Last Sunday was my birthday. I am like a small child when it comes to my birthday. I always have been and I imagine I always will be. Thankfully, my friends and family humor me and my narcissism during this important holiday that usually goes beyond just one day of Emily-centric living and becomes a month long event. Sadly, last year my birthday fell on the first day that I was in my new community, and was kind of lonely. But this year I spent my birthday at the beach with a few close friends, swimming in the warm waves, playing poker, and swatting mosquitoes. Afterwards we went to David, saw Tropic Thunder (oh my Ted, hilarious), and lost money at the casino. It was pretty perfect.
When I got back to my community my host family threw me a mini-party. My host mom and host sister came over with a slew of kids in tow. They brought me a cake and sang Happy Birthday to me in English (which is pronounced Appy Bairf day) and in Spanish. We didn't have candles so they put matches on the cake that 5 year old Yosuet kept blowing out.
Thankfully I have a lot of crayons to keep the kids entertained when they come over. They hung out on the floor of my living room drawing pictures for my walls. Clockwise from the girl in pink pants: Yurielis, Yalineth, Gisel, and Yosuet.
My good friend Liz, who lives in my community, also came by with some home made Sangria. She made it from Clos (a boxed wine here that I am not ashamed to admit I rather enjoy), pineapples, apples, and grapes. It was delicious!A couple of weeks before my birthday I went up into the Comarca Ngäbe Bugle to visit my friend Dennis in his community. About a month earlier the two rivers that converge in his backyard, the Soloy and the Fonseca, flooded, killing 6 and leaving many homeless. Dennis took me on a tour of the community and showed me some of the damage. This bridge crosses the Fonseca River, which was almost as high as the bridge during the flood, and is the only way to get to the many small communities that head up towards the mountains.
In some spots it was hard to imagine the before. I would be looking out at a big open space and he would tell me about all of the houses that were there only a few weeks earlier. Two Peace Corps volunteers, a married couple, lived about a forty minute walk down the river and their house, as well as those of almost their entire community, were washed downstream. This used to be a branch of the Soloy River but, as you can see, it is nothing but debris now. 
Dennis was fortunate. His house is up on stilts and wasn't damaged by the floods. This is the inside of his house. 
It is tiny, but somehow perfect. It is just one small room that has a bed on the floor, a counter with a camping stove on it (his water source is about half a block away) and a table with two chairs. He uses a composting latrine that he built with a few other volunteers recently, which is just past the water spigot a short walk away- although not a fun walk in the rain/mud, or if you have those ever present stomach problems that come from living in an area without clean water.It was really fun to get a chance to see Dennis' version of life in the Peace Corps. I admit to being a little jealous of his site. I love my community, Atalaya, but it is a lot more developed than I was expecting for my two years of service. Sometimes it doesn't feel like I should really be able to call myself a Peace Corps volunteer. So I take every opportunity that I can to go see other communities and get a feel for life on the other side.
One of the greatest things about the Peace Corps is the ability to really get to know the country. While I spend the majority of my time in my site, I really enjoy visiting my friends and helping with projects in their communities. But my focus in the coming months is definitely going to be on Atalaya. I'm about to start teaching more in the schools and I might start up a newspaper project with my Ecoclub. The kids will be responsible for doing interviews and writing articles and then we will sell each paper for around 15 cents each and use the profits to travel to other communities and spread the word about environmental health.
I'm also going to start helping my community look for ways to raise money so they can finish their long ago abandoned Casa Comunal (Community Center), which they hope to use for social gatherings, pageants, dance lessons, etc. And there are a group of men and women who do a variety of crafts including woodworking and card making that are hoping to form an official group of some sort, though they aren't sold on the idea of a cooperative. So, I will definitely be keeping busy in the coming months, and hoping to help in some way.
And, as always, my door is open. I now have two (2!) guest beds so come on down. So far I have had 7 visitors but I don't have anybody who has signed on to come down from here on out. I can't have visitors in my last 3 months so you have until July 15 to get down here! :) And hopefully by the time you get here I will have fixed my damn termite problem. The stupid little beasts are eating all my doors!
My house itself is made of concrete but the door frames and doors are wood. The annoying thing is not just that they are there but that since they can't tunnel through concrete walls they make their little trails in plain site, so I can't pretend they don't exist. It's obnoxious to see hundreds and hundreds of termites marching up and down your walls and be powerless to stop them. Oh, don't get me wrong, I try. I have gone through many a can of raid but they don't care. The second they plummet to their deaths a hundred more poke their heads out of the ceiling and pick up the path again. I hear you have to kill the queen. How in Frank's name do you find the queen? My neighbor tells me she lives in the ground out by this old tree in my yard. I have this vision of this giant 5 foot termite snuggled up in the roots of the tree, surrounded by her thousands of little drones. I creep myself out.
Either way, I've told my landlord and I'm praying she fixes it before the termites find my bed or start eating my closet. I'm okay with the thousands of ants, the hundreds (yes, hundreds) of daddy long legs spiders, and the plethora (good word, right?) of cockroaches. But I do not like termites in my clothes.
So yeah, I'll work on getting that fixed and you work on coming down to visit! :)
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