Culture Week

Just got back from two weeks of being out. This past week was culture week and the small group of us that have sites east of the Canal went out to the Darien to learn about Wounaan and Embera Culture. After a long school bus ride and a couple of Police checkpoints, we arrived at the site of another volunteer. Since I will be with a comunittee that is Embera, I stayed with a family that is Embera. They had a pet monkey, but he bites.

Also in this picture you can see some of my body paint. They painted ou

r bodies to share some of their culture with us. Since my camera is dead right now, I couldn´t take a picture of my face, which is alway painted. The paint lasts for a few weeks, and only us two brave souls got it on our face. They gave me a goatee, which I think was more of a joke because I heard it is not a traditional patern they paint. Now I´m sitting is an internet cafe, in a really busy mall in Panama city,that is surounded by windows with a goatee painted on my face and my arms painted. People stare enough at the huge Gringo, let alone with tribal paint on him. Heres a picture of me and Debrah flying toward the end of the Panam in the back of a pickup while it was raining on our way to see the take (toma) for the water system of the town we stayed in.

We had to do a little rock climbing to see the actual toma, here we are on top of the rocks with Joanna on the far left, Me in the middle, and Deborah to the right of me.

Sorry it is hard to see, we were in middle of the rain forest which was one of the coolest hike I´ve been on since volunteer visit. Here is some pictures of this cute girl that hung around the volunteer´s house we were at. I have a couple that I think turned out well.

It was funny because I was telling the kids (of which at any given time there were a million around us) That i was so tall because I ate kids. They liked that. They also had a river we swam in that had one hell of a current. We got carried a little further downstream that we wanted. And then when we got out we saw a turd float by. Gross. But that´s the reality here, the native people would rather go in the river cause it washes away clean, but they don´t realize the consequences downstream. We´re here to educate too.