Monday, March 26, 2007

The Macgyver of domesticity


Boquete, Panama, March 28, 2007

I want to pat myself on the back a little because Katé´s given me a new title that I´m pretty proud of, and that I´d like to share. The other night she called me, "The Macgyver of domesticity." And, as far as monikers go, I´m pretty sure I´ll never get a better one than that.

When you say it out loud, it has that ring that a perfectly coined phrase sometimes does. Like it could have been a command from an all-powerful being. Something like, "Turn and gaze upon your destiny, my son, for you have been chosen. You are the Macgyver of domesticity." (In my imagination, the being is a wizard who sounds like James Earl Jones and we´re standing on a hill looking out over Middle Earth, and I´m thinking, "God, it´s going to take forever to set up all those wirless internet systems.")

Anyway, Kate says I´ve always got a project of some kind going, which is true. And she says she loves me because I make everything work, which is also true. Well, at least true for our aged and infirm laptop, for which, in the last couple of weeks, I have built a new DVD player from internet software, set up a program and new drivers for the iPod that actually created a new drive through the USB port, and managed to get a gray-market Chinese wireless internet card to pick up a speedy internet connection from our favorite corner bar, Amigos. Awesome.

I´m bragging, but I feel pretty good about it, and I love the computer for continuing to work. It´s seven years old and has Windows 98 as its operating system and only works when it´s plugged in. And it gets so hot when it´s running that we´ve been setting it on top of packages of frozen vegetables just so we can watch an entire movie without burning anything.

But, man, being able to watch movies and listen to music makes life so much sweeter. What did people do before digital technology? Sit and talk?
Some other projects of late include daily systematic sweeps of our apartment for culprit allergens and mosquitos. Pretty much from the time that we moved in to the place, I´ve been down and out with a cold that, I´m convinced, was brought on by the hand-me-down mattress and pillows that furnish the place. So far, in an attempt to bring the apartment up to the hermetically sealed standard that we´re used to, I have done the following:
-covered both pillows and the entire mattress in roughly 150 square feet of saran wrap
-set out a score of roach traps and spent varying amounts of time nightly trying to coax the roaches in the general direction of their death
- combined a system of spotlights (headlamps) and heavy breathing (sleep) with Kate´s naturally catlike reflexes to control the mosquito population. (In essence, I fall asleep with the headlamp in my hand pointed at the ceiling. Kate wakes me up when she hears the mosquito buzzing in her ears, and then, using both headlamps, we follow and corner the mosquito, and make the final assault with a combination of hands, magazines, and semi-automatic weapons.
Seriously, though, the bug problem here is minimal, so I can´t even begin to imagine what it´s going to be like in the lowland jungle. What I envision is a Heart of Darkness scenario with the character of Kurtz being played by me, and the adoring natives by an army of geckos that I´ve captured and trained to protect me from the insect population (imagine 3 - 5,000 geckos surrounding a bed covered in mosquito netting where Kate and I sleep peacefully). Also, they will carry me around in a litter.
Ummm... anyway that´s about it, but to round out the whole Macgyver thing. Oddly, the day that Kate gave me the nickname was the same day that I broke Fernando´s ladder. And, the next day when we were talking to our teacher, Ins, about funny gringo Spanish mistakes like broken ladders and painting bottoms, she told us that, while she was trying to get into bed the previous night (she and Fernando sleep on a top bunk single bed when they´re here in Boquete) she asked Fernando how she was supposed to get in without a ladder, and he used a verb that she hadn´t heard before: he told her to "just Macgyver it". And, you can´t help but love a language that includes, among its verbs, "to Macgyver".

niña, agua and who is mama gatito?

