home sweet home

ok folks,

in case you didn't know, after a month long stint on the Osa, James and I have hightailed it back to the good ole US of A for what some may call "jobs". I was practicing what the Chinese call "do nothing" but it turns out that doesn't pay so well. I mean it does, spiritually and physically, but as far as cold hard cash goes, not so much. So here we are and we are having some problems catching up in America. We find that the grocery stores are a little too big and have waaaaaaaay to many options. We also realize that everyone drives without honking every two seconds and we're not sure how to accept this silence. And lastly, we can speak English. Everywhere. Well that's not technically true. Miami airport we still spoke Spanish. Our brains and our bodies are trying to catch up. In a matter of 9 hours we went from the jungle of Central America to the wide open spaces of the Delta in eastern Arkansas. I don't know if that's really cool or really strange.

Anyway, we are preparing to float the Buffalo River on Saturday in Arkansas and then back to Little Rock by Monday where we fly to Dallas Texas and then on to Raleigh North Carolina. After we get to North Carolina we buy a car, get a license, play with my nephew, hand out gifts, drink Costa Rican coffee and get on the road back to, you guessed it, our favorite Massachusetts playground, Cape Cod.

If you are interested in keeping up with our goings on we will be writing about our summer the shores of Cape Cod. We can also keep you posted on the water quality of the public beaches if you so desire. Jamey can help you out on that one.

I have posted all of the rest of our pictures from Costa Rica. There are over 200. Don't feel overwhelmed. I know you may not be interested in even clicking on the link but trust me, there are some goodies in there. A feast for your eyes, if you will.

Until we meet again...

new pictures

Hey check out my new pictures I posted (link to the right) from The Panamá Canal and the rest of our time in Boquete. They are a few weeks old now but I´m doing my best to keep up. Some of them are not rotated correctly so you may have to lie sideways or hang upside down to enjoy them. The computers here refuse to let me edit them so I gave in and let them win. You can only ask so much of technology here in Puerto Jimenéz. Enjoy my friends!

where are we?

Hi Folks,

Sorry we´ve been out of the loop. Just a quickie to catch you up. Jamey and I went to Panamá for the week of Semana Santa (before Easter) and enjoyed the deserted streets, closed restaurants and shops. What we didnt know before we left is that the City shuts down for the religious holiday. No beer, no shopping, no nothin´. But they did keep the movie theaters open for the heathens. That was us. We went to the movies. Not that cultural but we did end up getting to get out a bit and see some of the surrounding parks and the old city ruins. More on that later. I also have pictures trapped on one of my memory cards. For some reason my memory card is holding them hostage. I am negotiating their release.

Currently Jamey and I have made it to our volunteering post on the Osa Peninsula in southern Costa Rica. We are in the middle of nowhere with no phone, no internet, and no transportation. We love it. We rarely get to town to check our e mail and do our business so blogs are usually out of the question. Luckily today we are in town for an earth day celebration. We are celebrating in air conditioning and using the nice computer café. We figure everday is Earth Day for us.
Our volunteer position is with a fairly new non profit called Friends of the Osa or for you spanish lovers, Amigos De Osa. You can google that online and find a really good website. They are just getting things started here on the Osa. The facilities are top notch. We get a nice bed with real mattresses and pretty mosquito nets. They just built the residential cabinas and a lab and are currently raising funds to build a dining hall for when they begin to house more volunteers and researchers. Trond Larsen is the science director. He is the contact here for the entire organization and he seems to be stretched a little thin these days. Our first meeting with Trond was about a week after he had gotten into a pretty bad ATV accident on his way to the station. He is currently going back and forth between San Jose and here to get root canals to fix the teeth he broke in the accident. It was gnarly. So he´s been a bit distracted and overwhelmed.

Jamey and I hope to bring some peace to his life by helping establish a permaculture garden and some pura vida atop of the Osa. We are currently working on making raised beds to plant veggies and devising new ways to keep the millions of ants away from the plants. Jamey and I also spend part of the days either going to the completely beautiful deserted beach that is a 10 minute walk or we chase Howler Monkeys in the trees around the property. Either way we can always find something interesting to do. We´ve come to one of the most biologically diverse places on earth (according to Nat Geo) and we are darn appreciative too.

We will write more when we get the time. Love to all of you.

sucking fumes and pounding pavement

Do you ever wonder where U.S. school buses go when they die? They go to Panamá city. Once they arrive in Panamá City, the City government passes them off to a bus driver that, in no particular order, does the following things to the bus:

1. Take out the non-working parts and replace them with second hand Mitsubishi or Toyota truck parts.
2. Rip out the exhaust and tail pipe. Attach two huge, silver intake pipes to the back emergency door of the bus. Polish pipes.
3. Get out white spray paint. Paint entire yellow bus, bright white. Proceed to paint bright colored graphics via airbrush. DO NOT leave out the lude, inappropriate, overly-busty and leggy naked women. Next to the naked lady, or on the other side of the bus, paint a picture of Pope John Paul II or Saint Francis of Assisi. Or President Martin Torrijos. Whatever works.
4. Duct tape all holes and broken metal on the interior seats. Screw long pieces of scrap metal to the ceiling of the bus, covering the remaining emergency exits, as handles for standing passengers.
5. Place flag of Panamá on rear view mirror and hang banner that says ¨Yo Soy Panamá¨
6. Install car stereo. Play very loud salsa, day and night. Or 80´s music, whatever your preference.
7. Get in bus, speed, honk, yell at people and frighten small children.

Optional: Hydrolics, silver rims, off-road tires.

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!

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.