved on to teaching computers. This was of no choice mine as I have insisted that the school fix the computers and electrical system that it has before I bring my own equipment in. In another example of aid organizations absolutely failing the school has an incredibly large solar panel and battery system that could light up the entire town but about a month after the system was installed one part broke and no one knew how to fix it so only two rooms have fans and lights out of 8. The school also received computers which would have been great if there were a room to put them in. So instead of having electricity and computers, the electricity barely works and the computers rusted to a point where they don't turn on anymore because their was no closed area to put them in. Salomon and I have started talking to the head teacher to find out what the deal is with both cases but until then I have been signed up to teach computers on Friday's for 3 hours with one laptop. Its not really the type of hands on experience I was hoping for them to get.

Its not only the government failing the schools here though. There is also a giant $1000 water system that was dropped off by a supposed local non profit that failed to bring the tubes necessary to hook anything up. That tank has been sitting there for years unused.

I booked my ticket for home and will be coming into SFO on Aug 24^th! Can't wait to see my family after a year of being down here in Panama.

My Spanish has jumped another hurdle so to speak. I find myself being able to talk for hours in front of audiences and even taking questions with only a little explanation as to what they are saying. I've also started to visit more people's houses which is good to get to know them better but bad because they pretty much force me to eat their food. On another note I have gotten amoebas twice and worms once in the last 30 days and my immune system seems very fragile. I also feel extremely tired worn out most times which could be due to being so sick so much. I have a new filter so I'm hoping that helps.

In the Things I Didn't Need to Know category: Couple things I've started to realize about the people here and something that I'm sure happens pretty much all around the world, guys in particular will do one thing the first time they are alone with a computer that is connected to the internet. Look at porn. Not only have I seen many guys in open computer cafes here look at porn, but I've now caught two community members looking at it. I found out because they are the only two people here that have laptops which just happen to be filled with about as many search results for porn as there are virus' on the them. I guess technology really does bridge a gap. I'm pretty sure there is no place to get any type of pornographic material here and along comes an open invitation to as much as one computer can handle without going down in a blaze of virus glory.

I apparently have two packages on the way so I'm going to go ahead and say thank you in advance. I received the most amazing package ever from Desiree back home filled with organic goodies and some books. Thanks again. Next week I go to the island again, celebrate the 4^th with other volunteers, and start work on a new chocolate processing plant....