Boquete, Panamá March 26


When we decided to do a work-trade for free Spanish lessons I was ready to get back to work and jump-start my brain. Jamey and I had worked out a deal with Ins (the owner of Spanish by the River) where we would take four hours of lessons in the morning and in the afternoons Jamey would help out with some painting they needed around the house and I would watch her two children. Great, I thought. I had experience watching a certain little boy named Aiden and I felt that I could handle just about any nanny experience. I didnt take into account that Aiden is a boy that does boy things and these were girls that do very girl things. For example, most days here are spent playing princess cats or ¨princesa gatitos¨, brushing each others hair, playing house or play cooking. All of the aforementioned games I had never played with Aiden. My nephew and I spent many hours wrestling, eating, running, diving, jumping and screaming but we never did play princesa gatitos. I realized quickly that I would be receiving two types of education at our Spanish school, Spanish and how to entertain a 2 year old and 4 year old girls. With no TV watching allowed and ample space and beautiful weather outdoors we spend most of our time enjoying the Boquete sun and soft rain showers. Our days consist of various play themes mostly revolving around animals. We decide who is whose mamma and who is the niña. Rocío, the one and half year old, inevitably is the ¨niña¨(which she says over and over and over) and I am relegated to either a bus driver or the house keeper while Camila is usually the mama. She takes the matriarchal mammalian role very seriously and is often nursing her stuffed animals. After about two hours of that business we usually eat some, as Rocío calls it, yum yum( i.e. snacks), and then move on to another game just in time for them to get cranky and run off to Ins.




(camila, 4 years old, mama gatito)

It is exhausting to do this everyday. I love the Spanish lessons and I love playing with the girls and at the end of the day I love the fulfillment and tiredness it all brings. Recently Feranando, Ins´husband and their other daughter, Sophia, returned from a trip in Costa Rica where they were checking up on one of their other schools in Turrialba. Sophia is the eldest girl at 10 years old. The age gap between her and the younger girls sometimes puts a snag in our play time, mostly because Sophia has outgrown princesa gatitos and would like to play more grown up games that involve a lot of props and a lot of Sophia bossing everyone around. Most of the time they are content playing with each other but other times Sophia is off taking English lessons, Dutch lessons and practicing the Hebrew alphabet which she just learned from a traveler from Israel. I tell her that I am jealous that she is trilingual. Sophia is a smart girl. Today we were perusing the National Geographic in Español and we flipped to a page where she pointed and said ¨Hey look, this is in Africa.¨Glancing over I was quick to agree but a second glance made me realize that the picture was not of Africa, nowhere close. It was a picture of residents of New Orleans crowded around a water truck at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. There have been many times where I have looked at a picture of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and could not believe that it was the United States. I thought this was a perfect time to teach Sophia a gentle lesson in social responiblility (or in GW´s case, neglect) and geography of the USA. I explained to her that it was not Africa but was indeed the US and those people in the picture were impacted greatly by the storm mostly because they were poor and had no way to escape the rising waters and also because they live in a flood plain. I told her about the US and that unfortunately, it is a country that has neglected a large part of the population and that hopefully, after this disaster, that our government will take more responsibility for their own citizens well-being. Sophia points to the picture again and then asks ¨well do they speak English there?¨ It was apparent that she could not believe that the US had a poor population much less a city that was almost completely destroyed by a storm. I wasnt even sure she knew that there is such an extensive African American population in the US. It was another moment where I was able to appreciate National Geographic on so many levels. I think after our little conversation that she left a lot more informed (if not a completely leftest liberal) especially because I can see her propensity for absorbing information. She is inquisitive and smart and will do very well for herself.
After is all said and done, on Wednesday to be exact, I think that I will have improved my Spanish quite a bit and understand that little girls truly are a whole different adventure from little boys, and, equally as exhausting.

(Rocío, 1 and a halfish, niña and sometimes agua)

Also....


I am going to include a picture of Sophia as soon as I can snatch one. And..
I am working on getting my pictures on CD and once I am done I will post the link under the last link from Bocas and Pto. Viejo. Bueno!

Monday, March 19, 2007

lost... and found?


March 24, Boquete, Panama

(I think I´ll start adding my best language mistakes to the beginning of every post, but this time it´s at the end - and it´s a good one.)

I always get caught up, when I´m traveling, in the idea of travel writing. I want to turn every experience into a story, and then I wind up getting behind in chronicling the overall trip, like now, when it´s been 12 days since the last blog. So, here´s a little summary:

We´ve been really busy these last couple of weeks. We kind of fell into a microlife here in Boquete, Panama, and have really been enjoying it. How did we get here?

So, after Puerto Viejo and Bocas del Toro, we headed West for some good old fashioned carpe diem, and it hasn´t disappointed. We took a pretty ride over the continental divide in a minibus that stopped every fifteen feet and cost $2 for a 5 hour ride. (It´s amazing how many people there are waiting by the road in places that seem to be, otherwise, totally deserted.)

