I woke this morning realizing that I had things planned which was good. I needed to take a bath/shower and wash my clothes. In the states this might have taken me a total of one hour at most to do. Of course if your my step brother Danny, an hour shower is probably normal. I'm convinced he secretly does complex arithmetic using his finger on the shower door.
After waiting in the hammock for about two hours for breakfast I threw my board shorts on, grabbed my soap, stepped into my boots, and headed down to the river. About half way down to the river I realized that I had not only forgotten to wear socks with my large rubber boots, but I forgot to cover the outside of my left leg. For anyone that knows me, they know that I walk extremely strange. I have one foot that pigeons and one leg slightly shorter. You would only notice by either looking at the heels of my shoes or by closely observing me walk. Some would say that I walk like “a pimp”. Whatever that means. How this walking affects my large rubber boots is tremendous. When you have that much surface space potentially rubbing and grinding in certain spots bad things can and have already happened. I have a fairly large open wound on the outside of my left leg from the boot just rubbing that area after one day and a silver dollar sized wound on the inside of my right foot from not wearing socks just one day. So I walked back to put socks on and tie a bandana around my left calf.
Looking for the correct place to wash ones self in the river is key to having bathing success. The water has to be deep enough to be submerged but not too deep to wear you can't lather up. The spot also has to be somewhat secluded and hopefully not directly down stream from someone washing clothes or worse. It is pretty much a given that there are things in the river that I don't want to know about. I've already got amoebas from it once. Needless to say, I found the perfect spot and bathed in the river without a hitch and had time to buy a bar of soap from a local store/hut with 10 things in it to wash my clothes which I'm going to have to write about next time.
Some random observations:
1. It rained so hard the night before last that when I went to leave the house I found myself faced with a new river to fjord. The only problem was that the bridge for the once stream was now far under water. I made it through after careful navigation, but the thought of flooding just after one night of heavy rainfall caused me little alarm.
2. The latrine or “hole with the wood planks on top” as I like to call it seems to be dangerously full. I'm guessing that in the 3 weeks that I have left in this house that it will be fine but what about after that. I did realize that the hole/shack is located in a nice part of the area. There is a little trail that heads up past our house slightly up the mountain and there perched on the edge of a small hill next to some coconut trees is the latrine. When it rain there is even a cascading waterfall next it to that drains into the canyon. It's too bad that the latrine is in such disrepair because I can't imagine a better location for dropping a deuce.
3. I thought that checkers was played the same all around the world. It is just one of those games that one can't imagine would differentiate depending upon location. Apparently I was dead wrong. Walking back from Solomon's house one night I noticed a light on at one of the 3 “businesses” in town. I say “businesses” because they are either just cut out squares in people's houses that sell goods for a ten percent markup, or its the zapataria which is a shoe repair hut. The light was on in the zapataria which just so happens to be owned by one of the 5 kids living in the same house I am. I noticed that he was sitting next to an oil lamp directly below 3 empty shelves of which I imagine are supposed to have shoes on them. There were some shoes in the zapataria, but they were on the ground off to the side. To make a long story short I noticed a board for playing checkers and we started a game by oil lamp light.
It wasn't too long that locals crowded round and I could feel the pressure to win. Things were going pretty smoothly until it happened. He moved backwards. “What the hell is that” I yelled in English and then in Spanish. He put a puzzled face on and I took note of the apparent Panamanian rule change. He won the first game pretty quickly I like to think because of the differentiation in rules so we started another. The second game lasted longer and we got to the point where we both had checkers/bottle caps that were kinged. Then it happened again. He moved all the way across the board like it was a bishop in chess. Same exchange in words and expressions happened and he won. The third game was a different story. I took note of the “rules” and gleefully beat him at his own game. I even found more rules such as being able to go across the entire board with a king and take over a piece (not jump), and then go in a different direction in the same move and jump or take over another piece. I'm pretty sure some panamanian somewhere watched someone play chess somewhere and thought it was part of checkers and then got drunk one night and came up with this. The thing is, is that its way more fun than regular checkers. I would tell you to go try it but who the hell plays checkers anymore. I was just excited not be in the dark.
4. My host family was switching through the radio channels as they do every night and stopped on an english broadcast that I knew right away was of religious matter. I don't want to get into my views about religion as it pertains specificly to the Gnabe people just yet. At least not after I actually go to church here and see the whole picture. I do want to point out that for the one minute that the old tired man talked on this particular station before it was changed he went on about how homosexuality was a sin and that god is going to punish them. He also started siting specific parts of the bible that showed this. I find it too bad that the only English channel these people get to practice and learn English to be words of hate and especially from a source they are familiar with. These people are so impressionable its ridiculous. They still talk about Wild Bill every day and how all gringos are crazy. If you don't know who Wild Bill is you need to look him up. He was just arrested down here for chopping up other gringos and taking there land. He got deported back to the states where I'm sure he will get the chair. In any case, it is pretty sad to hear the only English voice on the radio spitting hate all over the speakers. Hopefully they are not doing that in spanish.
5. There are two companies that buy up all the chocolate produced in Bocas. One is a company from the states that I have heard is a sub division of Hersheys (If someone can back me up that that it would be great) and the other is a Swiss company that came here last year and did a bunch of tests on the chocolate seeds and decided it was some of the best in the world. They pay about 1.20 a lb for it. The same organic stuff in the states can go for 20 bucks a pound.
6. I also found out that one of the guys here went to Costa Rica once and saw a gringo pay twenty bucks to see a toucan up close. He came back to the community and designated an area the “Zoo” so gringos could come here and pay that too. It is surrounded by huts, farms and roads, and looks exactly the same as the rest of the land here except it doesn't have huts in it. There have also not been any visitors yet. That might be because the only advertising they have for it is a sign on a post that says “protected forest”. They might need to work on that one a little.
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