A Panamanian Tuesday.

This post is edited from many months ago, just condensed pictures and words.

My entries in my journal are getting progressively shorter. So sad that I haven't gotten my money's worth out of my 50 cent Panamanian notebook. All in good time!

Tuesday was rice paddy day! We got to wear our awesome rubber boots than we picked up in Penenome. I remember that getting the right sizes for 15 people was quite the ordeal, with only one person translating! Ha! We met Brandon, the Peace Corps volunteer coordinator (or something like that) for this region, stationed in Cocle (<--with a little accent over the e). He caught the chiva at some wee hour of the morning to get to San Miguel. He led us through the rainforest, up, down, sideways. Today was the day we learned about the "Ahhh-oo!" sound that the Panamanians sound to get someone's attention, as a greeting, or to acknowledge someone else. Out of this sound grew all of us greeting each other on campus in a similar matter. Except sometimes the intended recipient didn't hear and people just looked at you oddly. Heh.

We got to the nearby village after maybe a 30-45 minute hike (I forgot what the village was called) and had a little tour. Learned all about rice paddies and the advantages of them over previous methods of rice farming, got to try out a sugar cane press thing, running around in circles doing the job horses/mules usually do.

Also got to cut grass (or try to cut grass) with a machete, which instantly ignited a burning desire within all of us to get one. Thankfully back in Penenome we were able to pick some up as souvenirs. :-)

The trees there are HUGE! I guess trees are here as well, but I felt extremely tiny. Following that tour, we picared the ground - broke it up with axes, shovels, pick-axes, whatever we could find. We weren't too good at it - we'd work super hard on about 10 feet for awhile and Alfredo would come behind us and fix what we did. Yup, you can actually mess up breaking up mud. AND it only took him about 30 seconds to do what we just finished, and he never broke a sweat. Whew. It was pretty tough work. In such cases, the Panamanian's height differences are extremely advantageous.

We had lunch after that, which actually wasn't very good today (gasp!). It was some sort of mush, never found out what it was. Brandon had chicken feet, which apparently is where all the protein is?

Finished picaring the ground after lunch, and they began to flood the paddy. The usual step that comes next is stomping around in the mud with boots for a looooong time, mixing the dirt and water. However, we decided to make it much more interesting by having a MUD FIGHT!!!

Saved a lot of time and was a lot more fun. As we finished, they told us, "You are brown ones now too!" As the turmoil died down, we then had to level the paddy using a heavy piece of wood and our calf muscles. I was on one side of Brandon, this huge guy, trying to keep up as he basically runs across the paddy practically parallel to the ground instead of perpendicular.

Let's just say I got a lot of mud down my front and maybe in my mouth. And my legs might have given way. :-) But it was fun.

We walked barefoot over many spiky things to a nearby river to wash off. I missed my ears. You don't really think about where dirt can be when we shower almost every day. You've gotta get in there good.

When we were "clean" again, a band came and played for us! This one kid played the accordion and was supposedly the best kid accordion player in Panama.

Hiked back through the rainforest and changed. Went up to the church and had lessons about how to make fried dough! I think we had about 30 ilbs of flour? Maybe more? Whatever the amount was, it was a lot. We counted out each part of the recipe as a group - we must have sounded like pre-schoolers learning to count! I had trouble getting mine into a circle - it's harder than it looks to do it right! Eventually we started making all sorts of shapes and eating them. Delicious. The leftovers were sold.

Whoever was supposed to cook dinner for us (different organizations switched off every night making us dinner - one night the school, one night the church, etc) forgot that night, so we waited a long time. However, it worked out really well cause we had scarfed down all that bread! To pass the time I managed to convince Lauren, Kayla and Katie P. to do some skits with me/alone, so that was fun. Instead of reflection at Sixta's, we just had it there and headed home after.