We got into David, the second largest city in the country, and the hottest place on earth. 95 degrees with 95% humidity. (Close your eyes here if you have a weak stomach or a familial relationship to Kate or I.) Taking cold showers before bed, sleeping au natural on top of the covers with two fans, and totally uncomfortable. But, David has everything. We bought a wireless internet device (don´t worry Mom and Dad, in a few years you´ll probably be able to rent one of those from the phone company, too) stocked up on supplies, watched a movie, and ate at Domino´s. Simultaneously delicious and completely disgusting. I´ve never felt more American. And then, for no real reason at all, we followed Kate´s compass here to Boquete, and haven´t stopped smiling since.

We got to town, and, first of all, the climate is perfect - and such a relief from David, that just standing still had the same effect on my body´s nerve endings as I would imagine heroin does. (A breezy, sunny 75 degrees in the mountains with a view of the cloud forest and a volcano.) Boquete is like Switzerland on a perfect summer´s day probably 75% of the time, and, as the name implies, there are flowers everywhere. So, after the initial seratonin dump, we just walked around in a happy stupor, and I just kept talking about how much I loved everything. People, dogs, banks, potholes, litter. Whatever, it´s all perfect.

We found a little place to eat called Amigos, and talked to the bartender, Alan, whom we now see on an almost daily basis (no, not because we´re drinking), and who is a musician and sculptor in addition to his night job serving drinks. We asked about a place to stay, and he sent us over to Nomba, where we met Lucho, who plays guitar and dedicates songs to us every Thursday night at Amigos. (Jeff Buckley´s "Hallelujah" remake mostly - incidentally, we met Jeff Buckley´s uncle the other night at Amigo´s, and he´s going to take us on a tour of the hot springs nearby). Lucho invited us to hear him sing at Amigos that night, and, there, we ran into a group of ex-pats and Panameños that do an apparently seamless culture and language swap from one moment to the next that was fun to watch, but a little hard to follow at first. And we went to sleep thinking, wow, what a cute place to hang out in for a little while.

The next evening, grocery shopping, we ran into Lucho again, who´d had a prophetic dream about me the night before. In the dream, I helped him fix his computer (which was kind of weird because I´ve done some of that since I´ve been down here - I set up the wireless internet for a hotel in Puerto Viejo in return for free internet and a place to watch the Oscars). Anyway, he invited us to go on a weekend trip with him and about 10 friends to a new hostel about an hour away in the cloud forest that he couldn´t remember the name of. We happened to have found the blogsite for the hostel, called "Lost and Found", and wanted to go there to check out possible work trade options. So, we went, had a blast, met the owners of the yet unopened hostel, two solid Kanucks, Patrick and Andrew, and promised to come back and build a house there someday. (Just kidding, mom.) But seriously, if anyone has some extra cash that they want to invest in real estate, Panama is a great place to do it. There´s a growing population of American, Canadian, and Swiss ex-pat retirees here (Hemingway-esque and otherwise), and beautiful retirement communities with golf courses and pools, for better or worse (mostly worse), are springing up everywhere.

Since then, we´ve come back to Boquete, rented an apartment, and been doing a work trade for 20 hours of free Spanish lessons a week with a great school run by a lovely Dutch/Tico couple and their three little girls. I´m sure Kate will post some of the pictures soon. Rocio is my favorite. She´s a year and a half, and communicates with tongue clicks, slurping noises, and two words, that I will never forget. Niña and agua. In her world, something is either a little girl or water. That simple. She also does this thing where she communicates by blinking, and I really think that if my mind were a little bit more open, a little less tied to the physical universe, I could probably communicate with her. Anyway, I´m pretty sure she´s reading my mind, but I´m not too worried about it.

So, that´s about it. The funniest language mistake I´ve made recently, though, was when I was painting a bedroom at the school yesterday. I broke a bunkbed ladder when I lifted it up from the bottom to paint behind it, and I had to go tell Fernando (the Tico owner) who made the ladder and all the bunkbeds and all of the woodwork in the place. So, I practiced what I was going to say, gathered my courage, and said, "Fernando, yo roto su escalera, donde yo llevanto me, para pintar el abajo." Which means, I learned, after a later translation by his wife, Ins, my Spanish teacher, something like, "Fernando I break your ladder when I lift myself up for to paint his bottom." But, he either understood, or was gracious enough not to ask who´s bottom I was painting.

