New Song: Up All Night

Pretty sure you guys will like this new song. Well if you have any music sense that is. Share this one as I think others will like it too. You can also download this one too.
Up All Night by californiaadam

Teach Me How To Dougie. Or Whatever

So you can go ahead and make this video viral if you want:). Teaching the kids how to dance the dougie to a song that I'm pretty sure your not supposed to the dougie to.

Betrayal

Things are getting a little weird up in here. Things are happening and I'm not sure where they are going to go. For starters, a bunch of the directors of our artisan/business group along with myself just found out/realized that Solomon had been receiving 5% of sales of everything they make or sale including tours. I'm sure there was a meeting at some point where Solomon said something like “so I'm going to take 5% of the stuff we sell because we will sell more” and everyone nodded yes while staring into oblivion. I'm glad the others eventually realized that this is outrageous and that it is probably not right that the person taking the order over the phone is getting more money than the person creating the product that takes two straight days. Everyone also just realized that the tour guides are making about half as much as we are paying the owners of the farms to walk through them. This is absolutely ridiculous and when I saw this almost lost my shit.

I specificly remember when we planned out all this that there was no percentage for anyone selling the tour and that we would give about .50 to each farm for each tour. It just so happens that the tourists walk through Solomon's and his brothers farm during the tour so you can see where the money is going. It's not that all this is shady. I guarantee that he presented this to the group and they stood there in silence. It more that he about 10x smarter than most people in the group and he knows he can get away with it. Here is an example of the pure genius of another member of the directors. To measure out sugar quantities for each bag of hot chocolate mix he was filling up small plastic bags of sugar of once ounce and then stapling them shut to later be used to put into the mix and sell. There are 2 ounces of sugar in each bag so the next person had to open the staple on two bags and pour the contents into the mix. I simply asked why he didn't just measure out 2 ounces each time and pour it into the mix and he said that was probably a good idea. Solomon has the advantage.

So since a couple people are just finding out all this crap about how he is raking in the dough while everyone else is scraping by me and three of the other guys had to hold an emergency secret meeting to talk about how they were going to go about presenting all this to the rest of the group and wanted to know what I thought about it. I kida felt bad going behind Solomon's back but I knew that if we brought all this up with him present that he would take over and get his way. We talked for hours and they are going to have a meeting with the whole group to try to resolve all of it. I think my best word of advice was for them to do a silent voting system so no one can see if they are going against them. We will see. I won't be there I can tell you that.

As for the other stuff, well that's getting weird too. Well not weird. Just changing. We have a lot of tourists I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with the article that I wrote and the time of the year, but the thing is that is has been raining non stop and people seem to be slipping everywhere. I think it's funny when I see tourists show up in sandals and shorts like this was the beach.

I've started some preliminary stuff in looking for good houses to make water tanks for as I've been starting to plan for a group of high school kids to come down for 3 weeks with their teacher from the states to bring some money and do a project. I that sounds like pure hell to a lot of volunteers as they usually don't like sharing their site with anyone and the don't like young adults usually and especially from the states. I on the other hand don't mind. I worked at a summer camp for most my life and loved it. I think it will be a great learning experience for the kids and for the community and it will be kind of a last big hora as I will be leaving 3 months after they arrive. That's right I only have about 9 months left. Crazy huh? It's gone by so fast at some moments and slow as a snail in others. The next couple months are going to fly.

Other weird stuff. I got two types of amoebas at the same time and had blood in my stool. That was fun. I sat on the couch at our regional house and watched movies all day trying to forget about the knifing pain in my stomach. I had to be close to a toilet anyways as their was no warning as to when the little worms wanted out. Tonight is domino night and its right next to my house so its going to be loud. I've found the only way to get around it is to play along with them that way I'm less annoyed at the slamming of dominos. Until next time....

Help!

Ok we already raised half the funds. We need your help for the rest. Send this to everyone you know and donate today!
Follow the link to check out what we are doing and why we need your money:
http://helpfundthefuture.blogspot.com/2011/12/helping-fund-future.html

Chicken Versus Turkey

Damn Turkeys are freaking mean. I'm pretty sure this is the same turkey that chases me sometimes.

Mucus, Coffee, and Day Dreaming

I laid awake most the night listening to the pounding music of the bar down the street try to drown out the noise two volunteers were making in the room next to me. It sounded as if they were wrestling while trying to kill a pig. You figure it out. I was also very sick with globs of green mucus oozing out of my nose. I was not in the greatest of moods yet I was not mad. It made no sense. I should have been fuming. Anyone else would have been at least slightly annoyed, but not me. I had come in earlier that day to meet with Solomon to look at a couple different options for internet. He was there to file an official police report for the guy in our community whom stole three hundred bucks from the artisan house. His mom went to the river to wash clothes and boom. Money gone. Their after him supposedly. I was feeling like a wet piece a horse shit and internet face time on skype with my parents and Michelle was what I needed for sure so that's what I did. It was refreshing seeing and hearing them and even though I was real sick everything seemed better for at least a little bit.

