Community Analysis Meeting: A defining event

It's my first night in my new place living on my own. Quite a change after living with three different families these past few months. I had a wonderful experience with everyone of them but now I'm just looking forward to being able to finally be able to settle into a place instead of constantly living out of suitcases. Once I am all settled in I will post some pictures. But first I hope to paint this place a little. A bit too gloomy for my taste. 

So as I mentioned in my previous blog, this past Tuesday I had my Community Analysis meeting. July 23. I think I will remember that date forever considering how many times I repeated it to well over a hundred people in my community. After 3 months of getting to know our communities and schools, every volunteer has to hold a Community Analysis meeting. This is the meeting during which together my community, my counterparts, agencies, my director and I decide what projects I will be working on for the next two years. This meeting also serves a demonstration to my director of how well I got to know my community in the past three months and whether I have integrated well. And just as it demonstrates that to him, I think it also demonstrates the same things to me to a degree.

Overall I think it was a success. I honestly had no idea how many people would show up because RSVPs do not exist here. If you ask a person if they come they will just say, "We'll see" "If God so wills" "Possibly" Or they say they will, and then they won't. I've heard this millions of times from previous volunteers, but I was still that volunteer that believed that my site was different, that my community members are different, that they will actually support me and they will all come to the meeting. This, obviously did not happen. And I must admit that the night following my meeting I went to bed let down. I was disappointed in some people who I spent a significant amount of time with, who I worked with and helped, and then they were not able to find the time to attend one meeting of mine. Well at least that is how I was thinking the night of my meeting. But overall things worked out very well. Like I was saying I had no idea how many people would actually take the time to walk to my meeting knowing that they would be walking back in the rain. But I figured somewhere between 30 and 300. I know, quite a range. However, when organizing the meeting I had no choice but to choose a number and stick with it. I went with 100 hundred. I bought 30 pounds of rice and 20 pounds of chicken and another 20 of veggies to make "arroz con pollo" for 100 people. I set up seating for a 100 people, and lucky me, right around 100 people came to my meeting. Which supposedly is actually an amazing turnout for one of these meetings.

I would also like to mention that I started off my day by breaking a mirror. I told myself that in Panama this must mean good luck because on a day as important as this one it simply cannot mean bad luck. It seems to be that luck was on my side. Everything worked out just about perfectly.

My director and I had a meeting with my school director and the teachers that I would be working with at 11:00 at the school. After this meeting we headed over to the health Center at which I was holding my community meeting. I told everyone that the meeting was starting at 11:30 because here in Panama with "la hora Panamena" everyone is always late and nothing ever starts on time. I know, lying is probably not the best method, but it worked. To ensure that the people that did actually arrive on time did not just sit there without anything to do, I had two friends Ckaly, and Yadira arrive to the health center early and greet everyone, and get people started on some of the activities that I had planned for them for that waiting period. They did a fantastic job. When Francisco and I arrived, he couldn't believe his eyes at how many people were there. All 100 were there and ready to get started. I myself was very impressed. I welcomed everybody, Francisco gave a short speech and then we got started. I started off by talking about how incredible Membrillo is because of all the natural resources that they have, and how it is crucial that they care for them. I had a group of students come over from the school to do a choral poetry recital. Titled "The Earth is sad" They all wore black and very effectively got the powerful message across.






Now that I had everyone reflecting on what we as human beings are doing to the earth we were ready to start analyzing the problems that still exist in the community, what groups or people are already working on it and what I can do to assist and move it forward. We went through a lot of topics. It was a very extensive process, nearly 3 hours long and it was far from easy. The entire point of community analysis is that the community members share their opinion and say what they still need and want and how I can help. My community members do not enjoy speaking in public. In all honesty, most of them refuse to. For this reason, at first it was a bit like pulling teeth at times. It was exhausting to stand there in front of 100 people and my director for 3 hours, speaking only Spanish and trying to think of clever ways in which I can encourage people to speak. But in the end I believe we were very successful. Once people got a bit more comfortable they were pretty openly voicing their opinions, and slowly but surely we got through all the problems and projects.

Following are the projects that I will be working on:
1. Continuing and expand Recycling Program in School
2. Expanding Recycling Project to include all of the community
3. Providing community classes on tree nurseries
4. Potentially started tree nurseries with individual groups
5. Providing education classes on Eco-stoves
6. Potentially facilitating the construction of eco-stoves for a number of families
7. Organic Farming Education: Community Classes and Hands On Days
8. Eco-tourism: Guide training, hiking trails, promotion, sustainability
9. Coffee Plague: Facilitate implementation of techniques learned


After we had our list, we started to serve a late lunch to everyone. "Gracias a dios"  (Thanks to god), or possibly my good planning, hehe, we had enough arroz con pollo for everyone. After running around like always, making sure that everyone received food and that the Cumbia group was ready,  I was able to sit down for about 2 minutes and at least get a few bites of food.

