Swaziland

Smaller than New Jersey

We made it to Swaziland! (Two months ago.) 

At first we stayed with Lewis and Ruby, getting a feel of what Peace Corps Swaziland is like. It’s fairly similar to Peace Corps Paraguay: rural site down a long dirt road, in a poor, land-locked country no one’s heard of, doing development work with locals who are generally indifferent about working on projects, but very friendly. The food here is just as bland and unhealthy as in Paraguay (mealie meal/pap instead of mandioca), unless of course you’re eating at Ruby’s, where it’s the opposite of bland and unhealthy. There’s one aspect of Swazi life that I think makes “community integration” much more difficult: Swazis don’t drink! How would we have bonded with our neighbors in Paraguay if we didn’t get sloshed together at Sunday asados?

Walking through Lewis & Ruby's site. I guess I'm going for the 12-year-old Mormon look.

We helped Lewis and Ruby work on their school library, ate a bunch of good meals, and at night we bundled up to watch movies or play games. I had no idea Swaziland would be so cold! 

We got one siSwati lesson from their tutor, a sweet 20 year old girl who also gave us Swazi names. She named TK Musa, which means mercy/compassion, and me Thandeka, meaning loved/lovely.  Lewis’ name here is Mandla, meaning strength, and Ruby is Ngobile, meaning winner.

They have an awesome garden

After a couple of weeks of chilling with them, we ventured out to do something touristy and visited Mlilwane Game Reserve. We saw our first zebras, wildebeest, and warthogs!

When we went to visit the farm/NGO where we would be working and living for six months, the house they were building for volunteers still looked like this:

They needed another week to put together some temporary accommodation for us, so we rented a car and headed to Kruger National Park in South Africa. We saw tons of animals there, which means I took tons of photos, so I’ll do a separate post on that!

Home...

Oregon Coast

Between South America and Africa we spent one month in the good old USA, mostly in Oregon with TK’s family.

Somehow I didn’t take a single picture in Oregon, except once at the coast. Maybe setting down the camera is a side effect of feeling at home after so much travelling. Whatever “home” means. The first time I came back after two and a half years in Paraguay, I felt like an alien observing strange human behavior, stupefied by America’s wide highways packed with huge vehicles holding one person each. I never expected to cringe at the sight of someone using paper towels to wipe a counter, but that’s exactly the kind of thing that would send me into distraught reflections on mankind. Not to say that a few years in Paraguay turned me into a native, or that one place is better than the other. A good chunk of my Peace Corps service was spent wrapping my head around the Paraguayan psyche and their customs that initially seemed absurd, i.e. the general avoidance/fear of spending any time alone, and the preference of many adults to live with their parents for their entire lives, and even the little things like their use of a tablecloth instead of a napkin to wipe their mouths with. I grew to love Paraguay, but I could never feel completely at home there, not least of all because every walk through any public space brought on long, unabashed stares from children and adults alike, usually accompanied by hisses, whistles, “que lindas son tus ojos,” and “kuna poraaa.” That gets really old after three years. But then I returned to the U.S. to realize that American customs are no less absurd. (Try explaining Halloween to a foreigner.) One thing Peace Corps does is make you feel precariously connected to two different worlds and somewhat estranged from everybody in both, except for those few crazy RPCVs who did it all with you.

Anyway, since that first bout of reverse culture shock, it has become less jolting to go back and forth between North and South America. This last visit was, more than anything, incredibly comfortable. We thoroughly enjoyed English conversations with family and friends, carpet, hot hot showers, good food and drinks, and not being stared at ever. By the end of it I felt so at home in Oregon that I was as melancholy as I was excited about moving to Swaziland.

During our U.S. trip (or was it our U.S. return from a South America trip?) we took a mini road trip down to the Redwood Forest. I LOVED it there. We camped in the car and hiked on trails that wound through the biggest, tallest trees on earth. Beautiful.

Amelia really loves her cows :)

On our way to Africa, we paid a visit to some of our dearest Peace Corps friends on the east coast. Anita, Kyle, and Dan led us through New York City debauchery, and then Amelia introduced us to rural Massachusetts, her family, her newly acquired cows, and some of her favorite watering holes and swimming holes.

Then we flew off to spend the next six months (or more?) in a continent fairly new to both of us, and more specifically, a country fairly unknown to anybody: Swaziland. 

Colombia

Our whole crew, minus Stefi. Can you tell which one hasn't shaved in 6 months?

The first thing we did in Cartagena was meet up with the Yancey brothers and Phil & Stefi. We had parted on separate adventures after our Uruguayan Christmas, and six months later we all finished our South American trip in Colombia. 

Fishing/spearfishing adventure. Add some bikini-clad women and you have a beer ad.

I caught two red snappers! They were delicious.

