Hello everybody!
Happy belated birthday to America. This post is late because the East Siders and I were too busy being awesome over the weekend and I was away from the internet.
By 'being awesome' I mean 'getting covered in mud'. Allow me to explain.
So July 4 rolls around here on the East Side of Panama, so what do we PCVs decide to do to celebrate? If you said 'kill something' you go ahead and give yourself a cookie: you've earned it.
This time the victim was a turkey. Also, this time it wasn't killed at my house. Instead, we killed it just West of the Darien border near Danny's site (another PCV, the one from the Motown radio show). We ate it. What fun! Whatever. On to the better part of the story.
After spending the night of July 3rd hanging out at the cabin near Danny's site, eight of us decided we wanted to do a little exploring into the Rio Congo area of Darien and strike out for the beach!
Now, this is no ordinary trip to the beach. We're East Siders, remember? This is no tourist destination we're headed for. We did not simply take a bus and get out at the beach. Instead, we got up before 5am and hopped into the back of a cattle truck that took us down a progressively less-well paved road. The ride was pretty bumpy, but progressing along relatively smoothly until the truck ended up getting stuck in a really muddy hole for two hours. At first the fact that the truck finally did get stuck was kind of funny--the driver was gunning it trying to make it across the hole and slinging mud ALL over the stuff in the back of the cattle truck in the process. (All us passengers had climbed out of the back by this point, in order to avoid being thrown around like popcorn during all of this.) After about a half-hour, though, we started getting worried when the truck could not move forward OR backward out of the ditch AND the exhaust pipe was submerged in the mud, so we could not turn the truck off for fear of mud running into the exhaust pipe.
We tried everything. We tried pushing the truck (didn't work too well--all the skinny little Peace Corps Volunteers didn't think to bring any linebacker friends). We diverted the mud from the hole down a path on the side of the road by digging with our hands and making what we dubbed "the Panama Canal." We got the neighbors to lend their horses to try and pull out the truck. We threw dried mud around the tires to give them some traction to climb out of the hole. We picked at the mud under the belly of the truck when we discovered the truck's tires weren't even actually touching the ground. . .
Well, the end of the story is that we did end up getting the truck out of the mud. Looking back, it was HILARIOUS. We all got covered in mud, head to toe. At one point, one of the other PCVs even wrestled me in it--why? I dont' know. We were half crazy and already dirty, so why not? The Panamanians got a kick out of it.
The cool thing about this story is that it once again shows the awesomeness of Panamanians. When the people on the nearby farms found out that we were stuck in the mud, they hung around for about an hour and a half until we made it out of the mud. They even bought beers for everybody (because in Panama, you CANNOT do a job like this without tossing back a few brews).
Side note: I don't know how those beers were cold. SOMEBODY has a generator.
But you think that's awesome? Check this out. After we made it out, one of the guys who lives close by invited everybody to his house for fried fish and rice for lunch. What?!? Yes, please. Also, naturally, the entire time cold Balboas kept popping out of nowhere.
Set back by about a total of three hours, we continued on our journey and made it to the port to catch our boat to the beach. (I subsequently entertained everyone by screaming and nearly throwing myself around the boat every time we went over a big wave. Boats are scary!) Once at the beach, we met a school teacher in the town who cooked all of our meals and fed us on her porch for an extremely cheap price, arranged to have plenty of water for us to wash clothes and bathe, gave us free use of the empty rooms located across the street from our house (free place to sleep!), and kept our bellies full of free coconut water from the pipa trees that were around.
I'm trying to tell you guys, Panamanians set the bar really high. When I get back to the States, all of you guys are going to look like jerks by comparison.
All in all, it was a pretty great weekend. I got to relax and read on the beach and jam a little bit with my Peace Corps buddies (yes, I brought my flute on this adventure, because you can't take the band dork out of the girl). I'm not trying to pretend that my life is like this all the time, but I will say that Peace Corps has been good to me so far. What other time in my life have been on cool adventures like this one?
When was the last time I talked about work, guys? Maybe next post I'll talk about that. It's Year 2 and I'm less than ten months from finishing my service, I got work to do!
Much love to the old US of A! Special shout-out to Shelby! Good luck with your travels around the East Coast and during your move to Japan, soon!
--Aja
More books I've read recently:
Anthem - Ayn Rand
The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There - David Brooks
And been listening to Sam Smith, so we can tack that on the list of people I'm listening to! :)