Which I definitely needed, because after lunch the cumbia group that I invited started playing music and I of course had to dance. This group consists of some of the oldest community members. They are experts at traditional cumbia and play it on their percussion and violin. My favorite part is that they also dance, and when they dance, I dance, traditional cumbia skirt and all. We all had a great time! My community definitely enjoys seeing the "gringa" (the american) dance, and soon other people joined in. One woman even asked my director to dance, that was probably the highlight of the meeting for most people based on the smiles that instantly appeared on their faces.

Getting some help putting on the traditional Cumbia skirt. 

Ready to get my dance on!

 My director getting his dance on!

Me in my happy place. Dancing

Although some people that I expected to see at the meeting did not make it, in the end I must say that this meeting was a clear demonstration to me of how much support I have from the people in this wonderful town. People honestly went above and beyond to help me, including Yadira, my host sister from my first house which went to the city with my early Saturday morning to carry all the food with me. Omar, a 10 year old boy that sprinted to the school to let the poetry group now that we were ready for them, Juan and his family who carried and set up an EasyUp tent with me to provide an extra roof in case it rained. Ckaly, who arranged that I had a laptop, projector, and a microphone and speakers in case it rained and nobody could hear me speaking. and Sara who helped me with set up. Also Sr, Cristo from the health Center who had the entire place cleaned for me, and helped me set up the chairs, and hang banners etc. And of course the wonderful family that prepared the food for 100 people. Like I said, incredible support. There were many more, but if I attempt to mention everyone this post will without a doubt turn into a novel.

My director and I after the meeting standing in front of the banner I made out of chip bags. 

We like to recycle here!

Broken Mirror or not - I am one lucky girl to have received this community and to have so much continuous support from the community members. I am extremely excited to get started on all of these projects. My only concern now is how I will juggle all of them. 

Recycling: New and Improved

...well in the process of improvement at least.

If you read my previous post you now know about some of the positive and negative aspects of my school, I think its time for me to describe exactly what I will be doing at the school and in my community. Nope, sorry still too early for that. However, I can definitely fill you in a bit on what I have already done and what some of my ideas for the future are. As I'm sure I have already mentioned at some point, Sonia, had been working on recycling. She started a recycling program at the school and she achieved great success. She hosted recycling days every 2 weeks. On these recycling days students would carry to school all the recycling items from home, such as plastic bottles, aluminum cans, paper, tetrapak (juice/milk cartons) card board and batteries. Why carry all of this to school down those super long muddy roads? you may ask. Well because their is no trash management in small towns in Panama. Really there is no trash management system in most of Panama, besides a few of the larges cities. So what happens with the trash? It gets burned. And when it gets burned all the community members breathe in all the toxic chemicals that get released into the air with the smoke. So... recycling.... pretty significant here. Crucial actually to their long term health. All the recycling items are counted and separated accordingly, and then packed up into big trash bags. A day or two later a man from a super helpful and recycling center comes down to Membrillo, we pack all of the bags into the truck and go with him to the recycling center and to weigh it and receive some money for it that we then splurge and buy all the things that we cant find in out community! Just kidding. We use about a dollar each to get back to site, and save the rest of the money to fund future projects, activities and to buy the trash bags and pizza. Yes, Pizza. The class that recycles most wins 2 pizzas from Dominos and a soda. And they love it!

So to sum up, Membrillo rocks at recycling! However, as always there is room for improvement.

That second month, I also had a meeting with the entire recycling committee, and the teacher that is in charge of it in addition to Sara who is the president. We discussed whether we will continue with recycling now that Sonia is leaving. Of course I will continue! During this meeting I also introduced some minor changes that I was thinking about. Receiving a consensus from the committee I have gone ahead and implemented them. One such change, although minor, was the fact that every pound of paper counted as only one point. So a second grader would walk all the way to school with a 10 lb bag of paper and only receive 10 points  for it. Considering the fact that another child could bring in a 10 lb bag of cans (which is probably about 200 cans) and would receive 200 points for it, it didn't seem very fair. So in order to encourage kids to bring the paper to school so that it could be recycled, we will now be awarding 5 points per pound. An improvement I think. 