Friday, March 16, 2007

habla ya!



DISCLAIMER FOR THIS POST-
Kate makes mistakes too. A lot of them.


This morning while I was devouring a mango, I questioned my inability to make sense while speaking Spanish. It was 9 am and my Spanish lesson was scheduled to begin in a few minutes. Jamey was brushing his teeth for ten minutes and Ins, our awesome teacher, was on the skype with someone speaking one of the many languages she has perfected. This was a perfect time for me to think about several things including but not limited to the following:

1. Why do I sound like a two year old when I speak Spanish but write like a ten year old and read like a four year old?
2. Why cant we get mango's like this in the states?
3. How does Ins have three children and speak three languages fluently and always keep her composure?
4. Why did every school I ever attended tell me I had to take Spanish but nothing ever sank in for practical use?
5. Why am I starting to speak English like it is my second language?
6. I want a dog.
7. Gosh, where can I get more mango's?

Ok, I could keep going but that was the general trend of thoughts this morning. We started the lesson and I think I was loopy from lack of sleep. The night before we enjoyed cerveza and did our homework in a dark bar and did not get enough sleep for my brain to be able to conjugate verbs properly. Everything Jamey said was hilarious. He said "el niño tiene los chicles pequeños". He confused the word for teeth, in Spanish, for chicles, which means gum, and I could not stop laughing. So essentially he said, "the boy has small gum". To which Ins was instantly confused because she could not understand how Jamey could see that the boy in the picture had gum in his mouth. I was laughing because to me the word chicles always reminded me of the word chicklet, which is a type of gum in the U.S. (stay with me here). There is a movie, bonus points to ANYONE who can remember which movie, where a man gets his teeth knocked out and while he is out somebody replaces them with Chicklets. I cant help but think this is a childs movie. Anyway, all I could picture is this niño with chicklet teeth. Oh gosh. I still cant stop laughing about it. I really do think I either need food or sleep.

The whole morning went on like this. We kept making ridiculous mistakes and laughing, but learning. School was never this much fun. Never. Especially Spanish class. It was miserable and I realized that I had tricked every single one of my language teachers into thinking that I really did know what was going on. Very few lessons included an verbal session so our measure of success was solely on paper. I finally figured it out. Why did I continue to get good grades? Patterns, people, patterns. Spanish is all patterns. Could I follow the teachers example and apply it to different tenses, verbs and conjugations? Yes, because I see patterns. Not a complete language and certainly not a conversation. I saw bits and pieces and made it work and then left the class and went to Algebra. Again, useless. Less so than calculus however. The more removed I am from my years as a student the more I realized it was a game of tricking my teachers so I could move on and daydream.

I think I learned a little in school but a more effective course may be to give each student a ride to a certain part of the city, china town, little Havana, etc., an dropping them off for a few hours to order food, use the bathroom, get a haircut, go to the emergency room, you know, the usual. And then picking them back up at the end of the day, or not, and letting them panic and force the language on them. This technique is often used in wilderness training. You are left alone in a deserted environment and have to fend for yourself. You learn quick. How do I roast a squirrel?

Jamey is awesome at languages and I admire his ability to absorb information. But I do get to laugh.

Jamey- "hola señor"
clerk- "buenas"
Jamey- "Quisiera tres jueves porfavor" "may I have three thursdays please?"
Clerk- "si" (hands him three eggs)
Jamey- "Gracias"
Clerk- "huevos" (the correct word for eggs)

ahh, eggs. Not Thursdays. Lesson learned. Check and check.


Wednesday, March 14, 2007

roosters, among other things...

I finally did it! I found a computer that I could upload photos and they are finally available for viewing. Please check out the following link for our photos from Puerto Viejo and Bocas Del Toro. I have more from our time here in Boquete. I will post them as soon as I figure out where the hell my USB cord is. Grrrr.

http://new.photos.yahoo.com/jameybergman/album/576460762392660926#page1

this should work, if it doesnt then I will slam my head against this desk. I am going to eat cookies now. Enjoy!