We wandered up the coast to smaller beach towns, where we fished, spearfished, hiked, and relaxed. We wanted to venture into the Tayrona national park, but instead of paying for the costly camping grounds, we just asked a local fisherman if he could drop us off on a secluded beach. After stocking up on water and pbj, we squeezed into his little boat and drove about an hour to a serene cove. We camped a few nights, busying ourselves with cards, campfires and little explorations. One night the boys ran around the beach chasing crabs and catching them with their hands. They were probably the smallest crabs to ever be eaten, but so delicious. They cooked them in salt water over the fire, and we got maybe two bites out of each one.

Phil, Stef, and the fisherman who steered us through an hour of ocean and dropped us off on an empty beach.

Our lovely campsite

The boys disappear and return with coconuts

Which are great for holding rum.

Then our beautiful, dizzying, relaxing, exhausting trip through five countries came to an end, and we flew back to the U.S. I'm grateful for every experience we had, from sharing a Christmas fish feast with wonderful friends in Uruguay, to running around salt flats and cactus forests in Argentina, hiking through gorgeous mountains in the Andes, chasing pumas in the Amazon, playing with Panamanian preschoolers, canoeing through tropical mangroves, and sailing through the Caribbean. I’m lucky to have a wonderful partner to meander through foreign countries with, who’s always open to a complete change in plans, always up for a drink, prefers living in tiny houses with minimal possessions, and willing to carry on the awkward or tiresome conversations with strangers when I get antisocial. We suffered together through altitude sickness, sea sickness, random mystery sicknesses, and all the transportation frustrations, miserable bus rides, fruitless hitchhiking, long boring waits in bus stations, border crossings and airports. TK has lugged my bags, taken care of jungle bugs for me (cockroaches in Panama are HUGE!), pushed me to do things I swore I couldn’t, sometimes made life more difficult at the time, but better in the end. We’ve woken up in countless hostels, bunk beds, mosquito nets, hammocks, cabins, and once to the stare of a spider monkey hugging the top of our tent.

South America has given me nearly four unforgettable years in all and we’ll be back, but in the mean time there are more huts, farms, mountains, and beaches to wake up to, in Africa!

So glad I quit grad school!

Mind the Darien Gap

Considering all the effort and money and power struggles that went into the construction of a huge canal cutting through Panama, it amazes me that it is still impossible to drive from Panama to Colombia. We met several bikers who were riding from Alaska to the tip of Patagonia, and this is the only spot on their trip where they were forced to fly or take a boat. The border, aka the Darien Gap, is covered in impenetrable forest filled with drug lords and dangerous animals. Supposedly anyone who tries to cross it never makes it out. And on top of that, there’s no ferry and no cheap flights. We had our heart set on meeting some friends in Colombia, so we begrudgingly forked over the cash for a 5 day sailing trip from El Porvenir to Cartagena.

We piled onto the boat with thirteen others, about half of them doing the bike trip I mentioned. It started out lovely, and TK and I perched ourselves at the bouncing bow, enjoying the wind and the scenery. Within an hour we were both in the back, puking over the side and curling up in misery. Those not prone to sea sickness ate spaghetti up front while five or six of us moaned in the back. We tried looking at the horizon, tried closing our eyes, tried facing the breeze, tried munching ginger, tried to sleep through it, but nothing helped. Down in our cabin I sweated and squirmed through the whole night, using all my self-control to not puke on the bunk below me.

At 5 am the thrashing stopped and they dropped anchor. We got up later to see that we were parked alongside tiny picture-perfect islands. We spent the day jumping of the boat and swimming between the islands. The next day we moved a bit further, to where the indigenous Kuna people live. Women canoed to our boat to sell crafts, and men sold lobsters, crabs, and beer, all of which we bought.  Our captain took us to a larger island where they live, crowded into simple straw huts with hammocks as their only furniture.

After these two days of lounging around islands, the boat set sail for 40 hours to Cartagena. This time I had the foresight to take a lot of Dramamine, so I felt great and slept through most of it. 

Back-flip gone awry

Killing time on the long journey

Cartagena, Colombia

Farewell, Panama

My preschool class (plus two older boys who wandered into the photo)

Back to blogging!  We left Panama in early June, and here are some photos from our last week there.

Pumpkin seeds grew!

By this point we were fed up with the humidity, frustrated with our jobs, and itching to get out of the jungle. TK finished the last of 18 chicken coops, relieved to be done with kayaking from homestead to homestead in blazing heat to labor on them. I threw together a few projects at the school that I had been meaning to do for months, like planting a school garden. 

TK and Margaret from the lodge made a surprise visit to the school,
 to bring cupcakes on my last day.

As much as I wanted to leave, I held back tears the entire last day of preschool. Back at the lodge we exchanged gifts and hugs with the staff members who were so wonderful for our entire stay there. We lingered with them at the dock, postponing our final good-byes and sincerely hoping we’ll see each other again. I love these volunteer gigs that allow us to grow intimately close with small communities around the world, but the transitions between them are so draining and sad. It’s one of the reasons we talk about settling down in a year or so.