I have also implemented the use of a different kind of trash bags that Sara had discovered. I know, sounds like a very small change. But Now I am buying the same quantity of bags for only $17.50 instead of the $100+ that was aid before. That $80 or more saved every month will quickly add up and provide us with funds to possibly construct something at the school or take the children on an educational field trip. Both of which these students really deserve!

I have also spoken with the owners of the Recycling Center and have arranged that we receive a higher price per pound of cans. SO to give a bit of background. Aluminum cans are really the only things that we get paid a significant amount for. Normally the Recycling Center pays people 50 cents per pound. However since they provide the transportation for free, they reduced the price of cans to 28 cents. Recycling used to be picked up every 2 weeks. After every recycling day. But the truck is so big that there is plenty of space for two rounds of recycling. So now it will only get picked up once a month. Since now they will have to waste less time and gas for transportation, I convinced them to raise the price to 35 cents. A whole 7 cents more! Success!  Haha. No, but seriously, since we have at least 100 pounds of cans every round that's another $7. That will add up too! More funds for great projects at the school!

One major problem that we have with recycling is that the students in the afternoon classes (7th to 9th grade) do not want to recycle. They have "pena". Or in other words are embarrassed. Sonia also encountered this problem. So to get the kids a little more enthusiastic and involved I have created a group of Recycling Representatives. Each class has at least two representatives. Their role is to remind their classmates to recycle and to motivate them. We had our first meeting and we discussed our goals, reasons why students don't want to recycle and how we can combat them. As always when it comes to public speaking these students were very shy and it took a lot of effort to get any one of them to say more then one word. Nut no worries I already have fun leadership activities planned for next months meeting. It is so important that these students become more comfortable with public speaking and obtain more leadership skills. After this meeting with the,, the next recycling day that we had, there were students that participated from each class! This is the first time that this has happened in at least 4 months! Once again success! Of course only a few students participated from  each class. Most likely the representatives themselves, but nonetheless it is progress. And little by little as they serve as an example, I think we will get more students to participate. 

So my first day of recycling solo, without Sonia was a success, we recycled twice as much as the week before! I will check the exactly quantity and post it in the future! But it is at least a few 100 pounds! For a community of 3000 people, that is success. 

 I will definitely have to get used to counting and sorting so many bottles cans and cartons! Whew! These are the days I use sunscreen on! Many hours in the sun! But at the end of the day when I take a look at all these bags ready to go to the recycling center, I always feel lucky to have received such a wonderful and cooperative community. Bien hecho mi comunidad! Well done my community! Well done!

Also I participated in a parade for Natural Resource Month with some of the students and teachers from my school. I made this awesome banner to represent our school. And guess what its made of!? Yes recycled materials. Chip bags to be exact. Collecting washing, cutting, and gluing all of those letters.... more work then it looks like. But now we have this great banner, so it was well worth it! Lets just hope that with this Panamanian humidity all the letters don't unglue!

Anyways, tomorrow is my BIG COMMUNITY ANALYSIS MEETING! Yes caps was necessary. My Director is coming, and all these agencies personnel are coming, almost people from the main television station here were going to come. But I said no, because I wanted my community members to be comfortable with expressing their opinions and not preoccupied with television. This meeting is a defining moment during my service, because it is during this meeting that we will all decide together what projects I will work on! SO be on the lookout for my next post to see how it goes. And do some anti rain dances for me, so that it doesn't pour during my meeting (It rains here every every every single day now) Lets just hope the rain holds off until after 3pm.

Hasta pronto!

Karolina

I'm back! (Photos to be added)

For all of you who have consistently been checking my blog this past month or two, and unfortunately were always greeted by the same old posts, I apologize. These past two months have been very busy for me and unfortunately I lacked the energy and the right environment to sit down and blog. 

However that does not mean that it hasn't been a good two months. On the contrary it has been a very productive past two months. I have continued to meet many community members and i have gotten to know many wonderful families, near and far. I have also spent a significant amount of time at the school and have discovered many of its strenghts, as well as some weaknesses that I will definitely form a bit of an obstacle that I will have to face while working there. Being that my job for the first three months is to get to know my community, and the school, I think I have been doing pretty well.

 I finished my first month in the mining sector of town. I had so much that I still wanted to blog about while living there. Like How I planted my first seeds and they sprouted into these gorgeous little fellas that are now two months later are growing in the garden of the house that I will move into only a week from now. I named the first squash plant that sprouted, Milagros, or a miracle, because honestly I never believed myself to have a green thumb. Now Milagros is lost among the other cucumber, tomato, basil, spinach, bean, and okra plants that are growing in my garden.  I unfortunately haven't been able to check on the garden for a few days now since I live in a different sector of town ,but fingers crossed that the vicious little leaf cutter ants have't eaten everything.  