Monday, March 12, 2007

Beverly´s Hill

Isla de Bastimentos, Bocas del Toro, Panamá

Naomi of the beautiful smile, has a scar that slides permanently down her cheek like a dirty tear. She shows me her purple shoes, and beams with pride. (I tell her they must be the most beautiful shoes in the world.) Takes her papa´s hand and leads us up a long path through the sharp edges of the garden palms.

Later, drinking a beer in the hammock, I get the story of the scar from her papa, Simon, between lengthy laments over his futbol club´s latest loss. "Ahh... 3-2 in the 89th minute, and they lost it 4-3 ... 95th minute ... extra time. And Eduardo scored - hasn´t scored in months, has he? But he did, and he was over it. And the passion - he goes bonkers diving in the stands - nearly murders the front row - and he stands up and looks at the crowd and rips his shirt off. Oh, He´s got the passion, no doubt."

Apparently, Naomi loves the cat more than the cat would like, and when she was squeezing him, he had enough of it and got hold of her cheek. "She thinks he´s her baby, and that, but if he does it again, I´ll have to get rid of him. Not that I want to, mind you, but he can´t be scratching up the prettiest face you´ve ever seen - I´m a bit biased, you see."

But he´s not biased. She is one of the most adorable and precocious little girls I´ve ever met.

When we say goodbye the next morning, she´s singing a song of made-up words, standing in a foot of water in her bathing suit and water wings dumping a cut-up-half of a-gallon-milk-jug full of water on herself and feeding the 80 pound bulldog named Reno some melted chocolate.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

a little slice of paradise



We always decide to do hikes that are never planned out and rarely easy. In a little town named Manzanillo, about 100 potholes away from Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast, we decided to hike into the rainforest to discover some hidden beaches where we heard the snorkeling was awesome and the reefs still thrived. Okay, we thought, so we grab some food and head into the jungle on a hot balmy afternoon. I had sunscreen, snorkel gear, food and a bathing suit. I wore flip flops and I thought it would be a quick jaunt to a beach but I realized I should have opted for real shoes once I climbed the first of many steep hills on this jungle path to no wheres. I did remember to pack our trekking poles and they saved my ass, literally. We hiked for about an hour and a half on steep difficult terrain covered with huge spiders webs and roots of trees that looked like they could come alive at any moment, grab you and fling you to the sea. We knew going into the Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge that there were no marked trails and we were told just to follow the foot path that had been worn with time. As we walked we past barefoot surfers and managed to hike past a group of 70 year olds (no offense dad) on a guided tour. I thought that it was a good sign that perhaps we were close to our destination and that the terrain may be easy after all. One hour and forty almost -break-a-bone moments later, we arrived in a cove on the Caribbean coast that can only be described as perfect. Perfecto. We had heard when the surf was up that the snorkeling was no good. We had stopped once on the trail and found a perfect beach break that Jamey vowed he would come back to to surf once we had fulfilled our desire to see the reef below. It appeared that the surf was indeed up and we wondered if we would be able to see a thing. Luckily this little cove was protected and seemingly calm so we slathered on the sunscreen and dove in. This area is notorious for its rip tides which we were warned about several times. As soon as we dove in we could feel the intense pull and with some muscle were able to swim around and discover the reef underneath. The beach was deserted. Only us and the fishies. What a gem. A true piece of paradise. We swam and swam until the salt sucked the water out of us and our hands were pruned like when we were kids and played in the tub for too long. I didn't even notice the time pass. The beauty above and below had me so enraptured.




