Kari Kviten
Cuerpo de Paz
Entrega General
Tole, Chiriquí 0454
República de Panamá
Just a slight address change, and I promise this is the final one for the next two years! The only thing that changes from the previous address is the city and zip code. I have found there is a slightly closer post office than I thought...and I use slightly as a very loose term! If you have already sent something- do not worry- it will still arrive to me!
Kari Kviten Cuerpo de Paz Entrega General Tole, Chiriquí 0454 República de Panamá
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I got lucky this year and my birthday happened to be the day before all of the Peace Corps Volunteers in my region had a meeting. Meaning that I got to come into civilization on my birthday to be ready for the meeting tomorrow. How wonderful it worked out! In case you were wondering, I am celebrating my birthday eating a huge amount of ice cream which I know will give me the poops later because it is my first dairy product in weeks, but remind me that it was worth it because now it tastes oh so wonderful! Oh, and I am getting to post this blog so you can celebrate with me! For as long as I can remember I have played softball every year. My calendar was always either ‘softball season’ or ‘not softball season’. My friends always knew not to ask me to do things during season because the answer would always be the same, “I can’t, I have softball.” This is my first year not on any sort of softball team in 17 years (eek, I’m aging myself!) and although it has not hit me yet, I am sure it is coming. Every new season of softball meant new things. New teams, coaches, and players. Sometimes new gloves, bats, or cleats, and more often than not, new batting gloves. My hands have always been like a baby’s hands, blistering at the first swing of a bat and drying up with the first winter cold, even a little bit of swelling if the ball hit the bat in the right position. Because of my baby hands the extra protection batting gloves offer have always been a part of my life. I would bring them to every practice, long or short, just as mom would bring the cooler full of grapes and sandwich meat every tournament. Just as this is my first year without softball, it is also my first year without batting gloves protecting me at everything thrown my way. Boy, am I feeling it. I need to call Easton right now and have them overnight me a pair. It was merely Day 3 in site and my hands were blistering from the thumbs to the pinkies, and by Day 5 the blisters had broken and were bleeding. My host family did not understand why I was putting medicine on my hands and why I needed it. They had done this stuff all their life and their hands were used to anything. Before I explain how my hands became a blistering mess, I need to explain another vocabulary word for you all to learn: pasear. Pasear- the art of visiting random houses to meet people and experiencing the most awkward moments of your life. AKA the first three months of a Peace Corps Volunteers’ life. The first three months are about getting to know the community so we can truly understand what they are needing and wanting from us. Our goal is not to walk up and put ourselves in some random community and try to change what we think needs to be changed. The whole concept of sustainability (haven’t heard that word before!) is pertinent to our entire life. Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job so that the communities can sustainability manage and organize themselves without our help. The first three months is our groundwork figuring out how we can go about this. In order to accomplish this task I have learned this new thing called assertiveness where I invite myself places and push people to invite me places. Learning this new concept is what got me blisters in the first place so I am not too sure how I feel about this new concept. After getting settled into the community I began to start rounds of pasear to meet the people I would be surrounded by for the next two years. Day 2 I paseared to Adelina’s house who had been my guide for the week I visited. In between sipping coffee and eating rice she told me that she was going to harvest rice tomorrow. Being this new assertive person I promptly asked if I could join her and without hesitation she said yes, and now I know why. Harvesting rice is a time consuming, grueling process, and the more the merrier personnel to get ‘er done. I gaped as I saw how big her fields of rice were which she alone planted to support her five kids and mom. We began using machetes to clear the weeds on her newest fields and then continued to the fields that were ready to harvest. I watched as she took the stem of rice, neatly snapped it off the plant, and laid it in a neat stack in her hand. It looked easy enough. So I thought. Plant by plant, stem by stem we traveled throughout the field and soon I looked down in my hand to see a mess of what was supposed to be just rice. As I looked at Adelina’s hand I could see the neatly stacked pile of rice with equal stem lengths while my hand was full of long stems, short stems, leaves, some rice, and who knows what else. I had a lot to learn. We did this for hours under the blazing sun, working and little by little learning some Ngäbere and English words. I could feel my hands start to blister after hour one, but I was not about to wimp out! We took a break about halfway through when her son brought us some freshly picked, boiled corn for a snack and then continued on. Tearing the plant with our hands stem by stem took a toll on my hands, and I left that day staring at my hands and knowing this was only the beginning. The next day I went to pasear at some houses and somehow found myself surrounded by rice again. One family was toasting the new rice, one family was pulling the rice that still had the shells on out, and the other family was pounding rice. They have technical names in Spanish but granted that I have not been surrounded by harvesting rice all my life I do not even know the name for each process in English! The first house. One might think stirring a pot of rice was a piece of cake. Hmm think again. Think of that huge pot you have that you only pull out to use when the entire family and their chickens are over. Now picture quadruple, or moreover seven times it. This old woman was stirring the biggest pot of rice I had ever seen with a natural 2x4 slab of wood to toast it. Of course being assertive I asked to stir. The women only spoke Ngäbere and me with my 10 words of Ngäbere that mostly include food had a hard time communicating with her that I wanted to help. However, sooner than later I found myself with the hardest workout of my life. At first I was stirring a little too hard and a couple of rice kernels flew over the side of the pot. All I heard was Ngäbere words being yelled at me which sounds just as pretty as German in case you were wondering. Even though I could not understand her I knew she was saying, “This is our food source, be careful.” No pressure. So I started to stir and stir and stir some more. I changed arms and stirred some more. Then had a back replacement and stirred some more. Not really, but I could have really used one at this point! When I thought my whole body was about to crumble I heard my favorite word, “Ya” meaning ‘yes, it is ready, you can stop now’. After being given ripe bananas (a rarity here!) I traveled to the next house which was a nice undertaking after the previous house. Here we were pulling out rice kernels which still had their shells on out of the pile of shelled rice. We would break the rice shell and then add the kernel back to the pile. The third house though, oh the third house. My hand were still blistered from the day before of harvesting rice and now were warmed up from the day’s activities when I arrived. I walked up and saw this women pounding rice like I had never seen something being pounded before. Being assertive I asked if I could try it, and almost too soon she said yes and handed it over to me. This thing she gave me weighed more than a bucket a balls and here I was pounding rice with it. And she tried to get me to pound it with one hand. Pft. Maybe, maybe after two years. Maybe. The skin began to peel as the redness started to grow. I could feel new blisters forming, and I pounded away refusing to give up when she asked me if I wanted to stop. Why do I have to be so hard headed all the time? I should have given it to her while I had the chance. As I walked away from that house full from coffee and rice, I stopped and looked at my hands. These new blisters signify the beginning of the next two years of my new life here in Alto Estrella. They are only the beginning of the numerous things I am going to learn, try, and experience, and, although blissfully painful, eventually they create a harder surface ready to move on and face the next challenge. My sore back, aching arms, and not so blissful blisters are a sign that the next stage of my life has begun. A life without batting gloves.
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