That first month I also did a  lot of work with our local ANAM group. ANAM is the environmental agency of Panama. They are starting out a  "vivero" or a tree nursery. Their goal is 1500 plants. I helped them mix the soil and fertilizer, pack it into little bags and plant 300 seeds. After a hard days work I sure do hope the little trees grow into storng trees. I was also able to join them and some locals from la Mina on a trash clean up day. On which we walked through that entire sector of town and picked up all the trash bags. It really is sad to see how much trash gets tossed out onto the ground here. There is all this gorgeous natural wildlife surrounding these people, and they cover it with chip bags, cans, bottles, and candy wrappers. Although there have already been many Peace Corps volunteers in this community before, and the one directly before me spent 2 years working on recycling, the problem continues to exist. She did a spectacular job educating them and getting the recycling project underway, but change takes time. Lots of time. We in the U.S. have been trying to tackle this same problem for decades. The problem is still relatively new here since all these products are just arriving to the "kioskos" (the little family owned shops that really are the front room of the house). Many will argue that this is a perfect example of a negative effect of globalization. And I will agree. But hopefully I will be able to serve as an example of a positive effect of globalization and help further tackle the problem.

Speaking of tackling the problem my second month I was able to do some hands on work with this issue.

However, first, a bit of a general overview. My second month I lived in the central part of my community, just a few short steps from the school. My host family was very nice and helpful when I encountered a few issues and needed some advice. My host sister in law, Sara, which was Sonia's (previous PCV) closest counterpart, played a significant role in helping me adjust to this new sector of town, and did a wonderful job on filling me in on all the recycling project things. 

Like I had already begun to explain, I had the opportunity to spend a lot more time in the school. I spent a significant amount of my time observing classes. I noticed some clear differences between the teaching methods implemented here as well as the school system and just a way of thinking from that in the United States. The thing I really enjoy about the school in my community is that the teachers really make an effort to make the classes interactive and fun so that the students pay attention. There is a lot of singing and games for the little kids. The older classes make posters together, things of that sort. Although we take this form of education for granted in the United States, here in Panama it is really considered progressive. In many schools all across the globe education still consists of a teacher standing at the chalk board all day with her notes in hand, and copying down everything from the notebook onto the board, word by word. The kids role as a student is to then copy everything down word by word from the blackboard into their notebook. And that is what their education consists of. This is how it has been done for years, and this is how many kids around the world are still taught. However, little by little, teaching methods are improving. CEBG Membrillo, I believe,  is a perfect example of progress due to peoples willingness to try new things.

This being said, any problems continue to exist. Classes are canceled constantly, and for what I believe to be the silliest reasons.  For example, Anjurpis, the adorable and brilliant 5 year old that I lived with during my second month is in Kindergarden. Her teacher canceled class one Monday, without providing any reason. She also canceled class that Friday to throw a party at one of the teachers houses, for all the teachers that are fathers. A very cute idea, but I don't believe that it is necessary to cancel class for this considering that school during their morning shift ends at 12:00, really 11:30am. And of course in order to go buy gifts for the fathers, class was also canceled on Thursday. Once again, plenty of hours in the afternoon to go shopping. So that week the students only had class 2 days... and this is not abnormal.  However what is frustrating to me, is to see kids walking through extremely muddy roads, for 45 mins to get to school, just to find out that the teacher did not show up, and then make the same trip back home. And yet they manage to continue on with a smile. I guess that is because they are happy they have no school that day, but the poor kids are loosing out on so much education time. Like with all else I guess I will have to adjust, because honestly this is not a problem that I plan to tackle during my 2 years here. Not exactly in the environmental conservation sector, and it really is just part of a wider mind set that I believe will only be changed with generations.

Another problem that I will have to deal with is that of what expectations have been formed based on the service of the previous volunteer (volunteers). There have been many occasions already well the teachers have come directly to me first to ask me to pay for things before even going to the director to ask for funds. This is an issue that unfortunately I have already had a lot of experience with and can say a lot about. However, I may save that for a future post. Basically I will have to stand my ground and let them know, that I am not here to provide financial resources for them. As a volunteer I get paid a lot less then them, and I certainly do not have the funds to pay for things simply because they failed to plan ahead of time and think about how they will fund their projects. Hopefully if I stay firm from the beginning they will understand. And of course my wonderful director will have my back if I ever need him to talk with the school.

Photos and some more stories will be added to this same post some time soon when I have more time to go through my 6000 photos. For now you can read my next post. As always, gracias for reading. I promise I will be posting more consistently very soon!


Karolina