Adventures to a Sustainable Future: Tech Week

July 19-27, 2014

Things you appreciate ten times more when you’re living in a developing county:

The smell of clean clothes.

Your feet being clean and dry at the same time.

Flushable toilets.

Last week was tech week which involved the entire sas group traveling to an indigenous community on the other side of the county. We stayed with host families and got separated into the different core projects (coffee, cacao, and fish and rice tanks). I got coffee, which I am very pleased with.

It was very different staying with an indigenous family. This community is up in the mountains on the far western part of Panama. It rains a lot there. A LOT. The soil is bright red clay which does not allow for easy absorption of water. What does this combination get you? Mud. Lots and lots of mud. I was ankle deep in mud just trying to get from my house to the latrine (or nearly anywhere for that matter). The only footwear worth wearing were rubber boots and even sometimes they wouldn’t cut it. For example; after a really heavy rain the creek would rise turning my trek to coffee class from a simple stream crossing to wading in a river. Water was then in my boots and I sloshed around with puddles in my boots and wet socks/feet for the rest of the day. You also have to watch out for losing your boot to the mud suck. Imagine walking (not gracefully) along and one step you go to pick your foot up and your foot comes up but your boot doesn’t.

All the houses in this community are made of wood and are raised on stilts. Image climbing up a latter with a heavy pack while having to take your boots off in order to put your feet on the first wrung but trying not to step on the ground because it’s all mud and then crossing a single board bridge and ducking through a door to get to the main house. There were no walls inside the house, just one “big” room. They had hung curtains in one corner for the “room” I stayed in, but half the time they didn’t make a difference because several members of the family would just stand there holding the curtain back just staring at you. I think I now know somewhat what it feels like to be an animal in a zoo.

Other activities included:

Bathing in the creek. (Which involved trumping over to the creek, changing into your bathing clothes behind a tree, finding the one part of the creek that was mid-thigh deep, attempting to wash yourself, drying off and changing behind the tree again, and then hoping no mud will splatter on you as you walk back to the house.)

Eating a lot of boiled baby green bananas. (These are not my favorite…)

Learning how to make chacaras. Awesome.

Constantly being stared at. Not so awesome.

Eating a lot of the snacks I packed.

Attempting to sleep while the twelve children that slept in the house took turns crying/screaming. As well as roosters crowing way too early in the morning.

Learning about coffee production.

Fending off a scorpion.

Boiling water every night to drink the next day. (Also having no electricity.)