During that time using the internet I decided to down 3 cups of coffee of which I now blame for me not being able to sleep. But it was still strange. I had crashed mentally only hours before but lay awake in bed tossing and turning and switching things on and off like the tv and my phone. A couple things came up swirling around my mind during this really long night. One, I should do more writing. Two, I should do more writing that is part of something bigger. I know that when I put my mind to I can write and I can write well and I feel like I have been not using what some would call my “potential”. I started thinking to myself what I could write if I wanted to start doing it more often. I had started to write down some personal stories, of which there are many, but had grown bored with trying to put everything into a time-line as well as scared that people would start coming after me with an axe when I released it. I wasn't painting people in the greatest of lights.

So decided that I was once a great story teller and will be again. Well, I wrote a couple short stories once that people seemed to like. Well, my step brother seemed to like them. That was probably considering that as soon as I learned how to type and barely old enough to make anything coherent, I wrote a story about a bunch of kids falling into a well and then trying to escape. One by one each one died a terrible and graphic death until eventually at the end we find out it is all a dream. Until the main character actually dies in real life and the story ends. Real nice huh? Ya, my step brother really liked that one but I think it might show a little bit of disturbing behavior. Not sure why my teachers didn't pull me out of class and lock me in a room just to make sure I wasn't going to bring a meat cleaver to school. I guess it was the early nineties.

So I laid awake thinking to myself “I'm going to write great stories again”. I'm going to write a story about a boy who goes to a foreign land and runs through the jungle with special tiger shoes and barely misses branches as he jumps from one rock to the next and then comes to a clearing where he almost falls off a 1000 foot cliff and is saved by his great tiger claw grip shoes. That's what I'm going to do. I thought about how great this story was going to be. How the plot was going to be this kid learning this great lesson in life and how he was going to open up some magic door within time and space and find the answer to everything old and magical within the confines of this small jungle village of a people trapped in time. Yes folks. I was dreaming. I was just still awake.

I woke up with about 3 hours of sleep under my belt and with one of the suspected pig killing culprits knocking at my door to use the hot water in my shower. I stumbled across the street and got some coffee. I was going to need some time to recover from my mucus, coffee, and day dreaming hangover.

Chispiando

Written and played in my little house. You can hear how close everyone else is to me on this one. Hope you guys like it. It's an all acoustic one:
Chispiando by californiaadam

The Power, The Chinese, The Farming

I'm sitting in the dark corner of a Chinese restaurant in Almirante. I came into town today to wash my clothes and use the internet. I immediately noticed a problem when I stepped out of the taxi and looked into the buildings around me. The power is out here and there is nothing I can do now. No internet. No air conditioning. No clothes washing. It wouldn't be too bad if I wasn't extremely tired and annoyed as I have been for the last three days or so. I can't really pin down my crankiness. I just know that it's there. It has been more and more frequent. I'm thinking it might have something to do with the holidays. But then again, it might have something to do with just being run down.

I feel like there will eventually be a point where I feel good in the morning and not dragging myself out of bed after falling back asleep 5 times at around 9am which is pretty late here. There was a time when I was getting out of bed at 6am. I had energy. Now days, and especially if it's raining, its hard to get out of bed. My main group of work is too busy to listen to me and it feels like tours are a second thought these days. Some of that is due to the protests over the large electrical transmission lines and the other is due to this gigantic meso-american farm project funded by the world bank that my community just became a part of. Because of it they have to work almost every day in their farms.

About the giant project: From what I've seen the project seems pretty legit but of course it has its unintended consequences and glitches just like every other aid program done in large scale. I don't want to take away from what they are doing though because I do feel like it is important and I can see that they have done the best with the resources they do have. The basic idea seems to be to find organized farm groups that have farms and pay them to make them better which in turn gives the farmers more money in the long run from increased product and helps in not cutting down more rainforest to put in more inefficient farms. Its a great idea. They are not really paying the people per se, but really just paying for all materials, tools, seeds, and classes they want to take to make their farms better. Its 27k and they have to spend it all is what I was told which I don't think will be a problem.

It is a fact that focusing on increased production on existing farms saves rain forest and other lands. If you can squeeze what you need out of the land you are already using why cut down down more trees. This is why I don't have a huge problem with large scale farm projects. I have a huge problem with the harmful chemicals used in large scale production and I have an even bigger problem with the evil corporations that get subsidies for no god damn reason other than they already have a lot of money and lobby, and whom push out small farmers. I could write 40 pages about that and you can probably tell I'm not happy about it so I'm going to spare you and I both the amounts of time it would take to write and read it. Continuing, so the point is put more into the farms that these people already have and to make sure they are doing right the project calls for receipts for everything, close oversight of the farms and their continuing progress, and the money to be given out at small increments to make sure someone doesn't run off with it. I like it.

