Santa Clara

When we last left, our hero was in Panama City ready and able to begin his next arduous task: shitting in a latrine. On Sunday, August 19th after a an hour long bus ride west of Panama City he arrives to what will be his new home for the next 3 months, Santa Clara. It is a sleepy rural community of about 400 inhabitants doing their thing to keep on living. Counting Peace Corps teachers and staff and Trainees (me) it is now 450 strong. I am going to stop talking out of the 3rd person now. So i get to my host family (from now on when I say family I mean host family unless otherwise specified) and it´s real different. Well, not so different than what I´ve seen or experienced in Bolivia but I was never this submersed in rural Latin American life before.

The logisitics: One mother 70 years young, deceased father.
7 brothers and sisters ranging from 52 to 35 years old. Many nephews and great nephews (?).
Big family. Really nice people. Really good food. Lots of starch. Big portions.
The Latrine... For the first five days I just couldn´t go. I tried but it defeated me. For those of you who do not know a pit latrine is a deep hole in the ground. You put a make-shift toilet seat on top and set up 4 zinc walls around it and voila you got yourself a place to do business. Trouble is, it smells real bad and bugs are kind of everywhere. It´s really not so bad once you get used to it. I kept telling myself that what I´m smelling really concentrated methane gas and nothing more. Just get scientific with it.
I will not be building pit latrines in my site. They will be compost latrines which are very different. Same story but better. Compost latrines are about 3 or 4 feet OFF the ground. So you do your business into a huge barrel. The difference is you pee in area and poo in the other. The pee goes to a different bucket or has a tube connecting it to some far away area (like 30 feet) from where anyone lives or walks. So everytime you poo you throw some sawdust or ash on top and this stops it from smelling and helps it dry up real fast. Once the barrel is full (approx every six months) you pull it out, cover it and let it sit for another 6 months. When you open it, it will be dry and look and smell and feel like fertilizer. You then put it on some plants or trees, etc. The reason for the separation of pee and poo is because poo cannot dry if the pee is in the picture. So çm you obviously need two barrels and exchange them every 6 months. And that was the compost latrine bit.
More logistics: Spanish class/Culture class/Indigenous Class for 4 hours then one our of lunch then 4 hours of EH Tech class. Remember EH means Environmental Health (my sector). You have to remember all these acroynms with me. Those of us with strong spanish will be more involved with the Santa Clara community these 3 months doing more volunteer work and side projects. Tech class is informative but usually over my head. Lot of engineer jargon when it comes to building aqueducts and just water stuff in general. I´m getting the hang of it though. I got about 9 weeks left before i go to my site all by my lonesome. Speaking of which next week is our "volunteer visit" which means we all go off on our own to visit a volunteer somewhere in the country. I am a trainee right now, not a volunteer in case you didn´t know. So i was assigned to go visit a guy named Joe in Bocas del Toro province. This province is the farthest one west bordering Costa Rica. It is apparently beautiful and 14 hours on a bus away. I gotta get there by speed boat or something after that. All very exciting stuff. I´ll be there for about 4 days not counting the two days it´ll take me to travel. The purpose of the trip is to experience how a PCV lives and ask pertinent questions. Then we go back to training and let our bosses know ohw we feel and if we have changed our minds on how we feel about our placement. Well, I´ve got a lot more to tell but really this is enough.
Oh, by the way today we slit some chickens´ throats and boiled them and plucked the feathers and took out all the organs, etc. It was pretty sweet. It´s good to see the process. It makes you appreciate what you´re eating.
Franco
ps - the malaria medicine makes us trip while we sleep. i´ll see if i can bring a bunch for you, roberto, when i get back. JUST KIDDING, PEACE CORPS!!!