I had read a bit about the reefs in this area. In the 90´s an earthquake devastated most of the reef when the seafloor rose up about a meter above the sea level. Much of the reef was destroyed. Walking along the jungle trail you can see the remnants of the reef, the carcass of brain coral nestled in the rich dark earth. Another part of the story is found in the interior in the many banana fincas splattered all over the land. The banana trade has brought a lot of income to these families but has brought an incredible amount of deforestation and degradation to the rainforest. As the land is cleared for the banana finca, the stabilizing force for the soil is wiped away. During the rainy season the soil is washed out to sea from the mountainsides and much of it ended up on the reefs, clogging and killing the sensitive life that existed. The banana farms have had their impact in so many ways. As we passed the farms on the drive across the country we saw all of these blue bags that covered the bananas as they grew from the tree. I found out that the bags keep away the pests and protect the bananas so they can grow, then harvested and eventually end up in your fruit salad in August (no guilt there, wink, wink). And the blue bags? Oh they go out to sea. They float down the mountain side and many end up floating on into oblivion. I had asked a local about what they are doing about the bags and he said that he had heard in an effort to control the bag litter that the farms were now gathering the bags and taking them out to see on a ship and burning them in massive piles. I personally don't know if I believe that. It sounds nice, I guess, that they are attempting to solve the problem by burning them but I cant help but get the feeling that there is a graveyard of blue banana bags at the bottom of the Caribbean somewhere. It is this struggle between economic survival and environmental protection that is so vivid when traveling in Central America. I kept having "wow" moments when confronted with the staggering poverty on the Caribbean coast. Moments when I could not see the beauty past the shack falling into the sea where a family cooks, laughs, cries and tries to survive. Is this truly a slice of paradise? In many ways yes but with 37% of a population in poverty it makes you think twice.
I´m thankful for the time we spent in Puerto Viejo and when we ventured on to Bocas Del Toro Panama we were equally as amazed with the beautiful lush scenery. That is perhaps chapter two...
oh yes, and if I can figure out how to say "harddrive" and "upload" in spanish I will be able to post my pictures. We´ll see.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

rejoice, in the beauty of small things

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica (Southern Caribbean)

So, I´m lying down staring at this gecko on our window screen, absentmindedly watching him hunt for one of the houseflies that we let in, when he crosses a three-foot span of window, catches the fly in his mouth, holds it, and then tosses it a few times to make sure the head goes down first when he swallows (so the wings and legs don´t bend backward, clog his windpipe and asphyxiate him). He´s the crocodilian, in miniature, snatching his prey unawares, snaring life in his powerful little jaws, playing out the primordial lesson. Ambush. Eat or be eaten.

The strike was so nearly instantaneous that the fly saw it coming and still couldn´t get away. And, almost as fast, I´m up off the bed cheering, yelling at Kate to come watch the hunter savor his kill. (Who needs TV?) When her enthusiasm inevitably doesn´t match mine and she goes back to what she was doing, my bloodlust wanes and the emotional void is filled with a mixture of conflicting thoughts:

1.) something less than a half-hearted pity for the fly,
2.) deep respect for the gecko, and
3.) a line that might be from a hymn sung during some church service a long time ago that says something like, "rejoice, in the beauty of small things"

And, after four days of too little to do with too much time on my hands, my list-making, electronic-entertainment-craving mind calms down a little bit, and I take the first tentative, hesitant, self-conscious steps back toward equanimity - life lived outside the bubble of constant access, mass media, and to-do lists.

And, later, I fall asleep to the tapping of light rain on palm leaves and the pinging noises of tree frogs in the jungle.

Sunday, March 4, 2007

potholes and mangroves


Hi friends and family,

I am trying to nudge jamey into making an entry into this blog but seeing as our internet time is extremely limited and expensive we often make quick trips just to check our emails and run before the time clicks away with our dollars. We´ve discovered quickly that being here is expensive and because of that we end up halving everything. Food especially. I was eating like a starving horse in the winter time before we left and now, we manage to get by on very little by comparison. I believe its the sudden shock of our bodies being thrown into summertime mode. We play all day and eat in between.
Anyway, once we get to a place that actually has internet that works for five minute increments consistently then we will be sure to write about what kind of trouble we are getting into and our plans for the near future. Right now we are in the Bocas Del Toro region of Panama. We´re not quite sure how we feel about it. I think I had some expectations that would be met if I had a $100.00 a day to spend. We are trying to do a lot of snorkeling and swimming in whats left of the reef here after deforestation. Thats a whole other entry.
We had a great stay in Puerto Viejo and befriended a lot of quirky and helpful locals. The humidity was suffocating but amazing at the same time. Jamey is convinced he has malaria. We spent much of our time there swatting at bugs that looked like mosquitos and covering ourselves with deet. Mmmm. We made some great connections there and ate very yummy food. I would not be surprised if we ended back on the Caribbean coast again before we leave.

I hope all is well and we will be writing feverishly soon!

Peace

Kate and James