Of course what they probably didn't see coming was the fact that the people in the group that have cacao farms that are really old need to do so much work in them ie cut the entire farm down and start again because the trees are too old, and the people that have sparsely farmed land are cutting down what is left of the virgin ground vegetation because it's easy. I will say that about 90% of all nutrients in a rainforest are carried in the canopy and from what I've seen so far the canopy is not being effected much. Another unintended consequence is something that I think is not only unavoidable, but also probably just not talked about as it will only stir up a lot of crap that might take down the whole thing. That is the fact that the people are so busy now, and have to work in their farms I they want to participate, that they are sending their kids to work in place of themselves. Now this is a usual occurrence here in panama, but if it came out that they were promoting kids to work in the farms instead of going to school then I could see some problems. One could also argue that with more money in the family that they would be able to send more of their kids to better schools. I believe that, and I also don't think that missing a little school here is that big of deal as of right now considering Panama ranks 128 out of 138 in terms of education in the world. They could learn more by watching T.V.

So the lady told me that there is no coffee because there is no power. That is because all coffee comes from the machine and is not made on the stove. Oh the good ol days when all you needed was a fire. Oh wait that's how it is about a 5 min walk down the road....

Sandy Pocket

So, shit.

That's how I'm going to start this post because I can. And because I've reading a lot of Hunter S Thompson and got inspired to rebel against my typewriter/computer. And also, because a little bit of shit hit the fan. The fan on slow speed at least. It all boils down to the government here not paying when they said they would. Let me explain. There are these gigantic power lines that trench their way through my community that have done nothing but bring death to the forest and its fuzzies and hurt to the people whom own the land. Now Ngabe people usually don't give a flying crap about what the goes on in the world until it comes to them. Which makes sense because they are usually worried about what they are going to eat that day and which kid they are going to tell to go get the food. Anywho, there are these freaking huge power lines that tower through my community and when the good ol government put them in 5 years ago they plowed the forest over including all the chocolate farms and then erected these huge metal erections.

My community probably wouldn't complain too much if they were actually getting something from the power lines like maybe..hmmmm....POWER! Apparently it's all going to Mexico which seems silly but whatever. They did give each person a small portion of money which I thought was sufficient, but now the manure has grazed the blender. Yes Sr. the power company wants to put another line on the other side of the tower. Well this put the Ngabe into frenzy and the more organized lesser percent of them decided that if the government and the big business were going to get money out of this deal then by god they were going to too. Living here I see the whole thing as ridiculous. How the hell can you put power lines through a town and not even give them power. I do want to mention that I''m glad they don't have power. If they did I would have to invest in a large carton of ear plugs to block the terrible tipico music they play on the radio.

So here is this large company starting to put power lines on the other side of the giant towers and the Ngabes are like “Hell no. Where's are money bitch”? Except they said it in Ngabere. I have to hand to them. They had meetings. They negotiated prices with the government. They set dates and got representatives. Then when the government didn't pay them, they threw a bunch of shit in the street to block it, cooked up some hot chocolate and said it was a protest. Of course they had the typical megaphone which wasn't any louder than someone yelling but sounded cool. So here we are. After days of this malarky the government has said no word and in the mean time half my community is blocking the main road to Bocas del Toro from anywhere else in the country.

Now, I'm not going to take sides but I'm going to point out the facts. Big companies that don't give stuff to the poor people they are hurting are evil. Big companies that tear down the forest are evil. Governments that let all this happen are evil. The Ngabe expect money for everything and never pay taxes. The government did say that they were going to get the money a long time ago after negotiations and they did not deliver........sooooo.... did someone fall asleep while driving the money to the poor people living under these monstrosities. I mean not only are they probably getting all types of third world cancer from these metal beasts, but they are being slapped in the face by the government about it too. I don't know. Those are just the facts. No bias.

So what has this done to my work here. Well, Samuel, our main tour guide and the only one that speaks english has been in the protest for days now. In the meantime I have had to do the tour which is NOT the point of me being here, we have had orders for product that we couldn't send, the stickers for our product could not get through, tourists can't get through, and there is no cell service there so when Salomon goes and someone calls about chocolate anything they get nothing. Failure.

They say they are going to pay tomorrow. We will see. In the meantime a women from my community has had to leave at midnight to go to the city to sell her baskets with a government group.

I do have to hand it to the police. They know when not to screw with the Ngabe. They don't do a damn thing. In fact, they just hang out at the protest and talk to the protesters. Of course there is always only about 2 or 3 cops, but they learned their lesson against these people and that is they are tough as nails and hard as rock and they don't back down. I wouldn't screw with them, but that's not saying much.

So we have that going for us. Great stuff huh? I had to run a tour today and it would have been fine except for the fact that I had worked with the artisan group in the morning filling bags of dirt and I was extremely tired for some god awful reason only known to the worm gods living in my gut. Jesus. I got stop reading so much HST.