Last boat commute home. Kind of impressive to not get a single person looking at the camera.

(This is how the older kids get to school)

Boquete

As much as we love living on a chocolate farm in the jungle on an island in the Caribbean, we needed a break from it. So we went to the mountains. Three days in Boquete was all it took for me to finally agree with TK that it would be nicer to live in the mountains than in the tropics. We savored the cooler temperatures, the tall pines, the brisk air, the quaint houses surrounded by flowers and crystal clear streams.

Squirrel monkey

The spider monkey stole our camera case and reluctantly gave it back.

Now I look through my camera and find a lot of photos of animals, as usual, and not much else. We stayed at the strangest hostel I’ve ever been to – owned by a Bostonian woman who rescues animals to rehabilitate. We were the only guests and twice in two days we found the place completely locked up, forcing us to hop the fence and basically break in, which was “totally cool” with the owner. Monkeys, parrots, and one koati lived in large cages, goats and horses roamed out back, a large restaurant remained closed and unused, and then on the side, like an afterthought, sat the one-room hostel. We slept with boa constrictors slithering in cages outside our door and had to choose between a scalding hot shower with a shower head, or a freezing cold one without. Fortunately we both love monkeys. Monkeys are so humanlike, not just in their facial expressions and their use of their hands, but also in their moods and behavior. The spider monkey had some emotional issues resulting from past abuse, and she liked to wrap her tail around my arm with an affectionate death grip, and make furious clicking noises at TK if he touched me.

We rented a motorbike on our last morning in Boquete and drove up and down the rolling hills, stopping to check out waterfalls and farms and one exquisite restaurant. Then a bumpy bus ride back to Bocas to get back to work…  

Help us build bathrooms?

One of the biggest problems in this community on the bay is that the indigenous people have no bathrooms. Latrines don't work because the water table is too high, and no one can afford a flushing toilet system. Some families have little outhouses on stilts, that empty right onto the bay, while most just go in a river or on the mangroves. This pollutes the bay and raises health concerns for both residents and wildlife.

A couple weeks ago I held a meeting for anyone interested in discussing a bathroom project. About 40 people showed up, all in aggreement that we need to do something. We decided to build one bathroom for each homestead. The community is divided into homesteads, with about 20 people living in each one.

One family has been particulary proactive about comparing prices for toilets, tanks, etc. They brought me a penciled blueprint of the bathroom they want to build, and assured me that they can do all the construction themselves. They just can't afford the toilet and the tanks.

We decided to focus on this homestead first, as a model for the others to follow.

Appropriate Projects aggreed to help us raise $550. If you could donate a little bit towards the project, we would really apreciate it!

Here's the link:
 http://appropriateprojects.com/node/1138

Thank you!

Panama

Zapatillas

This may be the best job I’ve ever had, even though it doesn’t pay. It’s similar to Peace Corps, but with gourmet meals and tropical beaches. The NGO I work with started a preschool for the indigenous Ngobe community here on Bastimentos Island. I teach at the preschool and an after-school program for older kids and an English class for seven wonderful adults. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I love teaching. I don’t know if it’s because I feel more confident with my Spanish now or because this NGO is so laid-back, but I’m excited to jump on the boat to school every day.

Planted pumpkin seeds

My morning commute

We pick up all the preschoolers at their
homes because they're too young to canoe

We’re living at an eco-lodge, which is where TK works. The lodge is run by a British/American/Peruvian couple, who carefully designed the place to make a minimal impact on the environment. The guests stay in four cabins tucked into the jungle, and everyone comes to the main lodge for communal meals. Perhaps the best perk of our position is that we can join them at the table for the daily cocktail and three-course dinner. TK spends his days working on their gardens, the cacao field (they make chocolate here), the chicken coop, the jungle trails, and other work around the lodge. They also put him in charge of a community chicken project they started a few years ago. They got a grant to help all the families in Bahia Honda build chicken coops and raise chickens, for eggs and/or income. It’s been somewhat successful, but not sustainable, so TK’s trying to improve that.

A bike ride along the beach on Bocas Island

On the weekends we usually go to Bocas Island, where masses of tourists bumble along a strip of restaurants, bars, and hostels. There’s a certain breed of ex-pat that takes up residence in a tropical tourist town like that, and we’re quickly tiring of running into the same coked up bartenders and seedy old drunks who can always be found hitting on new young tourists. We nonetheless look forward to our weekly hot showers and internet connection, but I’m always happy to return to our peaceful cabin in the jungle.

Last weekend we went out to the Zapatillas Islands, which has some of the most serene, secluded beaches I've ever seen.

One weekend we stayed in Bastimentos town, on our
own island. The walk to Wizard Beach ended up
taking three hours, through jungle and across rocks.
Flip flops was a bad idea.