Lluvia, lluvia, lluvia.....

Tuesday November 18th started out as a normal day. I woke up early that morning to participate in a “Junta,” the Spanish equivalent of a workday. After breakfast, I ventured into the farm of one of my neighbors with him and 5 other locals. We spent the morning clearing a portion of his farm with our machetes. When these guys chop with their machetes, it looks like a lawn mower cleared the area. Anyways, we spent the morning clearing the farm and killing chipmunks, supposedly they eat the cacao. Another benefit to killing the chipmunks is that we get to eat them. There is not a lot of meat on a chipmunk, but it surprisingly has a decent flavor. After we finished clearing the farm we ate lunch, which was accompanied by a fresh glass of hot chocolate from the cacao in the community. After lunch I returned to my house to relax a little and read for a bit before another Peace Corps volunteer from a close by community arrived to learn how to make chocolate from dried cacao seeds.
My fellow volunteer Rebecca arrived a few hours later. Her, Charlo (the guy I live with), and I talked about Rio Oeste and cacao for a while. We then ventured to the town center to meet up with other community members to process dried cacao beans into chocolate. This process consists of roasting the beans over a fire to make sure they are sufficiently dry. After the roasting, the shell of the bean must be removed. We did this by hand. It was a long, tedious process. Afterwards, the meat of the seed is then ground into unsweetened chocolate mush. We added a little water to the mush to make it a little smoother so we could roll the mush into balls and wrap them in foil to sell. Rebecca and I had fun learning and helping to create the fresh round globs of chocolate. We then made some fresh hot chocolate by boiling some water, adding some of the fresh chocolate, and mixing some sugar. It is the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had. After drinking a few glasses of the hot chocolate, Rebecca returned back to her community in Bella Vista, and I returned to my house for dinner. Luckily, I arrived at home right before the rain started. As the rain started, so did another adventure…..
The rain started on the evening of Nov. 18th. Well the rain did not stop until about Nov 28ish. Panama has just experience the worst flooding it has had in 40 years. My province of Bocas Del Toro was more or less underwater.

Luckily, my site is somewhat elevated. Therefore, the flooding in my site was not bad at all, although, the above picture is from my friend Ray’s site. As you can see it was rather terrible in other places. The picture below is also from Ray’s site. He was in one of the worst spots. In some places in his site, the water was 8-10 ft above the ground.

The rivers in my site were incredibly large, but didn’t cause any damage. Many farmers in my area were losing cacao because they could not dry the seeds that were quickly molding in all the moisture.
On November 26th, the Peace Corps office in Washington DC issued an order to evacuate all the Peace Corps Volunteers from Bocas Del Toro. Although, this ended up being a somewhat difficult feat because the road between Bocas and the second largest city of David in the province of Chiriqui had sustained heavy damage from landslides. Roughly 70 kms of the road have been damaged, and roughly 20 kms of the road have been completely destroyed. Also, during the flood, cell phone service was periodically offline. So it was quite an adventure getting coordinating with the office and all the volunteers in the province. Eventually, we were all consolidated to the city of Changuinola. On Nov 27th, Thanksgiving, we were flown out of Changuinola to the city of David. The picture below is some of us sitting in the airport waiting for the plane.

Even though my site has no sustained extensive structural flood damage, my community and the surrounding communities have been affected by the lack of transportation into the province. Stores began to run out of food. Gas stations were running out of gas. Water lines had been broken; therefore, eliminating supplies of clean drinkable water.

After 8 days in David living in a hotel taking hot showers and not eating green bananas, I’m in the town of Almirante buying groceries and heading back to my village. Our time in David was spent making contacts with agencies and gathering materials to aid in the disaster relief efforts. On Wed Nov. 3 a group of us went to clear flood debris in a community called Boquete to the north of David. Well I need to get to the grocery store. I’ll try and provide an update of the flood damage in my next post.


En la Lucha,

Brian